COMMENTARY: Anti-Catholicism is becoming a growth industry

c. 1997 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ Item: The villain in the new film”Breakdown”is a rapist and a murderer. […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Item: The villain in the new film”Breakdown”is a rapist and a murderer. Yet on the dashboard of his 22-wheeler he displays a statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus. He’s an evil man, but a”devout Catholic”nonetheless.


Item: In all the hoopla surrounding the Sheila Kennedy annulment controversy, a national news magazine calls the process”phony.”Thus, the liberal media join forces with Catholic fundamentalists in attacking a practice that has meant second chances for tens of thousands of Catholics.

Item: The New Yorker publishes a shallow and intellectually dishonest article by ex-priest James Carroll in which he blames the Catholic doctrine of infallibility for the present pope’s failure to denounce the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust.”Infallibility and the Holocaust”is a theme bound to grab attention and stir up even more anti-Catholic sentiment. (I make no case for Pius XII, who was a neurotic coward, but to impose a demand on the present pope that he denounce a predecessor is a bit much.)

It looks like anti-Catholicism has become a growth industry.

Why all these outbursts of anti-Catholicism? Because such sentiments are deeply imbedded in American culture and history; anti-Catholicism is as American as apple pie.

But I believe most Catholics are neither hurt by it nor bothered by it.

There are no Catholic versions of the Anti-Defamation League (unless you count the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a small, conservative group with little influence). And church leaders are silent on the matter.

It seems to me the nation’s elite _ media and otherwise _ are in one of their recurrent”village atheist”modes in which anything and everything religious is under attack. But Catholicism is a free-fire zone because Catholics permit it to be.

I have to say, however, the church hierarchy hasn’t helped matters much. These days it seems the Vatican isn’t exactly presenting its most appealing face to the world, especially when the church’s doctrinal watchdogs tell gays they are objectively flawed human beings.

But the media don’t even try to understand the church.

When aggressive media types snarl at me about annulments, for example, I try patiently to explain the Catholic theology of the”sacrament”of marriage: The union of a man and a woman is sacramental only when it reflects the unity between God and his people. Such a union requires considerable maturity; in the absence of maturity, a marital union may exist, but not a sacrament.


But when I tried patiently to explain this theology to some reporters, they refused to understand. They would rather dismiss the theory _ and me _ as hypocritical.

Instead of understanding, it seems to me the media would rather feed the flames of an anti-Catholic frenzy.

MJP END GREELEY

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