This
paper was presented at the
"Anti-Catholicism:
The Last Acceptable Prejudice"
Conference
May 24, 2002, Fordham
University, New York, NY
co-sponsored by: The American Catholics in the Public Square Project, Commonweal Magazine,
and Fordham
Universirty's Center for American Catholic Studies
click
here for a printer-friendly version of the paper
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panel session
MORNING SESSION
CONVENER:
MARGARET STEINFELS
ELIZABETH
McKEOWN:
ANTI-CATHOLICISM:
WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT ISN'T
JOHN McGREEVY:
A HISTORY OF THE CULTURE'S BIAS
Friday, May 24, 2002,
11:15 AM - 12:30 PM
Transcript by:
Federal News Service,
Washington, D.C.
MS. STEINFELS:
I think I detected through the morning’s presentation a certain
distinction between what one might call religious prejudice and what we could
call cultural prejudice and I wonder if John McGreevy and Andrew Greeley might
like to talk to one another a little bit about that distinction. Andrew Greeley has picked things for his
questionnaire that are certainly cultural matters, but really touch more on religious
matters, whereas John focuses on things that seem to me less doctrinal or
religious and more cultural.
FR. GREELEY:
The cultural arguments are exacerbated by the religious differences,
though I really think that most of the people who are arguing with us about
cultural things are not religious at all; they’re secularists and there are not
very many of them in the country.
Secularists don’t count, except in New York and Boston. But of course they raise a lot of
discussion. I don’t find myself
disagreeing with Professor McGreevy.
MR. McGREEVY:
I’m not sure we disagree that strongly either. I’ll just try and repeat my point as clearly as I can. There is a religious anti-Catholicism that
you would see on the web site of Bob Jones University. That still exists in parts of the South, in
parts of the evangelical community, but that’s not why this conference on
anti-Catholicism was organized. It’s
something different. It is a cultural
anti-Catholicism which is complicated, but is connected to the assumption that
hierarchical institutions are troubling, that autonomy is the pre-eminent moral
good, and that institutions like Catholicism that have doubts about individual
autonomy at times, and are hierarchical, should be automatically questioned.
FR. GREELEY:
But these ideas that are hostile to Catholicism entered our culture and
have preserved a place there because of religion, and they are convenient ink
blots on which secular anti-Catholicism can easily focus and which probably
affect most secular anti-Catholics
simply because they’re Americans -- part of American culture.
MS. McKEOWN:
My bottom line is that anti-Catholicism is an Alice in Wonderland word
and you can use it for all kinds of different things. Part of what I hope to learn here today is how you’re using it
and whether you think there are significant differences that matter between
religious and cultural forms of anti-Catholicism. Certainly what John McGreevy is describing has to do with the
19th century pattern of nativism that persists.
But take the word hierarchy for a nanosecond. On the one hand, we all hate people that are
stuck up and put themselves above others.
On the other hand, this entire world is hierarchical. Science is hierarchical; Salomon Smith
Barney is hierarchical. Why don’t they
like hierarchies_ We live in
hierarchies all the time.
MS. STEINFELS:
We did have some questions from the audience, and I will begin with one
that is addressed to all of you. What
difference does anti-Catholicism really make_
Whom does it harm, why should we care_
MR. McGREEVY:
The difference it makes is that if you think the Catholic view on a
number of issues makes sense and you’d like to see the society reflect that in
terms of social justice other areas, anti-Catholicism--the assumption that
hierarchical institutions don’t have any wisdom about the world, or that
autonomy is the preeminent moral good--makes it more difficult for that vision
to become reality.
FR. GREELEY:
Well, as I said in my paper, it makes a big difference for people that
move in the world where it’s strong because you bang up against it like a brick
wall. It also makes a difference
because any society that tolerates prejudice or bias is deficient, particularly
a society that embraces the ideals that ours does. And then in the current situation, it bears false witness.
For example, there was an article in the
New York
Times by a man named Sam Dillon who came to Chicago to look at the Chicago
Plan, the reform that Cardinal Bernardin introduced for dealing with clerical
abuse. His lead in the story was that
it is now being severely criticized and is less effective than it used to be,
which is bad because it’s a model for much of the country, and it’s not really
successful. He had no case of an abusive
priest being reassigned. He had two
victims, or victims’ families, who complained that they were not treated
sensitively or sympathetically enough.
