Fr. Barron on Anti-Catholic Prejudice Then and Now

See also Fr. Barron's article, "Why Anti-Catholic Prejudice Ought to Bother Everyone."

Covering Catholicism

Pelosi gives talking points to Catholics!

 Elizabeth Scalia, The Anchoress, describes the unbelievable chutzpah of Nancy Pelosi.  Not only does Pelosi pretend to be a faithful (devout, even) Catholic rather than an apostate.  She also tries to suggest — in the face of the entire teaching body of the Church and thousands of years of understanding and reason, that say differently — that her Catholicism compels her to defy and denounce the teaching of the Church in order to impose her views on others. 

Pelosi Tries to Give Talking Points to Catholics – UPDATED

May 11, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

Right on schedule, Nancy Pelosi tries to do what Ted Kennedy and Mario Cuomo have done before her: give talking points to Catholics who wish to hop on to policy that flies in the face of church teaching.

You’ll recall it was Kennedy (and later Cuomo) who gave voice to the corkscrew notion that one could be “personally opposed” to abortion but too broad-minded to “impose my views on others.”

Because, as you know, modern-day liberals would never presume to impose their views on others, not at all. The HHS Mandate? Pffffft!…it’s not imposing anything on Catholic institutions! It’s just making them do the right thing!

Kennedy’s duplicitous language was effective, though. It informed whole generations of very cowardly Catholic politicians and others.

READ MORE HERE

Lucifer's Letter on Gary Gutting and the New York Times

I find it impossible these days to think of Gary Gutting, philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, without being reminded of C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters.  I imagine a letter from Lucifer to his nephew Snipe, the agent in charge of undermining Catholic education, something like the following.

Paul Adams 

My dear Snipe,

I have been watching with growing admiration your recent activities.  Even though the media and comboxes, even a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, denigrate the Catholic Church daily to good effect, there is nothing like the sophisticated musings and pronouncements of a professor at a prestigious Catholic university to sow confusion among the faithful.  It is very helpful to perpetuate - above all in centers of Catholic learning - the idea that orthodoxy is for simple folk, people like fishermen and tax collectors and much beneath the cultured elite.  So your work in fostering dissent and cynicism in philosophy and theology departments at places like Notre Dame, Georgetown, and Boston College is greatly appreciated.

It is very good to see how one of my favorite professors, Gary Gutting of Notre Dame’s philosophy department, is writing regularly for the New York Times to undermine the teaching authority of the Catholic Church as well as the teachings themselves.

I was amused to see Gutting’s comment in the New York Times that “the immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church.”  He based this astonishing but welcome news on the fact that so many Catholics ignore Church teaching on the matter.  What I especially enjoyed was his response to those like EWTN and Professor William E. May of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America who pointed out that God’s Son gave the authority to speak in his name only to a designated body.  “This was, and is,” said May, “Saint Peter, the Apostles and their successors.”  They alone “have the authority to speak, in the name of Jesus Christ, the truths that are necessary for our salvation.”  

Professor May even cited the teaching of Vatican II that Catholics “may not undertake methods of birth control which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law.”  He cites another document of Vatican II on the duty of Catholics to accept and submit to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff.”  These are dangerous arguments, drawing as they do on the authority of Christ himself and Vatican II, a council to which dissidents like to appeal. No worries - we know that the NYT looks to my followers, not the bishops, to speak for Catholics, and Gutting did a wonderful job of appealing to the “spirit” of Vatican II against what that Council’s documents actually say. 

But here our dear Professor Gutting surpasses himself.  He rejects the relativist view of the unsophisticated undergraduate that there is no objectively correct view, but asks how we can decide who’s right.  “We can’t appeal to the bishops to decide the matter, since what’s in question is their authority. So obviously, Catholics have to answer this question on their own, by their own best lights. That’s what I mean by saying it’s up to individual Catholics.”

That is brilliant!  He asserts as a matter of fact that the immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church.  He admits that his assertion is contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church as promulgated by the pope and bishops, but then says it’s up to individual Catholics to decide what authority those clerics have anyway.  Be sure to have our dear professor explain to the New York Times that the Church no longer teaches the Real Presence either and use this same argument to justify his position if challenged.  This is the way to go, a sure path to our ultimate goal, dissolution of the Church.

Now in a column in the esteemed NYT our friend goes further and questions God’s authority too, on the grounds that even if he exists he may be up to no good as far as humans are concerned and anyway it doesn’t matter what people believe.  Doesn’t he do a good job of turning God’s answer to Job--about the limitations of human understanding in relation to the omniscience of God (Job 38)--into an argument against (or for the irrelevance of) belief in God at all?  Mere mortals, as he says, have no idea what he is up to or whether it’s for the benefit of humans.  

This is all very good.  He not only undermines religious faith, but also attacks the very foundations of Christianity without firing a shot.  In becoming one of them, God confronted humans with a Fact, an inescapable truth claim that becomes for them the most important and inescapable question imaginable.  Either God became man or he didn’t. People accept or reject the claim.  It is, as we know, absurd to say that it doesn’t matter.  But this is exactly what Gutting does, with such sleight of hand that he appears sophisticated and intelligent while making those who think truth matters look ignorant and not too bright.  Admirable!

I want to conclude with an admonition.  Departments of philosophy and theology at major Catholic universities play a crucial role in undermining the faith.  So many intelligent young people come to professors like Gutting as faithful Catholics and lose their faith in just a few years under their skillful instruction.  That parents spend tens of thousands of dollars on the ruin of their children’s souls is an added bonus.

