COMMENTARY: Monica, the bishops and moral decline

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s 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 _ It’s easy to be profound. Just take any phenomenon in public life […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s 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 _ It’s easy to be profound. Just take any phenomenon in public life and link it to a presumed trend. Thus, you may ponderously observe that the present stock market volatility is merely a manifestation of the American peoples’ increasing fear for their future.


Who’s going to disagree? Doesn’t everyone know that people are increasingly worried about their future?

In fact _ and facts generally don’t matter in such discussions _ there are indications that people are currently extremely confident about the future.

That brings us to two observers of American life, William Bennett, former education secretary under President Reagan, and conservative Catholic author and thinker Eugene Kennedy.

Both recently linked the current contretemps between independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr and the White House to the declining _ or”muddled”_ state of morality in the United States.

Bennett is up to his old game of claiming for himself _ and by implication like-thinking Republicans _ a superior morality and denouncing the rest of us as immoral for not demanding the president’s immediate impeachment.

Kennedy limits his denunciation to the failure of U.S. Roman Catholic bishops and other religious leaders to speak out on the issue, which, he implies, might repeat the failure of European bishops to speak out against Hitler in the 1930s.

Huh?

I don’t think there is a systematic decline in morality in this country. The evidence suggests that in some ways we are more moral than our ancestors.


Moreover, I believe that the ability of Americans to distinguish between private behavior and public responsibility is a notable improvement in moral sensitivity. Likewise the public’s abhorrence of gratuitous violation of individual civil liberties is a long-overdue awakening to a grave danger to our freedom.

The”scandal”in Washington is not the result of moral decline. Vicious, paranoid politics have always been part of American life. Now, however, politics have been criminalized. Not only must we defeat our political adversaries in an election, we must put them in jail.

We can try to do that because of an accidental confluence of factors _ a badly written law, a weak and not very bright attorney general (how the president must wish he had stuck with Kimba Wood!), incompetent judges who like to get their names in the papers, an out-of-control prosecutor (like many other federal prosecutors), and media concerned only about the civil liberties of their own reporters.

All this is evil, but hardly connected to any trend in American life.

Kennedy says the bishops remain silent as if waiting to check with an attorney before saying anything. What does he want them to say? His oracular prose makes it difficult to know.

An example:”Can the American bishops make a distinction for us between spin and sin? Spin is the sausage ground out daily by the advertising/public relations complex. If the bishops don’t want to find out how the sausage is made, they cannot warn their flocks about its Mad Cow disease effect: the destruction of the national brain and the devastation of the national soul.”Come again?

If one is to judge from that concoction of mixed metaphors, it would seem he wants the Catholic bishops to condemn the president for adultery, just as Bennett wants all of us to condemn him. But if the bishops were to do that, would they not commit the sin of rash judgment? Would they have not forgotten _ as have Bennett and many conservative Christians _ the scriptural injunction that one should not judge lest one be judged?


What would qualify the bishops to leap beyond the data and conclude that the president has sinned? Moreover, even if he has, what would make it the business of the bishops to condemn him for a matter that is essentially between him and his wife?

I think the issue of presidential adultery is irrelevant, but even if it were relevant what extra insight do the bishops have to whether it actually happened? In what is essentially a political battle between Democrats and Republicans (along with some of the media), why should the bishops rush in on the latter side?

Adultery is wrong. Does it disqualify a man for public office? Does Kennedy want the bishops to say that it does? Is the president an adulterer?

Should the bishops cut the Gordian knot and say that he is? Should he be impeached because of alleged adultery? What do the bishops know about the constitutionality of”high crimes”and misdemeanors? Better they do what they’re doing: stay out of a fight in which they don’t belong.

IR END GREELEY

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