Anti-Catholicism Panel Afternoon Session

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

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AFTERNOON SESSION

CONVENER: PETER STEINFELS

VOICES FROM THE FIELD: GAIL BUCKLEY, DANIEL CALLAHAN, WILLIAM DONOHUE, NAT HENTOFF AND ALAN WOLFE

Transcript by: Federal News Service, Washington, D.C.

PETER STEINFELS: In this session we have brought to you an extraordinary panel of observers and commentators on the whole issue of anti-Catholicism. I am going to introduce the people on the panel and they will make their introductory remarks. It was just pointed out to me that actually alphabetical order is the last acceptable prejudice, and it was pointed out by Alan Wolfe.

Gail Buckley is an author and columnist whose commentary appears regularly in the New York Daily News, and who has also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and many national magazines. Her two books, “The Hornes: An American Family” and “American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm” were garlanded with praise and prizes.

Daniel Callahan is one of the pioneers of the whole field of bioethics, not only nationally, but internationally. He was a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard, he was the co-founder and for many years the director of the Hastings Center, a leading organization examining ethical issues in science and medicine. He is currently a senior fellow at Harvard Medical School. He is an elected member of the Institute Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. He is also an honorary faculty member of Charles University in Prague. Dan is the author of thirty-seven books on topics ranging from Catholicism to abortion, euthanasia, and the just use of medical resources. At one point in his past long ago, he was also an editor at Commonweal magazine.

In the 1970s William A. Donohue began a teaching career at St. Lucy’s school in Spanish Harlem and, as a number of people pointed out this morning, he has probably been teaching ever since. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology, has written three books, including a critique of the American Civil Liberties Union. He is the president and very much the public face of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He serves on the board of numerous Catholic and political organizations.

Paul Moses is a journalism professor at Brooklyn College, but that is a recent undertaking taken up after twenty-three years in daily journalism, mostly at Newsday, where he twice covered the religion beat and was city editor from 1997-2001. Paul wrote a book with Bob Keeler on Pope John Paul II’s visit to the Holy Land. He was the lead writer on a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for spot news reporting.

Alan Wolfe is one of the nation’s most prominent political scientists and public intellectuals. He is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and Public Life at Boston College, a frequent contributor to many leading journals, to the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, as well as Commonweal and the New York Times. His two studies, among his many books -- one called “One Nation, After All” and the other called “Moral Freedom,” were widely discussed analyses of the culture wars, the first book in 1998 and the latter in 2001. I had the pleasure of serving for three years with Alan on the Lilly Endowment’s commission on religion and higher education.

GAIL BUCKLEY: Is Anti-Catholicism the last acceptable prejudice_ In May 2002, the answer might well be, why not_ There is a caveat, however. It depends on which of the many htmlects of Catholicism incurs the prejudice. As Elizabeth McKeown states: “There are lines to be drawn.”

The Catholic religion is the biggest tent of all. The mandate is every race and nation. Add every opinion. The church is so utterly human and diverse, that the tent is always being pulled in several directions at once, but the foundation of faith is solid. Thus, there can never be any justified prejudice against the Catholic faith or the Catholic faithful as a group.

As for intolerance of the Catholic power structure, as of May 2002, why not_ Sadly, the power structure seems to imitate the Pharisees more than it imitates Jesus. “Do as I say, not as I do,” say the Pharisees. In the wake of the child abuse scandal, anti-Catholicism towards the power structure is now coming from inside the church as well as out.

As John McGreevy suggests, some anti-Catholicism is clearly criticism and not prejudice. Most of my non-Catholic friends are liberal; ergo, not prejudiced in their own eyes. They see the church as having a split personality: heroic on most social justice issues, but generally hypocritical and oppressive on reproduction and gender. “The pope is good for the world,” said an elderly Jesuit friend of mine, speaking of John Paul II, “but hard on Catholics.” To a certain extent my non-Catholic friends would probably agree. They would surely agree with favorable responses to Andrew Greeley’s Catholic education and care for the poor questions, but obviously be in the other camp on abortion. They can’t deny the moral right of Catholics to be anti-abortion. They do, however, question the justice of sticking to the letter of the law against condoms in Africa, when the continent is dying of AIDS before our eyes and, according to polls, Catholics all over the first world are using them.

They’ve also questioned the justice of the power structure position on liberation theology. Catholic anti-communism is seen as morally correct, but supporting Central American oligarchs instead of the oppressed Catholic poor is seen as wrong. Even my non-Catholic friends know that the Catholic clergy, religious and laypeople who were murdered in Salvadoran elsewhere weren’t killed because they were spreading communism, but because they were spreading Christianity.

The rigidity and letter-of-the-law htmlect of the power structure is what most arouses anti-Catholicism in people who aren’t normally bigots. It has also, in the case of the child abuse scandal, aroused a form of anti-Catholicism among Catholics themselves, who feel betrayed by the hierarchy’s refusal to admit that putting the structure ahead of the flock makes them very bad shepherds. The abuse, however, has also reinvigorated a “My brand is better than your brand”-type of anti-Catholicism between Catholics themselves. I get e-mail from angry Catholic conservatives who berate me for a column in the Daily News criticizing the power structure, instead of what they see as the true source of evil -- Vatican II -- which they say permitted gay men to be ordained. To them, the issue is not child abuse and its cover up, but gay men and, above all, Vatican II. Surely there were gay priests before Vatican II. Surely sin is in behavior, not orientation.

Many Catholic conservatives indulge another form of Catholic anti-Catholicism in bashing Vatican II. Vatican II bashers want to go back to 1870 in the worst way. “Traditional values, converts, and shedding your kind will be the way to renew this church,” said an angry e-mailer, urging me to shed myself. “Get lost,” he said, “find another religion, if they’ll have you.” It took me about ten seconds to see that he wasn’t talking about race.

Liberals, like conservatives, are always going to be with the church. Neither of us can convince the other to leave and I, for one, wouldn’t dream of trying. One of us seeks change, the other fears it; it’s probably genetic. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Vatican III, invoked by John Paul’s successor, would be the perfect place to find it.