He talked to the Chancellor of the Diocese, got all kinds of things from
him and ignored them.
Now, is this anti-Catholic or not_ I don’t give a hoot. It was false. The New York Times lied about the Chicago plan for
dealing with sexual abuse. It ignored
the fact that not a single abusive priest has been assigned under the tenures
of Joe Bernadin’s Fitness Review Board.
Is it motivated by secular anti-Catholicism_ Is it motivated by cultural anti-Catholicism or is it motivated
by the culture down there on 42nd Street_
I don’t know, but I don’t like it.
MS.
McKEOWN: There may be some advantage to
some of this. Catholicism has always haunted
America, and we can take it much further back than John did. When Europeans came to the New World they
found things they didn’t recognize, and the way they tried to make sense of
them was to give them labels that were labels they used for Catholics
frequently.
It’s not a bad thing to haunt a culture. What’s going on at the moment is that we’re
not very much in control of that haunting.
The ability to suggest that there’s more than meets the eye in some
positive way is undercut.
MS. STEINFELS:
This is to John and Elizabeth.
Do the other panelists share Father Greeley’s pessimism regarding any
improvement in the situation of anti-Catholicism_
MS. McKEOWN:
I’d have to get Professor McGreevy to do that again. When he hit the word despair, I was so
sympathetic that I’m not sure I got what it is he’s despairing over. I think he’s despairing over making
Americans pay attention to social science.
FR. GREELEY:
Well, the rule, Elizabeth, is that we only pay attention to the social
science which we happen to agree with.
No, I am despairing of Americans in general taking anti-Catholicism
seriously and of anything being done about that. That’s not despair, that’s realism.
MR. McGREEVY:
I’m a realist too. I think there
is a problem. I don’t think current
events are going to make it any better, and discussion of this is for the long
haul.
MS. STEINFELS:
The next question is about an economic boycott against a seemingly
prejudiced media giant, previously named on this panel, the New York Times:
an appropriate and significant response to such prejudice_
FR. GREELEY:
Well, no. It’s still the best
newspaper in the country, and if you want to stay in touch with the world you
have to read it. I guess maybe it’s
like permitting young people to read Playboy. It’s bad but it’s the best we’ve got. And you wish they’d change, but it’s what in the Civil Rights
Movement they called “institutional racism.”
Now, people don’t realize they’re anti-Catholic. I don’t think the folks down there realize
their sloppy anti-Catholicism. My
colleague, Mike Hout, who was chairman at Berkeley and then director of their
survey center there, said the other day, “The New York Times is
responsible for the core of anti-Catholic feeling in the country because it
does not accurately report Catholicism.”
MR.
McGREEVY: I would say no, and we should
remind ourselves that the New York Times didn’t create the present crisis.
FR. GREELEY:
But it could name the names of people that did.
MR. McGREEVY:
But the New York Times owns the Boston Globe, and remember
that 10 years ago, Cardinal Law called the wrath of God down upon the Boston
Globe for being a sensationalist newspaper. I don’t think the Boston Globe’s coverage has been
perfect, but without the Boston Globe we would not know what we now know
about the Boston archdiocese. So we
have to be very careful -- Father Greeley is right. The New York Times is the best newspaper in the country
and we have to be very careful about remembering who created the crisis as a
baseline.
FR. GREELEY:
And also we have to note, if it were not for the American media and for
the American legal system, the bishops like Cardinals Law and Egan could have
continued indefinitely to stonewall and cover up and reassign. A woman correspondent for NBC in Chicago,
Mary Ann Ahern, broke the story there and got a tremendous amount of verbal
abuse from the church. But she’s a
heroine and everybody that has broken these stories is heroic. Some things are being overdone. Is there a feeding frenzy now that they
don’t have Bill Clinton to feed on_ Has
Catholicism replaced him_ Well, perhaps
you can make that case.
