In 1979, Cardinal Medeiros put an end to Shanley’s “special ministry.” This didn’t go down too well with the “hippie priest” (as he was called), and so he publicly condemned the cardinal’s admonition that gays should abstain from sex. Shanley branded this “virtually useless advice,” as only he would know. Aside from losing his special post, nothing happened to Shanley. It is not surprising, then, that ten years later he publicly criticized the revision of two new oaths issued by the Vatican: the Profession of Faith and the Oath of Fidelity. And what did the Archdiocese of Boston do? It excused Shanley from taking the oath. 102
Shanley did what he did because he was a bad and belligerent man and no one stopped him. No wonder John Cardinal O’Connor once said that while most priests are good men, some are evil. 103 Much the same, of course, could be said about any demographic group, but Catholics expect more from their priests. Be that as it may, what allowed the scandal to unfold was due to two principal groups: molesting priests and their enabling bishops. Without citing the role played by homosexuality, the former is unintelligible; without citing clericalism, the latter makes no sense.
Most gay priests are not molesters, but most of the molesters have been gay. This is indisputable. No, homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, but when any condition is overrepresented as an explanatory variable, it demands attention. We know, for example, that 81 percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse have been males, and most have been postpubescent. 104 Indeed, the John Jay Report explicitly concluded that “The majority of alleged victims were post-pubescent, with only a small percentage of priests receiving allegations of abusing young children.” 105 Ergo, we are not talking about pedophilia, rather the condition is homosexuality. As for the enabling bishops, a sense of elitism, or unaccountability, is what allowed them to practice such callous indifference.
Clericalism, it needs to be stressed, has nothing to do with ideology, which is why a theological conservative like Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston and a theological liberal like Rembert Cardinal Weakland of Milwaukee had much in common. They also had something else in common: they were forced to resign.
Regarding the bishops, consider the elitism that was at work in Boston and Milwaukee. For example, in 1981, a woman began complaining to the Archdiocese of Boston about the predatory behavior of Shanley. The following year, Auxiliary Bishop Thomas V. Daily (who would later become the Bishop of Brooklyn) wrote to Shanley advising him “not to speak at all when she calls but merely to leave her hanging until she hopefully gets discouraged.” 106 In 1984, three Milwaukee parochial school teachers wrote to Archbishop Weakland about the predatory behavior of Reverend Dennis Pecore. Weakland wrote back saying that “any libelous material found in your letter will be scrutinized carefully by our lawyers.” 107 The teachers were then summarily fired. In 1988, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals chastised Weakland’s response to the teachers as “abrupt” and “insensitive,” exactly the kind of attributes associated with clericalism. 108
It appears, tragically, that at least some of the dissidents have learned nothing. Even today, after all the monstrous deeds of Paul Shanley have been disclosed, he is defended by Sister Jeannine Gramick, his ideological soul mate. Gramick and Shanley go back to the early 1970s, when their joint interest in homosexuality began. In 2005, she wrote a piece in the National Catholic Reporter that was sickening. After she made the obligatory comment how she was “horrified” by Shanley’s crimes, she got down to her real interest, which was finding a way to rescue the pervert. “At the same time,” she wrote, “my heart grieved for this man I had not seen in almost 20 years, but whose principles and whose advocacy for the downtrodden I had applauded for three decades.” 109
When Shanley told her he refused to sign papers to laicize him, Sister Jeannine exclaimed, “Good!” She asked herself, “What loving family or community would abandon a member because he or she was accused of a heinous crime?” 110 It might also be asked what kind of person would embrace a man who in 1977 said that when an adult and a child have sex, “the adult is not the seducer—the kid is the seducer.” 111 One of the crimes Shanley has been accused of is raping a six-year-old in the confessional, just the kind of thing that we would expect from a NAMBLA activist. Fortunately, Gramick’s apologia did not go unanswered in the pages of the National Catholic Reporter. Maureen Orth (whose husband, Tim Russett, died in 2008) wrote a splendid piece about Shanley in Vanity Fair and did the same in the left-wing weekly. She recounted how nine of Shanley’s victims whom she interviewed explained how the hippie priest would instruct them to “use my body.” Gramick, as Orth pointed out, never spoke to one of Shanley’s victims. 112
The good news is that the scandal has long been over. While the bill came due in 2002 when the Boston Globe exposed the Archdiocese of Boston for its serial delinquency, most of the damage was done years earlier: fully three-quarters of all the abuse cases took place between 1960 and 1984, 113 and the data in recent years show that the problem has largely been checked.
