The yuk of the Irish - Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to party with Al Smith and Cardinal Dolan in New York

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will once again meet 
at the Al Smith dinner in New York next week.

Next Thursday, October 18, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will call a brief cease-fire in their war for the White House.  They will make their way to New York for the annual Al Smith dinner and yuk it up with Timothy Cardinal Dolan.

The dinner is technically a fundraiser for Catholic Charities, and the 2008 dinner raised nearly $4 million.

Or, as Romney refers to $4 million, “Tip money.”

That’s right, you can expect all sorts of jokes aimed at Romney and Obama that night.

Traditionally, the candidates for president have appeared at the dinner right before the election.  This is a fine opportunity to remind people what a trailblazer Al Smith was, and the obstacles he faced as the first Irish American and Roman Catholic from a major party to run for the White House in 1928.

It’s also a convenient reminder that the Archbishop of New York is one of the few people in America who can invite the two presidential candidates to dinner and expect them to show up.

But mainly, this is an opportunity for the candidates to flex their funny bones.

Given the state of America, however, one can imagine nervous speechwriters chewing on pencils, trying to strike the right balance between funny and wildly inappropriate.

For example, imagine Romney standing up and at the podium, offering a standard greeting, before adding, “And if anyone in the room needs an abortion, please speak to the president before you leave tonight.”

Yes, it’s going to be hard to avoid tensions between the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church.  For example, Dolan made it clear he was willing to go to both the Republican and Democratic conventions back in the summer, but only the Republicans took Dolan up on the offer.

Which might lead Dolan to quip, “Nice to see you, Mr. President.  Would you like me to leave now?”

Or,“Mr. President, tonight I kind of wish I was speaking to an empty chair.”

Or, “If anyone needs a gay marriage ceremony, please speak to the president.”

In 1996 and 2004 the candidates were not invited to the dinner, and most people believe these non-invites were spurred largely by Democratic support for abortion and other social issues.

And you can bet this year’s dinner will have an awkward moment or two.  The New York Archdiocese, after all, is one of many organizations currently suing the Obama administration in a fight over whether or not contraception should be made available to employees through health plans.

Obama, of course, could ease this awkward moment.  With sight gags, for example.

Blow up a condom like a balloon.  Or toss birth control pills at the crowd.

But even then some people probably wouldn’t laugh.  As it is, over 2,000 people have signed a petition at alsmithscandal.org to voice their opposition to Obama’s presence.

Catholics, according to the protest organizer, “felt betrayed” by the invitation to Obama. “They felt like the cardinal placed a knife in their back. They felt let down and disappointed over this apparent show of weak leadership.”

Not that Romney is going to be let off easy. Dolan may introduce the Republican candidate by saying, “Now let’s make sure we make Mitt Romney feel welcome.  After all, he is a member of a strange religious cult.  And I don’t mean go-into-a-box-and-whisper-to-a-priest-to-forgive-all-your-sins crazy.  Or look-the-other-way-when-priests-sexually-abuse-boys crazy.  I mean real crazy!”

Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that the whole point of fundraising for charity might be a little lost on Romney.

“Why in God’s name are we raising money for poor people?” Romney may ask.  “I thought that fine Irish writer Jonathan Swift solved the whole poor people problem two centuries ago when he wrote A Modest Proposal.  You can be sure that in a Romney administration I will take that proposal and it will be a whole lot more than modest!”

Yes, given the state of the world, it will be good to laugh for an evening.  It might make us feel better when we break down in tears and realize the joke’s on us.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tdeignan.blogspot.com or tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

Religion and politics go perfectly together, but is the church closing their doors to possible parishioners?

Archbishop John J. Myers (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

Tom Moran was “born into a devout Catholic family, the fifth of nine children,” as the Irish American columnist wrote in a column this past Sunday for the Star Ledger newspaper in New Jersey.

Moran, however, now declares himself “a spiritual refugee,” who has “fled a million miles from the church.”

He, of course, is not the only one.

“One in three American adults was raised in a Catholic family, but fewer than one in four identify as Catholic today. No other church has shed so many followers, according to surveys by the Pew Charitable Trusts,” Moran writes.

This bit of soul-searching was prompted by a controversial letter written by Archbishop John J. Myers, the spiritual leader of the Newark Archdiocese.

Myers lengthy pastoral letter on marriage and family encouraged Catholics to vote a certain way in the upcoming presidential election. 

“Catholic citizens must exercise their right to be heard in the public square by defending marriage,” Myers writes. 

In short, Myers is placing gay marriage, as well as abortion, at the center of the 2012 election.  He adds that Catholics who don’t share his views should probably not receive Holy Communion.

