The Christmas season exhibit came to the attention of the Catholic League, which called the image of Jesus covered by ants “hate speech” and demanded its removal. The rest of the four-minute video, wrote Penny Starr, of CNS News, portrays “the bloody mouth of a man being sewn shut … a man undressing a man’s genitals, a bowl of blood and mummified humans.”39
The Washington Post rose to the defense of the exhibit, denouncing as censors any who would demand the removal of such art. But the National Portrait Gallery, hearing rumbles from the new Republican House about budget cuts, pulled the video. It was then acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which began to exhibit it in January 2011.
As New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan writes, Catholic bashing has become “a national pastime,” and manifestations of the classic bigotry “in the so-called entertainment media” are “so prevalent they seem almost routine and obligatory.”40 That, apart from Bill Donahue’s Catholic League, Catholics have not made more effective protests against vile and blasphemous assaults upon Christ, the Mother of God, and Catholic teachings and beliefs, and that Catholics grin and bear it, is an unmistakable sign of a declining faith.
IS NOTRE DAME STILL CATHOLIC?
Revealing that their religious beliefs meant less to them than their political beliefs, a majority of Catholics in 2008 voted for a man who captured the endorsement of the National Abortion Rights Action League in a race against Hillary Clinton.
Obama supported partial-birth abortion, in which the baby’s skull is sliced open with scissors in the birth canal and the brains sucked out to ease its passage, a procedure the late Senator Pat Moynihan said “comes as close to infanticide as anything I have seen in our judiciary.” In the Illinois legislature, Obama blocked the proposed Born Alive Infant Protection Act, a bill to protect infants who survive abortion. He promised supporters he would sign a “Freedom of Choice Act” to repeal all legislated restrictions on abortion, state or federal. Taking office, he opened the door to federal funding of embryonic stem cell research and, by executive order, repealed the Reagan-Bush prohibition against using tax dollars to fund agencies abroad that perform abortions.
Yet, this perfect record of support for abortion did not inhibit Notre Dame from inviting Obama to deliver the 2009 commencement address and receive an honorary degree from that university whose name is synonymous with Catholicism. Said the late Ralph McInerny, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame since 1955:
By inviting Barack Obama to be the 2009 commencement speaker, Notre Dame has forfeited its right to call itself a Catholic University.… [T]his is a deliberate thumbing of the collective nose at the Roman Catholic Church to which Notre Dame purports to be faithful.
Faithful? Tell it to Julian the Apostate.41
Julian was the emperor after Constantine who had died trying to return Rome to her old pagan gods.
McInerny called the invitation worse than the “usual effort of the university to get into warm contact with the power figures of the day. It is an unequivocal abandonment of any pretense at being a Catholic university.”42
An honorary degree from a Catholic university, said George Weigel, biographer of John Paul II, is a statement that “This is a life worth emulating according to our understanding of the true, the good and the beautiful … It is beyond my imagining how Notre Dame can say that.”43 Indeed, how can a Catholic university celebrate the life and work of a politician who is publicly committed to nominating Supreme Court justices who will ensure that killing one’s unborn child in America remains forever a Constitutional right.
Because of Obama’s support of embryonic stem cell research, Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend informed Notre Dame he would not attend the commencement. “While claiming to separate politics from science,” said Bishop D’Arcy, Obama has “separated science from ethics and has brought the American government, for the first time in history, into supporting direct destruction of innocent human life.”44 Despite protests from Catholics across America, Obama spoke at the commencement and was awarded a doctorate of laws honoris causa.
The Reverend John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, not only polarized the nation’s Catholics, he raised a question for the Church: What does it mean to be a Catholic university? Are there truths about faith and morals that are closed to debate at Notre Dame? Or is a Catholic university an open forum for moral discourse, like London’s Hyde Park, where all ideas and all advocates are welcome?
To Catholics, abortion is the killing of an unborn child, a breach of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Case closed. All who participate in an abortion are subject to automatic excommunication. Catholic politicians who support “choice” have been denied communion.
How can Notre Dame credibly teach that all innocent life is sacred, and then honor a president committed to ensuring that a woman’s right to end the life of her innocent child must remain sacrosanct? Could Fr. Jenkins not see what others saw: the inherent contradiction that renders Notre Dame morally incoherent?
Any appeal to academic freedom by a Catholic institution “to justify positions that contradict the faith and teaching of the Church,” said Benedict XVI, “would obstruct or even betray the university’s identity and mission.”45 Did not honoring America’s most visible advocate of abortion on demand “betray the identity and mission” of Notre Dame?
Fr. Jenkins said the invitation “should not be taken as condoning or endorsing [Obama’s] positions on specific issues regarding the protection of human life.”46 Still, what Notre Dame said with its invitation is that the president’s unwavering support for policies that have brought death to three thousand unborn babies every day for thirty-six years is no disqualification to being honored by a university named for Our Lady who carried to term the Son of God.