But there are challenges and we must maintain our vigilance.  We have had two strong popes in a row determined to stop the rot we are trying to spread.  Sadly, there is a new spirit of orthodoxy and enthusiasm among the young and the newer priests and religious.  Old dissident orders and seminaries are dying out or being closed down.  How to reverse these damaging trends?

First, it is necessary to criticize the Church and the bishops publicly whenever they come into conflict with the state.  Fortunately, you can count on the mainstream media to turn to our people as if they had equal authority to speak for Catholics.  People like our dear professor must always be on hand to explain that the Church no longer teaches what she teaches.

But now many seminaries and religious orders are again admitting young men and women who are orthodox and devout.  The work of keeping or driving them out as “rigid” is faltering.  Pious, good men are once again becoming priests and joyful, holy women are joining new orders, all wearing their clerical clothes and habits openly with pride.

That is very bad and you must see that this sort of thing does not happen in the prestigious Catholic universities you oversee.  You must make sure that orthodox, faithful Catholics are never hired as faculty in philosophy and theology departments and that students of that kind are given as hard a time as possible.  They must come to see the error of their ways or suffer the consequences of their obduracy.  Your people have only a few years to do their work with these impressionable young people.  They know not to teach the self-refuting claim that all truth is relative but don’t forget Gutting’s excellent alternative - it may be objective but what that truth is and who has authority to decide is just a matter of opinion. 

Remind our collaborators in the elite Catholic faculties of our slogan.  In religion you can say anything you like as long as you don’t claim that it’s true.  The only heresy is orthodoxy.  Drum this into students and the battle is half won.

Your affectionate uncle,

Reficul

A Canon Law Perspective on the Scandal of Nancy Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi deserves to be taken seriously. Very seriously...

February 7, 2012

In March 2010, I expressed the view that Nancy Pelosi’s protracted and public anti-life conduct, which she repeatedly justifies with (twisted takes on) the Catholic faith, sufficed, in my view, to bring about her debarment from the reception of holy Communion under Canon 915. If Pelosi’s “prolonged public conduct does not qualify as obstinate perseverance in manifest grave sin,” I wrote two years ago, “then, in all sincerity, I must admit to not knowing what would constitute obstinate perseverance in manifest grave sin.”

READ MORE HERE

From "In the Light of the Law: A Canon Lawyer's Blog" by Edward N. Peters, JD, JCD, Ref. Sig. Ap.

The Cruel Curse

Whenever I read the National Catholic Reporter, the house organ of the anti-Catholic Catholics, the 'bitter and twisted' old 'liberals' who espouse the "spirit" of Vatican II rather than its substance, who led the desacralization or, as some of them proudly call it, the Protestantization of the Catholic Church, who completed the work of the Reformation in what Eamon Duffy called in his book on the destruction of traditional religion in England between 1400 and 1580, The Stripping of the Altars, who call on the bishops to "listen" to the laity but who themselves are unable to hear the voice of the young who thirst for orthodoxy and piety, who revere JPII and B16, who come to World Youth Day in their millions, who choose seminaries and religious orders that are orthodox in faith and morals and that value devotion and piety, letting the old orders and seminaries with their aging dissidents wither... 


then I am reminded of this passage from German writer Martin Mosebach's book on the destruction in Europe of liturgy, altars, sacred music, art, and architecture over the past 40 years, The Heresy of Formlessness:

The 20th century cult of youth culminates in a cruel curse: while the aging process cannot be stopped, the aging human being is not allowed to mature. and is condemned, until his life's end, to play the long-dead games of his youth. This is most clearly seen in the world of art--which is so closely related to religion--where the avantgardisms of 1905 are still being repeated again and again, as an ossified ritual, a hundred years later. And, with her famous aggiornamento, the Church thinks that, in order to survive, she needs to 'open herself' to these senile avantgardisms!" (pp.81-82).

Mosebach is decrying the postconciliar devastation of the Catholic Church in Europe, but with a few minor word changes his point can be applied to those who claim the mantle of the Sixties generation as a whole, in the seminaries, universities, and media, secular and Catholic alike.

Sex and the New Intolerance

In a recent article on Maureen Dowd’s increasingly intense and frequent anti-Catholic rants in the New York Times, and on the general phenomenon of Catholic anti-Catholicism, George Weigel sees the driving force of this new bigotry as “an irrational and unsustainable belief in the sexual revolution” http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/270110 .

While the Church has cleaned house, Weigel argues, Dowd and other prophets and prophetesses of the Sexual Free-Fire Zone have blithely ignored the evidence of the broken and crippled lives caused by the sexual license they applaud as liberation.” What infuriates such anti-Catholic Catholics as Dowd, Anne Rice, and the National Catholic Reporter is, above all, the refusal of the Church to bend its teachings to the ideology and practices of the sexual revolution, to fall in line with the rich and powerful cultural elites that accept it as an unchallengeable orthodoxy.

In an excellent interview about the vote in New York on the “Marriage Equality Act,” Robert P. George discusses how the vote there “to redefine marriage advances the cause of loosening norms of sexual ethics,” how New York “has abolished marriage as a matter of civil law and replaced it with a counterfeit that New Yorkers’ children and grandchildren will be taught to accept and approve as if it were the real thing.” The whole argument is penetrating and should be read in full at http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/270662.

