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)

Governor Christie’s ‘crazy’ Catholic problem - why he relishes conflict

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

Last May, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie explained why he seems to relish conflict.

“I have an Irish father,” said Christie, who on Tuesday announced that he would not seek the GOP presidential nomination, “and I had…a Sicilian mother. For those of you who have been exposed to the combination of Irish and Sicilian, it has made me not unfamiliar with conflict.”

Meanwhile, Christie’s wife, Mary Pat, has not only been tabbed as a highly influential partner. She is also “the ninth of 10 kids in a close-knit Irish Catholic family,” according to the New York Post.

A long time family friend, New Jersey state Senator Joe Kyrillos, was recently quoted as saying, “(Mary Pat) does not get pushed around. She’s a tough Irish woman. She comes from a family of 10 kids!”
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So, if Christie ultimately decided to throw his (ample) weight behind a presidential run, it would have added a decidedly Irish Catholic flair.

And that could have been a big problem.

On the surface, an Irish Catholic Republican is no big deal these days. The problems come when you dig deeply into the conservative GOP base, where strong vestiges of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment still linger.

Now, it is true that Republicans already have a Catholic (Rick Santorum) and a Mormon (Mitt Romney) in their crowded field. But it’s also true that neither of them have exactly wowed vast numbers of Republicans.
And as one religious expert wrote in The New York Times in July, “Hardline fundamentalists remain anti-Mormon (and anti-Catholic, for that matter); they may not ever support any but their own.”

And let’s not forget the Muslims! Christie himself scolded conservatives who groaned when the governor appointed Muslim American Sohail Mohammed to the New Jersey Superior Court.

“I think it is terrible to try to exclude someone from office based only on his religion, and that’s what was happening here,” said Christie, before looking back to a pivotal moment in Irish Catholic American history.

“President Kennedy had to stand up in Houston and say his own personal faith wouldn’t intersect with his public life. Since then I thought we wouldn’t have any more of this ridiculousness,” he said.

Christie also famously said, “I’m tired of dealing with crazies.”

Well, that’s just what he would have had to deal with if he had jumped into the race.

Catholicism remains a problem when you wander away from the moderate Republicanism of the Northeastern suburbs and into the more intense hotbeds of evangelical Protestantism in the south and West.

Michele Bachmann has been linked to a Lutheran church with nearly half a million members whose admiration for Reformation leader Martin Luther has led them to label the papacy “the anti-Christ.”

Yes, Bachmann has left this particularly loving church. But how many Democrats do you really think are among the half a million members of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod?

Meanwhile, don’t forget that John McCain had to repudiate the endorsement of a notorious anti-Catholic preacher four years ago.

“The McCain campaign had already endured a series of other disclosures of controversial past statements from (Reverend John) Hagee about his views of Catholics,” the Times noted in 2008.

Hagee is far from a footnote these days. Word is he is thinking of endorsing Rick Perry.

The point of this is not to tar these candidates with the radical views of certain anti-Catholics. The point is to note that a significant number of influential conservatives still hold these views.

Now, it is true Christie is solidly opposed to abortion. But as his defense of a Muslim American judge suggests, he has also taken a generally moderate stance on immigration. (As, by the way, did Ronald Reagan, as Linda Chavez noted in an interesting New York Post column last week.)

It all comes down to this -- how will this ethnic Catholic who won’t bash immigrants and who talks about John F. Kennedy in a positive light fair in the Republican primary?

How many “crazies” would Christie have listened to before his famous temper made it clear that he is quite unelectable?

We won’t find out this time around, but maybe in four years . . .

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

Governor Rick Perry’s gaffes and the heart and soul of immigration in the US

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry (AP Photo/Joe Burbank, Pool)

So Texas Governor Rick Perry went ahead and voiced support for the radial notion that the children of illegal immigrants should be able to pay in-state tuition costs when they attend college.

Furthermore, Perry, running for the GOP nod for the presidency in 2012, suggested that since immigrants tend not to hail from the elite classes, making sure they have access to college might actually pay off for America in the long run.

You know what this means. It may be time to serve up the Perry toast. He may well be done.

Ever since Perry made these comments at a GOP debate late last week, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and other Republicans desperate to make their anti-immigration sentiments clear have been bashing Perry as “soft on immigration” (Rick Santorum’s actual words).

Can Perry survive his admission that, sometimes, you have to “have a heart” when it comes to certain vulnerable citizens?  It is amazing, in a race filled with so-called Christians, that this comment would actually cause a stir.

