NEW YORK
National Review
September 16, 2005, 3:12 p.m.
William F. Buckley Jr.
In New York City, and the greater environs of the city, which reach to Rome going east and to Los Angeles going west, Catholic men and women are up against a wrenching problem. It has to do with Monsignor Eugene Clark. How to deal with him?
Monsignor Clark has had a big tabloid hour. The husband of the monsignor's secretary engaged a private eye to follow them around. The detective made a videotape that showed the monsignor and the secretary entering a motel on Long Island and leaving five hours later, wearing different clothes. The husband turned the tape over as supporting data in a lawsuit asking the court to end his marriage and to assign to him ownership of their house and custody over their two children.
It is lurid stuff, especially because Monsignor Eugene Clark is a singular figure. When in August the explosion came, he was doing duty as rector of St. Patrick's Cathedral, the single most exalted rectorship in America. Add to this, Clark's long career as intimate of three New York cardinals. And as a priest of great eloquence who has thoughtfully, in ways quiet and unquiet, sought to extend the faith and enhance the best ideals of his country.
His eloquence resulted in a regular television program. Attention has focused on a talk he gave in 1999 under the title, "Falling, Being, and Staying in Love." It was a tough statement striking out at the popular culture. "Hollywood is not a Christian place at all, at all, at all. Most of the writers, the creative people, are homosexually inclined or homosexually recruited." These folk are "the enemy of Christian marriage and Christian falling in love and all the tenderness that goes with that. They are saying 'Don't pay attention to that business of permanence and fidelity.'"
Such tongues as could be expected to wag under the circumstances lost no time in doing so. But what was the cardinal to do? In a matter of days, Monsignor Clark resigned his exalted post at St. Patrick's. And admitted his lapse?