The part that especially struck me as a lifetime teacher of graduate social work students is the emergence of this new orthodoxy that George calls sexual liberalism. It is an ideology directly contrary to social work’s purpose of contributing to individual and community well-being and its commitment to the poor and vulnerable. Yet, like liberalism as a political movement, social work has fallen for this ideology hook, line, and sinker, and is increasingly intolerant of any evidence or argument that questions it.

It is an ideology whose early advocates were the likes of Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, and Hugh Hefner, who attacked and ridiculed traditional norms of sexual conduct as mere ‘hang-ups.’

Although Sanger was a racist and a eugenicist, though Kinsey was a liar and a fraud, though Hefner was a buffoon, the liberationist view they had championed eventually hardened into something very close to an orthodoxy in elite circles…. Devotion to ‘sexual freedom’ had been no part of the liberalism of FDR, George Meany, Cesar Chavez, Hubert Humphrey, or the leaders and rank-and-file members of the civil-rights movement. Today, however, allegiance to the cause of sexual freedom is the nonnegotiable price of admission to the liberal (or “progressive”) club.

The price is indeed nonnegotiable and faithful Catholics and other Christians are being forced out of leadership in the Democratic Party, its “Catholic” leaders like Pelosi, Biden, and Andrew Cuomo publicly and vehemently attacking the settled teaching of the Church.

But the same is happening in social work and other ‘helping professions’ as the belligerent adherents of the new sexual orthodoxy reject compromise on grounds of conscience or religious freedom and push out those who disagree with the sexual liberationist orthodoxy. George describes the process of conversion to sexual liberalism/liberation/libertinism and how it produces new levels on intolerance and bigotry in the name of tolerance:

Moreover, one will come to regard one’s allegiance to sexual liberalism as a mark of urbanity and sophistication, and will likely find oneself looking down on those “ignorant,” “intolerant,” “bigoted” people — those hicks and rubes — who refuse to get “on the right side of history.” One will perceive people who wish to engage in conduct rejected by traditional morality (especially where such conduct is sought in satisfaction of desires that can be redescribed or labeled as an “orientation,” such as “gay” or “bisexual,” or “polyamorist”) as belonging to the category of “sexual minorities” whose “civil rights” are violated by laws embodying the historic understanding of marriage and sexual ethics. One will begin congratulating oneself for one’s “open-mindedness” and “tolerance” in holding that marriage should be redefined to accommodate the interests of these minorities, and one will likely lose any real regard for the rights of, say, parents who do not wish to have their children indoctrinated into the ideology of sexual liberalism in public schools. “Why,” one will ask, “should fundamentalist parents be free to rear their children as little bigots?” Heather’s two mommies or Billy’s two mommies and three daddies are the keys to freeing children from parental “homophobia” and “polyphobia.

Kathryn Jean Lopez concludes the interview with a question of how name-calling and ad hominem attacks substitute for reason and evidence in the rhetoric of the new orthodoxy”

LOPEZ: Why should anyone care about this debate anymore? A man and a man can legally get married in New York. The die is cast. Besides, who wants to be an intolerant anti-civil-rights bigot — or so my inbox has called me all weekend, again.

Anyone in social work who has even attempted to explain the arguments for maintaining the integrity of marriage and the social harm done to women, children, men, the poor and society as a whole abandoning its legal recognition as a comprehensive union ordered to the having and rearing of children, will have experienced these defeatist sentiments. Students and colleagues, in my experience, are unable even to comprehend the argument or weigh the evidence, all claims to “critical thinking” notwithstanding.

Here is George’s response:

GEORGE: Well, people should care because the whole edifice of sexual-liberationist ideology is built on damaging and dehumanizing falsehoods. It has already done enormous harm — harm that falls on everybody, but disproportionately on those in the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of our society. If you doubt that, have a look at Myron Magnet’s great book The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the UnderclasThe Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclasss, or some of the writings of Kay Hymowitz and other serious people who have examined the social consequences for the poor of the embrace of sexual liberalism by celebrities and other cultural elites. Marriage is a profound human and social good; its weakening and loss is a tragedy from which affluent people can be distracted (and protected) by their affluence for only so long. The institution of marriage has already been deeply wounded by divorce at nearly plague levels, widespread non-marital sexual cohabitation, and other damaging factors. To redefine it out of existence in law is to make it much more difficult to restore a sound understanding of marriage on which a healthy marriage culture can be rebuilt for the good of all. It is to sacrifice the needs of the poor, who are hurt the most when a sound public understanding of marriage and sexual morality collapses. It is to give up on the truth that children need both a father and mother, and benefit from the security of their love for each other.

So people are calling you “intolerant” and an “anti-civil-rights bigot”? Well, for those who have absorbed the premises of sexual liberation and embraced its dogmas so fanatically that they can’t fathom the possibility that any reasonable person of goodwill could dissent from them, that’s what people like you and me seem to be. Like overly impassioned believers at all times and in all places, these folks suppose that anyone who doubts the tenets of their faith must have malign motives. Dissenters from what they regard as an unquestionable orthodoxy must be “haters” (the modern word for “heretics”). It’s ironic — and amusing — that these folks regard themselves as urbane, sophisticated people — critical thinkers — who are much smarter and better informed (not to mention more “tolerant” and “open-minded”) than their opponents. In truth, they rarely have the foggiest notion of what the arguments are in support of the view they reject or what the intellectual challenges are for the view they hold. They already know the truth, and that’s that! So what need is there for reflection, study, deliberation, and debate? Why argue with “intolerant, anti-civil-rights bigots”? To the barricades!

