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The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice
by Philip Jenkins Oxford Univ. Press, 2003 288 pp.; $26 |
Liberal conformists of the last century such as Walter Lippmann and John Dewey viewed the "American mind" as incompatible with, even inimical to, the Catholic mind. Reading Philip Jenkins' sometimes surprising litany of American enmity for the Catholic Church (and for "poor and ignorant" Catholics, too), it is hard to escape their conclusion.
Still, the long-troubled marriage between America and the Catholic Church must, it seems to this writer, be mended, for the sake of the nation's soul and the good maintenance of her freedoms. America needs a strong Catholic Church as a prophetic antidote to a pragmatist's hell in which no moral limits restrain the autonomies of the stock market, the laboratory, the state, and now (it seems) human nature itself.
Evangelical Protestants know well enough what separates them from Rome. There is the bogeyman of Justification, not to mention doubts about the extent of the pope's task in governing the Western Church, all the fuss over Mary, and a good deal more. In Jenkins' account, these theological problems—by no means trivial matters, however much subject to distortion in debate—do not rate much attention except insofar as they play lesser parts in the larger drama of American nativism, egalitarianism, and—lately—an absolute insistence upon unalloyed sexual license. For it is as participants in the American experiment that many readers will discover unexpected and unexamined anti-Catholicism—what Jenkins calls "the last acceptable prejudice"—in the nation's cultural foundations and in every stage of its history to the present.
The prejudice that greeted waves of Catholic immigrants in the 19th century is well documented, but Jenkins shows how anti-Catholicism continued to thrive in the period before Vatican II, well after the violent nativist passions of an earlier era had cooled. Even as American Catholicism enjoyed increasing respectability, cultural influence, and political clout, disaffected nuns and monks who had renounced their vows traveled from city to city relating fantastic tales of sexual liaisons (facilitated by tunnels that joined monastic residences and underground chambers where the aborted children of the steamy trysts were buried). In the 1930s and '40s, critics fabricated connections between fascists in Germany and Spain and the Catholic hierarchy, and in the immediate postwar years the church was routinely portrayed as a threat to American democracy—a familiar theme recycled for the early Cold War era.
That was the old anti-Catholicism. A radical shift came after Vatican II with the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae. Just as the sexual revolution was gaining momentum, particularly for feminists and homosexuals, and just when progressive Catholics thought they had left the old ways forever behind in the wake of the Council, the church's hierarchy got right into the beds of millions of married Catholics, upholding what had been the traditional and universal Christian teaching on the use of contraceptives since the faith's inception. For the first time in the nation's history, anti-Catholicism was fueled in part by massive dissent within the church's own ranks, a pattern strengthened by the reluctance of the American bishops to enforce the church's teachings in the decades following Humanae Vitae. The church's sons and daughters were becoming good Americans.
George Weigel has pointed to the comprehensive social vision that is the inheritance of all Catholics, that the Catholic Church (quoting Jenkins now) "claims the right to speak authoritatively on any and all issues affecting the human condition." Of course, this is at great odds with American notions of the individual's radical independence from religious authority of any kind. Traditional Catholics are often more consistent than their Protestant counterparts in recognizing that their first citizenship lies with another sovereignty than the one claimed by the United States. This loyalty to Christ's kingdom gets orthodox Catholic leaders like John Paul II in trouble with media and cultural élites who desperately desire to ensconce the sexual revolution as a permanent accomplishment of American public life, pushing the envelope out from abortion in the ever-more ambitious designs of biotechnology.
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