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
Sic et Non
Response
by Mark Silk
to:
Andrew Greeley / NORC: University of Chicago
/ University of Arizona
Click here
for a printer-friendly version of the complete text
It was
very nice of Mark and his fellow planners to include a couple of Jews on the
conference program, but perhaps not so nice to assign me the “non” role on
this Sic et Non panel. By
“non” I take
it that my job is to dispute the idea that anti-Catholicism is the last
acceptable prejudice, or possibly just that it is an acceptable prejudice. Well, we all have our crosses to bear.
Let me begin by saying that, from a Jewish perspective, the
problem of anti-Catholicism may not seem too severe. After all, there are a
billion Catholics in the world today, as opposed to 15 million Jews. In
America, Catholics are the largest religious body, representing a quarter of
the population—as opposed to Jews, who represent less than two percent. I dare
say we’d accept a fair extra measure of anti-Semitism for numbers like that!
But prejudice is not just a numbers game. It is also about how people are
represented in the central arteries of the culture. And so I will turn to the
news media, with which, in one way or another, I’ve spent most of my time over
the past couple of decades.
Are the American news media anti-Catholic_ The only systematic
effort to answer this question that I know of was a study conducted a decade
ago by Robert and Linda Lichter and Daniel Amundson. It looked at coverage of
the Catholic church by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, and CBS News during
three five-year periods in the mid-1960s, 70s, and 80s. Commissioned by the
Knights of Columbus and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the
study grouped stories into four coverage areas found to have dominated the
coverage: sexual morality, power relations within the church, relations between
the church and state authority, and relations with other churches. In all but
the last area, the study concluded, the church was on the losing side of a
policy debate. In addition, the authors assessed the media’s use of descriptive
language and found that the church was “overwhelmingly portrayed as an
oppressive or authoritarian institution.” The basic story line, they concluded,
“increasingly…revolves around a beleaguered authority struggling to enforce its
traditions and decrees on a reluctant constituency.”
As striking as the study’s conclusions were, they were
immediately called into question by our friends at Commonweal, in a
lengthy lead editorial in the May 17, 1991 number entitled “Thin-skinned.” The
editorial pointed out that of the 1,876 stories sampled by the study, only 115
used “emotive” words like authoritarian, rigid, or emancipating to characterize the church as either oppressive or
liberating. That 98 of the 1,876 used “oppressive” terms hardly justified
calling the media’s portrayal of the church as overwhelmingly oppressive. The
editorial had more to say about the inadequacies of the study, but you get the
point. And from my own examination of coverage of the Catholic church, I would
agree with the Commonweal.
For the past 5 years I have edited Religion in the News, a
triannual magazine that looks at how the news media deal with various types of
religious subject matter. In the course of a dozen issues we have published two
dozen articles that look at coverage of the Catholic church in some
fashion—generally but not exclusively by U.S. news media. The stories in
question include, among others: papal journeys to Cuba, the Holy Land, and
Greece and the Ukraine; vouchers, international debt relief, and charitable
choice; exorcism and Elian Gonzalez; Dominus Iesus and the mandatum for
teaching theology at Catholic institutions of higher learning; the election of
Vicente Fox as president of Mexico; a fight over a radical priest in Rochester;
a fight over coverage of Cardinal Bevilaqua by the Philadelphia Inquirer; the
fight over having a Catholic chaplain in the House of Representatives; the
death of Cardinal O’Connor; controversies over the television show “Nothing
Sacred,” the play Corpus Christi, and Chris Ofili’s artwork, “The Holy Virgin Mary” at the
Brooklyn Museum of Art; and, of course, the ongoing story of the church and
pedophilia. I will not here attempt to run down how the coverage went in each
of these cases. For all the details you can consult our website:
What I would say is that the treatment of the church—of
Roman Catholicism—has run the gamut from the positively hagiographic to neutral
to pretty negative, depending on the story. At the hagiographic end was
coverage of Cardinal O’Connor. Also hagiographic, I might add, was coverage of
the late Father Mychal Judge, the New York Fire Department chaplain who died
giving last rites at the World Trade Center on September 11.
At the negative end, I’d cite the Palm
Beach Post’s religion writer Steve Gushee’s 1998 characterization of the church
as “the world’s oldest totalitarian state and the quintessential old boys’
club”—a crack made in the midst of the coverage of the resignation of Bishop
Joseph Symonds for having molested several young men years earlier. The
Catholic League could doubtless cite others. But so far as I have found, such
comments are pretty infrequent.