“We should not be uniform, we should be unified”, said my friend, Father Vaclav Malley, when I interviewed him ten years ago for America magazine. What he had to say is relevant because he suffered another kind of anti-Catholicism as an ex-underground Czech priest, silenced and imprisoned under the communists. “We must recognize the living experiences of generations, but it should not just be the repetition of old customs,” he said. “Christianity must be alive. Jesus always speaks in the present tense.” Unable to abolish the church, the communists hoped to make it die out by forbidding all public interaction between laymen and priests. Finally, banning all legitimate priests, they established a form of legalized Catholicism, with licensed priests sanctioned by the government instead of Rome. Pope Pius XII allowed certain banned priests to secretly ordain bishops and other priests. According to Father Malley, some married men, and possibly even some women, were ordained.

Perhaps because of his time in prison, Father Malley looked for a closer relationship between the people and the church. “We are given Jesus as a gift. Simultaneously we are gifts to Jesus from the Father -- gifts; not property.” he said. We are introduced into an almost equal relationship. Our relationship with Jesus and the Father represents our human dignity. Human dignity doesn’t require the church to become a democracy, but Catholics can ask that it be democratized.

The child abuse scandal cries out for lay -- especially parental -- input. Why can’t registered Catholic parishioners be permitted to vote from the Vatican-produced slate for their cardinal archbishops, for example_ One name I would personally like to see on the Vatican slate would be that of Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, Michigan, who doesn’t have a rectory, but apparently travels around the diocese, basically living out of his car.

The Little Books Committee of the diocese of Saginaw created the Lenten and Easter Daily Reading booklets sold at my parish for a dollar each. Unfolding a new and wonderful mystery every day, they were a bargain at any price. “Our tendency to place Christ above and apart from us runs contrary to our faith,” read an entry from May 17. “It is to take the incarnation too lightly.” When I expressed the wish to a priest friend that Bishop Untener might come to New York, “Oh, he won’t be going anywhere,” my friend replied. “He’s too good.”

The Saginaw Easter readings included a six-part discussion on the virtue of hope and introduced some modern ecumenical saints, like Esther Wainio, religion unknown, the stepmother of Elizabeth Wainio, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11. In a last fear-filled call home, Elizabeth talked to her stepmother awhile, then fell silent, apologizing because in the last moments of her life she couldn’t speak. “You don’t have to,” said Esther, and possibly the last words Elizabeth heard, “I’ve got my arms around you.”

Surely, one of the reasons that Catholics, as Andrew Greeley put it, “like being Catholic,” is the knowledge that there are places like Saginaw, Michigan, where structure is unimportant and faith is radiantly alive. There, prejudice is irrelevant and a difference of opinion is resolved in friendship and the Holy Spirit.

DANIEL CALLAHAN: I feel I am here under rather odd auspices. I, as some of you know, but not all -- I am what used to be referred as a fallen-away Catholic, an ex-Catholic, but there are different types of ex-Catholics. I once read an article in the mid-60s, when this was beginning to happen to me, distinguishing between those who left the church because they got mad at the church but remained religious, and a much smaller group who simply stopped being religious, but still loved the church. I fell into the latter category and to this day I remain fond of the church. Most of my friends are in fact Roman Catholic, but at the same time, I have not been drawn back. The Catholic Church seems to be a wonderful church except for its obsession with the religion, that’s its problem -- but that’s a separate issue.

As mentioned, I was co-founder of the Hastings Center in 1969, and we examined ethical problems of medicine and biology. What was very striking for me is that I went from an essentially Catholic world, as an editor of Commonweal, to an extraordinarily secular world and an aggressively secular world. Over the years I had endless struggles in getting anybody with religious background invited to be part of our research projects to speak. The dominant group tended to be philosophers and lawyers. The philosophers, almost to a man or woman, were aggressively atheists, aggressively hostile to religion, and aggressively unwilling to even have that voice heard. That bothered me enormously because I felt there was much to be heard from the religious voice.

The case study I would like to use, and where I see a lot of the religious problem arising these days, would be the stem cell debate. While I come to think that there is not an awful lot of anti-Catholicism around these days, there is -- at least among a certain portion of the elite academics and intellectuals in this country -- a very strong dose of anti-religion. The stem cell debate has brought that out in a very dramatic fashion, I think, because that debate has essentially been cast as one of religious right over/against the enlightened proponents of research and particularly of proponents of the saving of life and the relief of suffering, and religion is seen to stand in its way. Any number of statements by Nobel laureates and others in favor of the stem cell research dismiss the objections, and there is particularly a constant tendency to bring it back to the abortion debate.

Certainly the abortion issue is central to the stem cell debate, but there is another issue very close to it, as well, and that is the standing one gives to scientific progress, and particularly biomedical progress. It is certainly characteristic of this secular world I entered that, for it, science, and particularly biomedical science with its possibility of saving lives and reducing suffering, is itself a very strong religion. Over/against this new religion -- it’s the religion of the enlightenment, if you will -- stand the churches, and particularly the very nasty coalition they see of the Roman Catholic Church on one hand and the Fundamentalist Protestant churches on the other. The New York Times is a very good example of this; the New York Times has never run one op-ed piece against stem cell research, though they have run many op-ed pieces. The editorials constantly speak of “them” as opposing it, and “them” are the forces of religion. Those of you who live in Boston will perhaps remember a column by Robert Kuttner, a columnist and quite an interesting fellow, who talked about the religious ayatollahs and their objection to the stem cell research.

Now, I think the Roman Catholic Church gets caught up in this in great part because it has been aggressively hostile, not only to stem cell research, but to cloning, both reproductive cloning and what’s now called research cloning, as well. It has thrown its weight around, it has acted like any other advocacy group in Washington, cultivating congressman, sending letters, petitions, and the like, and perhaps even more so than some of the Fundamentalist groups. But the two of them together have once again made religion in general, and Roman Catholicism in particular, part of the enemy. So what I see is a new sort of anti-Catholicism, but one I would generically want to put under the rubric of anti-religion, and particularly politically aggressive religion fighting what are seen as the great and vital causes.

