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John McGreevy begins his book with an emblematic story. The year is
1859; the place, Boston. The public schools, dominated by the
Protestant elite who also write the law, start each day with
obligatory reading of the King James Bible and recitation of the Ten
Commandments. Glorious as the King James version is, it is not taught
as literature but, with the commandments, is intended to build moral
fiber in the students, a great many of whom are Catholic. It disturbs
twenty-first-century assumptions to imagine Catholics opposing school
prayer, but the church doesn't subscribe to the Protestant Bible, or
to private Bible reading in general, and was even more hostile to it
in the nineteenth century. Nor are Catholic and Protestant versions
of the Ten Commandments the same, the latter proscribing "graven
images," an affront to the whole Catholic rococo of crucifixes and
icons, Virgin shrines, reliquaries and sacred art.
Returning to our story, one day a 10-year-old Catholic boy at the
Eliot School, Thomas Whall, is instructed to recite the
commandments. He refuses. Days of urgent meetings follow, but the
school committee decides it will not compromise. Again the boy is
asked to read the commandments and again refuses, upon which an
assistant to the principal declares, "Here's a boy that refuses to
repeat the Ten Commandments, and I will whip him till he yields if
it takes the whole forenoon." A half-hour later the child's hands
are ripped and bleeding from the blows of a rattan stick; by one
account he faints during the torture. All boys unwilling to recite
the commandments are ordered out of the school; hundreds leave.
Because they had been urged in church to resist Protestant
conformity, to "recite their own Catholic prayers" and "not to be
ashamed," they are seen in some quarters as mindless slaves to
priestcraft. The most important Republican Party newspaper in Boston
(Republicans were the liberals then) editorializes: "We are
unalterably, sternly opposed to the encroachments of political and
social Romanism, as well as to its wretched superstition,
intolerance, bigotry and mean despotism." When Whall and his father
sue the assistant for excessive force, the court vindicates school
authority, ruling that the child's disobedience threatened the
stability of the school, hence the foundation of the state.
A neat illustration of the shifting nature of morality--today the
principal would be locked up for child abuse--the story is important
for the way it complicates generalized definitions of Catholic and
liberal worldviews. It is McGreevy's intention to elucidate the
dialectical relationship between Catholic communalism and liberal
individualism in the development of standard-issue notions of freedom
in America. He traces the route by which church agitation for state
funding of its schools, coupled with its opposition to de facto
Protestantism in public schools, led to the elimination of organized
prayer in the latter. He analyzes the work of Catholic thinkers who
drafted some of the first minimum-wage laws, articulated concepts of
social welfarism, gave succor to early trade unionism--in effect,
defined liberal reformism--and of those who made the backlash against
sexual freedom, the church's latter-day mission.
Fascinating as that all is, ultimately McGreevy does something more
valuable: prompting a meditation on power, and its shadow,
marginality; on freedom, and its inevitable price, unfreedom; on
faith, particularly the kind dressed up as secular rationalism. In
the end, neither church power nor state power comes out smelling
sweet, a lesson of especial import for liberals accustomed to
challenging only one set of assumptions in church-state contests.
In a sense, power is Philip Jenkins's subject too, only he finds it
all in the hands of gays, feminists, their supporters in the art
world, the liberal media and the ranks of self-hating Catholics,
proponents of what he calls "the new anti-Catholicism."
A casual peruser of the book's back jacket might see the endorsements
of William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil
Rights (a kind of Catholic Anti-Defamation League) and of Michael
Novak, notable recently for trying to convince the Vatican of the
justice of unprovoked war, and dismiss Jenkins as a right-wing crank.
That would be a mistake. The author of such insightful works as
Pedophiles and Priests, written after the scandals of the early
1990s, and the masterful Moral Panic, on changing concepts of the
child and of child abuse through American history, Jenkins is
ordinarily a cool dissector of the cultural construction of social
problems. He aims to be the same here, but his book is a muddle,
alternately careful to distinguish anti-Catholicism from
anticlericalism, policy disputes from prejudice, and then recklessly
defining political protest--most dramatically, ACT UP's 1989 action
inside St. Patrick's Cathedral--as hate crime, anti-Vatican rhetoric
as hate speech, discrimination against policies as discrimination
against persons.
