The New Anti-Catholicism
The Last Acceptable Prejudice
by Philip Jenkins
Oxford University Press, 272pp., $27 THE CENTRAL CLAIM of Philip Jenkins’s newest book, “The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice,” is that nobody thinks much of insulting the Catholic Church. It has become widely acceptable, Jenkins persuades, to denounce the Church, its leadership and adherents, as sexually twisted, hypocritical, and power-hungry oppressors of women, gays, and minorities–all slanderous terms that would provoke outrage if directed at any non-Christian religious or ethnic group. What’s even more striking, he adds, is “the completely casual way in which these views are stated, as if any normal person should be expected to share these beliefs.”
Jenkins makes some useful distinctions, in contrast to other watchdogs of anti-Catholicism who (somewhat understandably) possess more of a hair trigger. Satire of the Catholic Church, even devastatingly vicious satire, has a long and honorable history. “The Canterbury Tales” might get Chaucer arrested for hate crimes were it written today. Films such as Kevin Smith’s “Dogma” or even the antics of the San Francisco gay group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence seem to fit in this tradition. And portrayals of the failings of Catholic clerics or institutions–think of ABC’s series “Nothing Sacred”–might make Catholics uncomfortable, but aren’t necessarily anti-Catholic. Jenkins is at pains to distinguish himself from the uncompromising approach of groups such as William Donohue’s Catholic League, and rightly so.
These useful distinctions make the book’s litany of real anti-Catholicism all the more depressing. In art, theater, the news business, and political debate, Jenkins finds widespread anti-Catholic bigotry–and more importantly, widespread lack of concern about it. “What sometimes seems to be limitless social tolerance in modern America,” Jenkins writes, “has strict limits where the Catholic Church is concerned.”
Much of the bigotry Jenkins catalogues in “The New Anti-Catholicism” is quite juvenile–think of the Brooklyn Museum’s show Sensation, with the dung-covered Virgin Mary. A good deal, however, is violent and perverse. In 2000, for example, Canadian feminists stormed the Cathedral of Marie-Reine-du-Monde in Montreal. Wearing ski masks, they disrupted Mass, spray-painted the altar with atheist slogans, threw condoms and soiled tampons around the sanctuary, and destroyed hundreds of hymnbooks and missals. Local authorities declined to press charges, saying they didn’t want to get in the middle of a political debate.
OF COURSE, anti-Catholicism goes way back in American history. Protestant colonizers feared Romish infiltration from Spain, while the Know-Nothings of the nineteenth century feared Catholics pouring in from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe would take jobs away from native-born Protestants and prove unassimilable. In 1920, when Al Smith ran for president, Protestant preachers whipped up crowds with lurid fantasies in which Smith as president would take orders from the pope; a rumor even circulated that Smith planned to build a tunnel from the White House to the basement of the Vatican. As late as 1960, John F. Kennedy was forced to assure Protestants that the pope wouldn’t be calling the shots on American foreign and domestic policy in his administration.
This type of anti-Catholicism has largely gone by the wayside, however, relegated to backwoods rabble-rousers. What has replaced it is an attack on the Church as a defender of traditional mores, especially sexual. Modern anti-Catholicism, Jenkins notes, derives its vigor from the Church’s unique position as an international institution that presumes to intrude on political and cultural debates. Catholicism understands itself to be a comprehensive system, and acceptance of the doctrines of the Church has implications for how Catholics conduct both their spiritual and temporal affairs.
More important, the Catholic Church claims the right to speak authoritatively on modern social issues, and has not shrunk from debates over abortion, homosexuality, birth control, euthanasia, and cloning, among other issues. Advocates for these practices frequently find that their most formidable opponent is the Catholic Church, and accordingly direct their rhetorical fire.
The fact that modern anti-Catholic attacks often focus on the Church’s teachings makes it difficult to distinguish between anti-Catholicism and opposition to Church teachings. Is there a difference between hating Catholics and hating the Catholic Church, and does that difference, well, make a difference? To put it another way: “No Irish Need Apply” is pretty straightforward discrimination, but is it in the same category as playwright Tony Kushner’s characterization of the Church’s hierarchy as “flagellants, fanatics, fundamentalists, and cynical political strategists whose utter lack of genuine spiritual inspiration and imagination, not to mention simple human compassion, is cloaked in inept, selective, antiquated misreadings of the Scriptures”?
Jenkins proposes two answers. The first is that regardless of any distinction between anti-Catholicism and opposition to the Church, it should make a difference that Catholicism is one of only a couple of institutions in America that can be the target of pure vitriol without inspiring condemnation or prosecution (evangelical Protestantism seems to be another). When Congressman Jim Moran bloviates about the Jewish lobby, or Senator Rick Santorum says that he opposes homosexuality, he is widely condemned. In contrast, when the group Queer Nation stages a mock crucifixion of a near-naked lesbian outside of Washington’s Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, underneath a sign that reads “Christ Loves Women and Queers/Why Does O’Connor Hate Us?” the media remain unroiled.