I see no particular resolution to this. I think it is a good thing. I happen to be a very weird character myself; I’m pro-choice in abortion and anti-stem cell research, and this particular combination is quite odd and would take me a few months to explain it. But it seems to me that what has emerged in recent months with the stem cell debate is that there are now other groups being counted as against stem cell research: some women’s groups, some environmentalist groups and, in Europe, the Green Party is very opposed to much genetic research.

In this country, though, it’s been cast as debate of religion versus progress. I think that may change, but for a long time we’re going to have this struggle, and it seems to me all the more important. The recent scandal -- even though I am a fallen away ex-Catholic -- hurt me. I should add as a footnote that all of the secular people that know me don’t make any distinction between a practicing Catholic and an ex-Catholic. Catholic is Catholic. And they often say to me, “Well, of course you’re against stem cell research, given your background.” They make these assumptions and that’s an interesting question --whether that sort of thing is true or not.

It seems to me, in the long run, if that debate is to be resolved in any kind of satisfactory way, we are going to need a very strong religious voice, we’re going to need religious groups joining coalitions of secular groups that also have reservations about much genetic engineering.

WILLIAM DONOHUE: I would like to begin by talking about what I think is the root core, so to speak, of anti-Catholicism today. I think it’s contrasting/conflicting visions of liberty.

The Catholic Catechism teaches that liberty is the freedom to do what you ought to do. I can’t think of a single line that is more counter-cultural in our society today than that. “Liberty is the freedom to do what you ought to do.” Contrast that with what the dominant elites have been arguing for some time, quite successfully, that freedom is the liberty to do what you want to do. You can trace this back, as some people have, hundreds of years. You can go back to the little essay by John Stuart Mill in 1859 on liberty with its one very simple principle. That idea -- the idea of the unencumbered self, that I am answerable only to myself -- has unfortunately triumphed in our society. I much prefer the Catholic emphasis on community.

Indeed, I think that the idea that restraint is anathema to liberty is one of the greatest problems that we have in our society today. Again, I would much prefer sexual reticence, as understood by the Catholic Church, as opposed to sexual libertinism as understood by our society at large. You live longer, you’re happier if you exercise restraint in your life. The fact of the matter is that sexual libertinism is what’s driving busted relationships and unwanted pregnancies and AIDS and herpes. It’s a matter of people breaking down in discipline, and that discipline comes from an impoverished conception of liberty.

As a matter of fact, this idea—“ I am in charge of my own destiny”—even crept its way into the Supreme Court of the United States. Listen to this remarkable sentence by Souter in 1992 on Casey vs. Planned Parenthood: “At the heart of liberty is the right define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, the universe and of the mystery of human life.” I have never in my life read anything more preposterous, coming from a Supreme Court judge. I am answerable to no one. I am the unencumbered self. I am disattached from community. I can create my own moral existence. I would say this is madness.

But let me give you a contemporary example on this. Dina Wise, writing in a recent New York magazine, is worried about Sylvia Hewlett’s work on the biological clock: Once you hit thirty-five, the eggs are dropping off, and some women are panicking -- maybe they go out and find a husband. Now, here’s what Wise says: “I don’t like to hear the word can’t. None of us do in New York. This city is all about can do and will do. You say I can’t have a baby whenever I want. Well, I’ll do it anyway, to spite you. But then the eggs,” she says, her face falling, “you can’t really get around that.”

Well, don’t despair. In fact Wise doesn’t. Here’s her answer. She says “Maybe I don’t want to go there” -- you know, hunting for a husband -- “I’m looking at a turkey baster, or adopting a child from Cambodia. We could use some in Hempstead, Long Island. I’ll figure it out. I’m a New York woman. I’m resilient,” she laughs, throwing back her head, and she says, “I know I can have it all.”

Hubris is of course a very staple of our society. I think it’s mad -- as a sociologist, I think it’s mad, all right_ The idea that you can have it all is driving so much of the problem, and it’s very hard to get a Catholic perspective out there, when this seems to be the reigning idea.

When you get down to anti-Catholicism itself, I don’t have a theological micrometer that I pull out of my pocket, touch this cartoon, and all of a sudden it lights up as anti-Catholic. I have to make my judgment calls like everyone else.

In terms of anti-Catholicism today, I think most of the hard news objective reporting has been pretty good. I haven’t found too many examples. I have some problems with a lot of the cartoonists and with the essayists, but it’s a different genre, I understand that.

Here is an example of a cartoon. I think it’s fair, and I’ll tell you why. Somebody’s throwing a book at Cardinal Law; it says, “throwing the book at him,” there are a couple of priests over on the side, and it says “Whew, the pope still has a good arm on him.” It’s not against all priests. It’s against Cardinal Law, who probably does deserve to have the book thrown at him.

Here’s a cartoon that I think is despicable. It was in the New York Post on March 22^nd. The kid’s in the confessional. Picture the priest smoking a cigarette, with his pants down around his ankles, a bottle of booze next to him, and the kid says to the priest, “Anything you want to confess to me_” That’s a general thing. You can’t go from the individual to the collective without getting into some problems with regard to bigotry.

I’ll give you an example of a New York Times editorial that I certainly didn’t have any problem with. They write, “Americans have become depressingly familiar with the sight of great men and woman dragged before a judge or grand jury and answering questions with an eye to the finer nuances of law rather than the grand moral questions of social justice,” and they went on about Law. They’re putting it in context. How could that be anti-Catholic_

The Washington Post talks about the Catholic Church, long a vital institution in American society, engulfed in a moral, financial and legal crisis, unthinkable only a few years ago. This is sympathetic. This is not hammering us. Why shouldn’t you criticize the Catholic Church_ I am concerned when dissent kicks over into disdain into disparagement into insult; when you take from the individual and you go to the collective like that cartoon. Take, for example, KFI Radio, in Los Angeles. Here’s what they say: “Ten percent of priests are pedophiles; the other ninety percent are equally as guilty because they don’t do anything about it. I always have heard that men have a calling to the priesthood, now we know the calling is in his pants.”