The conflicts Jenkins discusses might have presented an occasion to
challenge the slippery concepts of hate crime and hate speech so
readily embraced by liberals, the repressive simple-mindedness at the
heart of efforts to reduce socially bred antagonisms to matters of
criminal punishment, and the dangerous equation of speech and action
that is made by self-advertised defenders of freedom when it suits
their purposes. Jenkins flirts with this, expressing skepticism that
censorship or expanded prosecutorial powers can accomplish shifts in
consciousness. But he is so intent on advancing his
thesis--"anti-Catholicism must be seen as the great unknown
'anti-ism' or phobia, the most significant unconfronted prejudice in
modern America"--that the book distills to a contest between angry,
impolite liberationists and beleaguered, presumably conservative
Catholics. As ever, the accent on feelings, however collectivized,
rather than the push-pull of social forces, leads to terribly pinched
conclusions. His argument dead-ends, as it's bound to, in the
politics of sensitivity training, a watch-what-you-say political
correctness, this time toward Catholics.
One could debate how "significant" anti-Catholicism is today. By pop
culture's gauge, it's surely also significant that the most
interesting television family, the Fishers of Six Feet Under, with
their secrets and faceted sexuality, is Catholic; that the liberal
icon of mainstream TV for the past four years, President Josiah
Bartlet of The West Wing, is Catholic; that the Sopranos, who both
confirm and confound stereotypes, are Catholic. Although they figure
far larger in mass consciousness than the theatrical satire Sister
Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You, Jenkins doesn't mention them.
Instead, he catalogues potshots taken at the iconography, the clergy,
the Pope--Sister Mary, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, Sinéad
O'Connor's Saturday Night Live tear-up of the Pope's picture, Tony
Kushner's denunciation of the Pope in these pages after Matthew
Shepard's murder--and notes that similarly vituperative statements
would not be tolerated against any other group.
He points to the pains taken recently to argue that Islam is a
religion of peace when in practice it has also been repressive and
bloody-minded. But he misreads the motivations of Islam's non-Muslim
mainstream defenders. Since the same government officials who flatter
Islam and warn against vigilantism are also the authors of
state-sponsored harassment of and terror upon Muslims, their encomia
to the faith ought properly to be understood not as sensitivity but
as social control. Likewise, generosity toward Islam among liberals
these days largely reflects respect for civil liberties, not
religion. Individual Catholics might take offense at the freewheeling
criticism of their church, but among them there is no equivalent of
The Muslim, The Arab, who really has become the bogeyman.
The church is in a different category, and political jabs against it
are more usefully compared with those against Saudi Arabia or any
other religious state except Israel. On that last point, Jenkins is
right: There is a double standard when it comes to addressing Jewish
power, which barely can be spoken of, and Catholic power, which
inspires no such reticence. Jenkins recognizes that such power is
political not religious, institutional not individual, but he quickly
retreats, identifying "a very thin line between protest and
blasphemy" when the target is the Vatican, between protest and
anti-Semitism when it is Israel, and seeming to accept "offense to
believers" as the standard for judging on which side of the line
political speech falls. That is nonsense. Politics being organized
conflict, offense is its nature. Tiptoeing around Jewish
sensitivities to avoid plainspeaking about Israeli brutality is
neither honest nor healthy. Attacks on the church's policy
interventions on sexuality and reproduction may sometimes be raw, but
at least they recognize power for what it is. Certainly he Vatican's
seven-page multilingual denunciation of homosexuality following the
Supreme Court sodomy decision, and its vow to lead a global campaign
against gay rights, gives the lie to any suggestion that the church
is the put-upon weak sister in the culture wars.
Like Jenkins, McGreevy recapitulates the history of anti-Catholic
ugliness--the Know-Nothings and Klan attacks, the various state bans
forbidding Catholic children from public schools, the scare
literature and elite tracts, sometimes one and the same. But his
historical pairings more effectively reveal the poisonous nature of
that ugliness. Prejudice, as McGreevy shows without actually arguing
the point, is a problem not because it makes people feel bad but
because of the blinders it requires the bigots to wear with respect
to their own, favored culture, and the way that culture, if dominant,
is enforced and reproduced.