Is Notre Dame still Catholic? That question arose again in the fall, when the university, using fees collected from students, paid to send five members of the Notre Dame Progressive Student Alliance to D.C. to march from the White House to the Capitol for gay rights, although the Church teaches that homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral and homosexual desires are “disordered.”
William Dempsey, a 1952 graduate who heads Project Sycamore, which represents ten thousand “fighting Irish” alumni, said his members are “tearing their hair out” over what is going on in South Bend. “What happens to Notre Dame is crucial in terms of what happens to all religious colleges in the country,” said Dempsey. “We wonder if it’s going to turn into another Georgetown.”47
Good question.
“DESERT OF GODLESSNESS”
That same week (the first week of Lent) that Obama received his honorary degree from Notre Dame, Georgetown University hosted Sex Positive Week, funded by the Student Activities Commission and sponsored by the feminist and gay student clubs such as GU Pride. Monday’s session offered a speaker whose organization “provides a forum” for fetishism, cross-dressing, and bondage. On Ash Wednesday, the university offered “Torn About Porn?” a discussion of “alternative forms of pornography that are not supposed to be exploitative.” The first Saturday in Lent was set aside for a talk by a pornographic filmmaker about “Relationships Beyond Monogamy.”48
Do not assume Catholic doctrine about human sexuality is being taught at Georgetown, said political science professor Patrick Deneen. “It is not. The university feebly attempts to pretend to be concerned about matters of sexuality, but addresses them in terms of ‘health.’ The only orthodoxy on campus is sexual liberation.”49
Georgetown University has an established Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Resource Center, but no comparable campus center dedicated to Catholic teachings on human sexuality. Said Deneen:
[W]hat is the message being sent to today’s students? Sex, like everything else, is a matter of preference, choice, personal liberty and utilitarian pleasure. It is largely consequence-free recreation. We should recognize that the same moral climate that contributed to the devastation
of the worldwide economy is the same moral climate that informs “Sex Positive Week.”50
The Church of Vatican II was going to Christianize the culture. But the culture has de-Christianized Catholic institutions. “Rather than taking a part in attempting to shape, even change that culture, Georgetown is shaped in its image,” concluded Deneen.51
Yet, though discussions of alternative sexual lifestyles are welcome at Georgetown, alternative Christian messages are apparently not. Three years before Sex Positive Week came to Georgetown, six evangelical Christian groups were kicked off campus and told to have no “activity or presence” there, be it worship services, retreats, or even helping students move into their dorms. The evangelicals were pro-life and opposed homosexual marriage.52
“Our job as educators and as priests is not to bring God to people, or even to bring people to God,” says Fr. Ryan Maher, SJ, associate dean and director of Catholic studies at Georgetown. “Our job … is to ask the right questions, and to help young people ask those questions.”53
When this writer attended Georgetown half a century ago, the Jesuits taught us that the answers to those questions could be found in our faith.
What happened to the Catholic Church in America? The culture war against Christianity, once confined to dissenters and closet disbelievers, caught fire with the arrival of the baby boomers on the campuses in 1964. Their moral and social revolution spread swiftly to the media, Hollywood, the arts. Through museums, movies, magazines, music, books, and television, secularism converted much of the nation and changed the beliefs of millions about right and wrong and good and evil. Embedded in that least democratic of government institutions, the judiciary—where appointed judges and justices serve for life and answer to no electorate—secularism began to uproot and outlaw all symbols and expressions of Christianity from American public life and make its own tenets the basis of law. Thus, gay marriage is imposed by one state court after another, even as the people, in one referendum after another, reject it.
“I hate to inform Pat Buchanan,” wrote Irving Kristol in 1992, “that those [culture] wars are over and the left has won.”54 Irving may have been right. But, if so, that is momentous. For, in Christianity and Culture, T. S. Eliot, describing himself as a “student of social biology,” warned what would come, should the culture collapse because the religion that gave it life had died.
If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great grandchildren; and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.55
But Notre Dame and Georgetown have many imitators.
According to the Cardinal Newman Society, during that same Lenten season of 2009, at Loyola of Chicago, the Student Diversity and Cultural Affairs Office presented a film about a homosexual African American who is transported back in time to “cavort” with the supposedly homosexual writer Langston Hughes. The movie was part of a semester-long Color of Queer Film Series sponsored by Loyola. Another movie in the series concerns a twelve-year-old boy who falls in love with a male police officer.56
At Catholic Seattle University, the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the student Trans and Allies Club was sponsoring Transgender Awareness Week, which included a session on transgender heroes and heroines in the Bible. Also featured was Criss-Cross Day, when students were encouraged to “come dressed for the day in your best gender-bending outfit.”57
“That Catholic universities would permit these events on their campuses at any time of the year is unthinkable, but to do so during the holy season of Lent is unconscionable,” said Cardinal Newman Society president Patrick J. Reilly, adding that the “saddest part of this story is that there is no indication that these universities are ashamed or embarrassed by what is taking place on their Catholic campuses.”58
But are these universities still Catholic? In the culture wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, have they not gone over to the revolution?