MS. STEINFELS:
Since the Catholic Church forcefully tries to influence public policy,
why should it not be subject to vigorous public scrutiny_
MR. McGREEVY:
It should. The Catholic Church
should have vigorous public scrutiny.
The only distinction I would make is that sometimes public scrutiny
carries with it certain cultural assumptions:
that any hierarchical institution is bad, that personal autonomy is the
preeminent moral good, that if you don’t have an active sex life you are
somehow deranged. Those assumptions,
and others -- the Catholic Church is anti-woman, et cetera et cetera --
underlie lots of media coverage, but that doesn’t mean the Catholic Church
should not be subjected to lots of criticism, because it is a powerful
institutional force in this country that does try to shape the public life, as
it should.
FR. GREELEY:
There’s an important distinction and it’s made very well by Father John
O’Malley, a visiting professor at Fordham in history, in the May 27 issue of America. Catholics love their church, which, if you
look at the surveys, is pretty clear because they’re not leaving. If they’re not leaving they must love it
because it’s made itself look so ridiculous.
And he says that, while the Vatican Council has not been propagated
sufficiently, one thing that did get through to the lay people was the
information that they are the church too.
He says, and I have to yield to his historical expertise in this, that
they used to know this, but in the 19th and early 20th century they lost that
sense. Now they know it again. They’re not exclusively the church. They are not the church independent of
anyone else, but neither is the hierarchy in the church independent of
them. They are the church and the
church they know, and here he’s very good: he says, “The church of their
parish, the church of their friends, the church of their families, the church
of their neighborhoods. That’s the
church they love. That’s the church
they’re committed to.”
It seems to me this is a perfectly clear
position. It is certainly justified by
the data, but much of the secular world doesn’t get it. They can’t imagine an organization to which
people affiliate even though they think it’s run by idiots. And all I have to do is look at the attitude
on the present administration of the country.
The country is being run by idiots, but we’re still loyal to it.
MS.
STEINFELS: If I could enter in here as
a questioner myself: Given what Father
Greeley has just said, I’m wondering if any of the three of you have given
serious thought to what exactly it is that lay people ought to be doing. The most powerful suggestion that has come
forth, and which seems very problematic, is people withholding their
money. But, I mean, the state of the
church is such that that at this point in history seems to be about the one
effective piece of leverage they have.
FR. GREELEY:
If you hold back the money, you’re going to affect the young and the
elderly and the poor and the lonely and what good is that going to do_ I have no idea, Peggy. You know, the leadership panicked in the
late ‘60s because they realized that the effervescence of the Vatican Council
had communicated itself to the lower clergy and to the laity and they were
losing control. And so they had an
option of either trying to ride with it or to stop it and of course, being a
bureaucracy, they tried to stop it. And
one of the ways of doing this was to appoint safe bishops and they appointed a
lot of safe bishops. They’re still
appointing safe bishops.
Only it turns out that safety may not be what they
defined as safety, because you’ve appointed safe bishops who have blown things
sky high. Now, I don’t think the
present administration over there has a clue about what’s happening here, so I
don’t think they’re going to review their practices for appointing
bishops. But for change at that level
in the church to occur, you’re going to need different kinds of bishops and
none of us should hold our breath waiting for that to happen. Again, that may be my pessimism.
What about the young_ Mike Hout and I just finished a piece out at Berkley last
week. Thirty-one percent of Americans
were born Catholics. Twenty-five
percent are still Catholics -- 26 percent, so that’s a five percentage point
loss. Why is that happening_ It’s happening for a very peculiar reason.
Until the 1970s converts used to cancel out
defectors, because there were about as many defectors as there were
converts. Since the 1970s the convert
rate has declined notably and so the decline in Catholic membership is finally
a function of the lack of converts.
That may be a good thing because it may be the church is no longer
pressuring people to become converts at a time of mixed marriages. So defection rates across cohorts seem to be
less troubling than people might think.
People drift away, most of them drift back. Some of them have always not drifted back. That doesn’t seem to be the problem. The problem is not as many converts. I don’t think we’re going to get very many
converts this year.
MR. McGREEVY:
This is terrifying, but I’m going to disagree with Father Greeley for a
second.
MS. STEINFELS:
Not about data, we hope.