It is also interesting that this immigration scuffle came the same week that venerable, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Oscar Handlin passed away, at the age of 95.

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Handlin’s most famous work was written way back in the early 1950s.  Entitled The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that made the American People, Handlin changed the way we think about immigrants and immigration.  He did so at a time of hyper-American patriotism, and, hence, disinterest in all things “ethnic.”

Handlin himself was a wise college investment.  He was one of four sons of an immigrant grocer from Russia.  And yet he went on to become a Harvard professor, and turned to the Irish for his first book about Boston’s immigrants.

But it was in The Uprooted that he did something quite radical.  He looked at the Irish as well as the other major American immigrant groups and argued that, as The New York Times put it, “Immigration -- more than the frontier experience, or any other episode in its past -- was the continuing, defining event of American history.”

Imagine saying this in 1950s America. There had not yet been a Catholic in the White house. World War II had (supposedly) erased so many ethnic differences and immigration quotas from the 1920s had drastically reduced the number of foreign-born Americans.

In fact, in the early 1950s, venerable Ellis Island was shuttered with very little fanfare, and many of its buildings were left to rot.

Handlin, though, captured the misery as well as the drama and triumph of the Irish and Germans and Italians and Slavs who emigrated to the U.S.  By implying that the journeys of these humble immigrants -- and not the struggles of the founding fathers or the cowboys in the west – is what “made the American people,” Handlin was doing quite a bold thing in early 1950s America.

This, after all, was an era when adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance passed for social reform.

Since the 1920s, Americans had proven themselves fed up with immigrants. If you want proof of this, check out Ken Burns’ new documentary of the Prohibition-era, set to air on PBS stations Sunday, October 2.

It is no accident that immigration restrictions and the prohibition of alcohol were passed within a few years of each other.  The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan also rode to prominence once again in the twenties.

Middle American Protestants were fed up with what they viewed as the corrupt ethnic cities, with their exotic religions and old world vices.  Irish pubs and political machines, German radicals, Italian gangsters, all of these flamed fear of the big bad city.

It took 25 years for Oscar Handlin to weed through such stereotypes to find the poetry, the sadness, and the epic heroism, in the immigrant story.

And yet, the likes of Bachmann and Santorum believe that the way to the White House is to blast Perry (of all people) for charging in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants.

The sad part is, such comments have consistently been met with lusty applause at Republican debates, with Bachmann calling for fences "on every mile, on every yard, on every foot" of the Texas-Mexico border.

Almost makes you glad you can still have drink.

Then again, that may change if any of these folks actually get into the Oval Office.
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Irish ghosts haunt the presidential campaign trail

Ron Paul. (AFP/Getty Images)

As Martin McGuiness embarks on an Irish presidential race that is sure to resurrect a fair share of ghosts from the past, Americans are also slogging their way through a tough presidential campaign.

Recently, an interesting spat broke out involving a controversial candidate, a current Irish newspaper columnist, and a fascinating yet forgotten pundit from the past.

The next thing you knew, the charges of anti-Semitism and McCarthyism were flying, and it was real hard to tell who the liberal and who the conservative was.

More broadly, there is ongoing confusion about the Irish and their politics in America.  Were they really predominately union-loving Democrats before becoming, predominately (or not) Reagan-loving Republicans?

Perhaps it’s time for you to meet John T. Flynn. Flynn is touted as a great thinker by the presidential campaign of Republican maverick -- or is that kook? -- Ron Paul.

On the campaign trail, Paul touts Flynn’s many controversial books, such as As We Go Marching, The Epic of Freedom and The Road Ahead.

Though Mitt Romney and Rick Perry get all the press, Paul recently placed second in a closely watched Iowa straw poll and often places an impressive third in Republican polls.

The number of folks who remember Flynn is small these days, but he was a towering intellectual figure -- loved and loathed -- in the 1930s and ‘40s.

What did Flynn believe?  Well, that’s where things get complicated.

John Thomas Flynn was born outside of Washington in 1882 to John and Margaret
Donovan Flynn.  As John E. Moser writes in the 2005 book John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism, “In good Irish Catholic fashion, (Flynn) was educated in parochial schools.”


Famed for his passionate argument, an intellectual adversary once described him as an “eternal Hibernian in eruption.”
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Flynn rose to prominence as a basher of the elite and supporter of FDR’s New Deal, which aimed to heal the scars of the Great Depression.  So, Flynn’s a liberal, right?