On Good Friday 2009, Benedict XVI, speaking during the Way of the Cross procession at the Colosseum in Rome, deplored the secularization of Western society, saying “religious sentiments” were being held up to scorn and ridicule as the “unwelcome leftovers of antiquity.”59 Stopping at the seventh Station of the Cross, “Jesus falls the second time,” where the Savior is made an “object of fun” as he is being led to his death, the Pope declared,
We are shocked to see to what levels of brutality human beings can sink. Jesus is humiliated in new ways even today.…
Everything in public life risks being desacralised: persons, places, pledges, prayers, practices, words, sacred writings, religious formulae, symbols, ceremonies.
Our life together is being increasingly secularized.… Values and norms that held societies together and drew people to higher ideals are laughed at and thrown overboard. Jesus continues to be ridiculed!60
“Allow us not to drift into the desert of godlessness,” the Pope prayed.61
In the fall of 2009, Pope Benedict undertook a mission to Prague, a city the New York Times described as “what many religious observers … consider ground zero of religious apathy in Europe.” The Pope had hoped to “foment a spiritual revolt against what [he] labeled … as ‘atheist ideology,’ ‘hedonistic consumerism,’ and ‘a growing drift toward ethical and cultural relativism.’” Fr. Tomas Halik, who had been secretly ordained under the Communist regime that snuffed out the Prague Spring of 1968, was philosophical about the Pope’s prospects. Czechs inhabit a “spiritual desert,” Fr. Halik said. “The reanimation of the Catholic Church is a long-term goal.… And even the Pope can’t work miracles that quickly.”62
Jaroslav Plesl, lapsed Catholic and editor of a leading Czech daily, reflected the cold indifference of his countrymen to the Pope’s visit: “If the Pope wants to create a religious revival in Europe, there is no worse place he could come to than the Czech Republic, where no one believes in anything.… Add to that the fact that the Pope is German and socially conservative and he might as well be an alien here.”63
Plessl would seem to have a point. A 2011 report on the emerging extinction of religion in the West found that in the Czech Republic 60 percent of the people profess no religious affiliation, highest percentage of the nine nations studied.64
What happened to the Catholic Church in America happened to America. Catholicism and the country together went through the cultural revolution that altered the most basic beliefs of men and women. Both came out changed. What Nietzsche called a “transvaluation of all values” occurred. What was immoral and scandalous in 1960—promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality—is normal now. Were a Supreme Court nominee today to echo John Paul II on human life, Catholic senators would filibuster the nomination to death.
As for same-sex marriage, an ABC-Washington Post poll in 2011 found 63 percent of white Catholics now supporting its legalization, a leap of 23 points in five years.65 What was a National Review jibe about a papal encyclical in 1961, “Mater si, magistra, no!” has become the belief of two-thirds of all Catholics when it comes to Church doctrine that marriage is between a man and a woman.
NADIR, 2009
How did an effort by Pope Benedict, to effect a reconciliation with the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, cause a firestorm that blazed for weeks across Europe?
The tempest began January 24, the day the Holy Father lifted the excommunication of the four bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). The four had been severed from communion with Rome in 1988, when aging Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a severe critic of Vatican II, consecrated them, against the direct instructions of Pope John Paul II. The Pope had authorized only one bishop to carry on Archbishop Lefebvre’s work.
Quiet progress, however, had been made to bring the S
SPX and its hundreds of thousands of Catholic followers back to full communion. But how did this internal church matter come to outrage secular Europe?
British-born Bishop Richard Williamson, one of the four, had long held some extreme views. He was said to believe 9/11 was an inside job and that Catholic women should not be sent to universities. More controversial were his views on the Holocaust. In 2008, the bishop had said in Stockholm, “I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against—is hugely against—6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.… I believe there were no gas chambers.”66
Thus no sooner was the excommunication of Williamson lifted than his Holocaust views were broadcast worldwide and an assault on the Pope began, accusing him of “rehabilitating” a Holocaust denier. The charge was false. Williamson’s excommunication had nothing to do with his views on the Holocaust, and Pope Benedict had been wholly unaware of them. The Pope immediately renounced Williamson’s views and declared his “full and indisputable solidarity” with the Jewish people, especially those who had perished.67 The SSPX ordered Bishop Williamson to cease broadcasting his views. The bishop sent a letter of personal apology to the Vatican.
But this did not end the matter. The issue was seized upon to berate Pope Benedict and demand he reexcommunicate Williamson until Williamson renounced beliefs that had nothing to do with matters of faith. A campaign was mounted, abetted by Peter Steinfels, then religion editor of the New York Times, to goad U.S. bishops into denouncing the Pope.68 None collaborated. But in Germany the campaign met with some success. Cardinal Walter Kasper, who had overseen Catholic-Jewish relations for the Vatican, did not cease to protest. Theologian Hermann Haering demanded the Pope resign. Austria’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, still considered papabile, a potential Pope, declared that no Holocaust denier can be restored to communion with the Church.69
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