Return of a Church Militant
With the House debate on health care at its hottest, the U.S. Catholic bishops issued a stunning ultimatum: Impose an absolute ban on tax funds for abortions, or we call for defeat of the Pelosi bill.
Message received. The Stupak Amendment, named for Bart Stupak of Michigan, was promptly passed, to the delight of pro-life Catholics and the astonished outrage of pro-abortion Democrats.
No member was more upset than Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, son of Edward Kennedy, who proceeded to bash the Church for imperiling the greatest advance for human rights in a generation.
Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin responded, accusing Kennedy of an unprovoked attack and demanding an apology. Kennedy retorted that Tobin had told him not to receive communion at Mass and ordered his diocesan priests not to give him communion.
False! The bishop fired back.
He had sent Kennedy a private letter in February 2007 saying that he ought not receive communion, as he was scandalizing the Church. But he had not told diocesan priests to deny him communion.
As Rhode Island is our most Catholic state, Kennedy went silent and got this parting shot from Tobin: “Your position is unacceptable to the Church and scandalous to many of our members. It absolutely diminishes your communion with the Church.”
The clash was naturally national news. But Tobin’s public chastisement of a Catholic who carries the most famous name in U.S. and Catholic politics is made more significant because it seems to reflect a new militancy in the hierarchy that has been absent for decades
Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., just informed the city council that, rather than recognize homosexual marriages and provide gays the rights and benefits of married couples, he will shut down all Catholic social institutions and let the city take them over. Civil disobedience may be in order here.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York sent an op-ed to The New York Times charging the paper with anti-Catholic bigotry and using a moral double standard when judging the Church.
During the “horrible” scandal of priest abuse of children, wrote the archbishop, the Times demanded the “release of names of abusers, rollback of the statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records and total transparency.”
But when the Times “exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuses in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish Community … 40 cases of such abuses in this tiny community last year alone,” wrote the archbishop, the district attorney swept the scandal under the rug, and the Times held up the carpet.
Dolan singled out a “scurrilous … diatribe” by Maureen Dowd “that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish or African-American” faith.
Dowd, wrote Dolan, “digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription … into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics and his recent welcome to Anglicans.”
Dowd, said Dolan, reads like something out of the Menace, the anti-Catholic Know Nothing newspaper of the 1850s.
The Times’ refusal to publish the op-ed underscores the archbishop’s point.
Nor are these the only signals of a new Church Militant.
The Vatican has reaffirmed that Catholics in interfaith dialogues have a moral right if not a duty to convert Jews, and reaffirmed the doctrine that Christ’s covenant with his church canceled out and supersedes the Old Testament covenant with the Jews.
When Abe Foxman, screech owl of the Anti-Defamation League, railed that this marks a Catholic return to such “odious concepts as ‘supercessionism,’” he was politely ignored.
The new spirit was first manifest last spring, when scores of bishops denounced Notre Dame for inviting Barack Obama, a NARAL icon, to give the commencement address and receive an honorary degree.
Among the motives behind the new militancy is surely the wilding attack on Pope Benedict for reconciling with the Society of St. Pius X, one of whose bishops had questioned the Holocaust. The pope was unaware of this, and the bishop apologized. To no avail. Rising in viciousness, the attacks went on for weeks. Having turned the other cheek, the church got it smacked.
In his May address to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, Archbishop Raymond L. Burke said, “In a culture which embraces an agenda of death, Catholics and Catholic institutions are necessarily counter-cultural.”
Exactly. Catholicism is necessarily an adversary faith and culture in an America where a triumphant secularism has captured the heights, from Hollywood to the media, the arts and the academy, and relishes nothing more than insults to and blasphemous mockery of the Church of Rome.
Our new battling bishops may be surprised to find they have a large cheering section among a heretofore silent and sullen faithful who have been desperate to find a few clerical champions.
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.
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Pat, I wholeheartedly agree that Catholic-bashing has become one of the media’s most popular sports.
But, given the revelations out of Dublin, the sad history of the Boston archdiocese, and the Mount Cashel travesty in my own hometown (upon which “The Boys of St. Vincent” was based), this is, perhaps, not the time for the Church to be pointing out motes in the eyes of people like Kennedy, Dowd, or Foxman.
The credibility of the faith suffers somewhat at the hands of those whose perverse behavior diminishes it, but not as much as when the Church sits silent amidst so many maledictions and injustices to Her body and Her faithful and to the lowest of the lowly.
The American Catholic Church is loosing adherants so rapidly that even the massive, and ongoing, influx of overwhelmingly Catholic Latin Americans has not boosted its percentage of the population. Today, something like 10% of all Americans are ex-Catholics and I find it quite doubtful that spiteful posturing and naked political pandering to a GOP that is itself extremely unpopular, marginalized, and angry will do anything to bring them back into the fold.
The Bishops can blare their trumpets as loud as they want, but their flocks, and thus, in democracy, their influence, are rapidly withering. Perhaps if they could stop buggering small boys, or obsessing with internal power struggles, the hierarchy could address some of the increasingly criticial issues facing it such as: a rotting infrastructure, collapsing vocations, dwindling attendance, a rapidly ageing priesthood. I won’t hold my breath though as, apparently, quixotic crusades against abortion will magically solve all of the difficulties facing mother church.
The items that PJB mentions are a mixed bag, but overall a sign of a return of confidence on the part of the Catholic hierarchy as the sex abuse scandals mercifully fade into the past. But considerable damage has been done to the Church’s credibility. Catholics in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, for example, seethe with anger at how their abuse enabling Cardinal Archbishop has seemingly gotten away with it, without even the mildest reprimand or wrist slap. Much of this anger is inevitably turned against the Church itself.