Paul Vitello wrote a despicable column in Newsday recently where he generalized this way, and raised the propriety of Dennis Gillen, who happens to be a practicing Catholic, investigating Bishop Murphy and the diocese of Rockville Center. Can you imagine somebody saying, “Wait a minute, this guy’s a Jew. He shouldn’t investigate the Middle East because he could be bought. He may not be objective about it”_

I’ll give you one non-media example. This happened in Chappaqua, just the other day. At The Horace Greeley High School up in Chappaqua, four Catholic kids on a lacrosse team went on a retreat for a weekend to prepare for confirmation. When they came back the first year coach, Aaron Zimmerman, bawled them out and said in front of the whole team, “Why did you go on this retreat_ So you can get fucked by some priest_” The school acted on it very quickly. The man was fired.

PAUL MOSES: I worked at Newsday for seventeen years. I thought I would try to give you a view from the newsroom to see how this looks like from that perspective. We heard a lot of talk today about a hierarchical organization run by idiots, and that’s basically how reporters look at their own newsrooms.

Seriously, Ken Woodward said that newsrooms are very hierarchical, and you would think they maybe would be more understanding of the church’s structure for that reason, but they’re not.

I was city editor at Newsday for four years, city editor of the New York City edition, and one of the great pleasures of that job was that I got to speak with the most persistent of the callers who wanted to tell an editor that some story in the newspaper was biased. One day a man called in to complain that a story we had run about immigrants from Uzbekistan was biased. I was totally lost, because I hadn’t read the story, and at that point, three or four years ago, I really didn’t know anything about Uzbekistan other than that it was a former Soviet Republic. And the man said he represented a group called the Bukharan-Jewish Community and that he wanted to meet with me. I said, “When would you like to meet_” and he said, “In ten minutes.” It turned out that there were thousands of Bukharan Jews living within a few minutes walk of the office building in Queens where Newsday ran its city desk. So about three or four leaders from this community came up to the office within the promised ten or 15 minutes. They sat down at a table and they pulled out the newspaper story, an obscure story in the back of the paper, and the man said, “You called us Uzbeks.” And I said, “Well, you’re from Uzbekistan, right_” He went on to explain to me probably what many of you now know: Uzbeks are Muslims, and the Bukharan-Jews were obviously Jewish. Yes, they were from Uzbekistan, but they were not Uzbeks, and our error was so colossal they assumed that it was malicious, that we were somehow out to defame them and to insult them. I had to explain to them that it really resulted from ignorance, and that it was not meant to insult them.

I bring that story up because any discussion of anti-Catholicism in the news media should begin with the understanding that we Catholics join a long line of aggrieved parties. It is astonishing to me that there is so little knowledge about the Catholic Church in newsrooms given that Catholics make up so much of the population in major metropolitan areas; in New York City probably over 40 percent.

But are Catholics more misunderstood than Evangelical Protestants_ I really don’t think so. More than Muslims_ Definitely not. And we are certainly better known in the newsroom than immigrants from Uzbekistan.

Editors, reporters and columnists often define the Catholic Church in terms of how its views differ from theirs. But then again, journalists tend to define everything that way. If you look closely, for example, at the New York City media’s coverage of places like Staten Island, you’ll see what I mean. The subtext is always that these places are strange outside Manhattan. They’re not anything like the Upper West Side or Park Slope where most reporters live.

There was a really good example of that on the front page of the New York Times. The reporter expresses real surprise that there are people in the city who have to take a long time getting to work. I read this story on my hour-and-fifteen-minute trip in from the far reaches of Brooklyn. The news media does miss the boat in a lot of ways, not just with Catholics.

We Catholics get the same kind of coverage: the church is strange, it’s against abortion and homosexuality and even condoms for people with AIDS. Since these are hot button issues and since church leaders have emphasized these matters and sought to influence public opinion and legislation, the conflict is built in. But when does criticism or negative portrayal of the Catholic Church express bigotry_ Based on what I have encountered in twenty three years in the newsroom, I would have to say not nearly so often as some Catholics think. On that I tend to take a middling position between the excellent presentations by Mark Silk and Ken Woodward, which is, in some ways, a comfortable position to be in for someone who is a journalist -- in the middle, you feel that you are probably in the right spot.

Since I was known in the newsroom to be Catholic and not a lapsed Catholic or a collapsed Catholic, I would often be asked about allegations of Catholic-bashing. A lot of times I found them off base. When I was city editor, I used to get faxes almost every week about advertisers succumbing to a boycott of one of my favorite TV shows, “Nothing Sacred,” which was supposedly anti-Catholic. I thought it was a good and upbeat depiction of parish life, without having seen every episode -- when have you ever seen a liturgy committee meeting depicted on television_

Similarly, I never understood the fuss made over the movie “The Last Temptation.” Without going into all the details of it, I thought it was spiritually uplifting and I was happy after a few years to read a piece in First Things that said the same thing.

Several years ago I was at a meeting with Catholic Bishops Conference for a discussion on the news media and clergy sex abuse. This was about four years ago. And I was really bothered by the reactions of some the bishops who wanted to complain about the news media and this whole issue: would you do this with clergy from other religions_ I told them that I was surprised that some of the stories back in that period were not getting more attention nationally, and Mark Silk addressed that. I didn’t think the news media was really that interested in the story, unless it pointed to an institutional problem in the church. In my experience, we were running tiny stories in the back of the paper in that period. So I did become skeptical of claims about Catholic-bashing, even though I knew that the church was often misunderstood and even disliked by some in the newsroom. Of all the cases of alleged Catholic-bashing I encountered as a reporter or editor, I think the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensation” exhibit was probably the most interesting. I have to tell you, I was dismayed to see so little understanding among colleagues in the news media of why Catholics felt hurt that a museum would exhibit a painting of the Blessed Mother decorated with dung and with pictures of genitalia cut out from porn magazines. And articles on this subject often neglected that latter detail

But the cure was worse than the disease. Mayor Giuliani tried to evict one of the city’s great museums from its building. Here was a pro-choice politician ingratiating himself with the Catholic right to help his campaign for US Senate. We could talk about more why I think that, but the fundraising letters went out rather quickly.

I wish that anti-Catholicism in China or in Sudan could one day get the kind of publicity that Mayor Giuliani generated over that painting. That said, I want to note that about two weeks ago I got a call from the Brooklyn Museum reminding me that my membership had long ago lapsed. Actually, to borrow a phrase again, I would say my museum membership had collapsed. And I took advantage of this opportunity to tell the caller why I had no intention of rejoining any time soon.