MR. McGREEVY:
Well, yes, in fact about data.
Let’s just posit for a second that
the data in the macroscopic level show that relatively little change in
Catholic adherence is evident over the last couple of decades. What I would point to is this: For many of the people in this room the
crucial event in the institutional church in their adult Catholic lives was
Vatican II. For people under 40, it is
now the sex abuse crisis. We don’t know
what that means yet. It could mean that
there’s going to be a real difficulty in the kind of motivation that you can’t
track in public opinion polls. In other
words, will we be able to sustain the loyalty of people who will contribute to Commonweal_ Who will become leaders in their
parishes_ Who will work for that bogey
person, the institutional church_
That’s what I would worry about, which is a slightly
different problem than saying “Yes, I’m Catholic” in a public opinion
poll. An optimistic picture would be
that there will be a series of reforms, there will be a more active lay people,
that this will energize people. I hope
that happens. A pessimistic picture
will be that there won’t be reforms, there will be more alienation, the
institutional church will go along but people will be only loyal to their
parishes, only loyal to their families, and we will have a kind of Catholic
congregationalism. I think that would
be unfortunate.
MS. McKEOWN:
Is this the “what the laity should do” question still_
MS. STEINFELS:
Yes. We’re still on that.
MS. McKEOWN:
Three rules: One say your
prayers, two give money to Catholic charities and the third one is learn
Spanish.
MS. STEINFELS:
Well, there’s a lot of good advice for all of us. Okay, next question. Why is it that cultured and educated people
who would not be caught dead uttering a racial or ethnic slur feel justified in
making anti-Catholic remarks_ And what
should we do about it_ I’m going to go
to Elizabeth. I think she’s got a fix
on morals and manners here-- right_
MS. McKEOWN:
The question asked what should we do about people who are, as my
colleague Otto Hans would say, deep or dumb_
Pray for them. No. Peggy, I’m not treating the question
carefully.
MS. STEINFELS: Why is it that cultured and educated
people who would not be caught dead uttering a racial or ethnic slur feel
justified in saying anti‑Catholic remarks -- making anti‑Catholic
remarks, and what are we to do about this_
MS. McKEOWN:
Out in Butte, Montana, they wouldn’t dare.
I’m really isolated on a college campus. The kids on college campuses bend over backwards never to say
anything interesting to anyone about anything.
On the laity question, we all have to teach our kids
what irony means. They’re listening
still, some of them, to Alanis Morrisette.
They think it’s ironic if you have a black fly in your white
Chardonnay. Bummer maybe, but not
irony. Kids are very careful where I
live not to be making those kinds of slurs and they tremble at the thought that
they might be caught out. So somewhere
people are saying harsh and bad and unfortunate things about Catholics, and the
bromide is always more education. I
think William Donohue uses that regularly and to some effect. The thing to do is to teach well. How to do that is another question.
MS. STEINFELS:
I do have one other observation about this question, which is partly
what counts as an anti-Catholic remark_
All of us New Yorkers live in a city and I live on the West Side, and
sometimes I feel that I am perhaps the only person who would ever say anything
against abortion in my neighborhood, my exercise group, in my park, with my
neighbors. And I guess I do not count
it as anti-Catholic when my women friends say, “How can you possibly think
that_ How can you possibly believe that
anybody should treat from the moment of conception a life that should be
protected_” Naturally I don’t go into
the twinning debate with this crowd. In
various neighborhoods and families things get heated. And it is partly our responsibility not to fear the heat so much,
to say what we think and, of course, to make peace at the end of the
conversation if possible.
MS. STEINFELS:
Next question. To what degree
has press coverage of the current sex abuse scandal been persistent, ardent, et
cetera_
MR.
McGREEVY: Persistent, ardent and
occasionally unreasonable.
FR. GREELEY:
A good exercise is to read an article by Peter Steinfels that was in Commonweal
[April 19, 2002]. I thought it was an extremely fair, balanced, intelligent
article. Read that, and then go back
and read your last three or four weeks of coverage on Catholicism in the New
York Times. They are strikingly
different. Even though Peter Steinfels
sometimes writes for the New York Times, they are strikingly different.
