Grace Under Pressure

'The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice' by Philip Jenkins

THE NEW ANTI-CATHOLICISM
The Last Acceptable Prejudice
By Philip Jenkins
Oxford Univ. 258 pp. $27

The Catholic Church today suffers an enormous credibility gap, both within its own ranks of the faithful and from liberal and secular critics outside the faith. Much of the trouble stems, of course, from disclosures of sexual abuse of minors by priests and the cover-up of such crimes by some bishops. So it would seem that a writer would have to be either unusually confident or preternaturally foolish to come forward to debunk the pervasiveness of so-called pedophilia among the Catholic clergy. Perhaps tenure explains such chutzpah. In any event, Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, has drafted a provocative brief on some of the uglier prejudices lurking behind today's Catholic controversies.

The NewAnti-Catholicism is a spirited, if uneven, polemic that alerts readers to the forgotten history and persistence of anti-Catholic biases in American politics and culture. At bottom, Jenkins's plea is for evenhandedness. As he writes about contemporary films that exploit ancient stereotypes alleging the conspiratorial workings and sexually predatory habits of the Catholic clergy, "The question is not why American studios bankroll films that will annoy and offend Catholics, but why they do not more regularly present subject matter that would be equally uncomfortable or objectionable to other traditions or interest groups." His answer is that anti-Catholicism is so tangled up with contemporary gender and sexual politics, and has historically so often played the stock villain in the essentially Protestant creation myth of American democracy, that the prejudice is ineradicable.

Jenkins is a nimble writer and astonishingly prolific. Most recently he has written a provocative study on the vitality of traditional Christianity in the Third World (The Next Christendom). He first questioned conventional assumptions about clergy sexual abuse in Pedophiles and Priests (1992).

Jenkins's intellectual instincts are best described as contrarian. For instance, he argues that the only reliable studies of sexual abuse among the Catholic clergy do not show that celibate priests are more likely to commit such crimes "than their non-celibate counterparts." Most abuse cases, he notes, concern homosexual priests and adolescent boys, not prepubescent children, and hence are not pedophilia. Eager to goad the politically correct and sniff out hypocrisy among the enlightened, Jenkins, in his willingness to question conventional wisdom about the sexual-abuse scandal, has won the enmity of such liberal authorities as Garry Wills.

In The New Anti-Catholicism Jenkins doesn't shy away from picking fights with feminists, gay activists or high-profile Catholic dissenters such as Wills and James Carroll. Jenkins covers a lot of territory, and his arguments tend to be cursory, but he does have counterintuitive and useful things to say about a host of issues, including the church's putative responsibility for the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust. The New Anti-Catholicism, in short, will irritate anyone convinced that, because the church does not ordain women, opposes abortion and condemns homosexual acts, it is anti-democratic, deeply misogynist and a bastion of sexual repression and intellectual obscurantism.

Jenkins argues that a pronounced double standard takes hold when principally liberal-minded critics attack the church and Catholic beliefs. Scurrilous protests, such as the desecration of the Eucharist in New York's Saint Patrick's Cathedral by ACT-UP or the grotesque mockery of Catholic belief employed in Christopher Durang's "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You," have few parallels among other religious or ethnic groups. Jenkins scores points by showing how objections raised by Catholics to insensitive depictions of the church or Catholics are written off as attempts to censor or as the reactions of yahoos. Movies and art insulting to black or Jewish sensibilities are viewed as more serious problems.

Jenkins is right to say that "the principal force driving modern anti-Catholicism is divisions within the Church itself, and the ferocious anti-clericalism that has accumulated during decades of strife among Catholics." He is less reliable in explaining the sources of those divisions. His analysis of the reaction to Humanae Vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical reiterating the church's ban on artificial contraception, is worse than cursory. Jenkins suggests that the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) introduced the scourge of liberalism into an unchanging church. He then points to Humanae Vitae as marking "the first definitive stop on what had previously appeared an unrestricted road toward liberalization and conformity with the American Protestant mainstream."

First, the reforms of Vatican II were initiated and implemented from the top down. Change, in other words, originated in Rome. Second, aping the "Protestant mainstream" was hardly a Roman aspiration, nor were most Catholics aware of such a temptation. What Catholics found unpersuasive about Humanae Vitae was its logic. The pope's rejection of the recommendations of a committee of bishops, theologians and lay people he established to study the question of contraception didn't help. Jenkins too often identifies the most divisive church teachings, like the ban on contraception and the refusal to ordain women, with what is most distinctively Catholic.

Nor does Jenkins adequately deal with the main source of the historic American skepticism toward Catholicism: the church's rejection of religious freedom. "Error has no rights" was the Catholic position until the Second Vatican Council. Thanks largely to American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, the church finally embraced religious liberty. Yes, there is still a good deal of ignorance and unthinking bias at work when people talk about Catholicism. But just as often the conflict between the church and American democracy, as in the case of abortion, is driven by conviction on both sides. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Each has more to learn from the other than partisans on either side think. •

Paul Baumann is editor of Commonweal magazine.