The Catholic Civil Warrior - Patrick J Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society

Kathleen Sebelius (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GettyImages)

He's the most influential, confrontational, controversial Irish Catholic you’ve never heard of.

He makes Maureen Dowd of The New York Times angry.  He makes Bill Donohue of the Catholic League stand up and cheer.  And each and every May he reignites what some have come to call the “civil war” in the American Catholic Church.

His name is Patrick J. Reilly.

Reilly is the founder and president of a Washington group called the Cardinal Newman Society.  For better or worse, Reilly is widely credited for pressuring Catholic colleges that invite speakers who may be Catholic but do not strictly adhere to church teaching.

The lighting rod this year is Kathleen Sebelius, who was invited to take part in Georgetown University’s commencement ceremonies.  The Irish American Sebelius (born Kathleen Gilligan in Cincinnati, the daughter of former Ohio governor John Gilligan) is currently Health and Human Services secretary and was the public face of the Obama administration’s efforts to compel employers – including those who work for the Catholic Church – to pay for medical coverage which might include contraception. 

The conflict outraged conservative Catholics, who slammed the Obama administration for assaulting religious liberty.  The controversy catapulted New York’s Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan to the
national stage. 

Just this week, Dolan led a coalition of Catholic dioceses and colleges in a court challenge to the Obama administration.

The same sides of that debate were up in arms again this week, either defending or blasting Sebelius’s selection as a speaker at Georgetown University, the oldest Jesuit institution in the U.S. 

As David Gibson noted, writing for Religion News Service, “The Washington archdiocese issued a statement (calling) the Sebelius invitation a ‘shocking’ action that undermines the Catholic Church and supports the administration in what the hierarchy says is an unprecedented attack on religious freedom ... ‘It's practically a civil war,’ Michael Brendan Dougherty, politics editor at Business Insider and a Catholic, wrote on Wednesday.”

That would make Patrick J. Reilly a civil warrior. 

Those seeking change in the church, or hoping at least for debate on controversial issues, target the
Cardinal Newman Society as a defender of an excessively rigid theology that has alienated many Irish American Catholics.

“The latest kooky kerfuffle was sparked by the invitation to Kathleen Sebelius,” Dowd wrote in the Times this week. “The silver-haired former Kansas governor is a practicing Catholic with a husband and son who graduated from Georgetown.

“But because she fought to get a federal mandate for health insurance coverage of contraceptives and morning-after pills, including at Catholic schools and hospitals, Sebelius is on the hit list of a conservative Catholic group in Virginia, the Cardinal Newman Society, which militates to bar speakers at Catholic schools who support gay rights or abortion rights.”

As leader of the Newman Society, Reilly is surely glad to count Dowd as an enemy.  And it is understandable that conservatives want to draw a line, lest Catholicism become so watered down we might as well all become Protestants.

So of course they shudder when they hear someone like Mario Cuomo say, “Christ is my religion, the church is not.” 

Reilly and others argue that the church and its teachings are timeless, and thus should not bend. 

The problem is, the church has always bent and wavered and changed.  And to say the Catholic Church is devoid of political debate and maneuvering is just silly. 

There are many debates within the Vatican before the Pope speaks for all of the world’s Catholics.
The pope himself is selected via a political process.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., liberals and conservatives have to decide what kind of church will remain vibrant and relevant in the 21st Century. 

The only way to do that is to engage in debate and discussion, and that includes inviting a diverse range of speakers to Catholic institutions.

Otherwise, there will barely be enough Catholics left to have a debate.

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

Faith of the future - Christian Rick Santorum may represent their best chance

Rick Santorum, yesterday or tomorrow’s man?

A headline in this past Sunday’s New York Times screamed “Divided by God.”  The article, by Op-Ed columnist Ross Douthat, argued that it is “tough to pull together as a nation” with all of the religious diversity and tension out there.

This is understandable.  Archbishop Dolan is out there butting heads with the Obama administration, while Rick Santorum continues his culture wars crusade.

To me, however, the real headline should have said something about how religious rage is, in fact, at an all-time low in the United States.

A second headline might add that while many suggest that Santorum and Dolan are stuck in the past, they may well represent the future of the Catholic Church.  Just how many people will stand with them? Well, that’s a tough question.