Here is a guy who gets it. He knows what’s going on.
He knows the extent of it, but he also knows the limitations of sex
abuse. He knows that most priests are
happy. He knows that most priests
aren’t gay. And so compare those two
and you’ll see what Mike Hout meant when he said they are woefully inaccurate
when covering the Catholic Church.
They’re not interested in getting it right.
MS.
STEINFELS: Accepting the fact that
anti-Catholicism has always been part of the American landscape, how does the
other side of the coin, “the Catholic moment,”
or the more routine interpretations of the Catholic role in American
society fit in to today’s discussion_ I
think that the questioner is trying to get us to look around at the positive
interpretation of the Catholic role in American society. Is it all positive_ Are there other negatives_ I think that it is an effort to get off the
sex abuse question and look at some of the other possibilities.
MS. McKEOWN:
How do we deal with internal pluralism_
I think of Peggy Steinfels’ wonderful piece from 1989 about civility
within the church itself. So another
issue is pluralism and how to live with it and make it an asset, and not a
liability.
MR. McGREEVY:
One thing that’s given this story legs is the fact that Catholicism
matters. Can you imagine if there were
sex abuse crises in some similar ways in a mainline Protestant denomination
that there would be this kind of saturation media coverage_ No.
And part of that might be a cultural anti-Catholicism, but part of it is
the fact that Catholicism in this country runs the world’s largest system of
private schools, the biggest system of private charities, that it means a lot
to the fastest growing ethnic population, Latinos. Catholicism matters in a way that maybe no other religious
tradition does in the United States.
FR. GREELEY:
One could also point out that the Catholic influence in the labor
movement and in the Democratic Party was of enormous importance to the
Democratic coalition up until 1972. The
machines were thrown out when Richard J. Daley was ejected from the convention,
and the unions were thrown out when George Meany was ejected. The Democratic Party has never been the same
since, yet Catholics are still part of the Democratic coalition. They are disproportionately likely to vote
for Democratic candidates. And it is
said of them, contemptuously, that they’re conservative and the Democratic
Party doesn’t need any conservatives to win elections. But on a lot of issues they’re not really
conservative. Not perhaps as liberal as
Jews or blacks, but they are still over on the left side of the spectrum. This contribution of the Catholic social
imagination is a very important part of American life historically, and despite
the attempts to dispense with it, it’s still important.
MS. STEINFELS:
Part of this involves the he question of the Catholic Church’s teaching
on sexual matters, which is among the most stringent of all the religious
traditions in the United States. Part
of this story has to do with the question of stringent teaching, lax practice
and the apparent -- and I say apparent because I’m never sure that’s right --
apparent hypocrisy that connects, or disconnects, these two matters.
MR. McGREEVY:
The hypocrisy issue is enormous because of the big shift in the culture.
If it was scandalous in some sense for
an unmarried couple to live together in 1962, that’s generally not true
now. If it was scandalous for people to
openly declare themselves gay and lesbian, that’s not true now. So there’s been an enormous shift in the
last 30 or 40 years -- that’s not news to anybody in this room -- in cultural
ideas about sexuality. Catholic
doctrine has not changed and the Catholic Church has been the most significant
force, probably, in opposition to legal abortion and a number of other
issues. That makes the hypocrisy the
more salient, the more interest-demanding.
FR. GREELEY:
But the lower clergy and the laity have changed. One dimension of the
two essential combinations for the church have changed its mind and the other
dimension hasn’t. As far as I can tell,
what happened was that people decided in the late ‘60s that the Council was
right and they were the church, and therefore they could make decisions too. And secondly, it was an appeal from the
pope, who did not understand, to God who did, at least on the issue of birth
control. God would understand even if
the pope wouldn’t. Now, I’m not
necessarily endorsing that reasoning, I’m reporting it.
MS. STEINFELS:
This is a question to Father Greeley:
How is Protestant anti‑Catholicism handed down_ By preaching or by other means_
FR. GREELEY:
Well, I suspect it’s handed down the way any religion is handed
down: it’s handed down by stories. Stories told in church, stories told in the
family household. I’ve got emails from
people who say they’ve married into a Protestant family, although they remain
Catholic, and they get a hard time at every family festival, Christmas and
Thanksgiving, about the rosaries.
