Dolans Catholic Crusade, Joseph Bottum, New York Post, November 8, 2009

Dolan's Catholic Crusade

By Joseph Bottum
New York Post
November 8, 2009

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/dolan_catholic_crusade_7VXooQKS7BVSLIAT88kONN

Archbishop Timothy Dolan is turning his position into that of "America's Bishop" again.

Timothy Dolan came to town with a hammer in his hand. Of course, it wasn’t really much of hammer: just a little tappity-tap kind of thing, a tack hammer with a bright blue head, which he used it to rap on the door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral as part of the traditional ceremony for the installation of a new archbishop in New York.

That was back on April 15, the Wednesday before Easter. In the six months since, Archbishop Dolan has done hardly any public hammering — until now. On Oct. 29 he used the archdiocese’s website to publish a blistering attack on the repeated and knee-jerk anti-Catholicism of The New York Times.

Not that the attack was undeserved. At no point in its long history has the Times been what anyone would call a pro-Catholic institution, and if somebody needs to whacked upside the head to wake her up, it’s the Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd, whom Dolan singled out for the “intemperate and scurrilous” column she wrote on Sunday, Oct. 24.

The question for Dolan, of course, is why now? After all, Dowd has always done this. Once or twice a year, she uses her weekly column to indulge a wistful, oh-so-melancholy recollection of her childhood Catholicism — always for the purpose of concluding that, of course, she eventually had to grow up and put away such childish things, and, really, isn’t it a shame that the leadership of the Church today is so wicked that it doesn’t agree with her about everything?

There’s no doubt that Dowd’s smug and nasty little literary device makes most Catholic readers want to put their fist through a wall, but Archbishop Dolan’s response to her latest may seem heavy-handed. The archdiocese of New York includes 5.6 million Catholics, with 2.5 million, around 45%, in the parish pews on any given Sunday. The New York Times has a Sunday circulation of just 1.4 million — and that’s across the entire nation. Yes, the Catholic Church doesn’t have the influence in New York that it once had. It’s been a long time since the days when the archbishop’s office was known in city politics as “The Powerhouse.” Still, who uses a sledgehammer to crush fleas like Maureen Dowd?

Turns out that Archbishop Timothy Dolan does — though the attack on the Times is, in fact, more of a signal of coming battles than a real skirmish in its own right. Dolan came to town so sweetly, with his little blue hammer, and he spent his first six months on a charm campaign, playing everybody’s favorite Irish uncle. The storytelling, the easy blarney, the ready smile, the baseball games, the rounded sentences, the sure command of Catholic culture, the campaign for the poor: How could anybody not like this guy?

But enough, he has decided, is enough. Time to take the gloves off, time to show a little Irish temper. Beginnings are such difficult things, and a bishop always has to struggle to find his public place in a new town — especially on a stage as hard as New York’s. He can do what Dolan has done, and twinkle his eye as hard as the old actor Barry Fitzgerald. He can do what Cardinal Spellman did, filling the Godfather role, a Renaissance prince turned American powerbroker. He can be Heidi’s Grandfather, the curmudgeon with the obvious heart of gold, an act Cardinal O’Connor was not above playing from time to time. He can even be Casper the Friendly Ghost, rejecting the media and refusing, as Cardinal Egan did, the traditional job of the archbishop of New York as the public face of American Catholicism.

For all of them, however, the hammer must sometimes fall. Catholicism is not about popularity, and it’s not about being loved by the media, and it’s not about refusing to promote strong beliefs. Being Catholic means something; it has consequences in how one views the slaughter of abortion, and the injury done to the poor by the collapse of the institution of marriage, and the threat of an emerging medical culture that would rather eliminate the weak and the elderly with euthanasia than care for them.

The revelations in 2001 of decades of priest scandals revealed the existence of a corrupt clergy across the nation, and the Catholic Church watched a now middle-aged generation of believers slip away from the pews. In the midst of all this, how could an archbishop of New York not need to pick some fights? Especially one determined to restore the national prominence that the archdiocese of New York has traditionally had. “America’s bishop,” John Paul II called Cardinal O’Connor, which is what every archbishop of New York should be named.

In other words, Timothy Dolan’s swipe at Dowd is just the first blow in a what we should expect to be a long series. Uncle Tim is taking the gloves off, and public fights are coming with City Hall over schools, and with Albany over Catholic hospitals, and with Washington’s health-care reformers over mandatory abortion coverage, and with the Catholic colleges over their abandoning of Catholic principles, and with the blindered and old-fashioned clergy over the business-as-usual attitude that allowed the priest scandals to happen.

That little blue hammer wasn’t opening enough of the doors Dolan needs opened. The Irish in America have produced some charmers, but they’ve produced some brawlers as well. And the leader of New York’s has decided, after six months, to mix the two types a little bit. Which is surely what he’s supposed to do. This is America’s bishop, after all.