From Ireland to America, it is true that we have had a lot of bickering about theological matters lately.  More on them later.  For now, I invite readers to visit old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott
Street in downtown Manhattan.  It’s a beautiful old church, but you don’t even need to go inside to grasp an important point.  Take a look at the sturdy brick wall surrounding the church.

It was constructed to keep violent, anti-Catholic mobs at bay.  There was a time when folks thought it would be neat to torch churches and other religious institutions.  Groups like the KKK would later make arguments that America should never allow a Catholic or a Jew or a Mormon to run for president, much less sit in the White House.

That, to me, is true religious conflict.  To some degree, I think things seem so tense these days because so many people are present at the debate.  The worst kind of lunatic fringe bigots have finally been shamed into the darkest corners of the Internet.

That being said, there is anger in the air and the Catholic Church is at the center of many of today’s thorniest debates.

Out of Dublin, there are reports that the Irish Association of Catholic Priests is "disturbed" by the news that its founder, Father Tony Flannery, is under investigation by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  Flannery supposedly got himself into trouble because of writings which suggest that the church re-think its position on female priests, birth control and celibacy.

Here in the U.S., there was New York’s own Archbishop Cardinal Dolan on Meet the Press this past Sunday, talking about both John F. Kennedy and Rick Santorum, the latter of whom famously suggested that JFK’s speech on the separation of presidential faith and policy made him want to vomit.

This is not the only public spat Dolan, who has also been battling Obama over health care and birth control, has endured in recent weeks.

Just before Easter, a New York member of Catholic Charities’ board quit over the church’s teachings on homosexuality.

In many of these debates, it is very tempting to say that the Catholic Church and its most conservative allies – such as Rick Santorum – are on the wrong side of history.  The world is changing and if the church continues to oppose homosexuality and birth control, and investigate certain members for their political beliefs, it will doom itself to extinction.

It certainly appeared as if the church had begun that process already, given in its horrendous handling of the abuse scandals of past years.

A common theme among critics is that the Catholic Church must become more Christian – as in inclusive, respectful, remorseful and humble.

Perhaps.  I suspect, however, that Dolan and others believe becoming more Christian would mean becoming less Catholic.  Church officials themselves may not want to acknowledge an important fact: that super-devout followers such as Rick Santorum may represent their best chance at viability not only in the 21st Century, but also the 22nd.

Accommodating a broader, intellectually diverse Catholic flock takes an awful lot of work.  Why not focus on a smaller, more obedient flock?

This, of course, may mean alienating a vast number of Catholics.

But, hey, haven’t they been doing that for years now?

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

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)

The good old days? - Anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bigots and the KKK

Thomas Nast cartoon

It is always interesting, at this time of year, to remind people that cartoonist Thomas Nast – beloved
for more or less inventing our cherished image of Santa Claus – was also a wildly anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bigot.

For proof, see any of his cartoons from the late 19th Century in which the Irish look like apes and Catholics are depicted as crocodiles or other scheming, rapacious beasts.

Nast has been in the news of late because an entity called the New Jersey Hall of Fame has suggested that he perhaps be enshrined in their institution.

Such a situation can make you think about many things, but one thing that comes to my mind is that what we think of as “the good old days” were pretty damned bad.
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Oh, without a doubt, we have our problems today.  This is reflected in polls which show that Americans feel about as bad as you can about everything from the economy to Congress.

Along with that, inevitably, comes a feeling that things were once good but we lost something along the way.

Hardly.

Look at politics for a moment.  You bet we have our problems now.  You can say we have a real problem with these boneheaded Tea Party types or these freeloading Occupy Wall Street types.

But that is baby stuff compared to the rough stuff that emerged from the political scene, say, in the 1920s.

In fact, not one but two new books have recently been published about the power and influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th Century.  Talk about your fun holiday reading!

The titles are One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s by Thomas R. Pegram and Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 by Kelly J. Baker.

In his review of the two books in The New York Times this past Sunday, National Book Award-winner and Irish American historian Kevin Boyle blunders a bit by more or less comparing the Tea Party to the 1920s-era KKK.