ALAN WOLFE: Well, what can you possibly do when you’re the last speaker of a long day and everything’s been said. You have two choices really; you can basically say I relinquish my time, or you could say that I think that just about everything I have heard today is wrong. So I think I’ll take the latter course and challenge the whole basis of much of the day, and that is of the predominance of anti-Catholicism in the media or in any other places in American society.

There are, I think, religions in the United States that have experienced tremendous prejudice. In the middle of the 19^th century, believers of one faith were routinely killed, tarred and feathered, moved out of their towns by force and violence, constantly moving further west in order to find a home. One of the tenets of their faith was challenged in the American courts and was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, in the case of Reynolds vs. the United States. I speak, of course, of the Mormons. Unlike Catholicism, Mormonism was an American faith from the beginning, born and bred in the United States. It experienced tremendous prejudice and hostility throughout much of our history; a hostility and prejudice that remains in some corners of contemporary America, in particular among certain kinds of Evangelical Protestantism. But these days Mormons are widely praised for their honesty, praised for their probity. The Catholic state of Massachusetts may well have a Mormon as its next governor; if it doesn’t, it’s likely to have a Jew. This is a dramatic transformation in the way in which the United States has related to a religion.

I think the history and evolution of Catholicism has gone along a similar track. I agree very much with the history as John McGreevy has presented it. I think from the very founding of the United States there was a strong and persistent strain of anti-Catholicism. Indeed, I think that the whole idea of the separation of church and state, which we’re so proud of, was designed as a Protestant understanding of what the relationship of government and faith should be, and was explicitly directed against Catholic Europe. I think that one of the great political philosophers who influenced our culture, John Locke, in his letter concerning religious toleration, was explicitly anti-Catholic in his understanding of religious liberty, and had terrible things to say about the Catholic faith. So there’s certainly a history here. There is absolutely no doubt about it. But it is a history that is long gone, and it’s a history that’s long gone in part because American religion has changed and in part because American Catholicism has changed.

We’ve heard a lot today about what the media think and about what Harvard University thinks and about what professors think. My own research is an attempt to discover how ordinary Americans practice their faith. I just want to mention four htmlects of the way religion is actually practiced in the United States that mitigates against the possibility of any strong forms of anti-Catholicism in everyday life.

The first is that there is a tremendous amount of religious switching in the United States, and it’s increasingly unlikely that anyone who is an adult will be of the same religion as their parents were and certainly as their grandparents were. This, I think, is responsible for a great deal of the increasing tolerance of all religions. It’s almost like an insurance policy. If you don’t know what your religion is going to be twenty-five years from now, let alone what cockamamie ideas your children are going to come home with about how they should marry, then you are best off trying to be tolerant toward all of them because you just don’t know. It’s not a question of offending someone else; it’s a question of offending where you might be. Father Greeley mentioned that the drop-off rate from Catholics from birth to adulthood is from 31 percent to 25 percent. He minimized that. That’s actually an astonishing drop in religious terms.

It’s much more important that every study I’ve seen of Evangelical Protestant organizations shows that there are a very large number of former Catholics in these Protestant organizations and that, similarly, it goes both ways; there is switching in all directions. This is an enormously important htmlect of how Americans practice their faith.

Second, there’s an astonishing amount of theological ignorance in American religion. It’s remarkable because we’re supposed to be a Bible- reading country, and we always hear, especially about Protestants, about how they’re Bible-believing people, but people don’t know very much about the Bible at all. Their knowledge of the Bible is as about as limited their knowledge of American foreign policy. To think that people are going to make judgments about another faith based on ideas like the real presence of Jesus in the sacraments, or ideas about the liturgy and the role of the liturgy doesn’t take into account the fact that most Americans don’t know what the word liturgy means, that religious terms themselves are often confused by people, that most people’s approach to religion is not on the basis of ideas; it’s on the basis of feelings and what spirituality can do for me.

The notion that doctrinal disputes, especially the history of doctrinal disputes between Protestants and Catholics, are going to contribute to Protestant hostility toward Catholicism today is just incomprehensible in the actual world. Most Calvinists don’t know what Calvin stood for; they don’t know what the word predestination means. Lutherans have very little knowledge of the writings of Martin Luther. They will talk about the idea of a priesthood of all believers, but they’ll interpret it in ways that Martin Luther himself had never conceivably interpreted it. Theological doctrinal differences between people have decreased dramatically in the United States.

Third, one thing that almost all Americans do know about the Bible is the one sentence, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” That, in all surveys, comes up over and over and over again. Americans don’t want to make judgments about other faiths. Elizabeth McKeown said earlier that you can’t get students to make a negative comment about anything these days, and the idea that people are going to have a default position of negativity toward another faith runs against the grain of so much of what intellectuals, from Allen Bloom to William Donohue and even myself, find problematic in American culture. I wish my students would take their faith seriously enough to be critical of another.

In the aftermath of September 11^th, teaching in a Catholic University, I could not get a single student to talk about whether Catholicism and Islam might in fact be different religions with different ideas. It was impossible to do. All faiths are good; we don’t want to sit there and say anything negative about Islam. I had to try to tell them something about their own faith and why it might have resources that other faiths might not have, and why its historical evolution included a Vatican II and the historical evolution of Islam did not.

Finally, as with Mormons, there has been a dramatic change in the sociology of American Catholicism, an end to Catholic ghettoization, increasing suburbanization among American Catholics, increasing intermarriage between Catholics and non-Catholics -- a completely different world of on the ground reality in which most American Catholics live.

It’s a new world. It’s a world in which Catholics have rightly taken their place as one of America’s great religions.

PETER STEINFELS: I would like to give our panelists an opportunity to comment on one another’s remarks.

WILLIAM DONOHUE: I would just like to correct a couple of misimpressions. Never has the Catholic League come out in favor of censorship, or ever asked the government. Explicitly the opposite; we use First Amendment tools, like boycotts and things of that nature. You’re not going to win with the legal club.