But, given the revelations out of Dublin, the sad history of the Boston archdiocese, and the Mount Cashel travesty in my own hometown (upon which “The Boys of St. Vincent” was based), this is, perhaps, not the time for the Church to be pointing out motes in the eyes of people like Kennedy, Dowd, or Foxman.
I’m not saying this with any intention whatsoever to diminish the seriousness of what the Catholic Church has done in the situation you mention, but we need to remember that in every case mentioned by PJB, they’re reacting against the power-grabs of the Federal Government, an institution whose track record of violence (sexual and otherwise) exceeds that of Rome by a wide margin if the discussion is limited to recent history.
As an Anglo-Saxon on the downward slide toward my seventies I can only note that the leadership of today’s American church are not the disciples of the Berrigan brothers whose persistant and unremitting battle against the wars in SE Asia in the sixties and seventies was about the war against war. I find it hard to take seriously a church that for so many years protected child molesters within its ranks and yet has nothing to say about the daily deaths of innocents; children, mothers and fathers in today’s war zones. In my mind an act of mindful decency so soon after such crimes against the institution of the Church would require a period of contemplative silence, given the relative culpability of those who chose not to speak out. But no, having so terribly failed so many thousands entrusted to their care, the middle-management of the Corporation chooses to go to war against the life choices a woman makes. Does the church have any historical evidence of Christ as a sexist who presumed to tell women what was best for them and their families? These are not “leaders” of the Church we hear from these days, these are the CYA boys. Shame on the lot of them.
Neuyawker, the Church’s opposition to abortion can be consistently documented back to the first century, and I would bet that you would deem just about any view of women from that time period (Christian, Jewish or otherwise) as sexist. Thus, on “historical evidence”, the likelihood that Christ held the views of a 21st century American feminist rather than something more like what the first generations of Christians believed and the Catholic Church has taught for 20 centuries seems rather slim.
Also, while one can certainly wish that more bishops were of the “prophetic” variety than the “manager” variety, it’s simply not true that the bishops have been silent about recent US wars. (In fact, their opposition is a continual source of consternation for hawks, who would like to get the Church fully on board behind the GOP platform.) Moreover, what you call “life choices” for women are also “death choices” for the unborn. The bishops see the protection of these innocents as part of their concern as well.
Finally, you seem to want it both ways: because of their sins, the bishops should be silent about abortion. But, strangely enough, when it comes to your favored cause, the bishops are to be condemned for … silence. I don’t get it. If their moral witness is considered an intrusion in one sphere, why should it be welcomed in another?
Let’s face it: this is just shameless opportunism. What the left (and, in its own way, parts of the right) wants isn’t so much separation of church and state as subservience of church to state: religion is OK, but only insofar as it serves as a means to your party’s favored humanistic ends.
I am beyond sick and tired of the carping of those who want to point to the 4% of ordained Catholic clergy who engaged in sinful and wicked behavior while they ignore the 96% who continue to do good, to seek to live holy lives, and to help others.
I am equally tired of you people using these men as a convenient whip with which to beat the Church. Your real problem is that you don’t wish to obey anyone but yourself and your ideas of what constitutes proper religion and morality. In order to do this, you must strip the Church of Her authority, and the convenient way for you to do this is to find some pocket of wickedness and blow it all out of proportion to make it seem like this evil is what the Church teaches.
There is no pleasing you people. Had the bishops publicly laicized these priests and then turned them over to the civil authorities for proper punishment, there surely would have been a chorus of howls from somewhere. No matter what is done, someone is going to be professionally offended.
Am I upset at the scandals? Yes, I am. But that does not mean that I now have found a loophole for myself so that I can be like 70% of Catholics in America — a disobedient rebel to Church teaching.
The USCCB came out in opposition to the illegal and immoral war in Iraq. I remember that quite well because I thought at the time that the bishops needed to keep their mouths shut. In retrospect, I see that they were the wise ones and I should have listened to the princes of the Church rather than to a professional White House liar.
The bottom line is this: the Church has enemies. They infiltrated her in the 1950′s to try to destroy Her from within. Seeing some fo the messes that have been made, the lack of vocations, the lack of faith in American Catholics, I would say that they did a pretty good job of mucking things up. Now we are getting rid of these men, one by one. New bishops are coming in who are not of a mood to tolerate this nonsense any more. Yet you want us to wallow in the past, crawling on our knees in Mea Culpa’s while the Church flounders, all so you can be disobedient to the Church’s teachings because you try to say that She has no moral authority to teach and direct.
Bub, those days are over!! The new bishops who are standing against this garbage are the first breath of fresh air in a system that is longing for a change. Get used to it! We are not going away, even if you kill us!
“What the left (and, in its own way, parts of the right) wants isn’t so much separation of church and state as subservience of church to state: religion is OK, but only insofar as it serves as a means to your party’s favored humanistic ends.”
Well said. A progressive friend of mine recently told me that “religion is fine as long as it serves the community.” There are a lot of interpretations of such a mission– some more menacing than others.
“Serve the community” eh?
So religion should serve the “sodomite community” by performing marriages for them? Should serve the “abortion community” by offering to escort the women into the killing centers and not opposing their “right” to kill their unborn?
Well, let’s not stop there, shall we? What about the Military/Industrial Community?” We should send our sons and daughters into mindless and unwarranted wars because the fat cats need to make money, right? What about those who want to marry horses? Surely we must serve that community also and NEVER suggest that such desires are wicked and perverted. How about the “NAMBLA Community?”
Yeah, that’s what we’re here for — to serve everyone in pursuing their degeneracy. Never mind God. What does He and HIS DESIRES have to do with religion?