The faith suffered bigotry, but it isn't the issue now.
By Jonathan Zimmerman
Philadelphia Inquirer
April 6, 2010
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/89974202.html
In 2005, a Philadelphia grand jury concluded that at least 63 priests in the city's archdiocese had sexually abused hundreds of children. The victims included an 11-year-old girl raped by her priest, who later took her to get an abortion; a fifth grader molested inside a confessional booth; and a 12-year-old boy who was told that his mother had consented to a priest's abuse of him.
But to the archdiocese, it was the victim. In a scathing 70-page response, officials called the grand jury report "a vile, mean-spirited diatribe" that was comparable to the "rampant Know-Nothingisms of the 1840s."
I thought of this exchange as I read about the church's reaction to the latest allegations of sexual abuse by priests. On Good Friday, a Vatican priest compared the accusations against the church to anti-Semitism. A few days before that, after newspapers suggested Pope Benedict XVI had known about a pedophile priest who was allowed to remain in the ministry, one of Benedict's advisers bemoaned a "conspiracy" against the church.
Closer to home, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan told a Palm Sunday service that Benedict was the victim of "inaccuracy, bias, and hyperbole." Indeed, Dolan maintained, the pope is "suffering from the same unjust accusation and shouts of the mob as Jesus did."
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| Raniero Cantalamessa compared criticisms of the pope to anti-Semitism. Photo by Alessandra Tarantino |
If all of this sounds like a bit much, that's because it is. As the church's defenders note, America has a long, hideous history of anti-Catholic bigotry. But whereas earlier attacks on Catholics were based on fantasy, the abuse scandal is altogether real. By ignoring the difference, church apologists end up diminishing the real discrimination that Catholics suffered in the past.
Start with our pilgrim forefathers, who barred priests from the Massachusetts colony and required officeholders to take an oath denouncing the pope. Even the New England Primer, the era's most popular schoolbook, trafficked in anti-papal diatribes, introducing the letter A with the phrase, "Abhor that abhorrent Whore of Rome."
To the author of the Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, Catholics represented a profound threat to the fledgling American republic. "History furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government," Thomas Jefferson wrote. "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty."
Anti-Catholicism reached a zenith during the so-called nunnery riots of the 1830s, when rumors spread that priests were raping nuns. Unlike today's accusations of child abuse, these charges were almost entirely false. But many believed them, and Protestant mobs set fire to several convents across the country.
Then came the era of "Know-Nothingism," as the Philadelphia Archdiocese called it, in the 1840s and '50s. The Know-Nothings, who organized as a political party, demanded "the exclusion of all foreigners, and Roman Catholics in particular." The party won 75 congressional seats in 1854, and it controlled several statehouses before it disintegrated in the late 1850s.
Anti-Catholic sentiment would flare up again after the Civil War. In one of his best-known cartoons, "The American River Ganges" (1871), Thomas Nast depicted Catholic bishops as crocodiles menacing America's most sacred institution: the public schools. Forty years later, the Georgia segregationist Tom Watson condemned priests - alongside blacks - as mortal threats to the body politic.
"Remember that the priest is often a powerfully sexed man, who lives on rich food, drinks red wine, and does no manual labor," Watson wrote, echoing the rhetoric of the nunnery riots. "He is alone with a beautiful, well-shaped young woman who tells him that she is tormented by carnal desire. She will never tell what he says or does."
Accusations of sexual abuse and corruption also marked the anti-Catholic attacks of the Ku Klux Klan, which peaked in the 1920s. There were whispers of similar ideas right into the 1960s, when John F. Kennedy had to make a speech denying that he would take orders from the pope if elected.
So do the contemporary sexual abuse charges reflect this long and ignoble anti-Catholic tradition? Hardly. First of all, nobody seriously disputes the charges themselves. Across the country, hundreds of priests have molested and raped thousands of children. That's not fantasy; it's fact.
Second, the most vehement critics of the abuse - and of the church's inadequate response to it - have often been Catholics. In a Temple University survey after the 2005 grand jury report in Philadelphia, 40 percent of Catholics described themselves as "very dissatisfied" with the way the archdiocese handled the issue. An even greater share of Catholics - 77 percent - said bishops or cardinals should be removed from office if they knowingly reassigned abusive priests without notifying the police.
I agree with that. And saying so doesn't make me anti-Catholic - any more than criticizing the president makes me anti-American. Shame on the pope and his apologists for invoking a sordid history to escape their own responsibility.
Contact: jlzimm@aol.com
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