The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  Are you a bunch of frail and sensitive little bullies? Is it possible you’re not intimidated but intimidators?

  Again, discuss.

  By the way, I went back to the op-ed and read the online comments it engendered from the Columbia community. They were quite wonderful. One called, satirically, to ban all satire because it has too many “verbal triggers.” Another: “These women are like a baby watching a movie and thinking the monster is going to come out of the screen and get them.” Another: “These girls’ parents need a refund.”

  The biggest slayer of pomposity and sanctimony in our time continues to be American wit.

  The Wisdom of “Mr. Republican”

  The Wall Street Journal: October 18, 2013

  Are the Republicans in civil war or in the middle of an evolution? Sen. Robert A. Taft (1889–1953) says it need not be the former and can be the latter. Taft, known in his day (the 1930s through ’50s) as “Mr. Republican,” possessed a personal background strikingly pertinent to the current moment. He was establishment with a capital E—not just Yale and Harvard Law but a father who’d been president. And yet he became the star legislator and leader of the party’s conservative coalition, which had a certain Main Street populist tinge. Taft contained peacefully within himself two cultural strains that now are seemingly at war.

  In his personal style he was cerebral, courtly and spoke easily, if with limited eloquence. The secret of his greatness was that everyone knew his project was not “Robert Taft” but something larger, the actual well-being and continuance of America. His peers chose him as one of the five best U.S. senators in history, up there with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. What would he say about today?

  Senator?

  “Nice talking with you even though I’m no longer with you. Out golfing with Ike one day and felt a pain in my hips. Thought it was arthritis, turned out to be cancer. It had gone pretty far, and I was gone soon after.”

  Why did they call you “Mr. Republican”?

  “Well, I suppose in part because I never bolted the party, and, in spite of what were probably some provocations on my part, no one managed to throw me out, either. But I felt loyalty to the GOP as a great institution, one that historically stood for the dignity of the individual versus the massed forces of other spheres, such as government. I stayed, worked, fought it out.”

  What is the purpose of a party?

  “A theater critic once said a critic is someone who knows where we want to go but can’t drive the car. That can apply here. It is the conservatives of the party, in my view, who’ve known where we want to go, and often given the best directions. The party is the car. Its institutions, including its most experienced legislators and accomplished political figures, with the support of the people, are the driver. You want to keep the car looking good. It zooms by on a country road, you want people seeing a clean, powerful object. You want to go fast, but you don’t want it crashing. You drive safely and try to get to your destination in one piece.”

  In the current dispute, he says, “both sides have something to admit. The GOP will not be a victorious national party in the future without the tea party. The tea party needs the infrastructure, tradition, capabilities—the car—in order to function as a fully coherent and effective national entity.” He feels more sympathy toward the tea party than the establishment. “Their policy aims, while somewhat inchoate, seem on the right track. They need to be clearer about what they’re for—intellectually more ordered. They can’t lead with their hearts.”

  The establishment? “My goodness—lobbyists, consultants. I gather there’s now something called hedge-fund billionaires.” The establishment has a lot to answer for. “What they gave the people the past 10 years was two wars and a depression. That loosened faith in institutions and left people feeling had. They think, ‘What will you give us next, cholera?’”

  The tea party, in contrast, seems to him to be “trying to stand for a free citizenry in the age of Lois Lerner. They’re against this professional class in government that thinks we’re a nation of donkeys pulling their winged chariot.

  “Their impatience with the status quo is right. Their sense of urgency is right. Their insight that the party in power has gone to the left of where America really is—right on that, too.”

  But the tea party has a lot to learn, and quickly. “It’s not enough to feel, you need strategy. They need better leadership, not people interested in money, power and fame. Public service requires sacrifice. I see too many self-seekers there.

  “The tea party should stop the insults—‘RINO,’ ‘sellout,’ ‘surrender caucus.’ It’s undignified, and it’s not worthy of a serious movement. When you claim to be the policy adults, you also have to be the characterological adults. Resentment alienates. An inability to work well with others does not inspire voters.”

  They should remove the chip from their shoulder. “Stop acting like Little Suzie with her nose pressed against the window watching the fancy people at the party. You’ve arrived and you know it. Forget the obsession with Georgetown cocktail parties. There hasn’t been a good one since Allen Drury’s wake.” Taft paused: “You can Google him. He wrote a book.”

  Most important? “I don’t like saying this but be less gullible. Many of your instincts are right but politics is drowning in money. A lot of it is spent trying to manipulate you, by people who claim to be sincere, who say they’re the only honest guy in the room. Don’t be the fool of radio stars who rev you up for a living. They’re doing it for ratings. Stop being taken in by senators who fund-raise off your anger. It’s good you’re indignant, but they use consultants to keep picking at the scab, not to move the ball forward, sorry to mix metaphors. And know your neighbors: Are they going to elect a woman who has to explain she isn’t a witch, or a guy who talks about ‘legitimate rape’? You’ll forgive politicians who are right in other areas, but your neighbors and the media will not. Get smart about this. Don’t let the media keep killing your guys in the field. Make it hard for them. Enter primaries soberly. When you have to take out an establishment man, do. But if you don’t, stick with him but stiffen his spine.”