“Imagine,” Boyle wrote, “a political movement created in a moment of terrible anxiety, its origins shrouded in a peculiar combination of manipulation and grass-roots mobilization, its ranks dominated by Christian conservatives and self-proclaimed patriots, its agenda driven by its members’ fervent embrace of nationalism, nativism and moral regeneration, with more than a whiff of racism wafting through it.”

He’s speaking, of course, of the Klan, but leading readers to think of the Tea Party.

Even if you agree with Boyle’s characterization of the Tea Party, to see them as inheritors of the Klan’s  tradition says more about the Tea Party’s current critics than it does about the group itself.

If anything, even if you believe the Tea Party is the new Klan, this shows you how much better off we are today.  After all, there’s no denying certain, maybe even many, Tea Party members have dabbled in race-baiting, class warfare and religious zealotry.

But those things are not central to the philosophy of the Tea Party, as they proudly were to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.

The Irish, Italians, Jews, the Vatican.  The Klan vociferously fought against all of these things and more.

As Ken Burns’ recent documentary on Prohibition showed, the Klan was making a final stand for a rural, Protestant America that saw cities as mongrelized bastions of sin.

And when Roman Catholic Al Smith was roundly beaten in the 1928 presidential election, it might have seemed the Klan was going to win.

Perhaps most interestingly, Republicans sat out this fight.  This was an intra-Democratic clash, with the ethnic Tammany Hall wing of the Dems doing battle with the racist, anti-immigrant rural wing of the party.

Yes, the KKK had members on the Supreme Court and in Congress and in state houses across the country. But the Klan was eventually ushered off the national stage.

Their paranoid impulses, of course, stuck around.  We see vestiges of it today all across the political spectrum.

Vestiges are one thing.  Burning crosses are another.

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

Rebelling against the Catholic Church - the nuns versus the Cardinals

Cardinal James Francis McIntyre

It is a time of great tension in the Catholic Church.  People are asking questions that people never used to ask.  

 
It seems as if the men in charge cannot keep up with the pace of change, and a widely-read national magazine puts the crisis on the front cover.  

 
The story inside explores “The Catholic Exodus,” and explores the difficulties American parishes are having staffing schools and churches with priests and nuns.

 
You can be forgiven if you think this is a story from 2011.  But it is, in fact, from 40 years earlier.  

 
It was way back in 1970 that Time magazine wrote about the Catholic “exodus,” and tried to explain “why priests and nuns are quitting.”

 
Indeed, it is easy to believe the crisis in the Catholic Church in the U.S. is a fairly recent thing.  

 
But in some ways, the debate that is going on now is an extension of debates that have their roots in the 1960s.

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This came to mind last week when I read about the death of a 95 year-old nun named Anita Caspary.  Her name is no longer a household one, but it was her’s on the cover of Time when the magazine explored the Catholic crisis decades ago.

 
Caspary came to be seen as a “rebel nun” who had a conflict with one of the most powerful Irish American Catholics, Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, who rose through the ranks of the church under Cardinal Francis Spellman, dubbed by one biographer as the “American Pope.”

 
In the end, some 300 nuns initiated a series of changes in day-to-day life that they thought were in the spirit of the times.  

 
Cardinal McIntyre, whose mother was born in Kiltormer, Co. Galway, disagreed.  When all was said and done, the nuns parted ways with the church. Some see it as one of the largest breakaways in Catholic American history.  

 
The trouble between the cardinals and the nun has its roots in the changes wrought by the reforms which came out of the Second Vatican Council.  Spellman had attended the meetings in Rome and feared liberal forces had hijacked the proceedings.

 
Spellman, whose Irish grandparents had settled in Massachusetts, was named sixth archbishop on New York in early 1939.  Later, he would also be named Apostolic Vicar for the U.S. Armed Forces, a key position with World War II looming on the horizon.

 
Since Spellman had to serve New York and the military, he relied heavily on an auxiliary bishop – James Francis McIntyre.

 
Both were seen as traditionalists, at a time when many Irish Americans were still familiar with the sting of anti-Catholicism. (In fact, Spellman accused Eleanor Roosevelt of being anti-Catholic.  When, however, a Catholic ran for president, Spellman supported Richard Nixon, an early indication of the Irish drift away from the Democratic Party.)

