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When I first went to Boston (oh my!) just over 50 years ago, fresh from high school, I recall visiting the home of a classmate in Quincy and being met at the door by his very sweet Irish grandmother. Welcoming me warmly she was a little puzzled by my name. "Novak?" she gently asked, "What sort of name is that?" "Slovak," I replied in as sprightly as voice as I could muster. "Oh," she said thoughtfully. "Well, that's nice, too." "And you, Mrs. Sweeney [not her real name]," I countered. "Have you lived your whole life here in Quincy?" "Ah, no!" her eyes flashed merrily. "I was born out west." She added as a clarifying afterthought: "In Worcester." I figured out after a while that I had to explain to people why Boston is called the Hub of the Universe. The rest of the world is moving. It so happened that a few years later, when I was in graduate school at Harvard, my brother married a young woman from Ireland who had relatives in "southie" (i.e., south Boston). For the relatives, in those days, Harvard was another country and spoke another tongue. By accident, we also had friends who moved in the circle of the old WASP families, from whom various governors of the commonwealth had come, and that too was a different world — banking, investments, an especially interesting veteran of the CIA with vivid personal adventures overseas, insurance, etc. "Everyone in Boston votes Republican," one young woman told me with total self-assurance, not adverting to the total dominance of the Kennedys in Boston politics. But then I realized she meant "everyone that matters," and in her frame of reference was being quite accurate. Others of our friends were younger Catholic professionals (lawyers, surgeons) in Wellesley and Newton, which was still another world. During a season like Christmas, my wife and I often found ourselves visiting a stunning array of these enclaves, made poignantly aware by the nuances of jokes and humorous asides of potential conversational land mines to be avoided. Boston seemed to me a region of islands, an archipelago of mutually mistrustful rivals. A fascinating and lovable city, but a little more content in its multiple insularity than one would have liked. Wouldn't a kind of open meritocracy have been easier on everybody, without so much reliance on who had which roots? One of my teachers, the beloved David Reisman, warned me more than once about the fierce anti-Catholicism that seeped from the roots of the ancient trees in Harvard Yard and Boston Commons, "the ghosts of Puritan Boston." This pervasive anti-papist feeling was compounded by generations of ethnic rivalry (and not only on this side of the ocean), and again by monetary differentials, and differences of manners. Not to put to fine a point upon it, the later arriving Irish and Italians were looked down upon, and not really liked, by the old-timers. You can see this genteelly put in one of Emerson's essays, invidiously describing the faces of the Irish of Boston, as compared with the rosier faces of London. The tragic fall of Cardinal Law has brought all these old memories to the surface. His fall is tragic because it was through a weakness of his own (a weakness internal to one of his virtues) that he did himself in. He believed it a bishop's duty to be a father to his priests, to be especially compassionate to them, to nurse them along — and he did so, the record shows, most unwisely, and in the end destructively, both of some of them and of himself, and of the reputation of the archdiocese. Meanwhile, he lost sight for far too long of the gaping wounds inflicted on vulnerable young people, on families, on the confidence and trust of the laity. His priests kept letting him down, he became preoccupied with the priests, he forgot the flock they were pledged to have been guarding. Some few shepherds — but far too many for any one place — ran with the wolves. A bishop is not merely a company commander, in charge of officers immediately below him; his foremost duty is to his people, all of them, to protect them from the wolves and guide them, to instruct them, and to bring them to holiness. The reputation for lax discipline that had started long before Cardinal Law's time did not compel his immediate attention on his arrival in Boston. In fact, he never did really, deeply challenge and uproot it. Perhaps he never even diagnosed it. Perhaps, having peered into it, he gave up, not finding in himself the Herculean moral strength a real housecleaning would have entailed. Perhaps he hoped to change it by small steps and gradual degrees. I have learned from friends in Boston these days that from the beginning Cardinal Law faced four huge moral deficits in the Archdiocese of Boston. The first is an unusually tribal and mutually protective, ranks-drawn-up clergy, circling around its own three-generation tradition of moral fault; a pattern of "weakness" or "corruption" in some few, but covered over and unpoliced by the others, in a long-standing and defensive posture. The second is a 