Well, not quite.  He grew to hate Roosevelt, seeing the president himself as an elite.  He later embraced the rabid anti-Communism of fellow Irish Catholic Joseph McCarthy.

Super-conservative, right?  Well, no, because Flynn clashed with right-wing icon William F. Buckley and bashed military spending as a problem which drove Americans into debt.

He also opposed American military involvement abroad, and was a prominent member of the America First Committee, along with Socialist Norman Thomas and hero-turned-Jew-baiter Charles Lindbergh.  This opened Flynn up to charges of anti-Semitism.

To this day, no one can quite piece the puzzle of John T. Flynn together.

Irish American Newark Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine, for example, is a Paul supporter who has traded barbs with a conservative radio host named Mark Levin.

A recent article in the American Spectator magazine argued, “When a [Ron] Paul supporter like…Mulshine repeatedly zeros in on conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, always dismissing the Jewish Mr. Levin…Mulshine seems to be conjuring the ghosts of Ron Paul’s favorite, John T. Flynn.”

In other words, Mulshine -- and Flynn -- are anti-Semites.

Mulshine would have none of this, noting that he is “as Irish as Paddy’s pig.”

On occasion Mulshine also calls “Sean Hannity…as dumb as a Dublin doorknob.”  That, Mulshine says, “does not make me anti-Irish.”

Perhaps the only tradition John T. Flynn fits neatly into is the very complicated Irish American political tradition.

Like many Irish Democrats, Flynn was raised to be wary of elites. And yet, like Joseph P. Kennedy, his belief (perhaps because they were still insecure Catholic in Protestant America) was that Americans should not sacrifice their lives in foreign wars.  Especially ones which allied them with the British.

Finally, like Joe McCarthy and, yes, even the sainted Bobby Kennedy, anti-Communism was a central tenet for John T. Flynn.

That’s one reason why, in 2000, the fanatically anti-Communist John Birch Society named Flynn, alongside dictators such as Franco and Pinochet, as one of its top 25 heroes.

Interestingly, the fellow who wrote the list for the Birchers was the group’s Brooklyn-born President, a lad named John F. McManus.

Where does that leave us in 2012?  I guess it means that a vote for Ron Paul is a vote for John T. Flynn.

What that means exactly is entirely up to you.

Daniel McGowan - an unlikely Irish terrorist

Daniel McGowan

There are not many people in the world who have as complicated a relationship with that word as the Irish do.

Most obviously, the Irish were called terrorists when they more or less invented modern guerilla warfare in their efforts to gain independence from Britain.

And throughout the wretched decades marked by The Troubles in Northern Ireland, support for any aspects of the Nationalist movement could get you slapped with a Scarlet “T.”

And yet, as we saw this week in the deluge of 9/11 coverage, the Irish in America suffered greatly at the hands of terrorists.

We were reminded anew just how many people with Irish names perished that day. A total of 15 firefighters alone who were killed on 9/11 had last names beginning with “Mc” or “O”.

The 9/11 anniversary also reacquainted many with the Irish enclave known as the Rockaways.

“The peninsula suffered one of the nation’s most concentrated losses when the terrorist attacks scythed through generations of firefighters and Wall Street traders in the largely Irish-Catholic neighborhoods here.

“Fifty-nine people from Rockaway died; about 70 counting summer and former residents. One enclave, Breezy Point, lost 32 of its 5,000 people. A proportional hit to New York City would have taken 51,000 lives,” The New York Times reported on September 11 of this year.

The article, among other things, reported on a 9/11 charitable group called the RIBS Foundation, short for Rockaway Irish Boys. As befitting a Catholic neighborhood with plenty of cops and firefighters, the Rockaways can safely be described, yes, as union friendly, but also quite conservative.

As The Times put it, the area was “already patriotic.” After 9/11 “the neighborhood became more so.”

Perhaps that’s what makes Daniel McGowan such an unlikely “terrorist.”

McGowan was one of four children born in Brooklyn.  His father was a New York City police officer and the family eventually moved out to the Rockaways.

McGowan attended Catholic schools and was a business major at SUNY-Buffalo.
Currently, though, he sits in jail. He has been labeled a terrorist by federal prosecutors.

McGowan’s saga is the focus of a movie that is about to hit theaters, and which was also broadcast this week on the PBS series POV.