More complex is his second answer. Catholicism, Jenkins notes, has never held that individual Catholics, even members of the clergy–including the pope–are immune from normal human failings. In fact, there is a long tradition of Catholics upbraiding their leaders for immoral or injudicious behavior. (St. Catherine of Siena once wrote of three heretical cardinals that their “stench . . . makes the whole world reek,” and told the pope to his face to act like a man.) While the Church considers itself guided through history by the Holy Spirit, it is of course left to fallible men to enact the divine will.
SO CATHOLICISM can handle human failings, and the earthly Church exhibits those failings frequently. To point them out is not anti-Catholicism. Less defensible, however, is the suggestion that individual Catholics, or even the Church as a whole, fail because they are Catholic–that is, because of something in the nature of Catholicism that encourages unacceptable behavior. Jenkins gives a Jewish example to highlight what he means: Most observers would agree that it is one thing to criticize Israel or even to accuse it of serious crimes. It is another thing, and anti-Semitic, to suggest Israel does what it does because “that’s the sort of thing that Jews will do.” Similarly, it is bigotry to suggest that Catholicism itself accounts for the sins and failings of individual Catholics.
This attitude is most apparent in the recent priest scandals in the United States. Conservative and liberal Catholics alike both decried the behavior and called for resignations and reforms. Yet many observers pounced on the scandals as conclusive proof of the sickness of Catholic teaching on sexual ethics. No matter that Catholic doctrine clearly opposes sexual assault in all forms. To many people, the scandals demonstrated what they had long suspected–Catholicism perverts and deforms normal sexual desire, leading to criminal behavior. After all, what else could you expect from a Church that refuses to sanction homosexuality, contraception, and abortion, maintains an all-male, celibate priesthood, and defends traditional sexual values–that refuses, in short, to be honest and open about sex? A headline from Slate captured the sentiment perfectly: “Booty and the Priest: Does Abstinence Make the Church Grow Fondlers?”
Jenkins notes that such rhetoric echoes anti-Catholic attacks of earlier eras, when Protestant readers were titillated by semi-pornographic tales of sluttish nuns and lecherous priests. But today, anti-Catholic attacks are also battles in a larger social conflict over sexuality and the proper limits of human behavior. “The disproportionate reaction to the clergy abuse issue, the suggestions of pervasive criminality, cannot be understood except as a reflection of accumulated political grievances over other issues, involving sexuality and gender,” writes Jenkins. Those who attacked the Church did so because they oppose the Church’s teaching on sex, which is fair enough, and not necessarily a sign of bigotry.
What is anti-Catholic is the assertion that the Church’s insistence on celibacy leads to rape. Scratch a priest, it is said, and you’ll find a molester underneath. Accusations of that sort against any other ethnic or religious group would be considered a violation of the American values of inclusion and tolerance. After September 11, for example, the media, political leaders, and religious figures widely insisted there was no link between Islam and terrorist violence and, many times, tried to rule such discussion out of bounds.
On the matter of the priest scandals, however, some of the vitriol Jenkins identifies has less to do with the Church’s teachings than with the betrayal felt by ordinary Catholics. Still, most post-scandal reform movements are simply repackaged versions of the same old groups that have been pushing for the liberalization of the Church for four decades. (The leadership of Voice of the Faithful, which formed in response to the scandals in New England, includes a number of prominent American Catholic dissenters.) And examples that Jenkins compiles give credence to his suggestion that, for many, the reaction to the priest scandals is not about righteous anger, but about bashing a church that remains a formidable obstacle to sexual revolution.
A similar phenomenon is at work in recent books and articles accusing the Catholic Church of institutional anti-Semitism. Working from a questionable, if not false, reading of the historical record, Daniel Goldhagen and James Carroll, among others, link the alleged anti-Semitism of particular Catholics directly to Catholic theology. Both make out lists of offending Catholic beliefs–the divinity of Christ, the Church’s claim to universality, the efficacy of the Sacraments–that must be jettisoned to expiate the sin of institutional anti-Semitism. In other words, both demand that the Catholic Church abandon the very tenets that make it Catholic.
Jenkins is nothing if not comprehensive in laying out the examples that support his case, and there are times when “The New Anti-Catholicism” loses steam as a result. Fortunately, the author’s calm and rigorous thinking saves it from ever feeling like a clip job. Jenkins is at his least convincing, however, when he poses “a kind of solution” at the very end of the book, arguing that writers should examine their work for unconscious anti-Catholic bias. This would certainly be welcome, but it seems likely that anti-Catholic bias as Jenkins identifies it will remain. Why? Because the Church will not abandon its beliefs, and anti-Catholic activists will settle for nothing less. From the collision of immovable objects and irresistible forces inevitably comes conflict and bias.
Justin Torres is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C.
