President Barack Obama’s Blessing for “Pope” Timothy Dolan

Archbishop Timothy Dolan (AP Photo)

Sarah Palin saw this coming all along.

Back in 2009, Palin was all fired up about Notre Dame University’s decision to invite President Obama – pro-choice on abortion – to speak at its graduation ceremonies. Many – not just Palin – shuddered at the thought of such a president speaking at what is arguably America’s most famous Catholic institution.

"My favorite grandpa, Clem James Sheeran, was Catholic. Irish to the core,” Palin was quoted as saying back in 2009.

“His favorite place (other than church) was Notre Dame. I can't imagine what he would think as the university recognizes someone who contradicts the core values of the Catholic faith by promoting an anti-life agenda."

And now we have another brouhaha over Obama and Catholicism. A few weeks back, the Obama administration unveiled plans that would have compelled Catholic institutions to provide contraception to employees. There was a compromise offered on Friday, though the damage to Obama has largely been done.

Thunderous objections have followed, though they were quite understandable. By all accounts, Obama had been warned by Irish Catholic members of his inner circle – including Vice President Joe Biden and former Chief of Staff Bill Daley – that requiring Catholic institutions to provide coverage contrary to their teaching would start a holy war.

And boy did it.

It played to the right wing belief that Obama – and really, most Democrats – are anti-religious.

Former George W. Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said the edict was “delivered with a sneer,” and added that this was “the most transparently anti-Catholic maneuver by the federal government since the Blaine Amendment was proposed in 1875, a measure designed to diminish public tolerance of Romanism, then regarded as foreign, authoritarian and illiberal.”

Newt Gingrich charged that "the Obama administration is engaged in a war against religion." Mitt Romney declared this "a direct attack on religious liberty."

No doubt that this was a boneheaded move by Obama. Then again, now that this issue has become a political football, it’s easy to forget a few things.

First of all, the vast majority of Irish Americans and other Catholics are quite liberal when it comes to contraception.

In fact, as The New York Times noted this week, “Although Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York has vociferously argued that a national requirement for religiously affiliated institutions to cover birth control in their insurance plans is immoral and unacceptable, some Roman Catholic organizations in his own backyard have for 10 years been grudgingly complying with a state law making  them do precisely that.”

Manhattan College and Fordham University are among the Catholic institutions that offer contraception as part of their health care packages.

And yet, the fact is, after years of backpedaling because of horrific sex abuse allegations, church leaders were actually able to take the moral high ground on this issue.

The biggest winner here seems to be New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan. He has emerged as an outspoken and legitimate defender of religious values.

This is a role Dolan’s predecessor, Edward Cardinal Egan, never seemed to grow into. If Dolan manages to maintain this position, he could recall the more vigorous days of John Cardinal O’Connor.

This comes just as Dolan is elevated to cardinal this Saturday. So swift and significant has Dolan’s other elevation – to significant public voice – been that the New York Daily News actually ran a long analysis outlining the circumstances under which Dolan could someday become the first American pope.

This sounds more or less absurd to me. The U.S. has enough influence on the world stage without also ruling over the Vatican.

And yet, this mere discussion is an indication of how well Dolan has managed to articulate a certain moral message, all the while retaining his gregarious, even fun-loving side.

How will this all effect Catholic voters come November?

If only we could ask Sarah Palin’s grandfather.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Mitt Romney bashers fail John F Kennedy test

Hopeful GOP nominee Mitt Romney (REUTERS/Rick Wilking)

How is it possible that all these years later, revelations about JFK and women still make headlines?

This week, there were more sordid tales coming out of Camelot, this one about 19-year-old Mimi Alford, who supposedly had an affair with Kennedy while she was serving as a White House intern. (You can insert your own Clinton joke here.)

Naturally, Alford has a book to sell. The bizarre thing is not that she has a book to sell but that there are people willing to buy it.

Nevertheless, these days, there are some things about JFK worth discussing.

Ironically enough, this has nothing to do with JFK’s sexual dalliances, but instead with his religion.

Kennedy, of course, was the first Roman Catholic to become president. He didn’t face the fire and brimstone Al Smith did in 1928, but the 1960 campaign had its fair share of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic sentiment.
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So, Kennedy famously delivered a speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, attempting to confront whispers that he would be the Pope’s president.

“Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured -- perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in -- for that should be important only to me -- but what kind of America I believe in,” he said.

The speech was considered a bold move on Kennedy’s part. But it was also kind of sad that a member of any religious minority had to make such a speech in the first place.

The implied message was that Kennedy had to prove that he had just as much a right to run for the presidency as any Protestant.

Now, we have a Mormon running for president, Mitt Romney. And while much has been made of the rift between evangelical Protestants and Mormons, less has been noted about the way normally tolerant liberals have also raised questions about Mitt’s faith.

Romney’s “conspicuous cone of silence about this major pillar of his biography also leaves you wondering what he is trying to hide,” writes former New York Times columnist Frank Rich in the current issue of New York Magazine.

Rich goes on, “That his faith can be as secretive as he is…only whets the curiosity among the 82% of Americans who tells pollsters they know little or nothing about Mormonism.”