40-year period of massive moral dissent from Catholic moral teaching, especially in regard to sexual and "gender" questions, in the principal Catholic institutions of learning in Boston, including conspicuously Boston College and the (Jesuit) Weston School of Theology. This fairly systematic dissent, through which some have boldly called the theology of Pope John Paul II (and Paul VI before him) wrong, mistaken, and based on untruths, has had the inevitable effect of weakening the sense of right and wrong in those faced with severe sexual temptations. It is hard enough to show fidelity when right and wrong are clear. But in the mists and fogs of inner uncertainty, driven rapidly ahead by passion, one most easily jumps the curb, smashes into trees, plunges over cliffs. Third is a laity in very large numbers living in open dissent and rebellion, and encouraged in this by many clerical voices — even among their own pastors — first on many small things but gradually on many increasingly large things, too. In fact, one can hardly be certain, listening to them parade their utterly self-confident convictions, why they don't become Congregationalists (and elect their own pastors), or Baptists, or Unitarians, or, at least Episcopalians. They seem to abhor the most-distinctive features of the Catholic Church, most notably full communion with Peter, the bishop of Rome. They seem embarrassed also by her traditional and not-at-all-new teachings of embodied personhood, the physical/sacramental nature of reality, the full and rich sexuality of Catholic teaching (expressed in so many great works of literature, painting, and music down the ages), the nature of matrimony, and most obviously the tradition of celibacy and chastity as high ideals affecting the lives of all. Does it go without saying that the First Family of Catholicism in Massachusetts is led by Senator Kennedy, and that his open and unrebuked dissents down the years have taken a great public toll on the faith of others? Finally, least significant but not unreal, the aforementioned bitter and unrelenting anti-Catholicism of Boston's elites and the media over which they seem to have almost total control. To be sure, these elites are no longer purely, or even mostly, Brahmin. On the contrary, liberals of all stripes stand upon the heights, looking down upon the Church they find most contemptible, that lowly stumbling block to their own ambitions. Included in their number, alas, is a fairly large number of anti-Catholic Catholics. And the worst thing about the recent, rushed disclosures of the sins of the Catholic Church of Boston is that they have dramatically verified the darkest Maria Monk suspicions of Boston's oldest elites, concerning the inexorability of Catholic moral corruption. I will leave for another time any mention of the McCarthyism in the legal procedures involved in forcing these revelations out into public for public delectation (calling to mind the practice of public humiliation in the stockades in the Commons of old). These procedures, many of them gross violations of due process, Boston's elite have here tolerated, because aimed at the Catholic Church. They would never tolerate these abuses were their own interests threatened. I leave these to the conscience of the Boston legal community, which will one day pay for these precedents. Providentially, it is better for the Catholic community that the worst abuses come to light now, all at once, so that no one will ever doubt how bad things have been, or fail to gauge their exact dimensions. One day, comparisons will be made with other institutions in Boston and elsewhere. Even if many recent procedures have been unjust, still, this is a wound that the Catholic community gave itself. It can be blamed on no one else. Some years ago, a priest called me aside after one of my lectures in the Northeast and begged me to write something about the spread of homosexual abuses of young men by priests. He described it as a scourge, covered over and protected by those priests who knew better but were uncertain of being backed up by their bishops, if they reported their confreres. I was stricken by his remarks. I did not doubt him, but I did not have the evidence he seemed to have. All I had was hearsay. I couldn't see how to proceed. My interlocutor was right. Something needed to be done. I left it for others. Do you agree with me, that we all have reason to stand accused in our own consciences for our role in abetting, and refusing to confront, the "sexual revolution" of the last 40 years? It was not only the Catholic clergy that was at fault. So also were we, the laity. May God have mercy on us all. |
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here is a uniquely
tribal quality to Boston, more so than in any other major American city,
even among others in the northeast. Bostonians don't take to outsiders
easily, and don't allow them to become insiders easily, either. And Bostonians
are themselves divided into tribes that to this day seem to mix with one
another as little as necessary. 
