Religion for Dummies
The New York Times
April 27, 2002
By FRANK RICH
He said they're calling us child
molesters. He said that will
never wash off."
Those words were spoken to an
official investigative committee
this year, though not, it seems,
by any of the clergymen who have
spent decades running a
protection racket for child
molesters within the Roman
Catholic Church. The speaker
was instead that sparkling
exemplar of corporate ethics circa
2002, Jeffrey Skilling. He was
telling Congress of a final
conversation with J. Clifford
Baxter, the shame-filled fellow
Enron executive who committed
Suicide just as the world was
learning how America's "most
innovative company" (as Fortune
put it) had engaged in shadowy partnerships designed to
rape its employees and shareholders.
Mr. Baxter was, of course, speaking figuratively about the
public outcry against Enron. In the case of the church the
accusations are literal, and only the church itself, by its
own actions, can determine when the stain will wash off. A
Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that the
church's standing among Catholic and non-Catholic
Americans alike is crashing - a crisis of confidence "as
bad as anything that I've seen," according to the pollster,
Peter Hart, who reaches to Watergate for a historical
parallel. And that poll was taken before Wednesday's
communiqué from Rome, which, to borrow a phrase from
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, allows the church
perhaps the last thing it needs - "wiggle room" - in
punishing its child molesters.
Yet sexual parasitism within the priestly ranks is far from
a new story. Last weekend "60 Minutes" rebroadcast an
exposé of a former archbishop of Santa Fe that it had first
broken nine years ago. Nine years before that, the Rev.
Thomas Doyle, then a canon lawyer at the Vatican
Embassy in Washington (and now an American Air Force
chaplain), helped draft a prescient protocol intended to
counter the priesthood's looming child-abuse crisis. This
time, though, the scandal has captured the broad public
imagination as never before, and perhaps with good
reason. The cover-ups, blame-shifting and arrogance that
have emanated from church leaders in recent months
have an all too familiar, and secular, ring. The cardinals'
rhetoric, righteous in style but often self-serving in
content, seems like a metaphor for too much of the
behavior we've seen from American religious, political and
business leaders alike since the nation's supposed moral
turning point of Sept. 11.
What has been most shocking about the church scandal
so far is not the revelation that some priests prey on
minors but that their bosses are looking out for No. 1 (and
I don't mean Him) rather than their victims. "Mistakes
may have been made," said Cardinal Edward Egan of New
York - but always by somebody else. Instead of taking
responsibility for their own failings, American cardinals
have made a hymnal out of the Enron playbook.
Just as Linda Lay went on TV to testify that "God is good"
and attribute her husband's woes to the media's
propensity for wreaking "havoc and destruction in people's
lives," so Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore (among
others) tries to deflect attention from clerical sins by
chastising "the media of the United States" for their
"feeding frenzy." Much as Enron first tried to pin its
wrongdoing on Arthur Andersen, so Cardinal Bernard Law
of Boston at first rationalized his cover-up of serial
pedophiles by lamenting "how inadequate our
record-keeping has been." Other Catholic leaders have
turned to other scapegoats - the "sexual anarchy" of the
1960's, the alleged depravity of America in general and,
inevitably, homosexuality - to avoid accountability for a
plague of abuse that is documented at least as far back as
1950, that spans the globe from Ireland to Africa to
Australia and that is not caused by (or exclusive to) any
sexual orientation.
It's depressing when the nation's spiritual mentors sound
like businessmen fending off indictment, whether at
Enron or Merrill Lynch - or, worse, like buck-passing
politicians on the order of that preacher's son Gary
Condit. In recent months, this seems to be a pattern. Not
until weeks after the latest round of Richard Nixon Oval
Office recordings were released - and only after a storm
of reprimand - did Billy Graham take full responsibility
for his anti-Semitic remarks about "the Jews." Even so, his
son and successor, Franklin Graham, soon rescinded his
father's mea culpa by asserting that the taped quotes had
been taken out of context and meant to refer to
"liberalism," not Jews. The younger Mr. Graham's
disingenuousness is of a piece with Jerry Falwell's and
Pat Robertson's pseudo-apology for their televised
remarks in which they tried to pin the Sept. 11 attacks on
the same all-purpose culprits (gays, feminists) whom some
Catholic leaders now hope will take the fall for abusive
priests and their enabling higher-ups.
But the abdication of personal responsibility by some
religious leaders in America is only half of the confused
moral equation since Sept. 11. If too many religious
leaders sound like politicians right now, the flip side is
that more and more politicians in power are rushing into
the ensuing vacuum. They exploit the exigencies of war to
sound like clergymen, seizing religious language to veil
partisan public policies in a miasma of ersatz godliness.
With the exception of Tom DeLay - who this month
announced that "only Christianity offers a way to live in
response to the realities that we find in this world" - no
politician in power has ratcheted up this rhetorical
religiosity louder than John Ashcroft. In a February
speech he declared, "We are a nation called to defend
freedom - a freedom that is not the grant of any
government or document, but is our endowment from
God." So much, then, for that trifling document that
defines our freedoms, a k a the Constitution. By wrapping
himself in sanctimony as surely as he wrapped the
Justice Department's statue of Justice in a blue curtain,
our attorney general is trying to supersede civil law on the
grounds that he's exercising the Lord's will whatever he
does. Last week a U.S. district judge had to intervene and
reprimand him for his repeated efforts to criminalize
doctors who are obeying a law allowing physician-assisted
suicide that has twice been approved by Oregon's voters.
-
President Bush's penchant for stark religious terminology
has waned in the international arena now that he has lost
his innocence in the Middle East. He has yet to brand the
Israelis, the Palestinians or, for that matter, the Saudis
"evildoers." But on the domestic front he has joined Mr.
Ashcroft in pumping up the volume of his preening
sanctimony, referring to the Almighty so frequently that
He is becoming his de facto running mate for 2004. The
president's push to ban therapeutic cloning is typically
cloaked in a stated reverence for human life, without any
humble recognition of the fact that he is playing God in
determining that the "life" of a blastocyst, a tiny cluster of
cells, is worth more than the lives of those suffering from
juvenile diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other
diseases whose remedies could be hastened by the most
comprehensive medical research.
If we learned anything from Sept. 11, surely it is that
there is a reason to worry when politicians hijack religion
- just as we've learned from the church's scandal of the
dangers that abound when religious leaders value political
self-preservation over protecting the defenseless in their
flock. But a half-year later, the overarching imperatives of
that once-indelible morning are being devalued. In his
latest effort to give himself some spiritual wiggle room,
Cardinal Law said last weekend that "Some have likened
the situation facing the Catholic Church in Boston and
across the country to last year's Sept. 11 tragedy" - as if
there were an equivalence between the slaughter of
thousands of innocent victims by terrorists and the
destruction of a religious institution brought on by its own
priests' practice of victimizing their young charges.
There was heroism along with tragedy on Sept. 11, and it
was often informed by true religious values: self-sacrifice,
concern for others, accountability for one's own actions.
Among the first casualties that morning was a Fire
Department chaplain who hurried from his base at the St.
Francis of Assisi church on 31st Street to the stricken
World Trade Center so that he could minister to the dying.
That hero, it should be recalled, was Mychal Judge, a
Catholic priest, who, not that it should matter, happened
to be gay.
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