The name of the film is If a Tree Falls in the Forest, and chronicles McGowan’s journey from Queens kid to the subject of an intensive FBI investigation which dubbed him and others “domestic” or “eco” terrorists.

McGowan and others were charged with destroying or setting fire to property owned by universities or private companies.

In 2001, for example, members of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) targeted a lumber company in northwest Oregon which had plans to genetically engineer trees in such a way that ELF members claimed would be devastating for the eco-system.

All in all, it is believed that the loosely-affiliated environmental radicals McGowan ran with caused $80 million in damage.

Though you might not expect a radical environmentalist to rise from the streets of New York City, McGowan has said his youth in Rockaway influenced him greatly.

“I grew up on a peninsula so I had a beach and a bay and could do a lot more exploring and surfing,” McGowan said in a 2007 interview.

“I remember as a kid they tested the hair of the surfers. They were telling us to get out of the water and stop surfing because of the contamination. There were hypodermic needles showing up on the water in Rockaway.

“It left a really big impression on me how poor neighborhoods get the lion’s share of pollution. I didn’t need an environmental textbook to tell me that.”

After his arrest in 2005, McGowan had many friends and family members in court to support him.  He was sentenced to seven years in jail in 2007.

And though, these days, it might seem like an Irish kid from Rockaway could never be any kind of terrorist, there is one more interesting point worth making.

As part of his plea deal, McGowan acknowledged his role in several radial environmental acts. However, he refused to name the names of any others involved.
A terrorist may be bad, but an informer, apparently, is worse.

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

9/11 Memorial: Remembrance of things past and Irish Americans lost

Officer Liam Callahan

Donald and Marcee Robertson do it by placing a candle and an illuminated shamrock in the window of their New Jersey home.  It is a particularly Irish way of remembering their son, Donald Robertson, Jr., who was 35 and an employee at Cantor Fitzgerald when the planes hit and the world changed 10 years ago.

“I put a candle in the window and it’s been there ever since,” Marcee told the Star-Ledger newspaper.  “When I put it on at nighttime I say, ‘I love you
Donnie.’  And in the morning I turn it off.”

Somehow, a decade has now come and gone.  The world has changed vastly.
Three thousand were murdered that day and you have to count the thousands more lost in Afghanistan and Iraq and other hotspots around the globe since.

And so for us, the living, we are left to remember, to reflect.  But how?
Solemnly?  Angrily?  How?

We know all eyes will be on the World Trade Center site, what used to be called “the pile,” and then Ground Zero, but where, now, a Freedom Tower rises 1,000 feet into the sky.

Also at the Trade Center site is the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum.  Perhaps more than any other place, this museum will represent the collective memory of New York City.

The memorial opens to the public September 12. The museum is slated to open next year. But we have been given a glimpse into the museum’s collection and it nobly preserves the memory of the Irish Americans -- of everyone -- who survived that day.

The museum’s displays include the dust-covered flashlight that once belonged to Port Authority Police Department officer James Lynch.

A 22-year veteran, Lynch was on medical leave that day, but nevertheless raced from his Woodbridge, New Jersey home to downtown Manhattan.

He ran into the burning South Tower. His body was recovered on December 7, 2001.
He was still carrying his flashlight, with his badge number, 775, still clearly etched on its barrel. Lynch’s family donated the flashlight as well as his bunker jacket and first aid kit to the museum.

Also at the museum is the Pipe Band hat belonging to Port Authority officer Liam Callahan.

Callahan, who had four children with his wife Joan, had already been recognized for his "heroic actions" while responding to the 1993 Trade Center attack.

There are also oral histories from Irish Americans. There is Brooklyn native and firefighter Adrienne Walsh, one of just 30 or so female firefighters in New York.  Walsh was off-duty that day, driving on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.
As every other firefighter in the city did, Walsh raced downtown.

“I looked up and there was just this explosion of confetti in the air,” she recalls.

While riding on the outside of the rig, they approached the towers. “When you got to City Hall, it’s almost as if there was a curtain. The sky disappeared.”

Walsh speaks of “six inches of dust on the ground.”

When the first tower collapsed, she was still on the street and feared the worst.
She thought, "If I beat the cloud, I’ll beat the building.  And I said to myself as I started to run, ‘I’m not gonna beat this cloud.  It’s just moving too fast." When Walsh realized she was safe her mind inevitably turned to others.

“I remember drawing a line in the middle of my brain and putting those who I thought were dead on one side and those who I thought had a chance on the other,” she said.