Of course, there is an astonishing degree of ignorance on display in all this, especially when considered in proportion to the certitude and moral passion of sexual liberalism’s true believers. Perhaps it is too much to ask of them, but for those who might (perhaps secretly, when no “sophisticated,” “urbane” friends are looking) want to know why those of us on the other side dissent, and who might be willing to consider what we believe are the damning intellectual challenges that same-sex “marriage” advocates have not met and cannot meet, here again is the link to “What is Marriage?”

[For more on the post-Sixties phenomenon of the anti-Catholic Catholic, see Philip Jenkins’s excellent study, The New Anti-Catholicism]

Fr. Barron Comments on Anne Rice's Leaving Christianity

Fr. Barron posted these charitable and penetrating comments last August in response to Anne Rice's announcement that she was leaving Christianity. In light of Rice's continued denunciations of the Church, its leaders, and the Magisterium, on her Facebook page and elsewhere, it is still very apposite.

The clip prompted several interesting comments, including the following question from Kell Brigan:

Hm, yeah, but... Is it better to consider oneself a Catholic, but then to continually advocate for ideas directly contrary to Church teaching (i.e. Pelosi on abortion, Colbert on same-sex marriage), or to be an honest "heretic" and leave Catholicism specifically because one wants to do politics in opposition to the Magisterium. At least Rice is being honest, which is more than I can personally say for either Pelosi or Colbert, et al.

To which list of unfaithful or anti-Catholic Catholics we might add the National Catholic Reporter (always excepting the good work of John Allen who unaccountably still writes for them), which continues to use the word Catholic in its title. I have tried reading it from cover to cover (metaphorically speaking, since I read the online edition), found many reasons to oppose or leave the Catholic Church but almost none to encourage, support, or inform me in my faith. With such friends....

Kristof's Anti-Catholic Krap

A friend suggested I do a response on my blog to a typically nasty and ill-informed anti-Catholic NYT op-ed by Nicolas Kristof. Glad to see Carl Olson of Ignatius Press's Blog Insight Scoop did it for me. He has a bigger readership! I blogged about this situation twice in May but the Anti-Catholic Catholics of National "Catholic" Reporter and anti-Catholic ex-Catholics like Kristof and Anne Rice have decided this is a good story for bashing faithful Catholics and the Church.

Check out this link:
Insight Scoop | The Ignatius Press Blog: Nicholas Kristof is spouting Nasty Krap

Some calmer responses, less dripping with sarcasm, and so perhaps more persuasive to the unpersuaded, appear in the comments responding to Kristof's column. Like this one:

Mr. Kristof,

Your op-ed represents a gross misunderstanding of the situation at St. Joseph's and of the Catholic Church's teaching on the issue of troubled pregnancies.

...

To make a long story short, the Catholic Church does not forbid the death of an unborn child if the mother's life is in danger. The key standard for distinguishing what is permitted is whether actions taken by medical professionals are targeted towards saving the life of the mother or directly towards end the life of the unborn child. If medical treatments administered to the mother have the unfortunate effect of ending the unborn child's life, the Church does not condemn such actions - so, for example, if the mother has an illness that requires medication, and that medication is the only way to save the mother's life but is toxic to her unborn child, the Church would permit the medical professionals to administer the medicine.

In this case, however, the medical professionals performed a procedure with the express intent of killing the unborn child, despite the fact that the mother's life was not in imminent danger. Again, even if they had performed a different procedure that had the effect (but not the intent) of killing the unborn child, the Church would not have felt compelled to act they way it did. But, unfortunately, the medical staff (advised by the sister in question) chose the only morally impermissible course.

The medical professionals and religious staff at St. Joseph's are not nearly as deserving of sympathy as you make them out to be, nor is the Church nearly as strict or dogmatic as you make it out to be. Next time, try learning one iota about Catholic theology before making broad generalizations for political purposes, Mr. Kristof.

Unhinged: Anti-Catholic Catholics Lose It over JPII

They Do Hate JP II, Don’t They?
By Austin Ruse
FRIDAY, 14 JANUARY 2011

The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Little birdies sing in the sunshiny day. And heterodox Catholics possess a shocking enmity toward Pope John Paul II. The Associated Press, calling JPII “a universally beloved figure,” reported just yesterday that Benedict XVI may announce today the beatification of his predecessor. But the reaction was quite different when John Allen first broke this story last week in the pages of the National Catholic Reporter.

Within minutes of his report the comment boxes at NCR sputtered with outrage. Immediately, someone wrote, “Evidence that corruption is active at the highest levels. A disgrace.” Followed by, “John Paul 2 [sic] sat as the Head [sic] of the Roman Catholic Church and allowed rapists to continue to prey on their victims.” Third comment, “How do you say ‘what a farce’ in Latin? Is there ANYTHING [sic] credible in institutional Catholicism?”

Another advocate of the church of peace, love, and social justice added, “I’ll tell you what a REAL [sic] miracle would be . . . Mr. Ratzinger drops dead tomorrow so they can bring on the next stooge.”

John Allen does not share these views. And blog commenters are not necessarily representative of the editorial content of a website. Certainly, every website has its own nuts in the comment boxes. But these types of comments are common at NCR and echo the point and tone of many NCR contributors, e.g., almost any Eugene Kennedy column.