Moran and many like him are wondering why such a prominent religious figure would release such a highly-charged document on the eve of the closely-watched presidential debates, and just a month before this hard-fought election, in which religious values have played a central, often contentious, role.

It’s easy to say religion and politics don’t mix, and that Myers shouldn’t go about endorsing candidates, even though Myers never technically mentioned that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan (who is Catholic) are members of a political party whose views match the Catholic Church’s.  Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden (also Catholic) support abortion and gay marriage.

Trouble is, religion and politics have always mixed, like it or not. 

“Dagger” John Hughes, the Irish immigrant who more or less built the New York Archdiocese, openly supported political candidates who joined him in his fight to rid New York’s schools of their deeply Protestant influences. 

John Drina of Massachusetts was a Catholic priest who joined the anti-war movement and actually won a seat in congress in 1970.  He was followed a few years later by Robert John Cornell of Wisconsin, a priest who served in Congress until 1978.

So, if you don’t like mixing religion and politics, that is your right, but it’s been happening for about as long as people have been mixing scotch and soda.

Perhaps the real interesting place to get some thoughts on the archbishop’s priorities is St. Anne’s school in Jersey City.  Or Queen of Angels in Newark itself. 

Those are two of eight schools in the Newark Archdiocese that were slated for closure in an announcement earlier this year.  Yes, Catholic school closures are generally about budgets and finances. 

But across the country, budgets and finances are in bad shape because so many Catholics are indeed
voting.  But not at the ballot box. 

Catholics, instead, are voting with their feet, by attending church fewer and fewer times.  They are voting with their pocketbook, simply unable to pay the high cost of (an admittedly very fine)
Catholic education.

Are people fleeing the church solely because of abortion and gay rights?  No, but most polls show the vast majority of American Catholics disagree with their leaders on these issues. 

And while it is easy to say an institution such as the Catholic Church has little use for polls, it’s going way too far to suggest that the church is some timeless institution that never changes or responds to the political tone of the day.

Myers, for example, is a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a body which would probably not exist but for pressure created by victims.

Ultimately, it is perplexing why so many church leaders choose to make abortion and gay marriage the most pressing issue of the day, going so far as to suggest support for these issues precludes Catholics from participating in the sacraments.

Is this an institution that really wants to be closing its doors to anyone at this point?

Doing so may go over well with some on Election Day. But it only creates more and more spiritual refugees.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tdeignan.blogspot.com or tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

The real miracle of Bishop Fulton Sheen on his road to Sainthood -- Overcoming New York’s Cardinal Spellman was a true miracle

 Bishop Fulton Sheen

Two years ago, an Illinois woman named Bonnie Engstrom gave birth to a stillborn baby. Throughout the pregnancy, Engstrom had prayed for a healthy child.

Specifically, she invoked the name of the popular 1950s television priest, Fulton Sheen.  In a development that surely would have made the media-savvy Sheen proud, Engstrom even watched videos of the former Irish American bishop on YouTube.

Nevertheless, tragedy for Engstrom’s newborn seemed imminent. That is, until the baby’s heart finally did start beating. The two year-old child is now happy and healthy.

Was this a miracle?  Did Sheen, in death, intercede on behalf of this mother to save the child’s life?
If the Vatican believes so, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen may very well become the first male American-born saint.

Last week, the Vatican officially recognized Archbishop Sheen’s “heroic virtues” and gave him the title “venerable.”  The next step towards sainthood is to establish whether or not Sheen is indeed responsible for miracles on earth.

There are fewer and fewer people around these days who remember Sheen, even if millions watched his TV show in the 1950s.  (Sheen even won and Emmy.) 

Those who do remember him recall a firm yet comforting figure, and one who represented arguably the high point of American Catholic power.

However, it’s important to remember that while Sheen may have seemed a stabilizing presence, he rose to prominence at a time of great tension, just two years after a controversial anti-Catholic book became a best seller.

Meanwhile, once Sheen became a household name, he privately battled an even more powerful Irish American force in the church who was known as the “American Pope.”

In other words, you might say Sheen already pulled off a miracle or two, in doing battle with the likes of author Paul Blanshard and Francis Cardinal Spellman.

Sheen’s television show Life Is Worth Living hit the airwaves in 1951.  Just two years earlier, American Freedom and Catholic Power was riding high on the bestseller lists.

Written by Nation magazine editor Paul Blanshard, the book argued – as anti-Catholics had for over a century in American – that Catholics simply could not be Democracy-loving Americans because of their allegiance to Rome.

The book clearly struck a chord with many readers, given its popularity.  In 1954, Blanshard published another book, this time bashing the Irish.  The book was simply called The Irish and Catholic Power.

Given this lingering suspicion of Catholic power, one would think Sheen would tone down his act on TV.  But Sheen always wore his full clerical garb.