Another Irish American, Tom Canavan, was working as a securities specialist on the 47th floor of the North Tower.

“Our offices face south when I looked out the window. I could see pieces of metal, pieces of glass, falling outside the window,” he said.

The roof of the nearby Marriot hotel was also on fire, as were many cars on the street. Smoke was already coming through the office doors.  Canavan and others made their way to the stairs.

Then, “there was a huge rush of air straight down...and the sound of - I’d like to say a locomotive.  But it was a thousand times louder than that.”

Canavan, too, believed he’d died.  The cuffs of his pants were on fire.  He told himself the bodies around him were mannequins, because there were department stores in the tower.

“I knew they weren’t,” said Canavan. Canavan, in the end, made it down what came to be known as the “Survivors’
Stairs.”

In the end, the memorial and the museum mean nothing unless we as New Yorkers remain vigilant in honoring the legacies of those lost that day.

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

Here comes a religious hurricane - the 9/11 Memorial

Father Mychal Judge.

Catholic League president Bill Donahue and many of his fellow Irish Americans are fuming mad at Mike Bloomberg.

No, they are not angry at the New York mayor’s handling of Hurricane Irene.

It is a religious conflict revolving around 9/11 which has many upset, and even calling upon the memory of 9/11’s first official victim, the sainted Irish American Franciscan Father Mychal Judge.

In short, we have the makings here of a different kind of hurricane, a full blown force of human nature which could leave a lot of destruction in its angry wake.

This week, Bloomberg announced that no members of any religious organizations would be speaking at the 9/11 anniversary ceremony. Bloomberg's office has argued the service should be focused on the families of the victims.

"There's an awful lot of people who would like to participate and you just can't do that,” Bloomberg noted.
Catholic League president Bill Donahue is having none of this.

“When it comes to granting the clergy their constitutional right to freedom of speech on the 10th anniversary of 9/11…(Bloomberg) simply elects to ban them,” said Donahue.

William McGurn, in The Wall Street Journal online, evoked the memory of the beloved Irish priest.
“The exclusion of religion from an important anniversary distorts an undeniable part of the 9/11 story, perhaps most vividly illustrated by its first recorded casualty -- a fire department chaplain named Rev. Mychal Judge.”

McGurn then quotes Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who said, "If the fear is that the inclusion of religious leaders at a public commemoration is divisive, we've really lost something."

Donahue offered this solution: “Mayor Bloomberg should reverse his decision, allowing a priest, minister, rabbi and imam to make a short statement.”

This certainly seems sensible. Sadly, it’s also absurd on its face.

First of all, clergy did not speak at the previous nine ceremonies. Then, obvious questions about Sikhs and Hindus and Mormons who died on 9/11 also arise.

Then there are the atheists who would inevitably enter the fray.

As it is, Republican presidential candidates such as Rick Santorum have already jumped into this battle, surely hoping to score political points as they paint themselves holier than every one else in the 2012 race.

Meanwhile, Donahue surely knows that a lot of people are enraged that imams and other Muslins are setting up shop two blocks from Ground Zero.

Seeing an imam actually at Ground Zero at the ceremony would surely whip up a lot of those hostile feelings.

Such an ugly fight, and possibly even lawsuits that would result, leading up to this solemn anniversary would surely taint the event.

No one denies religion did and should play a role in how families cope with this tragedy. But let’s also not be naïve.

Religion can divide as well as unite. Those familiar with Ireland can tell you a thing or two about that.
Same deal with evoking Father Mike. He was indeed an earthly saint. Yet many of his admirers also opt not confront obvious questions about his sexuality and the broader implications those questions raise about gays and the Catholic Church.

More simply, as a blogger at uscatholic.org noted: “With September 11 falling on a Sunday this year, there will be no shortage of religious ceremonies that day…There will certainly be opportunities for people to reflect and remember in a religious way.”

The broader, more disturbing problem here is the growing number of people in America who believe that, since the country is falling prey to evil secular forces, they need to fight harder to bring religion into the public sphere.

The first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, stressed that the U.S. Constitution would guide him, rather than any religious authority. That would probably get him booted from today’s Republican Party.

We live in a city of many religions and that is sometimes amazing, but let’s not pretend it is ever simple. Keeping religion out of the 9/11 anniversary is a bad decision -- with the exception, perhaps, of any other decision that could have been handed down on this very sensitive issue.

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