Archive: Putting an end to the Catholic bashing!

My boyhood years during the 1940s were spent in a small town in southwestern Minnesota. That idyllic community had many virtues, but religious tolerance and ecumenism were not among them. The virus of anti-Catholicism was as pervasive as polio. Unlike polio, however, hating Catholics was popular and widely supported.

Catholics were second-class citizens, not quite fully American. They were supposed to have a secret plan to subvert cherished American ideals and undermine American institutions by means of parochial schools. The board of our public school was entirely Protestant and the superintendent was on notice to refrain from hiring more than a token number of Catholics.

“Teachers, especially coaches, get very close to students,” reflected one board member. “We don’t want any proselytizing.” Protestants inwardly rejoiced when a succession of priests were unsuccessful in raising money to build a parochial school. They breathed a sigh of relief when the inadequate funds went to refurbish a bingo parlor. “How characteristically Catholic,” mused a Baptist pastor.

Fifty years ago we called Catholics “mackerel snappers” and nuns “penguins.” There were lurid tales of lascivious sex between priests and imprisoned sisters behind monastery walls. The pope was called the anti-Christ by a number of preachers.

Those were the days before John F. Kennedy. His election in 1960 was supposed to have symbolized the final acceptance of Catholics as full-fledged citizens. In Boston, his ancestors had seen signs, “No Catholics or Dogs Need Apply.” Mobs had burned monasteries and rectories when Nativism and the Know Nothing Party rode high in the saddle. During the Civil War WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) subject to the draft paid Catholic immigrants $120 to wear the Union blue in their stead. Tens of thousands of Catholic proletarians died to preserve the nation and free the slaves.

But Kennedy’s election proved, said most political scientists, that this form of religious bigotry was now finally over. Tragically, recent events have proved them wrong:

  • In Boston, members of the militant Queer Nation have thrown condoms and shouted obscenities at newly ordained Catholic priests and their families.
  • In Los Angeles, nine Catholic churches have experienced a wave of anti-Catholic hate crimes and have been vandalized with graffiti, painted swastikas, and smashed and decapitated statues.
  • At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, demonstrators routinely desecrate the Mass by shouting protests and holding lewd parodies of the Catholic liturgy.
  • During “Saturday Night Live,” millions of viewers witnessed singer Sinead O’Connor tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II.

As a Protestant religion professor, I am deeply troubled that the media has failed to come to the defense of the Catholic Church. If such attacks were directed against an African-American denomination, an Islamic mosque, or Native American rituals, outrage by the media, the academy, and the opinion makers would be fortissimo. When the Pope recently visited Denver the media again gave the back of its hand to Catholics. It focused on those who disagree with established Church doctrine, such as Catholic feminists, homosexuals, and those who no longer participate in the church.

When a gay man, infected with HIV, suddenly recovered a “repressed memory” after 20 years and said that Chicago’s Cardinal Joseph Bernardin sexually abused him, why did the media give knee jerk credence to his charges? The accusation has now been withdrawn but a sterling character has been defamed and sullied. Meanwhile, both the California and Minnesota Boards of Medical Examiners are bringing charges against psychologists and psychiatrists who have been charged with injecting “repressed memories” of sexual abuse in their adolescent clients. The Catholic Church, it seems, has “deep pockets” for unethical counselors and their clients.

Catholic bashing makes good copy, for there is a deep and visceral hatred of Catholicism among the media elite and opinion makers. To be sure, at times their church officials have not properly handled mentally and sexually sick priests. But then, has not this also been true of the legal, the medical, and the Protestant church ad judicatories? Where in the media is fairness, compassion, and understanding?

Hilton Kramer, a former New York Times reporter, states that “the bias that the media has against Catholics has no rival anywhere in the population.” When Khalid Abdul Muhammad, a disciple of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, delivered his infamous Kean College attack against Jews, Catholics, Nazis, whites, and homosexuals, the Times strongly criticized the speech, but neglected to mention the tirade against Catholicism. Indeed, Mr. Muhammad spent more time blasting Catholics than he did homosexuals. The following is a small sample of his speech:

“Go to the Vatican in Rome when the old no-good Pope—you know that cracker, somebody need to raise that dress up and see what’s really under there—when the old Pope was shot, he didn’t pray in front of no white Mary.”

Why didn’t the New York Times mention the attack on the Pope? Perhaps this is more than callous indifference to Catholic bashing. “Put plainly,” comments William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League For Religious And Civil Rights, “if the politically correct police have assigned a victimizer status to the Catholic Church, then the Church cannot readily be transformed into a victim.”

Perhaps the issue is abortion. Polls indicate that those in the media are 98 percent “pro choice.” Journalists find it hard to be objective about an issue they feel passionately about. Simply put, their fault is ethical reductionism. Are there not many issues—poverty, health care, race, unemployment, peace—where the church is on the side of the angels? Catholic parochial schools are one of the few bright lights of our urban ghettos—with minority children struggling to enroll.

Among many of my liberal friends, it is fashionable to bash Catholicism. It is their form of anti-Semitism. The very existence of the Catholic Church offends them. “How can people believe that stuff” is their common mantra. Of course, as a Protestant, I see Catholic doctrines with which I disagree.

Nevertheless, I am pleased that the Catholic Church is strikingly countercultural. It holds to a moral hierarchy in spite of the moral rot, drift, and pathology that stalks our land. A “go-with-the-flow” morality is no morality worthy of a name. Instead, Catholic moral universals are an anchor of comfort and guidance to millions in a way that “feel-good” situationalism, relativism, and nihilism do not provide.

Unlike mainline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism is forging common bonds with Catholic social witness. Neither group can condone the increasing disrespect for life, media sensuality, public school incompetence and arrogance, statist intrusion into familial and private matters, or the diminishing of decency and civility in our public life.

Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law has stated: “The tension between Church and culture has increased in this past decade. In the past, even those who disagreed with the Church acknowledged with respect the validity of her role to offer our society a vision of life which everyone understood was intended for the common good. That has changed. There is an evident anti-Catholic bias that manifests itself constantly. The Church’s refusal to bend her teaching to the ways of the world has escalated the attacks upon her. What once would have been veiled has become a blatant and mean-spirited prejudice.”

As a Protestant, I want Catholicism to flourish. The church has a core of teaching and tradition that has endured. It is not a weather vane that is subject to every changing moral or cultural fad. After 37 years of teaching I find that many of my Catholic students have a firm hold on life. They have been enriched—not impoverished—by their faith. There is little that is antiquarian, regressive, or bigoted in their familial or church training. They seem to have a spiritual centeredness and a moral compass that will guide them well in life.

“There are so many more reasons why I am grateful for the spiritual and moral formation given to me by my church,” commented one of my Catholic students, “that I can tolerate a few of the instances in which I disagree with its teachings.”

Liberals should embody that cardinal virtue of tolerance, and pledge themselves to make Catholic bashing as politically incorrect as antipathy toward African-Americans, Jews, Hispanics, Native Americans, and homosexuals. Moreover, they should read contemporary Catholic theology and ethics so that their data base is larger than a few hoary stories of those who left the church some time ago. Let us get beyond the paradigm of “Us v. Them” prevalent during an earlier era of bigotry in America.

Our society needs a vibrant Catholicism to help heal the terrible social pathologies of our society.

Walter W. Benjamin, Ph.D., is professor of religion emeritus at Hamline University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he taught for 28 years. His area of concentration is medical and business ethics in both teaching and research.

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