At the same time, he reminded viewers that Catholics were deeply committed to fighting Communism, which seemed to go a long way towards establishing their ability to be full-blooded Americans.

One viewer who embraced Sheen is currently leading the New York church -- Timothy Cardinal Dolan.

“(Fulton Sheen) showed the broad American public that the truths of our faith were consonant with the highest values of the society -- patriotism, God, family and the struggle against Communism,” Dolan said back in 2009.

Perhaps an even more formidable foe than anti-Catholicism was Dolan’s predecessor and America’s most powerful Catholic in the 1950s, New York Archbishop Francis Cardinal Spellman.

Tension between these two Irish American powerhouses rose in the 1950s.  In his role as leader of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, Sheen butted heads with Spellman over money and programs designed to feed the world’s poor.

It has been said that even Pope Pius XII and President Eisenhower were forced to intercede in the war of words between Sheen and Spellman.  In the end, Spellman had the final word: he reassigned Sheen, forcing him to leave New York to head up the much smaller Diocese of Rochester.

Despite all this, Sheen persisted and remained a cultural force until his death in 1979.

Surviving the anti-Catholic rants of Paul Blanshard and the massive ego of Cardinal Spellman?  Seems to me the saintly Sheen has already accomplished several miracles.

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

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan - much power but little glory

Archbishop Timothy Dolan (AP Photo/Louis Lanzano)

“Could Cardinal Dolan Become Pope?”

The question jumped out at me from the CBS News website and made me chuckle for several reasons.

First of all, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan will not even get his red hat until February 18.  Yet here they are speculating that the guy might become Pope.

And then there’s the prospect of an Irish American pope in Rome.  That made me chuckle even more mightily.

Still, it was quite a week for Irish American power. First, there were reports that First Lady Michelle Obama once griped about the power wielded by just three Irish Catholic clans in Chicago -- the Daley, Madigan and Hynes families.

Then there was the elevation of Dolan, as well as Bronx native and fellow Irish American Edwin O’Brien, to cardinal.

That means for over 170 years now an Irish American has ruled the biggest, most visible diocese in North America.  And all but one, in that time, has made it to Rome as a cardinal.

This got me thinking about what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in his book Beyond the Melting Pot back in the 1960s.

“The Irish didn’t know what to do with power once they got it. …[T]he very parochialism and bureaucracy that enabled them to succeed in local politics prevented them from doing much else.
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“In all these 60 or 70 years in which they could have done almost anything they wanted in politics, they did very little. Of all those candidates and all those campaigns, what remains?”

What remains, of course, is power. Still.  To this day.  In 2012.

Moynihan’s point seems to be that after the Irish scrapped and battled their way from the bottom of the social heap to the corridors of power in Boston, New York, Philly and Chicago, they seemed content simply to be powerful and influential.

And one is tempted to ask who can blame them?

It’s particularly interesting to read Moynihan’s lines in the first month of 2012, decades after the Irish finally had to begin sharing power with other ethnic groups, as they moved out to the suburbs and began inter-marrying in great numbers.

Oh sure, it’s hard to find a Hibernian trace of Tammany Hall these days, even if two of the most likely candidates for New York City mayor in 2013 are named Kelly and Quinn.

And the rank-and-file of the unions are nearly as diverse as the city, though the cops and teachers and firefighters have union leaders named Lynch and  Cassidy and Mulgrew.

Yes, the historically Irish Transit Workers union leader is named John Samuelson.  But even he has a son named Jack Duggan Samuelson, thanks to the old Irish ballad.

Moynihan and many others have suggested the Irish could have done more with the power they accumulated.  Others still suggest that had the Irish shared their power they might have made a more just society.

In an important new book to be published in March, entitled The Irish Way, Professor James R. Barrett writes about the Irish in America: “Their most common impulse was to exclude: to bar more recent immigrants, women and people of color from jobs and unions, to discriminate against women and minorities, and to fight more radical groups in the labor movement.”

If this is not excusable, is it at least understandable?  Given what the Irish went through?

There are, of course, plenty of harsh things to say about the Irish influence on the American Catholic Church.

But imagine if you had told “Dagger” John Hughes that the Irish would rule Catholic New York for nearly 200 years?  It would have sent his head spinning.

Yes, they should face the reality of the changing times and the changing faces in the pews.

Yes, the church was a force social mobility, but at a high price when it came to conformity and sexuality.

But maybe for this week, just this week, we should acknowledge this amazing fete.  That the Irish in
America obtained and maintain influence, not for its own sake, or in the name of making the world a
better place.

The amazing thing is that it happened in the first place.

Could they have done more?  Of course.

Let’s not forget the biggest miracle -- that they did it at all.

(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)