Secular Sabotage

by William A. Donohue

  The saboteurs have also engaged in campaigns of religious cleansing at Catholic schools. When a student at Boston College wanted to start a Holy Name Society he was denied on the grounds that it was an all-male organization. At the same school, it was left to Jews and Muslims to protest the removal of crucifixes from the classroom: they wisely accused school officials of assuming they were anti-Catholic bigots who might be offended by the Christian symbol. 46 Stung with criticism, Boston College officials decided to study the issue of increasing the presence of religious symbols on the campus.

  Eight years later, in 2009, the crucifixes were put back up in the classrooms. But it didn’t please Maxim D. Shrayer, chairman of the department of Slavic and Eastern languages and literatures. “I believe the display of religious signs and symbols, such as the crucifix, in the classroom is contrary to the letter and spirit of open intellectual discourse that makes education worthwhile and distinguishes first-rate universities from mediocre and provincial ones,” he said. 47 So typical. The secularists at Catholic institutions are always scared to death that their colleagues at secular institutions will think less of them for teaching at one of those Catholic schools. If they had any integrity, they’d pack up and leave.

  When Georgetown announced that it was going to remove crucifixes from its classrooms in 2004, the most vocal critic was Yahya Hendi, the school’s Muslim chaplain. 48 Georgetown is also home to a pro-abortion group, Hoyas for Choice, and is so far gone that when an African cardinal spoke at a graduation ceremony in 2003 saying that an anti-life mentality exists in many parts of the world, angry professors left the stage where he spoke and 70 faculty members signed a letter of protest. His offense? He said such a mind-set is “mocked by homosexuality,” among other things. That was it. 49

  Ends and Means

  Ask an anti-American in the United States why he hates America and the likely answer is that the U.S. is great for what it stands for, but not for what it has become. The same is true of Catholic saboteurs: they profess an allegiance to a Church that doesn’t exist. Meantime, they do everything they can to undermine the only one that does.

  Most of the dissidents are dreamers. And of all the dreams they ever had, none was more exciting than the vision of the Church they witnessed on the ABC TV show Nothing Sacred. Until the Catholic League killed their dream, that is. At least 37 sponsors, and as many as 50 plus, withdrew their ads as a direct result of a boycott. Indeed, the Catholic League was credited as the first advocacy organization in the nation to successfully use its Web site to launch a boycott. The show, which aired during the 1997–98 season, also bombed in the ratings: after the first 11 episodes, it was tied for 107th place.

  It would be an understatement to say that disaffected Catholics liked the show. No, they worshipped it. Like little boys and girls, they literally cried their eyes out when it aired, rearranging their life to keep pace with the show’s ever-changing schedule (there isn’t a big market for shows that appeal only to alienated Catholics, so ABC constantly had to experiment with new days and times). When the show died of natural causes—with more than a little help from the Catholic League—a Brooklyn nun literally held a vigil for her friends. Yes, it was just that sad.

  What they liked most about the show was Father Ray. He looked scruffy, came from a dysfunctional family, thought of his vocation as merely a job, openly admitted he wasn’t sure about the existence of God, violated his duty as a confessor, and rejected the Church’s teachings on sexuality. But he loved the homeless. We knew this because he gave them a cup of coffee. By contrast, those Catholics who were loyal sons and daughters of the Church were portrayed as coldhearted, tyrannical, and bigoted.

  The show’s pilot had Father Ray telling his parishioners from the pulpit that it was time to “call a moratorium on the sins of the flesh.” There is nothing sweeter to the ear of dissidents than this. He also told the faithful that the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, promiscuity, abortion, and contraception could be ignored because the Bible says little or nothing about them. He boasted that he was not a “sexual traffic cop,” and advised the faithful that if that was what they wanted, they had better shop around for another priest.