“Corpus Christi” was shown at an Indiana University last summer, and we came out against the play of course, using our own moral suasion. Some people asked us to join a lawsuit against the school. I came out against the lawsuit. We don’t believe that censorship is the answer.

Second, “Nothing Sacred.” Yes, we worked hard against that show. Never did I call it anti-Catholic. That show was hardly anti-Catholic. What was my problem_ I didn’t like the spin on it. We have Father Ray, who can’t make up his mind about abortion, but certainly he can about smoking. He’s a guy who half believes in what the church thinks. The nun is off making statements about Buddha, and of course, the positive spin: every good Catholic on the show is a dissident Catholic. And every Catholic who is loyal to the Magisterium is the Neanderthal, bigoted, Archie Bunker-type. I’m tired of the stereotype.

PETER STEINFELS: Questions from the audience now. Here’s one for Alan Wolfe: Isn’t it possible that Americans who don’t want to make judgments are anti-Catholic precisely because Catholicism is a religion that makes judgments_

ALAN. WOLFE: Catholicism is a religion that makes judgments. I’m not sure whether Catholics do. I didn’t have a chance in my talk to talk about everyday ordinary Catholics who I don’t think are all that different from other American religious believers, in the way I described. Here I have to go on the basis of a very limited sample, my own students at Boston College, 85 percent of whom are Catholic, middle class -- the future, in many ways, of American Catholicism. If I were to rank them on a judgmental scale compared to other students, they are probably more nonjudgmental than students I’ve had at other institutions. They’re the nicest, sweetest, loveliest people I think I’ve ever taught, but getting them to make a judgment about anything is almost impossible. I try. I have discussions on abortion and I will occasionally have a student say that “I think abortion is murder, it’s an innocent life that’s being taken, it’s absolutely against God’s command.” And I’ll occasionally have another student say, “No, I think it’s a woman’s right to choose,” but then I’ll invariably have a third student who says, “I think you’re both right.”

PETER STEINFELS: Is it true that anti-Catholicism is mainly directed at Catholics who are orthodox, traditional and not liberal or reformed_

DANIEL CALLAHAN: Peter, if I understand the question correctly, this is certainly the case in the secular world I’m in, and the flavor of this world is aggressively secular. Catholics are accepted, but you pretty well have to have the right views in opposition to the church to be accepted. You really could not get away with being a pro-life person at the Harvard Medical School unless you absolutely kept it to yourself and treated it as private religion, but you certainly couldn’t lecture on it; you absolutely could not.

PETER. STEINFELS: What would be the penalties_

DANIEL. CALLAHAN: The penalty would be enormous. You’d be ostracized, I think.

PETER STEINFELS: Does the church want it both ways: to stand for counter-cultural values in the public square but to be spared criticism as a sacred institution_

PAUL MOSES: No one likes to be criticized. No one likes to be criticized and leaders of the church are the same way. I think they’ve made a lot of effort to avoid being criticized and that’s a human reaction. Whether it’s a weaker diocesan press or the Mandatum or the last meeting of the National Conference, they even put Catholic News Service through a lot of scrutiny. People don’t like to be criticized or questioned.

PETER STEINFELS: Is not the most practical and virulent manifestation of anti-Catholicism the government’s refusal to allow Catholics the financial means to give their children an education of their own choosing_

WILLIAM DONOHUE: I have no problem with somebody making an argument against vouchers. I happen to like vouchers, but you are not anti-Catholic, for God’s sake, if you’re against vouchers.

But, unfortunately, so many times state legislators can’t just make the case against vouchers without making an anti-Catholic statement. And that is regrettable.

PETER STEINFELS: Alan_

ALAN WOLFE: The initiative of President Bush to provide government money to faith-based organizations was something that was widely perceived as something going to evangelical Protestantism, and in its initial phase to African-American, inner-city churches. It has run into substantial opposition. My guess is that something will eventually be passed, but it will be significantly watered down.

On the other hand, a great deal of federal money has gone to Catholic and Jewish organizations -- to Catholic charities, to Catholic hospitals, to Catholic institutions of higher education. So on that particular issue there is more prejudice against evangelicals than there is against Catholics in American culture. Of course I don’t think that’s the real reason. I think the real reason for the opposition to funding the evangelicals is they wanted a clause that would exempt them from anti-discrimination laws, where as the Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals are more than happy to agree, as they properly should, to abide by the law in order to receive federal money.

PETER STEINFELS: The next question is not presented in the form of a question, it’s marked “Topic” and I’ll do my best to make it a question. The topic is “Catholics who tell other Catholics to leave the church if they don’t like it.” Gail, you seemed to refer to that in your experience.

GAIL BUCKLEY: Yes, I have gotten a couple of letters saying, “Get out. You know you hate the male hierarchy.” I happen to like a lot of the male hierarchy. But I feel that it all boils down to this anti-Vatican II thing. So I do consider that a form of anti-Catholicism because they want to go back to another kind of Catholicism. I was very hurt originally, and then I decided it was funny because I’m never going to get out of the church and he’s never going to get out of the church, so there we are, facing each other for the rest of our lives, and why not. I wish we could find a way to meet, at least in courtesy, and be able to talk to each other like we can in panels like this.

PETER STEINFELS: Is anti-Catholicism possibly more acceptable than anti-Semitism, anti-black, et cetera, because it’s against an institution rather than against people_

GAIL. BUCKLEY: I think my liberal friends would think that way. I think they would feel this is against the structure of the church. They see the Catholic Church as maybe more powerful than we see the Catholic Church or even the Catholic Church itself sees itself. And they feel that any other form of bigotry of course is horrible, but it’s fair in their eyes because it looks like it’s against some sort of power structure thing.

ALAN WOLFE: I think that’s right and I think it’s a fair question. One of the significant developments in American Protestantism has been an almost virulent anti-institutionalism that takes the form of people seeking home worship, for example. Just like home schooling, there are home worshippers. There’s been a huge growth of nondenominational Protestant churches based on the idea that denominations themselves are corrupt and that the purest form of worship, by its very nature, has to be nondenominational. There are charismatic churches that downplay, very strongly, any institutional loyalties in favor of immediate, spontaneous, emotional forms of worship.