Thus in the nineteenth century, the liberal intelligentsia decried
Vatican authoritarianism. No quarrel there. But for priests, nuns
and ordinary Catholics to be branded enemies, as they were, this
authoritarianism had to be made utterly alien; and America, its
opposite, made a model of liberty. In 1870 the First Vatican
Council announced the dogma of papal infallibility on matters of
faith and morals. Writing from Rome for The Nation, Charles Eliot
Norton said that the world was now divided "between the principle
of authority and that of freedom in matters of opinion." That
simplistic formula would be reiterated down the decades, and in the
late 1940s would form the basis of a celebrated series of Nation
articles against the church by Paul Blanshard, who railed against
Catholicism's "organized system of cultural and moral controls"
(and whose passion for "American freedom" was matched only by his
enthusiasm for anti-Communism and eugenics). Other intellectuals of
the day rated those faiths or sects that fostered freedom and those
that inhibited it, with the historian William Warren Sweet
crediting Puritans and Calvinists with "all the great concepts for
which American democracy stands today." One of those was
capitalism, whose rise Weber had associated with Calvinist
asceticism and whose iron logic was associated in the liberal
imagination not with dogma but with dynamism.
"Our culture is a Protestant, and not a Catholic culture,"
Harvard University's Howard Mumford Jones wrote in describing "The
Drift to Liberalism in the American Eighteenth Century." "It is a
Protestant culture begun in dissent and retaining dissent as its
chief characteristic." Like Sweet and Blanshard, Jones was writing in
the period between the 1930s and 1950s, when much intellectual
firepower was trained on defining "Americanism" and "American
culture," a culture described by Henry Steele Commager as "practical,
democratic, individualistic, opportunistic, spontaneous, hopeful"; by
Talcott Parsons as freedom-loving and entrepreneurial; by Robert
Merton as distinctly suited to reason and experimental science
because of its climate of "organized skepticism"; by Charles Morris
as "non-dogmatic."
The resilience of those definitions is evidenced, in a backhanded
way, by the recent profusion of T-shirts, buttons and other
paraphernalia of protest against the Bush Administration proclaiming
"I Want My Country Back," the implicit notion of a hijacking reifying
the ideal. Now as before, the problem with liberalism is the problem
with any faith: Belief in the ideal necessitates delusion. For young
Thomas Whall in the 1850s, dissent was not an option because for a
child in the church it was unthinkable, and for an American it was
allowable only within the terms of right-thinking. Catholicism was
excluded from right-thinking, even from Americanism. Today the
spiritual descendants of the Eliot School authorities are legion, and
include George W. Bush, whose foreign policy flows from the "City on
a Hill" exceptionalism that the Boston elite embraced and whose definitions of liberty and individualism are similarly situational.
We may sneer at Bush's assertion that God commanded him to invade
Iraq, but the roots of that claim are deep in a tradition of
American goodness. This country's overseas imperial adventure
began, after all, with Calvinist missionaries from Boston, midwives
to the destruction of Hawai'i, who counseled a suffering people
that the cure for all ills lay in Jesus, buttoned-up sexuality and
private property. McGreevy, I should note, says nothing about
liberalism's role in securing relative freedom and wealth at home
by imposing unfreedom and penury abroad. Whatever arguments may
arise for or against liberalism or Catholicism, he leaves them
largely to the reader.