  It wasn’t just Father Ray who was a loser priest. One of his colleagues, Father Leo, was shown dutifully apologizing to Rachel: she had had an abortion and Leo was guilty of being “judgmental.” Then there was Father Eric, the boob who was shown being utterly unable to explain basic theology to his high school kids. But at least he didn’t have strange spots on his hands like Father Philip. Like all the other priests, poor Phil was depressed; he was also an alcoholic. To show balance, the show introduced Sister Mo, a nun who pretended she was saying Mass (inmates in the asylum have been known to do the same), all the while drifting between Catholicism and Buddhism.

  The most telling commentary came from cardinals, bishops, priests, brothers, and nuns who either praised the show or attacked the Catholic League for protesting it. The Los Angeles archdiocesan newspaper, The Tidings, hailed the show as worthy of a “Lenten reflection.” Four bishops took out an ad criticizing the Catholic League’s campaign. Writers such as Father Greeley went ballistic. Best of all was Brother Michael Breault, a Jesuit writer for the show. He admitted that the show was based on his experiences at St. Francis Xavier in New York City. Until recently, he confessed, women preached after the Gospel, the church was run by parishioners (many of whom he identified as gay), liturgies were invented, etc. 50 No wonder Father Ray was his alter ego.

  If Nothing Sacred symbolizes the ends, the means is revisionism. The left has always been good at discrediting the past as a way of discrediting the present. So when Garry Wills, John Cornwell, and James Carroll write books smearing the Catholic Church’s response to the Holocaust, they seem to be less interested in the purported subject than they are in weakening the prestige of the Church today. It’s a game they play, and many Catholics and Jews have fallen for it. But not Rabbi David Dalin, author of The Myth of Hitler’s Pope.

  “The anti-papal polemics of ex-seminarians like Garry Wills and John Cornwell, and of ex-priests like James Carroll, and of other lapsed and angry liberal Catholics,” writes Dalin, “exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today.” He cites their opposition to “issues relating to sexuality, abortion, contraception, priestly celibacy and the role of women in the Church” as the basis of their agenda. 51 Dalin is exactly right.

  Take Wills. In his book Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, he assigns collective guilt to the entire Catholic Church for any actions taken by any Catholics during the Holocaust that were sinful. But this is nothing more than a ruse. Wills not only wants the Catholic Church to change its teachings on women and sexuality, he wants the Church to junk its theology. “In the course of the book,” writes Catholic author Robert Lockwood, “he rejects the teaching authority of the Church if exercised without lay involvement and agreement, the concept of papal infallibility and any possible divine guidance to papal teaching, the ordained priesthood, the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist and that the priest has sacramental powers alone to consecrate the Eucharist. Apostolic succession, the Immaculate Conception and Assumption, and Church teaching on homosexuality are dismissed as well.” 52 That just about covers it.

  The Englishman John Cornwell made quite a splash when he promoted the utterly baseless charge that Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” (he later recanted this accusation, though it got little play in the media). What was most striking about his book was the way he used the Holocaust as a foil for his politics. How do we know? How else does one explain why a book on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust would end with a chapter attacking Pope John Paul II for reaffirming Church teachings on celibacy, women priests, artificial contraception, and abortion? What does any of this have to do with Nazi Germany? Nothing. But casting aspersions on Pius XII serves to weaken the moral base of his successors. />
  Bob Lockwood nailed James Carroll for playing the same game. Constantine’s Sword was allegedly about its subtitle, The Church and the Jews. But as with Cornwell, the last section of his book has nothing to do with his professed subject: he closes with a clarion call for Vatican III. As summarized by Lockwood, Carroll says, “The Church must abandon claims to universal and objective truth, realize the Gospels are anti-Semitic, abandon theology of the atonement of Christ for the sins of mankind, reject papal infallibility, ordain women, elect bishops, dismantle the ‘medieval clerical caste’ [and] forget the belief that Jesus is the only means to salvation.” Lockwood properly labels Carroll’s solution a call for Unitarianism. 53

  Now, if Wills, Cornwell, and Carroll were to have their way, then the Nothing Sacred Catholic Church they so pine for would materialize. Then the saboteurs wouldn’t have to talk about the Holocaust ever again. Unfortunately for them, there is still something called Rome.