Commonweal – a slightly more responsible, slightly more respectable, and certainly more crafty among heterodox outlets – linked to the Allen piece on its blog. The debate over JPII went on for five days. The comments were not so blood-in-the-teeth as NCR’s.  Commonweal contributors and followers specialize in what they consider to be a more thoughtful critique, which becomes therefore even more insidious as they persistently undermine confidence in the Church and Her teaching. There does not seem to be a Church figure – except dissident nuns – or a Church teaching – except maybe transubstantiation – they do not question.

The initial commenters were in basic agreement: “Has Rome no shame?” “Many catholics [sic] on the left will perceive this as another move to glorify hierachs [sic], especially popes, who move the Church to a more ‘purer’ [sic] standing.” “Groan, say it isn’t so. Does Rome want the pews emptying any faster than they already are?” “Do the concepts of credibility and integrity have ANY meaning to the Vatican anymore?”

Not all the dotCommonwealers criticized JPII. One lauded his accomplishments including “his dancing with African natives in the liturgy.” And the aggressively orthodox also have their odd commenters, one of whom drifted over to dotCommonweal to say that John Paul II’s “burial face was the look of a man who had come to realize at the last that much of his life’s work was in error.”

You have to wonder why they are so angry, bitter, and sometimes unhinged. They will say their complaints are legitimate. They wonder why the rush to beatification. Six years is rapid. Rather than trusting the Church, which they do not, they see this as nothing more than a political sop to conservatives. And one gets the feeling they want more time so that they can sully his reputation, looking for a Pius XII moment that will forever scar him.

Some seem angry that he presided over the papacy at the time the sex-abuse scandal reared its ugly head, believing he was, at best, willfully ignorant. Others are angry that he was friends with and largely ignored the charges leveled at the now thoroughly shamed founder of the Legionaries of Christ.

Does any of this speak to his lack of heroic virtue? Folks like Cathy Kaveny of Notre Dame and dotCommonweal will doubtless cite theological chapter and ecclesial verse – oh so chin-scratchingly thoughtful – about how these problems suggest – perhaps, maybe, one might think, only speculating here – that JPII might lack heroic virtue. But it seems as if they would be gleeful to know that he is not in Heaven.

Their real anger, and they are quite open about it, is that one of his primary projects was the proper implementation of Vatican II, which means taking the Council at its word and reining in the “spirit of Vatican II” that has so pleased the heterodox and so vexed the Church in recent decades. They are especially troubled about the new generation of JPII bishops now beginning to sprout orthodox wings.

The country is debating about our sometimes fractious political discourse, but it is especially disappointing to see it erupt in the Catholic blogosphere. I am not immune from the temptation. I’ve weighed in aggressively at various left-wing Catholic blogs including dotCommonweal, where I was eventually banned for I’m not sure what.

I think the anger is a sign that they see it all slipping away, all their hopes and dreams. How else to explain their giddiness over the Holy Father’s supposed blessing of condom use by homosexual prostitutes and other attempts at catching at straws? Has the liberal project fallen so low? Well, yes, read the comment section of National Catholic Reporter and dotCommonweal and, in an odd sort of a way, you will see that their anger and frustration is a barometer of the health of the orthodox project.

Austin Ruse is the President of the New York and Washinton, D.C.-based Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), a research institute that focuses exclusively on international social policy. The opinions expressed here are Mr. Ruse’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of C-FAM.

Retrieved January 14, 2011 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/?task=view

Austin Ruse's essay originally appeared at The Catholic Thing (www.thecatholicthing.org), copyright 2011, all rights reserved. It is posted here with permission.

Typical! English Humor in the Face of Outrage

Lesbian-hugging Marxist nuns have reduced US parishes to nuclear wasteland, Catholic pundit tentatively suggests

A classic headline from Damian Thompson, Editor of Telegraph Blogs (UK) and a journalist specializing in religion. He is describing a clip from an American conservative Catholic broadcaster. Michael Voris runs RealCatholicTV.com and he makes Thompson appear like a fuzzy, warm-hearted and amused observer of the antics of the "progressive" clergy and religious who presided over the rot--the collapse of faith and morals--of the seminaries in the 1970s and 1980s (on which see Michael Rose), the introduction of pop music of that period that persists even today as 'sacred' music in place of Gregorian chant and much-loved traditional Catholic hymns (in the U.S. via the appalling outfit OCP (Oregon Catholic Publications), and--you see how hard it is to maintain one's equanimity in face of the devastation wrought by these developments?

Somehow Thompson maintains his wit and humor in a way that is beyond most commentators on this wreckage of Catholic liturgy, music, architecture, catechesis, seminaries, and religious orders that followed (but was never authorized by) Vatican II. Voris, on the other hand, is heavy-handed and clearly violates the English anti-earnestness rule (on which see Kate Fox). Voris does not share the English penchant for ironic understatement.