 
In the late 1940s, McIntyre went west to become the second Archbishop of Los Angeles.  The area’s population boom made McIntyre an influential figure.

 
When the impact of Vatican II became clear, McIntyre and Spellman were seen as opponents. 

 
The Los Angeles-based Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, however, believed that the time was right to propose a series of changes -- nuns would no longer need to wear habits, or follow traditional Vatican guidelines when it came to prayer and even reading material.

 
The sisters believed they were doing what a good Catholic does -- following the rules that were coming out of the Vatican.  

But McIntyre did not accept the nuns’ proposals. If they moved ahead with their changes they would not be allowed to teach in Catholic schools.

 
“All these changes were taking place without incident in the majority of dioceses around the country. Cardinal McIntyre simply was saying, ‘Not in my diocese,’” Sandra M. Schneiders, a professor emeritus at the Jesuit School of Theology, told The New York Times this week.

 
The 300 nuns eventually formed a communal Christian organization that served the poor and elderly and still has over 150 members.

 
So, while the times are rough these days for American Catholics, maybe they’ve been that way for a long time.

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

Was Catholicism worse than Communism?

John Banville

If you are looking for a good anti-Catholic rant, you can listen to certain Evangelical Protestants or rigid atheists.

But why bother? Many Catholics these days are as reliably anti-Catholic as the Vatican’s oldest enemies.

This is understandable, given the revelations of the last decade or so.

Living as a devout Catholic requires a tremendous amount of dedication and sacrifice. That was especially true in a largely Protestant nation such as America, where Irish Catholics were a distinct minority for the century or so following the Famine.

But these days, it seems as if Catholics are the ones who want to throw stones at the stained glass windows.

This was made crystal clear by two recent developments in the ongoing tension between the Irish and Rome.

First came the announcement that members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) have filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, outlining how Vatican officials tolerated and enabled “the systematic and widespread concealing of rape and child sex crimes,” as Irish American SNAP leader David Clohessy has written.

Clohessy added, “After many years of effort in the United States and around the world, the (abuse) problem became too big to ignore. … We finally began to feel heard. And now we want these crimes investigated and prosecuted.”

Clohessy knows this move may not be popular.

“Some may be shocked that we are accusing the world leader of a church, a man considered by many people of faith to be a holy leader. But one cannot be the head of an institution and escape accountability for that institution’s continuing criminal cover-ups,” he writes.

Clohessy then quoted Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny, who said, “The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution — its power, its standing and its reputation.”

Most observers feel that SNAP’s ploy is not likely to be successful -- unless, of course, by successful they mean drawing more attention to an urgent problem.

Still, whatever the technical outcome, trying to haul the Vatican before a human rights tribunal means that at least some people want to equate priestly crimes with systematic atrocities committed under brutal dictatorships in places such as Haiti and China and Chile. Or, for that matter, old Communist regimes.

Which is why I was taken aback when I heard a recent interview with acclaimed Irish writer John Banville, a widely admired writer who has won the Booker Prize (for his novel The Sea) and is now gaining a larger following for his mystery novels, written under the pen name Benjamin Black.

Banville told the editor of The New York Times Book Review that Ireland in the fifties “was a time of great secrecy. We were in the clutch of the Catholic Church. The church for us was what the Communist party was for Eastern Europe.

“We only discovered this when we got older, how unfree we were. And everything was hidden, as we have discovered, to our horror, in the past five or 10 years.”

Are SNAP and Banville right? Do the church’s transgressions rise to the level of the 20th century’s worst dictatorial regimes?

We probably do need to make distinctions between Ireland and America, though Catholicism did pervade big-city parishes in the U.S. nearly as thoroughly as it did elsewhere.

Indeed, Banville’s comparison is particularly jolting for Irish Americans. They often flaunted their anti-Communism to prove to native WASPs just how patriotic they could be.

And now it is being said they themselves were no better off than the victims of Communism?

I’d say SNAP may be on to something, but I will respectfully disagree with Banville.

Moreso in Ireland, but also in America, parish institutions pervaded every aspect of life. To say they were as negatively pervasive as Communism’s rigged elections and secret police is simply too strong a case to make.

The saddest thing, of course, is that the case can actually be made at all.

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