  Dissidents Are a Dying Breed

  Buoyed by “the spirit of Vatican II” and encouraged by Pope Paul VI’s 1971 appeal to Catholics that they “address a fresh and insistent call to action,” a group of bishops, priests, religious, and laypeople assembled in Detroit in 1976 to form Call to Action. The delegates ranged from those who wanted the Church to adopt the social policy of secular leftists to those who wanted radical doctrinal changes. Russell Kirk said the delegates were quite candid in their aspiration to remake the Catholic Church in the image and likeness of “the extreme left-wing of the Democratic Party.” 54 John Cardinal Dearden of Detroit chaired the conference, calling it “a new way of doing the work of the church in America.” 55 No one could disagree.

  Guess who was there? According to Call to Action’s own words, those in attendance “represented the church’s ‘middle management’; 64 percent were church employees.” 56 Those were the good years. By 2000 they were ready for assisted living. Colleen Carroll described what went on at the annual conference, held in Milwaukee: “The conference spilled over with gray-haired radicals, priests wielding canes, and nuns dressing as defiantly as septuagenarians can.” To make matters worse, in order to fill a room of “the next generation,” conference organizers “defined young adults as anyone between the ages of eighteen and forty-two—a move that provoked snickers among the college-aged students in attendance.” 57

  Call to Action has flipped out so much over the years that Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, announced in 1996 that any Catholic who joined the group would be excommunicated. In 2006, Bruskewitz celebrated the 10-year anniversary (he excommunicated dissidents on the right who also rejected Vatican II) by branding Call to Action “an anti-Catholic sect composed mainly of aging fallen-away Catholics, including ex-priests and ex-nuns.” 58 The dissidents took their final hit in 2007 when the Vatican’s highest court ruled against them: Call to Action wanted the Vatican to overturn Bishop Bruskewitz’s decision to oust them, but the jurists in Rome contended they had no right to do so. 59

  In 2008, the codirectors of Call to Action announced their retirement. Dan and Sheila Daley had done their best to sow dissent among the faithful, and now it was time to move to Florida. Like other embittered ex-priests and ex-nuns, the Daleys were unable to move on with their lives without fighting yesterday’s battles time and again. What they left behind was in such shambles that Tom Roberts, one of their fans, questioned whether the organization had a future, especially given the fact that it is “old and graying.” 60

  Call to Action got some competition in 2002 when Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) was founded in Boston. Unlike Call to Action, VOTF sells itself as a reformist movement, brandishing its motto “Keep the Faith, Change the Church.” But it has been obvious from the beginning that the lay group, formed in response to the scandal in the Church (Boston was the epicenter), had a lot more in common with Call to Action than it was prepared to admit. Indeed, only months after VOTF started, Call to Action welcomed them with open arms. Commenting on the inaugural convention in Boston, Call to Action director Dan Daley boasted, “It is a wonderful coming of age of another strong lay voice in the reform movement.” 61

  The inaugural convention was quite a display of dissidents, as well as those whose hostility to Catholic values was palpable. Non-Catholics like Debra Haffner, who works tirelessly against the Church’s teachings on sexuality, were invited to speak. Haffner was once president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, an organization that is pro-gay marriage and pro-abortion. Paul Lakeland, a Catholic professor from Fairfield University, thrilled the crowd by informing them that they were “suffocating from structural oppression” (as opposed to random oppression), and imagined a future Church that might resemble the United Church of Christ. 62 This is not exactly encouraging news given that the United Church of Christ is collapsing.

  The following year, VOTF held its conference at Fordham University, this time inviting Eugene Kennedy to give the keynote address. Kennedy is another ex-priest dissident, and his big interest is sex. In his address, “The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality,” he blasted the Church’s teachings on sexuality, blaming them for causing so much “grief, guilt and self-hatred in its members down through the centuries.” 63 Makes one wonder how Catholics managed to have such big families.

