c. 2000 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)
(UNDATED) In a rare demonstration of bipartisanship, both Democrats and Republicans made common cause in foolishness in their weeks of blundering and in their transparently insincere deal to make a Catholic priest the chaplain of the House of Representatives.
This move, engineered at the last minute by former wrestling coach J. Dennis Hastert, speaker of the House, was supposed to soothe Catholic voters who, it has been widely alleged, suffered multiple slurs during the recent primary campaign.
You remember, George W. Bush going to the anti-Catholic hotbed of Bob Jones University and failing to drive the hatemongers from their temple. Then John McCain made things worse by employing this incident with feigned high-mindedness in a low-road effort to use Catholics to his own campaign advantage.
In short, congressional leaders showed how to make a dumb thing into a dumber thing: Let’s treat Catholics like excitable children and pacify them with a little political cotton candy.
My Aunt Margaret, who died a few years ago at 105, had a shrewd eye for such chicanery. Feeling that the motivation of a woman character in a soap opera had faltered badly, she wrote to the sponsor, “What do you take us for, damn fools?”
That is apparently what leaders of both political parties take their Catholic constituents for. Most Catholics feel that the scandal lies not in calling Bob Jones anti-Catholic but in calling it a university.
Catholics are accustomed to insults. What is truly offensive is the condescension toward them shown by both Republicans and Democrats in this congressional maneuver. That is equal-opportunity bigotry.
The plain truth is that Catholics really do not care much about who the chaplain of the House of Representatives is, or even if there is one. Their ancestors grew stronger in the harsh environments they found in some American cities that welcomed them with signs on workplaces that said “No Catholics Need Apply.”
Baptists are supposed to be hard-shelled, but Catholics had to become thick-skinned to establish and expand their place in the sun in the New World. Catholics never accepted the uncertain status of being “victims” and they have never been seduced into playing that role. They have never sought pity, just a fair chance.
Although there could be an Academy Award for the Most Gratuitous Insult to Catholics every year, Catholics ignore these, remaining adults and unprovoked by the childishness or adolescence of most of the bad taste in matters Catholic of filmmakers.
Most Catholics are spiritually confident of themselves and their faith. It is more pathetic than provocative to observe the pettiness in members of the House. Rep. Steve Largent, R-Okla., for example, revealed much about the slippery snail inside his football player’s shell in his mocking questions of the original Catholic candidate, Father Timothy O’Brien. He asked O’Brien whether he would, if appointed, wear a Roman collar or not, ignoring the fact that his predecessor, Lutheran James Ford, had done so for 21 years.
No members distinguished themselves in that first round that led to the appointment of a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Charles Parker Wright, who has now been publicly embarrassed by being pushed out of the way for a priest, recruited by Hastert through some hasty church-state negotiations with Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago in Hastert’s home state of Illinois.
This paint-by-the-numbers scenario is an insult to all Americans, especially Catholics, including George, called on to bail out the politicians, and the hard-working priest, Father Dan Coughlin, who awakened as an expert in liturgy only to find out by nightfall that he had been picked up as a free agent for a job for which he had never applied.
Blessed are the good-hearted, for politicians will take advantage of them every time.
Truly oppressive anti-Catholicism, far more arch and ill-motivated, came from those who planned the Democratic Convention in 1992 to excluded any pro-life speaker. Democratic Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania was denied a chance to speak. That is scheming with forethought malice, and all the Catholics _ including former Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York _ who went along with it are guilty of a profound and calculated anti-Catholicism.
In the current campaign, the most anti-Catholic sentiments still spout from the Catholic candidate, Patrick Buchanan, whose notions on trade and immigration cannot be reconciled with Catholic social principles. Politicians are too shallow to take on either of these kinds of anti-Catholic attitudes. This scrambling about the House chaplain is about the right level to gauge their ideas about religion in general and Catholicism in particular.
Yes, they do think we are damn fools.
KRE END KENNEDY