So how does Thompson bring Voris's short video to the attention of his readers while keeping under control his own glee at the sorry fate of the modernist, 'progressive' orders of nuns? First, he suggests that if some of his readers think he is mean and hypercritical about the English bishops and their 'Magic Circle,', they would not enjoy Voris's video. Then he introduces and quotes from the video to give its flavor:

"Voris, who runs RealCatholicTV, is not pleased that Rome is planning to “acknowledge the hurt” felt by Lefty nuns as they’re asked to demonstrate that they are, you know, Catholic. And understatement really isn’t his thing. As he puts it:"

Is there a Catholic in the world who still goes to Mass who doesn’t realize the nuclear damage that has been done to the Church by modernist nuns? Millions of Catholics have had to stand by while these “good sisters” dismantled hundreds of years of work … advancing a socialist, Marxist political agenda, embracing lesbianism, instituting yoga classes along with Mother Earth prayer tutorials, conducting retreats based on sorcery and witchcraft … making a shipwreck of the faith by teaching that abortion is acceptable, that women can be priests, that WE ARE CHURCH…

"Fortunately, he adds, “real nuns” in real habits are on the rise, proclaiming the truth of Jesus Christ, and the radical orders are disappearing into oblivion…"

… but we can’t go there because that annoys the femiNazi nuns and we don’t want to spend any more time having to acknowledge their “deep hurt and anger”. Most of them are getting along in years, well along, and while in New Age theology death doesn’t really mean anything except being released into the fullness of your feng shuiness and whirling around Mother Earth gardens for eternity, we know who will be standing there waiting for them!

A bit over the top of Voris, perhaps, but right on nevertheless, thinks Thompson. What to do? Should he post Voris's video or restrain himself on grounds of charity, not to mention Voris's flouting the English cultural rules of humor and anti-earnestness? How to convey his own shared pleasure at the slow demise of those orders that have wrought such damage in the Church? But without appearing too gleeful himself? He resolves the question in a way we can only call, "Typical!"--the key word of English Eeyorishness:

Such mean-spirited glee is, of course, deplorable. So let me make one thing absolutely clear. I’ve posted this video only to show what can happen when conservative Catholic commentators lose their sense of charity. Yes indeedy.

As for me, an English expat in the US for most of my life, I thought long and hard how to resolve this problem for myself and my modest blog. Charity prevents me from posting Voris's video, but I cannot avoid citing my source, Thompson's own blog. I have quoted here from: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100068888/lesbian-hugging-marxist-nuns-have-reduced-us-parishes-to-nuclear-wasteland-catholic-pundit-tentatively-suggests/

Warning: Thompson's blog can be addictive, but ignore the comments that follow it--they mostly come from the same few people who ignore the topic and substance of whatever Thompson posted and indulge in silliness that they seem to enjoy. The banter may reflect English male-bonding rules as described by Kate Fox. According to Fox, male bonding is a cultural universal, but this is not a particularly attractive form of it.

Augustine, Aquinas, and Anne Rice

Ignatius Press has an excellent blog that has recently addressed--in relation to Anne Rice--the question of attempts by Catholics to pick and choose what part of Catholic doctrine on faith and morals to accept. In a recent essay at

http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2010/07/st-thomas-aquinas-and-anne-rice.html

the blog examines the Anne Rice case in light of the teaching of Augustine and Aquinas.

How right Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, was back in the 1980s when he responded to his interviewer's question (The Ratzinger Report, p.45) that the key to the crisis in the Church is in ecclesiology. "My impression is that the authentically Catholic meaning of the reality 'Church' is tacitly disappearing, without being expressly rejected. Many no longer believe that what is at issue is a reality willed by the Lord himself."

I admired the works of Anne Rice's Catholic period, but a glance at her Facebook page, with tens of thousands of followers, shows that she always used that site more to attack the Church than to evangelize for it. And whenever she brought up a topic on which Church teaching is settled and clear, but on which she continued to hold heretical views, she elicited a flood of vehemently anti-Catholic posts from her followers.

It seems that sometimes celebrities--Tony Blair appears to be another example--join or return to the Church more in the hope of bringing her round to their way of seeing things than to submit to her teaching authority, especially where that teaching conflicts with liberal-secularist orthodoxy.

Paradoxically, it is often easier for those who move and have their friends and family in liberal-secularist circles to accept Catholic dogma on, say, the mystery of the Trinity, than to accept and publicly support those teachings on morals and the nature of the Church that conflict most sharply with prevalent secularist assumptions and liberal public opinion--questions like same-sex marriage or ordination of women or contraception.

An Open Letter to Hans Kueng by George Weigel

As John Gray puts it in his review of A.C. Grayling, quoted in my last post, "Indeed, the realization that history will not go his way might account for the shrill, peevish and increasingly baffled tone of Grayling’s polemics. There is nothing as dead as the opinions of the day before yesterday, and Ideas that Matter contains little else. Yet, despite the fact that it points to the past and not to the future, there is something to be prized in this volume. With his mix of adamant certainty and high-minded silliness, Grayling has captured for posterity a glimpse of that soon-to-be-extinct species, the late-twentieth-century bien-pensant."

How exactly right this is about Hans Kueng, the dissident theologian who championed a view of Vatican II as representing a complete rupture with the Tradition of the Church. He saw the future of the Church as lying in a kind of Protestantization and accommodation to modernity--the very path to oblivion taken by the mainline Protestant denominations. He seems to have learned nothing since making his name as a dissident celebrity and darling of the media. His open letter to the bishops published in the Irish Times exceeds all bounds of decency. It is only with the greatest effort that one can refrain from describing this once-distinguished theologian as a scum-bag.

Here is George Weigel's response to Kueng. Skip the red car story at the beginning. The rest of it is excellent.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/04/an-open-letter-to-hans-kung

The Passion of Pope Benedict: Six Accusations, One Question

Sandro Magister has an excellent short essay on his blog at

http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1342796?eng=y

which reviews six areas of strongest leadership of this pontificate. He shows that pedophilia is only the latest weapon aimed against Joseph Ratzinger. And each time, he is attacked where he most exercises his leadership role. Wherever Pope Benedict has most effectively moved the Church forward. Where he has addressed problems that had gone unattended or broken deadlocks (ecumenism, relations with Islam or the Jews), there he is most attacked by his liberal enemies. Having hoped for one of their own, they have never forgiven him for being elected pope and continuing in the path of John Paul the Great.