  What should the establishment do?

  “Wake up and smell the Sanka! Listen, reason, talk. Advise in friendship. Be open to debate and get broader, ask yourself questions. Deep down, do you patronize those innocents on the farms, in the hinterlands? Or perhaps you understand yourself to be a fat, happy mosquito on the pond scum that is them? You had better get a mind adjustment on that, and soon. You’re better than nobody. You had a good ride for 30 years. Now you’re going to have to work for it.”

  How will a big merge happen?

  “Day by day, policy by policy, vote by vote, race by race. On both sides they’ll have to keep two things in mind. A little grace goes a long way, and ‘A kind word turneth away wrath.’”

  Ted Cruz? Here Taft paused. “That fellow is a little self-propelled.” Another pause. “We had a saying, ‘Give him time and space to fall on his face.’” Others with him on the Hill, however, are “good, smart, intend to make America better, and will be a big part of the future.”

  And don’t forget, Taft says, “the first Mr. Republican. Abe Lincoln. First inaugural: ‘We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies.’ Members of the party should wake up every day saying those words.”

  CHAPTER 7

  What I Told the Bishops

  I have had an uneasy relationship with the Catholic Church the past 20 or so years. I am a believing Catholic, perhaps an ardent one. It is the core of my identity. But the sex scandals and other scandals put a distance between me and the church’s leaders that I’d never before experienced. I felt that all Catholics have a responsibility to help right the Church, and my way of righting is writing. When I began to write about the sex scandals, some cardinals became angry. One accused me of disloyalty and another attempted to cause me professional embarrassments. The one who accused me of disloyalty was Cardinal Bernard Law, who presi
ded over the Boston scandals, and barely escaped arrest. He told me, as you will see, that when the church is under pressure, it needs its friends to act as friends. I assured him I was a friend and was acting as one, and if the scandals didn’t stop, he, the cardinal, would lose his mansion to trial lawyers. In fact, years later the mansion was lost, along with so much else. But what struck me was that that’s the part of the conversation that really caught his attention, the part about real estate.

  My church needs better leaders than it has.

  * * *

  What I Told the Bishops

  The Wall Street Journal: September 15, 2003

  A week ago today Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, Bishop Wilton Gregory, the head of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Council, and a handful of bishops met in Washington with a few dozen Catholic laymen to discuss the future of the church. The official name of the conference was “A Meeting in Support of the Church,” but everyone knew the context.

  Two months before, in July, Cardinal McCarrick and Bishop Gregory, both influential leaders in the church, held another meeting with laymen. That meeting, alas, was secret, and they had invited only those who might be characterized as church liberals. The story leaked, as stories do. Many, I among them, thought that holding a secret meeting to discuss a scandal borne of secrecy was ham-handed and tin-eared, at best. Why were only those who share one point of view asked to attend? Why was there no follow-up in terms of a statement from the participants on what was discussed, suggested, declared?

  The cardinal and the bishop were said to be embarrassed when news of their meeting broke. Those often characterized as conservative asked for a similar meeting; the cardinal and the bishop obliged. And so last Monday’s meeting, which thankfully was on the record, although participants were asked not to quote from the speeches they heard but rather to characterize them.

  Last week several participants came forward to quote what they themselves had said at the meeting, and to give their general views. I’ve been asked what I said, for I was one of the speakers. And so, here is what I said to the bishops.

  * * *

  First, I think in some small way the meeting was historic. The non-Catholic public would probably assume that bishops and cardinals frequently talk with conservatives in the church. The non-Catholic American public would probably assume bishops and cardinals are the conservatives in the church. But this is not so. Conservatives in the church often feel that they are regarded, and not completely unkindly, as sort of odd folk, who perhaps tend to have a third hand growing out of their foreheads and tinfoil hats on their heads. We say, “Please, we must speak more as a church about abortion,” and church leaders say, “We may possibly do that after issuing the report on domestic employment policy.” We ask the church to teach Catholic doctrine, and they point out that the press doesn’t really like the church. We ask them to discuss the pressing issues of the moment, such as cloning—we’re entering a world in which industrial fetal farms may grow replacement people for replacement parts—and instead they issue new directives on how it would be better if people sang songs during the mass after communion and hugged each other instead of shaking hands during the moment of peace.

  So it was real news that Bishop Gregory and Cardinal McCarrick met with conservatives and heard them out for almost an entire day. And it was important that the conservatives assembled were so earnest (it was Princeton’s Robert George who warned of a future that could include fetus farms) and so direct, too.

  I had planned to address the teaching of Catholic doctrine, which is something the American Catholic Church doesn’t really like to do in any depth, at least for the people in the pews. But it seemed to me that earlier speakers had so much to say on so many topics that are crucial and pending that the scandals were given short shrift. So I rearranged my speech as others spoke.