People keep saying, “Why do you carry a rosary_ Why do you say a rosary_” Or people whose daughter is marrying a
Catholic and that’s all right with them, just so long as the marriage isn’t in
church because they can’t stand the statues in church. These things get passed down I both in
sermons and in clergy instruction. But
it gets passed down in families too.
MS. STEINFELS:
Again to Father Greeley. Why is
there a surprise at the high percentage of non-Catholics who believe Catholics
cannot be allowed to think for themselves, when there are actions like
imposition of the mandatum and declaration of most Vatican pronouncements as
binding under magisterial power.
Non-Catholics regard this as dictatorial and mind control. Is this anti-Catholic or mere accurate
assessment
FR. GREELEY:
I think the question is anti-Catholic.
FR. GREELEY:
How many Catholic lay people, outside of the readers of Commonweal, America and the
National Catholic Reporter, know about the
mandatum_ And how many theologians have
been fired for not taking it_ I’m not
going to get involved in that silly thing.
What they ought to do is look how Catholics respond to these seemingly
authoritative arguments from their leadership:
they dismiss them. Now, in an
institution where there was better communication between the two essential
components of the church, things like that wouldn’t happen. You judge Catholics by what Catholics do,
not by what their leaders say.
MS. STEINFELS:
Another question to all of you.
What about the anti-Roman complex within the American Catholic Church_
FR. GREELEY:
Well, what about the anti-Roman sentiments in French Catholicism,
Spanish Catholicism, Italian Catholicism even, Irish Catholicism_ There are anti-Roman sentiments and there
always have been among the outliers of Catholicism. That’s a tension between the center and the periphery and you
find it in Ireland. You find it in
France. You find it in Germany. You find it in Italy. You find it in Spain. You find it everywhere. Why select us_ Out of all the countries I’ve mentioned, including perhaps
Ireland, Americans are most loyal.
And also it’s worth noting that the issue is not
matters of faith. They believe in God,
they believe in life after death, they believe in the Eucharist, they believe
in the Trinity, they believe in all the central doctrines. The difficulties are authority and
sexuality. And while these are
important, these are not the essential note of the Catholic Church.
MS.
STEINFELS: Father Greeley, are there
any points at which Protestant imaginations positively respond to
Catholicism_
FR. GREELEY:
The theologian David Tracey sees the Protestant and Catholic
imaginations as complementary, and says that religion needs them both. It just happens that the dialectical
imagination which emphasizes the distance of God and is afraid of folk religion
and superstition and idolatry is strikingly different from the ontological
imagination, which sees God as present in all the creatures and all the persons
and objects and things of creation. So
there is a different emphasis you can validate empirically. Both need one another and both should learn
to respect one another.
The risk in the dialectical imagination that wants
to protect God from being contaminated by Her creation is that the net result
is a very bleak world, a God-forsaken world.
The risk of Catholicism is a syncretistic world. I just finished some research on
Brazil. Brazil is the largest Catholic country
in the world. People are deeply and
devoutly Catholic, but they’re syncretists and this is what happens when the
Catholic imagination gets out of hand:
it gets involved in witchcraft and voodoo and all kinds of other things.
MR. DANIEL CALLAHAN: I think it would be very helpful to distinguish between
discrimination, prejudice, stereotyping.
In 1960 my wife and I were at the Harvard Divinity School during the
Kennedy election. There were
Protestants ranting against Kennedy, ranting against the church. That I considered anti-Catholicism. That seems to me very different from having
certain stereotypes and making little remarks about Catholics being this way
and that. I think we all do that with
lots of other groups; that goes on all
the time. I wish you would just get
some of these distinctions in, because I think they make an enormous
difference, and they’re getting lost
FR.
GREELEY: It would have been interesting
to see what would have happened if Mario Cuomo had run for president. Of course, he would have won and we would
have been spared all the positive and negative Bill Clinton. They were saying that he couldn’t carry the
South because he was Italian. And in
addition he was a very devout, almost mystical Catholic. The country might be ready for rowdy
secularized Catholics like the Kennedy clan.