On the subject of slavery, for instance, a key point of contention
between liberal and church elites, he does not assign hypocrisy. He
doesn't need to. In the same breath that it denounced Romanist mind
control in the Eliot School case, the Republican Boston Atlas and
Bee opposed "the monster institution of human slavery and for the
same reasons." Although there were some heroic Catholic laymen and
clergy who eventually joined radical Republican ranks, officially
the church reckoned that slavery might not be such a bad thing--if
it wasn't a matter of buying and selling, if slaves weren't
"thingified," to borrow Martin Luther King's memorable phrase, if
they were allowed to marry, if lynching stopped, if they were
treated well, preserved as families and, especially, brought the
good news. In other words, if slavery wasn't slavery. In 1839 Pope
Gregory XVI barred Catholics from participating in the slave trade,
though not from owning slaves. In America, Catholics of the
reformist/fantasist opinion argued that there was no reason whites
couldn't be slaves too, and, with respect to freemen, they rarely
segregated churches and generally accepted black-white intimacy so
long as it was within the holy sacrament of matrimony. Beneath this
surface confusion, however, lay a crude consistency. For the issue
of slavery forced a choice between love, the "queen of virtues," and
authority, what Philadelphia's Bishop Francis Kenrick plainly named
the "social order." Kenrick, writing the first US textbook in
Catholic moral theology in 1843, bemoaned the atrocities that
defined slavery but worried more that immediate emancipation would
mean chaos, radicalism, institutional concessions to individual
rights. In one of many reiterations of the church's original
sin--its identification with power in the Holy Roman Empire--"Love
thy neighbor" took second seat to preservation of order.
Now, many prominent Abolitionists held to a similar hierarchy of
values, only in their case "order" was laissez-faire economics, which
they called "freedom." McGreevy is helpful here, linking both
mainstream liberal opposition to chattel slavery and nonchalance
toward wage slavery to the laissez-faire commandment of "freedom of
contract." The Nation's founding editor, E.L. Godkin, despised
slavery and unions, considering the latter combinations in restraint
of trade, and until about 1917 the magazine was exceedingly hostile
to workers' movements, supporting law-and-order reflexes, whether in
the form of the hanging of the Haymarket anarchists or the violent
suppression of strikes.
The church, for its part, rejected freedom of contract, saying such
freedom was an illusion where workers struggled to survive. "Free
competition," wrote the Italian Jesuit Matteo Liberatore in the late
1880s, "is a terrible weapon, most effectual to crush the weak and
reduce whole populations to economic slavery under a rod of iron
wielded by the potent rulers of social wealth." Or, as Marx put it
more succinctly, "It is not individuals but capital that establishes
itself freely in free competition."
There was the rub. Protestant liberals hated and distrusted
Catholics, but they hated and distrusted socialists more. The huge
immigrant proletariat was drawn to both, and with less contradiction
than Catholic leaders would admit. With its advocacy for a "living
wage," for profit sharing or, in its absence, for unions, for
government intervention where wages were "insufficient to support a
frugal and well-behaved wage earner," the church was the enemy of
laissez-faire economics. But that "well-behaved" said it all. Old
liberal worries over "the combined power of rebellion, Catholicism
and whiskey" faded in the face of the red flag. "Freedom of opinion"
had its limits, and even Charles Eliot Norton looked to Catholic
authority to curb the "anarchic religion of the unchurched
multitude." There was a class war to fight, and on that bloodied
ground liberalism made its historic compromise with Catholicism.
By the 1930s, McGreevy writes, "the most obvious legacy of early
Catholic involvement in the union movement was not the development of
Catholic social thought but Catholic leadership in the struggle
against socialism." Liberal fears of Catholic authoritarianism would
resurface in the 1940s and '50s, and again be trumped by fears of
Communism. Liberalism had found its calling, and the church, so
easily derided in other areas of civic life, could reliably be
counted on to manage dissent. Later, Paul VI would favor economic
redistribution, and on his watch Latin American bishops would meet in
Medellín to critique "liberal capitalism" and articulate a
"preferential option for the poor." But his name would forever be
welded to Humanae Vitae, the disastrous encyclical rejecting all
forms of artificial contraception. Once capitalism "won," there was
nothing left to fight about but sex.
Re-enter Jenkins, whose book revolves largely around contests over
sexuality and seems to have been prompted, in fact, by the sex panic
around priests, with its echoes of old denunciations of Catholicism
as "the whore of Babylon," politically corrupt and sexually
dangerous. We're inclined now to regard the Catholic Church as the
sex police, and there's much evidence for that--from the "love the
sinner, hate the sin" posture on homosexuality to the international
bullying on reproductive rights to the criminal abuses of "bad girls"
depicted in harrowing detail in the new docudrama The Magdalene
Sisters. Yet another view has always run parallel, that of a
hypersexual, "Italianate" (read: effeminate, pederastic) Catholicism.
