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This new branch of the Catholic Church has a breezy modern creed. It permits married persons to divorce, and still attend the sacraments. (Of course, confessions are no longer heard, and the Eucharist is merely bread and wine). This attractive new church accepts same-sex partners equally with opposite-sex married couples, with appropriate "sacramental" rites for each. This new Catholic Church is broader and understanding about premarital sex than the old Roman Catholic Church, but does counsel the use of condoms. It makes a comforting distinction between its counsels, and its commands. It is certainly in favor of contraceptives; the condom is one of the most effective indulgences it offers sinners. The New (York Times) Catholic Church has no pope. Howell Raines would look particularly undignified under a tiara. In this New (York Times) Catholic Church of the future, all churches will be local churches. There will be no equivalent to Times Square, no head office. Only bureaus, each equal with, and collegial with, the others. There will be no censors, either, not a blue pencil in the entire flock. Every man, and every woman, his own, or her own, editor. One beauty of this futuristic ecclesiastical structure is that, under its very broad umbrella, there will be no large, highly visible organization to sue. What trial lawyer worth his salt would sue a measly local bureau? Or an impecunious parish priest or a bishop, as an individual? A second quite astonishing advantage is that sexual scandals will become an anachronism. Since this branch of the Catholic Church adheres to no particular sexual morality, there will be nothing shocking anyone can do. Not even Peter Singer could ruffle this church, even if he advocated doing something awful to a hen. (As long as the person doing it is paid a minimum wage). Most readers infer from daily perusal of its pages that this good gray New (York Times) Catholic Church actually looks down upon the Roman Catholic Church. Well it should! Consider just how poorly the Roman Catholic Church performs. First, its top-heavy centralization; then its organization by large archdioceses. The trial lawyers' dream church! Second, its propensity for "cover-up." For decades, apparently, top RC churchmen knew about sexual abuses by some of its clergy, and almost never went to the police. On the other hand, the trial lawyers knew about these abuses, too, and they also didn't go to the police. But, then, the trial lawyers had a very good reason not to go to the police. There would go their fees! Whereas if the bishops had gone to the police first, and disowned the priests who sinned against Catholic teaching, and also sinned against their own solemn and voluntary promises, the bishops would not have had to deal with the lawyers, and could have avoided entirely the awful scandal that now engulfs them. But no one expects trial lawyers to be moral, or even civil, so no one is blaming them for a cover-up. No one is blaming the newspapers that had the stories, either, or the TV stations. They didn't go to the police. No one went to the police. It wasn't only the bishops who didn't go to the police. Don't get me wrong, the bishops were wrong not to go directly to the police, not to blow the whistle on criminal acts by their own errant clergy, not to go immediately and abundantly to comfort and help the poor victims of these criminal priests, openly and honestly, professing their horror, and trying to make amends. But it is not altogether easy, either, to admire the behavior of the trial lawyers who have controlled the press coverage since early January, 2002, for five long months. It is not easy to admire the one-sided and hypocritical behavior of the press — the very press that has cultivated every kooky phase of the sexual revolution in every other institution. The very press that has averted its pious eyes from the kooky doings of the North-American Man-Boy Love Association, and now professes to be so outraged by adult males seducing or raping teenage males. The very press that crusaded against the Boy Scouts, who turned out to be so much wiser than the Catholic bishops, in shaping realistic policies to diminish the probabilities of abuse by authority figures of vulnerable young males. It is good that the press has lanced the festering wounds within the bosom of a portion of the Catholic clergy. But the hypocrisy with which it has done so reeks to heaven. Notwithstanding the hypocrisies of the press, the Catholic bishops have not been the good shepherds they were consecrated to become. They have allowed wolves to devour an unprotected flock. They have tolerated abuses among some clergy that they ought to have cast out decades ago. The flagrant sins of these criminals which have now come to public notice, committed mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, profoundly and radically violated the most basic teachings the bishops were consecrated to protect. Why on earth didn't the bishops just to cut the offenders loose, turn them over to the police for jail, and call public attention to how far below its own standards these corrupt and dishonest priests had fallen? The bishops could even have sponsored public expulsions from the community. Begone, you evil ones! What on earth possessed the bishops to be dumb enough to pay millions for something they could so easily have avoided? My own hypothesis is that they were afraid of being thought too rigid, too orthodox, too conservative, too (oh horrors!) reactionary. They preferred to make no public statements, and to avoid seeming to insist on law and order, orthodoxy, toeing the line — they were too timid to insist upon fidelity, fidelity, fidelity. They feared being thought old-fashioned, even puritan. There is evidence for how dumb the Catholic progressives are, as well. For instance, some "collapsed Catholics" (as Bill Keller calls himself, a few steps farther out than merely "lapsed Catholics") insist that the Catholic Church they have abandoned should be restructured, now that they are gone. They demand that it be led by lay committees. Well, Roman Catholic canon law provides even now that when a bishop wants to spend more than $500,000, he must have the approval of a lay committee of financial experts. But that particular standing lay committee in Boston recently refused to accept an urgent request by Cardinal Law, to keep his agreement to pay $30 million to some of the victims of a predatory, now defrocked priest. It refused to be a rubber stamp, it figured things out for itself, and it said — are you ready for this? — No! Experience suggests that almost all committees made up of church-going Catholics will be, contrary to the utopian fantasies of progressive Catholics, right-of-center, more traditional, stricter, and tougher-minded than their bishops, much less easily taken in by progressive nonsense. And yet, did the New (York Times) Catholic Church, for instance, give credit to Cardinal Law for the independence of his lay committee? It did not. It hissed at Cardinal Law. Did it rebuke the trial lawyers of Boston for their unbecoming fury, when poof! quite suddenly, their full 40 percent contingency fee, which they had already mentally banked, 40 percent of a rich 30 million dollar settlement — a whole cool 12 million dollars — dissolved into thin Yankee air? No, it did not. The NYT gave full coverage to their fury, and sympathized with it. Did the NYT rebuke those trial lawyers, who in their fury sputtered that they would put Cardinal Law on the witness stand, and keep him there, and make him hurt until he couldn't stand it any longer? No, it did not. It featured their words with clucking sympathy, and patently licked its chops, until it could print the whole story. They will break Cardinal Law upon the wheel, they will. And the poor, stricken silent Catholic Church seems unable to defend itself. Put on trial for its life, mocked, spat upon, beaten about the head. When Cardinal Law is made to testify in court for his deposition, they should throw a purple cloak around his shoulders, and try to make a fool of him. Be not afraid. There will come a springtime of the faith.
— Michael
Novak, the George F. Jewett scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute. Mr. Novak is the author, most recently, of
On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. |
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efore
they sign off entirely from things Catholic, those Americans who reject
the Roman Catholic Church ought to give a chance to the New (York Times)
Catholic Church. That Church is something else! What other Church has
as Co-Pontificators Maureen Cardinal Dowd, Holy Office of the Secular
Inquisition, and Bill Cardinal Keller, head of Propaganda?