  There were some central questions behind my remarks. Do these men understand the extent and depth of the damage done by the scandal, and is still being done by it? Do they understand the church must move comprehensively to stop it?

  To speak of a problem so difficult and yet so delicate, and to do it in front of men who lead the wounded church, and who came up through a system that we now know to have been marked by institutional sickness, seemed to me—well, delicate is the best word I can come up with. And so I thought the only fair way to begin was to say that I meant to speak with candor, as one does among friends, that we all love the church and love Christ, and that candor demands candor about myself, too. I said that I speak from no great moral height, that I was certain I had “the least impressive personal biography in the room,” that I am no moral exemplar, “far from it.” I said I wanted to make this clear because “who we are both as individual people and as a church, who we really are, is at the heart of things.”

  Then I said my piece. I told them the scandal was in my view “the worst thing ever to happen in the history of the American church”; I told them they had to stop it now, deal with it fully; that if reports of abusive priests “continue to dribble out over the next two and four and six years, it will be terrible; it could kill the church.” I spoke of how terrible it is that just the other day a priest in Maine was finally removed from his parish two years—two years!—after it was revealed that he was one of the priests who had set up the pornographic Web site “St. Sebastian’s Angels.” I said, “Two years after he was found to be doing what he was doing—and he’s still in business!”

  I attempted to paint a picture of a man in the suburbs of America, taking his kids to church. He stands in the back in his Gap khaki slacks and his plaid shirt ironed so freshly this morning that you can still smell the spray starch. He stands there holding his three-year-old child. He is still there every Sunday, he is loyal and faithful; but afterward—away from church, with his friends, at the barbecue and the lunch, he now feels free to say things about the church that only 10 years ago would have been shocking. “He thinks the church is largely populated by sexual predators, men whose job now is to look after their own.” And then perhaps he says, “But not my priest.” But maybe these days he doesn’t say “but not my priest” anymore.

  And so, I said, we must move. “We use buzzy phrases from the drug wars like zero tolerance” for sexual predators, but maybe we should use words that reflect who we are and where we stand—“defrocking” and “excommunication” being good words that speak of who we are as a church.

  I told the bishops and the cardinal that we are a demoralized church, and—I told them this was hard to say—that they too must feel demoralized. “Imagine a leader of our church. He became a priest to help humanity, to bring it Christ. And he became a priest and did great work and rose to a position of leadership. And now he is in the meeting where the archdiocese lawyer muscles the single mother who brought suit against the local priest who molested her son after she took the boy to the priest so he could have a good male role model—and learn of the greatest male role model, Christ.”

  So, we are demoralized. But there is help. I spoke of the scene in Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion,” which I knew some in the audience had seen in screenings. Mr. Gibson had attempted, obviously, to base his film on the Gospels. But there are a few moments in which what might be called his art asserts itself, and he does it his way. There is one scene like this that for me was the great moving moment of the film. The broken and brutalized Christ falls under the weight of the cross. He is on his way to Golgotha. He’s half dead. When he falls, his mother runs to help him, and he looks up at her, blood coming down his face, and he says, “See, Mother, I make all things new again.”

  I quoted this dialogue to the bishops and the cardinal. And when I said the words Christ spoke in the film my voice broke, and I couldn’t continue speaking. I was embarrassed by this, but at the same time I thought, Well, OK.

  What choked me was thinking of Jesus. And thinking of how we all want to be new again, and can be if we rely on him; but it’s so hard, and deep in our hearts whil
e we believe we do not believe, could not believe, or else we’d all be new again.

  Anyway, I regained my voice and concluded my remarks with some hard advice. I said the leaders of the church should now—“tomorrow, first thing”—take the mansions they live in and turn them into schools for children who have nothing, and take the big black cars they ride in and turn them into school buses. I noted that we were meeting across the street from the Hilton, and that it would be good for them to find out where the cleaning women at the Hilton live and go live there, in a rent-stabilized apartment on the edge of town or in its suburbs. And take the subway to work like the other Americans, and talk to the people there. How moved those people would be to see a prince of the church on the subway. “They could talk to you about their problems of faith, they could tell you how hard it is to reconcile the world with their belief and faith, and you could say to them Buddy, ain’t it the truth.”

  I didn’t know if this had hit its mark until the meeting was over, when an intelligent-looking and somewhat rotund bishop spoke to me as I waited for a cab. I was trying to rush to the airport and make the next shuttle home. He said, “I’d give you a ride but I don’t have the limo!”

  I laughed. Now I think perhaps I should have said, “You will.”

  I was asked privately after my speech if I meant to suggest the church should divest itself of its beautiful art and cathedrals and paintings and gold filigree. No way. We are neither Puritan nor Protestant; Catholicism is, among other things, a sensual faith, and it is our way to love and celebrate the beautiful. Moreover, regular people have as much access to this finery as the rich and powerful. But the princes of our church no longer need to live in mansions in the center of town. Those grand homes were bought and erected in part so the political leaders of our democracy would understand the Catholics have arrived. But they know it now. The point has been made.