Maureen Dowd and the New Anti-Catholicism

In her latest column in the NYT, Maureen Dowd introduces her brother Kevin with a comment about how, since she gets attacked "vitriolically" for her anti-Catholic series of columns and is not taken seriously as a woman, perhaps "they" (the bishops of the Church) will listen to her brother, a man and a faithful, conservative Catholic. Incidentally, she mentions, no doubt to the astonishment of many of her readers, that she is herself a Catholic.

Her remarks are interesting on several levels. First, she herself has just written some of the most vitriolic attacks on a religion and its leaders ever to appear in the New York Times. Second, she treats the bishops and the pope with complete disrespect and yet complains in a rather hurt tone that she is not respected. Not because she is rude, belligerent, and completely unfair. Not because she is reckless and irresponsible in her fueling a new wave of anti-Catholicism in North America and Europe. (Two friends already have sent me her columns by way of saying that I ought to leave the Church.) Not because she attacks personally the head of the Church, who precisely has been resolute and effective in addressing the clergy abuse issue and who is completely innocent, personally, as former head of the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith and now as pope. Not because her columns have been full of factual errors for which she has not apologized or provided corrections. Not because, unlike her target of attack Pope Benedict, she offers no constructive way forward. But because she is a woman.

Finally, her remarks and previous columns are typical of a trend within the Church among liberal elites--declining in numbers but still full of resentment and bile--to attack the Church and its teachings especially on matters of sexual morality in terms as extreme as almost any outright enemy of the Church. They use as outlets for their attacks reputable publishers and newspapers many or most of whose readers are secularist enemies of the Church. (Every time Dowd publishes one of these columns in the NYT, it is followed by hundreds of comments vehemently denouncing, not just a Church policy or leader, but Catholic Christianity as a whole.) It is the phenomenon of the anti-Catholic Catholic. This open attack on the Church from people themselves claiming to be Catholic provides the cover for expression of some of the deepest prejudice and bigotry, not in fringe nativist or Klan papers but in mainstream secular-liberal newspapers like the New York Times. In this sense, Dowd's columns are symptomatic of something larger than her own tendency to express herself in the form of intemperate rants.

There's an excellent book by an Episcopalian, Philip Jenkins, called The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice. It is very insightful about U.S. history beyond its immediate topic. It is unsparing about some of the more embarrassing figures in American Catholicism, like Fr. Coughlin and Sen. McCarthy, but he has a good analysis of the deep anti-Catholicism in the U.S., both at the nativist level of the KKK and fundamentalist (and until recently, even mainstream) Protestants on one hand and among academics and the media on the other. On the first, Jenkins points out (in a context very different from that of the Vatican preacher's recent comment--that of a serious analysis of anti-Catholicism in its historical and contemporary forms) how similar the images and themes of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism are--sexual depravity, danger to children, divided loyalties, etc. That was of course big still in the 1920s, with the populist response to Al Smith's candidacy and the KKK's propaganda and thuggery against Catholics, Jews, and Blacks. (None of which is to say that the current wave of anti-Catholic media attacks can be compared with the killing of six million Jews--no-one made such a comparison of verbal attacks with physical genocide, including the Vatican preacher. Father Cantalamessa's comparison of anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic stereotyping was nevertheless grievously inappropriate and insensitive because it was, precisely in its context, so open to that kind of interpretation.)

Jenkins describes well the huge shifts that occurred in the 1970s, with the sexual revolution, abortion, contraception and the corresponding shift in the base and nature of the Democratic Party. From a time when almost all Catholics were instinctively Democrats, mainly on class grounds as well as because the Church's teaching on social justice is more naturally aligned with the DP, the party has become uninhabitable by faithful, orthodox Catholics. The party downgraded class in favor of identity politics, took up abortion as the litmus test for any DP leader (leading such luminaries as Jesse Jackson, Edward Kennedy, Al Gore, and even Bill Clinton to abandon their pro-life positions). I think the Obamacare vote was the last gasp for pro-life Democrats--they really showed there was no place for them in the party and the question will never be even discussable again in it.

The relevance of all this is that this huge sea change we usually call the Sixties for short--sexual liberation, moral relativism, abortion, contraception, along with collapse of family structure, etc., etc.--was not only a big pressure on the Church to secularize and accommodate as the mainstream Protestants did (thereupon rapidly disappearing or breaking up in disarray like the Anglicans). It was also a big pressure within the Church. So you had seminaries becoming places of active gay culture, rejecting celibacy and chastity as unrealistic, and generally treating the moral teaching of the Church over the previous millennia as old hat. (This is well documented in a study by Michael Rose, Goodbye, Good Men. It shows how pious, orthodox, and "manly" applicants were turned away--generating a shortage of priests that fueled a push for married and women priests--in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.)

All this led to several investigations that cleaned up the seminaries--which Dowd conveniently ignores when denouncing the equally necessary investigations of the rapidly declining sisters' communities. Their problem had a different aspect, in that it led to a strongly New Age, separatist-feminist wackiness and joined up with the anti-Catholic Catholic stream associated with people like Garry Wills, John Cornwell, and James Carroll. Whenever the Church comes under attack and has its back to the wall, these people join in the fray...against the Church. This is a new trend in anti-Catholicism. In the past Catholics would close ranks in face of external attacks in a deeply anti-Catholic culture. Now the anti-Catholic Catholics provide cover for the most vicious and strident bigotry, as we are seeing now.