  Self-hatred might be the proper term to describe angry ex-priests, and someone who might know is Richard Sipe. Sipe is a former Benedictine monk who specializes in writing about sexual abuse, but only if committed by priests. Married to a former Maryknoll nun, he dazzled the crowd with his dissident views. Anthony Massimini was there as well. His contribution was to alert everyone to “the psychological and spiritual damage being done to the Church” by priestly celibacy; he said the damage was “immense.” 64 Oh yes, Massimini is another ex-priest.

  Things had gotten so out of hand with VOTF that by 2006 journalists were openly questioning the fidelity of the organization to the Catholic Church. Why, for example, does VOTF, which claims to “keep the faith,” constantly feature in its newsletter people like Valerie Schultz, a pro–gay marriage Catholic religion teacher, and Daniel Maguire, a man who positively loathes the Church’s teachings on a wide range of subjects? 65 And why is it that when the Catholic League fights bills in states that would end the priest-penitent privilege, which is analogous to exemptions afforded psychologists and others, it winds up fighting with a VOTF member who pushed for the legislation in the first place? 66

  Almost all Catholics who hear bad news about the Church are disappointed, saddened, or angry, but not the dissidents: they love it. As they see it, it’s another reform opportunity to seize. What they don’t like is good news. To wit, when the Catholic League ran an op-ed page ad in the New York Times in 2006 citing data that showed how priestly sexual abuse had practically come to a halt, it was criticized the next day by VOTF for being too optimistic. 67 The National Catholic Reporter ran a lengthy editorial also criticizing our statement, 68 though they were fair enough to allow me a lengthy reply. 69

  A profile of Catholics who belong to VOTF shows they have more in common with Call to Action than just ideology. “With their gray hair and their overwhelming preference for decaffeinated drinks,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005, “the nearly 100 members of the lay Catholic group Voice of the Faithful who gathered inside St. Matthew’s Catholic Church gym in San Mateo on Sunday didn’t look too intimidating.” 70 Then they did what they always do—they burst into singing and broke into small groups for discussion. They love that.

  On the east coast, John Marshall Lee, who owns an insurance company, went to a VOTF meeting in Connecticut in 2003 “and the first thing that surprised him was the age of the people.” As he told a reporter, “I met a group of people who were alert, probably average of 70 to 75.” 71 This is the kind of comment one might expect from someone visiting a nursing home, not a meeting on how to revamp the Catholic Church.

  Even Paul Lakeland is forced to admit that the typic
al person who attends Call to Action and VOTF meetings is over the hill. “While the statistics may not be available,” he writes, “it would be a fair wager that many if not most spent some time in the seminary or the convent, even if the majority of them did not proceed to ordination or solemn profession in their religious congregations. A good sprinkling are ex-nuns and resigned priests.” A realist, Lakeland says, “Today they continue to fight for a more progressive future for the Catholic Church, though as they look around them for younger faces at their meetings, they must wonder if it’s a losing battle.” 72 Peter Feuerherd of the National Catholic Reporter agrees with this assessment, estimating that many of those who graduated from the Pastoral Formation Institute during the tenure of Rockville Centre Bishop John McGann, 1976 to 2000, “are now active in Voice of the Faithful.” 73

  A month after Lakeland wrote that statistics weren’t available on VOTF, the numbers were in. Two researchers from Catholic University of America, William V. D’Antonio and Father Anthony Pogorelc, published their findings on the group. “One of the most distinctive characteristics among members is their high level of education, with 87 percent holding college degrees and six out of 10 also earning a master’s or professional degree,” they said. In fact, “Almost a quarter of Voice members hold degrees in theology, canon law or scriptural studies, and almost as many said they participated in diocesan- or parish-sponsored courses in theology.” They are overwhelmingly Irish (64 percent), senior citizens (41 percent are 65 or older), and wealthy (the majority earn in excess of $100,000 annually). 74 Though they are rich, they are also stingy: only 25 percent donate money to VOTF. 75