Secretive? Trying to hide something?

Given what folks have said about the all-powerful Vatican in the past, these very things could well have been said about JFK in 1960. And that’s a shame.

There’s a fine line between wanting to know more about a candidate’s background and equating silence with suspicious secrecy.

The late best-selling author Christopher Hitchens, before he died, declared, “we are fully entitled” to ask tough questions about how Romney’s faith shaped his political philosophy. There is, of course, a defensiveness to that declaration.

Because Hitchens and those like him know that you run the risk of seeming anti-Mormon, if not anti-religious, by pushing such questions. Hitchens, for one, was a proud atheist.

But one suspects that if the leading Republican candidate was a devout Buddhist or Jew -- or heaven forbid, Muslim -- people like Rich would be the first to view such questions as bigoted.

There is so much material to slam Romney on -- his flip-flopping, his cutthroat private sector policies, his thin political experience. Why go after his religion?

Yes, he himself speaks of God oh so much on the campaign trail. He is not the only one.

The problem, then, seems not to be Mormonism but religion in the political sphere in general. Liberals don’t like to be labeled as anti-Christian, but there are times when they make it awful easy for the right wing to do just that.

Sure, Romney could make another JFK-style speech about his religion. But would that really satisfy the critics who view him with suspicion?

As JFK said back in 1960, “For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew -- or a Quaker or a
Unitarian or a Baptist.”

Or a Mormon.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

The real Fighting Irish - Boston Irish fight each other

Former Boston Mayor Kevin White

With gleaming stars like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck bickering over who has the right to make a movie about that rapscallion Whitey Bulger – you know, the gangster and drug dealer who killed at least 19 people – it’s safe to say we have moved so far away from Boston’s dark past that it looks nearly charming these days.

And yet, it really wasn’t so long ago that the Boston Irish were at the center of a drama that was ugly, raw and rooted in ancient hatreds. And it had nothing to do with Whitey Bulger.

The death last week of former Boston Mayor Kevin White, at the age of 82, was another reminder of these bad old days.

This also reminds us that while we have our problems in the year 2012, they are nothing compared to the rancor of 1970s Boston.

Finally, lest we ever forget, the White days also proved that we may be known as the “Fighting Irish” not because we fight against the world, but because we fight each other.

White’s glory days were 1970s Boston, a town ruled politically by the Irish. In fact, former Boston Globe reporter and editor Gerard O’Neill has a new book coming out in March entitled Rogues and Redeemers: When Politics Was King in Irish Boston (Crown).
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The book’s starting point is “Four Micks,” including, Thomas Fitzgerald (JFK’s Irish-born great-grandfather) and Michael Curley, whose grandson James would serve as Boston mayor and Massachusetts governor, while also serving time in prison.

But perhaps the most interesting – and timely - sections of O’Neill’s book are the White years.

White was briefly a towering figure. He was nearly selected as George McGovern’s presidential running mate in 1972.

And yet, White may be the least colorful of four key figures from late 1960s and early 1970s Boston. 
They were all Irish and all, in their own ways, despised each other.

First there was White, who like most Irish pols of his generation had a strong political pedigree. His father once served as Boston’s City Council president, and also served in the state senate. He even eyed the mayor’s chair his own son would eventually occupy from 1968 to 1984.

White, simply put, was a moderate liberal. He even labeled Boston “racist” in 1980.

And so, when the notorious bussing controversy of the early 1970s hit South Boston, White was vulnerable when it came to political enemies such as Louise Day Hicks.

“Bussing” hit the big time in 1974, when Irish American judge Arthur Garrity ruled the Boston’s schools were racially segregated.

The solution? Sending African American kids on busses to mostly white schools, and vice versa.

Louise Day Hicks looked like everybody’s grandmother, but she was supported by the vociferous, sometimes violent, anti-bussing crowd, including the group ROAR.

Demanding that someone “Restore Our Alienated Rights,” Hicks won over her fans and earned her
enemies when she said, “You know where I stand.”

To some, she and ROAR stood for racial segregation in the north, just as fat, bald sheriffs had done in the American south.

A more complex opponent of White’s was Joe Timilty. “They came from opposite sides of the tracks to enter city politics at the same time, in the same place,” O’Neill writes.

“One was a hard-charging, beer-drinking Marine from St. Gregory’s parish in Dorchester. The other was something of an intellectual from a lace curtain family in West Roxbury who read the philosophers and sipped white wine – when he drank at all.”

Timilty and White, who battled in three ugly races for mayor throughout the 1970s, represent two sides of the Irish American experience -- one, blue collar and feisty, the other more upper class and anxious to escape these less sophisticated roots.

When all was said and done, there was racial tension and violence, not to mention Irish-on-Irish violence.

Most notoriously, Judge Garrity faced death threats and Senator Ted Kennedy was nearly mauled by an angry crowd.

Meanwhile, even though White got the most votes in those mayoral races, it’s hard to say someone actually won given the long-lasting scars left behind.

To some, these days are ancient history. And that’s a good thing.

So long as we do everything we can to avoid the passing of such days ever again.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomedeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)