In this overall American religious environment, which has had a long history of anti-institutionalism, Catholicism does stand out as different. There are similar developments among Catholic believers. There is a charismatic attraction among certain Catholics, but by its very nature the Catholic Church is different on this score, and therefore those anti-institutional trends will, I think, take the form of anti-Catholicism -- not directed against the believers, but directed against the church.

WILLIAM DONOHUE: It is towards the institutions to a large extent. But it’s not entirely that way.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation” exhibit’s picture of Mary -- that wasn’t attacking the hierarchy; that attacked me. So that’s an attack on me as a Catholic. I love my church and I don’t need that.

When you have Christ performing fellatio on one of His apostles on stage -- simulated of course -- in “Corpus Christi,” that’s an attack my religion. It’s not just the hierarchy, or abortion and Catholic teachings; sometimes it goes beyond that.

PETER STEINFELS: Why is abortion treated as a religious matter when conception is an elementary scientific one_ We could go down long road here. Dan, do you have any observations on both that question and more generally the labeling of people with religious identifications as a shorthand to deal with arguments regarding abortion_

DANIEL CALLAHAN: Well, from a philosophical perspective I think the view that life begins with conception is a perfectly rational viewpoint. You may object to it and say, “No, it begins later in development, not at the first,” but the point is it’s a rational viewpoint.

But I think the striking thing is that it is a rational viewpoint, which just happens to be held mainly by people in one church, so it’s very hard to see the rationality with that associated with the church. And it also has sort of a double-whammy in that the church, in effect, says, “You have to believe.” Yes, it’s perfectly rational, but behind this all is the teaching authority of the church, which says you must accept it. That, I think, is the main difference. But it’s mainly the association of Catholics with this particular viewpoint, which makes it looks religious though I don’t think in principle it need be religious at all. But it’s damned hard to find people who take the biological -- what’s called the genetic -- viewpoint, who aren’t Catholic. That’s just the way these things work out.

PETER STEINFELS: A question to Alan Wolfe: Do you think we might have something to learn from the students and their lack of criticism for other faiths_ Won’t they contribute to the establishment of a more pluralistic and healthy society_

ALAN WOLFE: It all depends on how it’s done. I think that there’s a kind of pluralism and a kind of tolerance that comes from knowing one’s own tradition, from feeling self-confident about it and, based on that knowledge, having a positive outlook toward people from other traditions, as opposed to one that comes out of a kind of defensiveness or ignorance. I’ve spent some time over the last couple of years at evangelical Protestant institutions, which require statements of faith on the part of their faculty, which would not allow Catholics to teach there. At Wheaton College, where I spend a lot of time, I asked the president of the institution what he would do if one of his faculty members came to him and said, “I’ve decided that my faith is best fulfilled through the Roman Catholic Church, and I’m going to convert.” And the president of the college just said, “He wouldn’t have any place here. There’s no place here for Catholics” -- as blunt as can be.

I teach at a Catholic college, on the other hand, which has no statements of faith, which welcomes people, like myself, who are not Catholic and who are not even religious, in my case, even to run and direct the Center on Religion and Politics. I see it as an institution secure about its faith, and secure enough in its identity, that it can welcome other people and other points of view. And I wish my students had that. When it comes out of “Well, I don’t want to say anything for fear of offending anybody,” then I think it’s not healthy.

PETER STEINFELS: Gail, do you think that the sexism of the Catholic Church fosters anti-Catholicism from both within and outside of the church_

GAIL BUCKLEY: I think it probably does. That’s what I hear from my non-Catholic friends, that it’s the sexism they consider. There were apparently women ordained in Czechoslovakia -- at least one. Now that there is a shortage of priests, why can’t the church consider women as deacons_ This is the kind of thing that a lot of women I know do feel.

I recently gave a speech at the Citadel in South Carolina where they are not afraid of saying they are anti-Catholic. These people think that we don’t believe in Jesus Christ. They think only they believe in Jesus Christ. It’s terrifying. And these are people who are going to be in our armed services, these young children. This is what they believe. And they say there can’t be any good Muslims, Buddhists, Presbyterians; their anti-Catholicism is fierce. They think we are really bad.

ALAN WOLFE: I should have added that my last visit to Wheaton College, which is Billy Graham’s alma mater and also the alma mater of Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House of Representatives, was after the current crisis in Boston. Given the history of this institution and its exclusionary policies toward Catholics, you would have thought it would be something like what you found at the Citadel: a kind of gloating that we told you so, how could we be surprised that this is what Catholics were doing_ I found none of that. I found exactly the opposite of what you found. I found a great sympathy and empathy for what the church was going through; a feeling that this is a crisis for all religions; a statement that, well, we’ve had our Jimmy Swaggarts and our Tammy Bakkers and so on, we’re in no position to criticize anything. I found a completely different kind of reaction. It may be the difference between the South and the Midwest.

PETER STEINFELS: I would have to underline the same thing as someone who surveys a lot of religious publications. The Lutheran Monthly Magazine recently devoted a whole issue to sex abuse questions with the indication that they share this problem as much as others. Christianity Today balks at the figure that was referred to earlier that in fact the Insurance Company Consortium reports that 70 allegations a week are made in Protestant churches; by the way, not all allegations against ministers. Twenty percent of them were allegations of sex abuse from other children in their programs.

So I agree: They are looking at this as a shared problem and not as something that they’re going to be gleeful about.

There was a question here about whether anti-clericalism and anti-Catholicism could be differentiated. I think the answer, probably, is yes, and probably everybody would agree it’s not always so easy to do that in specific cases.

There are two questions here for Dan Callahan, and they overlap. The first one is, “Why does the religious voice have to be heard in the stem cell debate_ What do religion and Catholicism have to contribute to this matter_” The second is whether we really know enough about stem cell research to take a definitive yes-or-no moral position on it.

DANIEL CALLAHAN: A large number of people in our country are religious. That’s where they get their values, that’s where they get their perspective in the world, that’s how they shape their view of the way things ought to be. So it would seem to me absolutely stupid and truly un-American to eliminate the religious voice and allow only non-religious people to enter into the debates. As a practical matter, I think the church is – Roman Catholicism and others -- have things useful to say that ought to be heard by others.