Overall—and this will, I’m sure, come as a great
shock—the church tends to look better in the eyes of the secular media when it
takes positions that the media tend to find worthy—debt relief, ministering to
the downtrodden, working for peace. On the other hand, when the church—or, let us
say, its leadership—seems to protect child abusers, that’s another story. When
it comes to cultural productions like Corpus Christi or “The Holy Virgin Mary,” there is tension between disrespect for
a religion (something the press generally doesn’t like) and the free expression
of ideas (which the press tends to salute). When the Catholic League launches a
protest, the balance tips towards free expression (now threatened by
“censorship”), and the news media generally side with free expression.
Whether this is anti-Catholicism is a nice question.
The claim is made that journalists would be a lot less tolerant of something
that disrespects, say, Islam. Maybe so. But there is a cultural rule of thumb
worth bearing in mind here. The media expect large and powerful groups to be able
to absorb more criticism than small and powerless ones. The Church may consider
itself a minority school in a sea of Protestant and secular fish. But that
isn’t the way Catholicism is viewed by outsiders.
In any event, it is hard not to notice how often
controversies over Catholicism these days appear to be an intra-Catholic thing,
with the rest of us kind of looking on with interest. “Nothing Sacred” and Corpus Christi and “The Holy Virgin
Mary”—and, for that matter, the movie “Dogma”—are the creations of people who
are Catholics or were Catholics. Maybe some would call them self-hating
Catholics. But the point is, the controversies have the character of a
commentary or critique or debate among insiders. This, indeed, can be said of a
good deal of the discussion, in the media and outside it, of the current crisis
in the Church—especially in Boston, which is ground zero. Just about everyone
weighing in, including the judges and the district attorneys, are Irish
Catholics. The Boston Globe, which is
filled with Catholics of different species, has of course led the journalistic
pack. But, interestingly, the editorial line of the Boston Herald has been far tougher on Cardinal Law than the Globe’s, and indeed the Herald has had the better of the
reporting from inside the archdiocese. Why_ Because the Herald, from its publisher on down, is more connected to the church
than the Globe is.
So where
does this leave us_ Is anti-Catholicism still an acceptable prejudice_
Despite the
remarkable growth of acceptance of religious “otherness” in American society,
there will, I believe, always be theological disagreement, an odium theologicum that shades into
prejudice. The strongest hostility to Catholicism these days, I would venture
to say, comes from the Eastern Orthodox, who fully share in the analogical
imagination but have various historical and doctrinal bones to pick with Rome.
If other Americans think that Catholics worship the Virgin Mary, it probably
has as much to do with ignorance, invincible or otherwise, as prejudice. (I
doubt many are aware of those who would have the church pronounce Mary to be
co-mediatrix.)
But what
the Jews have learned, more or less, is that the anti-Semitism that counts is
not the odium theologicum per se but
the anti-Semitism that has effects in the real world. I think that’s a good
standard. The fracas over the appointment of a Catholic chaplain in the House
of Representatives was notable but, I think, far less notable than the election
of Catholic governors in states like Alabama and Oklahoma. American Catholics
themselves seem to me to be pretty at home in America—perhaps too much at home
for some tastes, but there it is. There is no other explanation for their
readiness to express their feelings about the church hierarchy as publicly as
they have in the current crisis.
Consider the following exchange
between Archbishop Elden Curtiss of Omaha and a local layman, Frank Ayers, who
had written a letter to the Omaha
World-Herald criticizing Curtiss’s handling of a priest charged with
viewing child pornography on the Internet. “Any Catholic who uses the secular
media to air complaints against the leadership of the church, without dialogue
with that leadership, is a disgrace to the church,” wrote Curtiss to Ayers. “The
clergy and the laity have been silent about this in the past, and it has not
served the church well,” Ayers told the newspaper. “We’re going to discuss it
openly and publicly. The bishops in the United States aren’t going to be
allowed to handle this quietly any longer.”
From the
peanut gallery of onlookers, I’d say that, for those worried about
anti-Catholicism, there’s a silver lining in the present crisis: It should
disabuse all non-Catholic Americans of any residual belief that Catholics are
people who follow the orders of the hierarchy like sheep. For this reason if no
other, the revolt of the Catholic laity, evident on the pages of newspapers
across the country, should gladden the heart of Father Andrew Greeley. I’d also
advance the opinion that William Donohue’s refusal to bash the media over the
past few months has done more for the cause of anti-anti-Catholicism than all
his previous protests. As we know from Sherlock Holmes, sometimes the most
significant datum is when the dog doesn’t bark.
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