In the nineteenth century, anti-Catholic sensationalism (one of the
most notorious such tracts underwritten by a prominent Abolitionist)
provided, as Jenkins writes, "one of the few socially approved
vehicles for pornographic interest," so laden was it with lecherous
priests, lesbian nuns, sensual iconography and beastly goings-on in
the confessional.
Indeed, the confessional was one of the few places where sexuality
could be plainly discussed. And if, as Foucault suggests, the
penitential rite was another "scheme for transforming sex into
discourse," thereby controlling it, it also provided a zone of
privacy in which, as a practical matter, people could unburden
themselves of their secrets. Not ideal, but what is? In that
aforementioned 1843 moral theology, Bishop Kenrick also instructed
confessor-priests that it was a married woman's right to coax herself
to climax "by touches" if she didn't experience orgasm during
intercourse, that a man who ignored his wife's pleasure was guilty of
a venial sin of omission and that--contrary to some Victorian counsel
urging women to distract themselves during lovemaking to avoid
orgasm--the woman should yield to her body, the intentional avoidance
of orgasm being a mortal sin. This recommendation, Peter Gardella
observes in his intriguing book Innocent Ecstasy: How Christianity have America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure, "reflected normative
Catholic teaching" at a time when the Calvinists spoke only of sin.
Jenkins offers no brief for the church's sexual agenda or its errant
priests, but he rightly suspects games of "gotcha." He notes that
the soundest study of priestly sexual misconduct--involving 2,252
priests over forty years--indicates that 1.7 percent behaved badly,
such behavior ranging from inappropriate speech to rape, and in only
one case involving a true pedophile: i.e., an adult sexually
interested in prepubescent children. Obviously, some 1,500 priests
accused of any sexual abuse between the 1960s and 2002 indicates
trouble, but Jenkins argues that honesty demands a recognition that
(a) incidents of pedophilia are rare, (b) priests hold no monopoly
on such behavior and (c) "there is strikingly little evidence that
clergy of any kind are any more or less likely to abuse than
non-clerical groups who have close contact with children."
A 1998 study by Education Week, for instance, cited 244 incidents of teacher-student sex
over a six-month period, ranging from unwelcome touching to
consensual relations to serial rape, an average of nine cases a
week. The press has not elevated this to "social problem" status.
As Jenkins puts it in Pedophiles and Priests, "there is no
cultural home" for the pedophile pedant.
In the heat of the scandal, Jenkins was verbally pummeled for such
views, by liberals who found fuel in the crisis to push for an end to
celibacy and the ordination of women; by conservatives who saw their
chance to purge gay priests. Garry Wills attacked him for making the
unpopular but sensible distinction between sex with children and sex
with teenagers, which Wills lumped together under the curious label
"boy-sex." Given the near-totalitarian perception generated by the
scandal, Jenkins's chapter on the subject here is most important. If
he weren't otherwise so focused on gays and others demonizing
Catholicism, he might have noticed, though, that the target of this
sex panic was as much homosexuality as it was priests. Why else would
newspapers wallow in stories of priests and boys, priests and men,
when most targets of unwanted priestly attention are girls and women,
and most sexual violence occurs in the heterosexual home? He might
also have challenged the Boston Globe's legal-rights-be-damned
approach to the story, its retailing of false assertions (which he
and McGreevy repeat in the case of one Father Paul Shanley) and its
prime role in making monsters, to which the unlamented jailhouse
murder of John Geoghan now stands as grim testament.
There is far more to say on the scandal, on the contradictions of
Catholic homoeroticism and homophobia, the elision of accusation and
guilt, the opportunism and disingenuousness of the press, the church
and lawyers than can here be accommodated, or than either book
explores. It is perhaps enough, for now, to let the
century-and-a-half-old image of Thomas Whall, faint and bleeding,
provoke us to more complicated considerations of the latest power
struggle between the church and liberal Boston than the received
narrative of perfidy versus righteousness provides. The church is
surely disgraced, but what of liberalism when its victory comes at
the price of truth, fairness, privacy rights, proportionality, the
presumption of innocence, all of which were trampled in last year's
media frenzy? As ever, in the contest between Catholicism and
American freedom, neither side has much to preen about.
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Pax Montani - Founded August 1, 1985
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