There is probably too strong a tendency in Roman Catholicism to be overly certain on everything; instead of saying, “This is really an open, difficult question,” as it should have done on contraception. They should have said, “There is a division in the church. We’re not sure on this matter; let’s have it debated for a while longer and see how it develops.” I think that would have been a much happier solution than simply ignoring a commission set up to deal with that issue, as well as the voice of the public.

PETER STEINFELS: Monsignor Maniscalco, who’s the press officer from the Bishop’s Conference, and Bishop Galante from Dallas made themselves available to reporters. Bishop Galante related the story of a pastor that he had to move because the pastor refused to carry out a safe-environment policy for his parish which would involve background checks on all the employees as well as ordained ministers. The parish was up in arms about the fact that their pastor was being removed for not following a stringent policy that the bishops had been insisting on.

When we left the meeting, in the newsroom, on a TV monitor tuned maybe to MSNBC or CNN, the very priest that Bishop Galante had been talking about now had a national platform for condemning his bishop for being despotic and cruel. This is a side effect of the whole current situation, and probably not deeply indicative of something about the media being ready to entertain virtually anybody who has a complaint about bishops.

PETER STEINFELS: “Media has never covered anything adequately: politics, economics, et cetera. Why should we expect that media will cover Catholicism adequately_” “Is it the task of media to give a complete story_ Is such a thing possible_” Oh ye of little faith.

I think most major metropolitan papers should have at least one specialist in covering religion. A study not too many years ago showed that a great percentage of the stories dealing with religion will inevitably be covered by general beat reporters or by other people because that’s where they are. You might hope that from time to time the editorial process would check those stories with a specialist in religion, which has, in the history of the New York Times, been done very unevenly. My guess is that at most papers where they have specialists in science and where, for some reason, a non-science beat reporter has to do the story, that would get run by the science specialist on the paper.

In many fewer cases, I would guess, does that happen with religion. Perhaps the reasons are related to all the things that Alan talked about, including the theological ignorance that characterizes a lot of American religion.

Last question: “Is the Catholic Church as assertive or aggressive as it should be in telling the world about what it has been, is about, and in taking the offensive rather than being reactionary and defensive_” Maybe they mean “reactive” here.

DANIEL CALLAHAN: I don’t think it’s any more appropriate for a church to be self-congratulatory and triumphalist than for individual people to be. It seems to me that it should be inverse ratio: there should be an enormous humility about very powerful organizations; they should not simply lord their power over others.

I think at some point in the past 20 or 30 years, the Catholic bishops decided, by god, we’re now equal in this country and we stand up and tell everybody else what to do. I don’t think a hundred years ago the idea that there would have been Catholic bishops telling Protestants what the hell they should do with their lives would have been common.

GAIL BUCKLEY: I wish the church were more aggressive in telling its wonderful parts. For example, if you only read the press you’d think that the Pope and the church were only interested in sex. Well, we know there’s a lot more out there that they’re doing really good things with and about, and that’s what I wish they’d publicize. There’s no need to be shy about the wonderful things the church is doing. There should be more balance between the way it’s shown in the press, People have asked me, is the church only interested in sex_ Obviously it’s not, but that’s what people think.

PAUL MOSES: In covering the religion beat – I did it twice – I was always struck at how the church really was not that good at putting its best foot forward. When you get out into the parishes, into the neighborhoods and see what’s really going on, it’s very impressive, and more people should know about that.

PETER STEINFELS: I was given an assignment -- an impossible assignment, so I’m not embarrassed about flubbing it – of summing up the day. The best I can do is hit a few moments and a few images that we can take with us, and perhaps work with in our own thinking.

One of the very first ones of the day was Father O’Hare’s remark about the church being a Rorschach test where all sorts of people saw all sorts of different things. The same could be said about the idea of anti-Catholicism. And Elizabeth McKeown later referred to it as an “Alice in Wonderland,” “Humpty Dumpty” word that means what you want it to mean, and you have to decide what use you want to put it to.

We also were given some helpful distinctions; one a helpful distinction between religious and cultural anti-Catholicism by John McGreevy, where the latter was underlined as the most relevant one for our situation today, and the core of cultural anti-Catholicism was making autonomy the preeminent virtue, and making hierarchy, especially in matters of religion, suspect. He went on to talk about sexual issues and the major movements related to them -- the women’s movement, the gay and lesbian movement -- as a context for cultural anti-Catholicism. There is still matter to be explored there: certainly one could simply engage in a rational discussion of the question of whether autonomy should be the preeminent virtue, and hierarchy should be suspect in matters of religion.

John also pointed to the problem of the church’s leadership being unable to make a compelling case for its traditional sexual ethic, taking into account the contemporary emphasis on personal experience.

Of all the very interesting material that Andrew Greeley left us with, the most important that I take away is his finding about the question of whether Catholics can think for themselves, or whether they do think for themselves. This has the most relevance to the other things we’re talking about, particularly the presence of the church as an institution and Catholics as identified individuals in the public sphere. The underlying assumption is one which could be critical in those areas.

Elizabeth McKeown had some very interesting insights, comparing the experience of Jews confronting anti-Semitism, and the whole question, which I think was running through her comments in a number of ways, about the use of anti-Catholicism as a form of building identity within the Catholic body. R. Laurence Moore has an interesting book called, “Outsiders in American Religion” where he talks about Catholics, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Jews, a number of non-mainstream groups, and how they have leveraged outsiderness, if you will, to become insiders and to consolidate their own ranks to that end. And I think that is a point that we should keep in mind when we’re thinking about the whole issue of anti-Catholicism.

If there’s anything that maybe we should have addressed more directly, although it has come up indirectly, it is the whole dimension of emotion and feeling that are captured by the two words -- contempt or repugnance -- that is one of the questions that may divide legitimate criticism from what could be called bigotry, and whether it really is a serious factor in this discussion.

My final observation is something that is always pertinent to meetings where there are many different points brought forth, and where there’s going to be no vote taken at the end of the day, and that is the observation that the literary critic and political thinker and activist, Irving Howe, always made at the end of meetings like this: “We all may leave confused, but we’ll leave confused at a higher level.”