Was it ready for someone who was intensely devout like Mario_ I’m not so sure. I think they might have been ranting against him at Harvard for
other reasons, or in other rhetoric then.
MR. ALAN
WOLFE: I want to ask Father Greeley a
question. The survey is
fascinating. It does not, however, ask
Catholics any of these questions. And
to really raise the point that this data represents anti-Catholicism you would
have to compare Protestant responses with Catholic responses.
Now it may seem obvious that Catholics would have a
different view on some of these things, but with regard to the question of
whether Catholic rosaries and holy medals are superstitious, I’m not sure how
many Catholics would believe that they were.
There’s been a dramatic decline among Catholics in their actual
religious practices in devotion to Mary and in the rosary and in benedictions,
and so on. It’s quite possible that
there wouldn’t be a significant difference between Catholics and Protestants on
that question. I think the question of
whether the Catholics do what the pope and bishops tell them to do, as you
yourself have said Catholics do not follow the leadership of the hierarchy on
some of these issues. So they might
very well interpret this question to mean that this is what Catholics are
supposed to do, but I don’t do it. It’s
quite possible that their responses would be about other Catholics rather than
about themselves. So the differences
between Protestants and Catholics wouldn’t be so dramatic on that question
either.
FR.
GREELEY: About one-quarter to one-fifth
of Catholics would agree with those things.
To the idea that Catholics can’t think for themselves, about 10 percent
would agree with that. But they’re part
of a culture where that’s believed. To
answer those things more fully we need a real study. And I would be only too happy to consider if an offer from a
benefactor came along. It ought to be
done. There ought to be ongoing
research on the climate of religious interaction in America: that really would
be important. No one in New York would
consider it important because they believe religion is irrelevant to life and
should be irrelevant. But in the larger
society it’s well worth looking at .
I’ve done work on the Southern Baptists in my book “Religion is Poetry,”
and they get an awful beating. They’re
as much if not more a target of bigotry than we are. So the serious study of America requires ongoing research on
American religion.
MR. PETER
STEINFELS: I want to start from a very
small point. I agree with virtually
everything John McGreevy said, but I was struck by the fact that you cited a
story about Cardinal Law calling down the wrath of God on the Boston Globe. I myself believed that that was a story
until I read a long article in the recent issue of a publication that Mark Silk
puts out, and it turns out that that was not the context at all. [NEED TITLE
AND DATE] If anything, it had to do
with Cardinal Law’s concern about the attention that was given projects and
communities for poor people.
My question is, why have we been consumers of this
story_ Why has it been so widely and
inaccurately retailed, and might that have something to do with certain
stereotypes that exist, maybe some that Cardinal Law has created about himself
personally, but also maybe the stereotype that Catholic leaders must be that
sort, if they call down the wrath of God on local newspapers with whom they
have an adversarial relationship.
MR. MARK SILK:
This is a very complicated story.
I would begin by saying that Cardinal Law did not speak very
clearly. And he didn’t call down the
wrath of God; what he said was the power of God. And he was calling it down promiscuously on all kinds of people
in Boston: business leaders and the media and especially the Globe, and
this was specifically said in the context of “We want everybody to give to the
poor.” But the Globe was on his case
about the Porter case, and it was easy to read that. I mean, I read it myself as being particularly hostile to the Globe.
The Globe itself, in its second page story,
did clarify the statement. But as we
all know anybody who is in journalism or following it, the second page story
never gets the attention. It’s like the
Washington Post’s famous line that evangelicals were poor, uneducated
and easy to command. The next day they
issued an apology, but nobody remembered the apology. It’s a complicated story, but it is true that it’s unfair to
Cardinal Law to accuse him in some simple way of singling out the Globe.
FR.
GREELEY: What’s the point in being a
cardinal if you can’t anathematize people every once in a while_ The first thing I’m going to do when I get
the red hat is collect a cross bearer, a thurifer and two acolytes and in full
robe parade across the Midway sprinkling holy water. The second thing is I’m going to list -- and I have a long list
-- the people that I want to anathematize and then I’ll feel good.
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