So back to Maureen Dowd. The first of her columns lionized the dissident nuns who broke with the bishops in a letter saying that the health bill did not open loopholes for federal abortion funding and would not lead to a big increase in abortions. This is an empirical question that calls, one would think, for an examination of the facts--by looking, for example, at the wording of the legislation then before the House. Given Dowd's claim in this latest column that it was not the devil, but the facts that led her to launch her attacks, you would think she would have some interest in the facts of the matter. But no, she launches into a gender-based rant about the excellence of the nuns and the rottenness of the bishops, as if that settled the point at issue. I think the old exorcist was probably closer to the truth than the amazingly insight-lacking Dowd. In the course of that column and subsequent ones, she showed an equally reckless disregard of the facts. For example,
• she follows the dissident nuns and some major media outlets in stating as a fact that the signatories of the letter represented 59,000 nuns in the U.S.--i.e., the sum total of American nuns. The truth is that we don't know what the dissident group represents in the way of sisterly opinion, but we can be sure it is nothing like the numbers claimed. We do know that a real, recognized group of nuns with 10,000 members signed a letter supporting the bishops. These are the nuns that like the younger JP II priests and seminarians of the last decade or so, are orthodox, loyal, and deeply religious unlike the "liberal" old guard from the 1960s and 1970s. (Those seminaries and religious communities are thriving by the way--for an example of their spirit, see the story of the young nuns who appeared on Oprah recently;
• she plays up the case of the Wisconsin priest Murphy as grounds for attacking the pope personally and calling for his resignation; but after the whole argument has been debunked as factually wrong without anyone producing a shred of evidence that Ratzinger or his office did anything wrong, she offers not a hint of retraction or apology;
• she ignores the fact that sexual abuse is a plague across society and the world, no more common in Catholic settings than any other, and today much less so. Most sexual abuse of children happens not by celibate clergy but in the children's own homes, from parents, live-in boyfriends, etc.
• she demonizes the Pope in the most intemperate way, when a cursory knowledge of the facts reveals that he has done more than anyone in the Church and probably the world to reduce the incidence of sexual abuse of children;
• relatedly, none of these cases is less than ten years old, and Catholic clergy abuse has virtually ended in the U.S., which cannot be said of public schools, Orthodox Jews, or many (any?) other religions or child settings;
• today, the Church and its schools are the safest place for boys (and the abuse has nearly all been homosexual in nature, involving for the most part not young children but adolescents and homosexual priests at a time when open homosexuality was practically the norm in seminaries);
• the media, and Dowd in particular, have singled out the Church (and Ratzinger in particular) for relentless and vicious attack in a way that no-one would dare publish against any other religious group, Muslims and Jews included (see NY archbishop Dolan's column at http://blog.archny.org/?p=42#comments which the NYT declined to publish). Only fundamentalists who see the Church as the new Babylon and the pope as the anti-Christ approach such extremes of bigotry and hate.

In her latest column, just published in the NYT, Dowd hands over the space to her brother Kevin, whining that she is not being taken seriously because she is a woman. Her own columns are as nasty and vitriolic as anything I have ever seen in the NYT, yet she complains that she has been attacked (in vitriolic terms, even!) by those who have come to the Church’s defense.

But unlike her rants, Kevin's comments are worthy of respect, not because he is a man, but because he offers a much clearer perspective on the Church than Ms. Dowd. He acknowledges the seriousness of the problem in past decades--though neither he nor anyone offers a shred of evidence that it was ever more serious in the Church than anywhere else--but he does not incite a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry and hatred as did Ms. Dowd with her venomous columns--just look at the hateful and bigoted anti-Catholic comments her columns elicit by the hundreds. Kevin also accurately identifies the corrosive effects of the post-Vatican II changes, the destruction of sacred liturgy, the stripping of the altars, the erosion of piety and traditional devotions, and most damningly, the corruption of the seminaries and religious communities.

Most important, he doesn’t follow Maureen and the rest of the mainstream media here and in Europe in targeting the one man who, apart from being innocent, has done most to correct these abuses. No-one in the Church, and probably in the world, has done more than Pope Benedict to address the problem of clergy sexual abuse of young people, with the result that all these abuses are over ten years old and nowhere are children and adolescents today safer than in the Church, its schools, and other bodies. But the real agenda of the attack on Pope Benedict is to bring down this close ally of John Paul II who, with him, helped save the Church from the ravages of post-Vatican II liberalism. That is why he is attacked most vehemently precisely in the areas where he has done most good (for a good essay on this point, see Sandro Magister’s “The Passion of Pope Benedict: Six Accusations and One Question” (http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1342796?eng=y).

As for celibacy as the problem, which Kevin suggests, let's not forget that most sexual abuse occurs in families. It was not the standard and vow of celibacy that were the problem. As Kevin himself points out by reference to Rose's Goodbye, Good Men, it was rather precisely the loosening and relativizing of the Church's moral teaching among liberal Catholics and in the gay subculture of the 1970s seminaries--from which pious, orthodox, and upright men were systematically excluded according to Rose's report—that led to this spate of homosexual encounters between priests and young men in this period.