So where does this leave the “agents of change”? In 1998, Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago, shook lay leaders when he told them that “liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project.” 114 Ten years later, Time magazine’s senior religion writer, David van Biema, was asking, “Is Liberal Catholicism Dead?” 115 To be sure, there will always be those who respectfully challenge the Church to rethink its ways. They are not the problem. The problem lies with those raging Catholics who would like to shove their fanciful Nothing Sacred church down the throats of the faithful. They gave it their best shot and they lost, but not before creating much havoc. It’s up to the rest of us to clean up the mess they left behind.
CHAPTER 9
Self-Sabotage: Protestantism
The Numbers Don’t Lie
“We have figured out your problem. You’re the only one here who believes in God.” 1 This is how Dave Shiflett begins his book Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity. The quotation cited is a remark made by one seminarian to another, the nonbeliever being more representative of the student body than the believer. Which means the guy who believes in God is a freak.
There is something bizarre going on when the average student studying to become an auto mechanic is far more likely to believe in God than the average student studying to become a minister. Not only that, the student of auto mechanics, unlike the divinity student, does not lack for integrity. When I asked Bronwen Catherine McShea about this matter, she provided great insight. McShea is a former Catholic League policy analyst who did her graduate work in theology at Harvard and Yale. “I would say the atmosphere is much more challenging—and marginalizing—to students with strong faith, less because ‘belief in God’ per se is so rare,” she said, “but more because there is a deep-seated opposition to certainty in religious belief.” Belief in absolute truth, she added, is regarded as a close cousin to “intellectual fascism.” 2 Sounds like mutiny is commonplace in divinity schools.
The mutiny is confined to the mainline denominations, the ones that have been in a rush to assimilate to the dominant culture. A loss of faith does not mark evangelicals or fundamentalists, or Lutherans who belong to the Missouri Synod. What has happened to the secular-leaning mainline denominations has been nicely captured by Walter Russell Mead.
Mead is not being flip when he says that “liberal Protestantism tends to evanesce into secularism: members follow the ‘Protestant principle’ right out the door of the church.” 3 Second, Mead says, “liberal Christians are often only tepidly engaged with ‘religious’ issues and causes.” He cites, by way of example, their interest in the environment or human rights, issues which mesh so well with the secular world that they have little that is distinctively religious about them. Third, Mead cites the liberal Protestant disposition to separate themselves from the Catholic Church on abortion and gay rights, and from Jews on support for Israel, leaving them somewhat ineffectual in the interfaith community. Fina
lly, they are fighting with themselves over gay rights and other issues, weakening them even further.
The numbers don’t lie. In the 1970s, somewhere between three-fifths and two-thirds of Americans were Protestants. By 2008, the figure was 51 percent. 4 It was the mainline Protestant denominations—Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian—that took the biggest hit. In general, the more liberal the denomination, the more devastating the loss. For example, the United Church of Christ, which makes the mainliners look orthodox, is losing members at a record pace. No wonder Dr. Richard Land of the Ethics and Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention has charged that “liberal Protestantism is imploding.” 5
Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, saw what was happening and declared in 2008 that “The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time.” He drew his conclusion based on data which showed that “only three Mainline denominations still have enough members to be included among the ten largest churches: the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).” Worse, all three are still losing members big-time. When considering all of the mainline denominations, the situation is catastrophic. “In other words,” Bottum wrote, “less than 8 percent of Americans today belong to the central churches of the Protestants.” 6
Along with this marked decline in membership is a great deal of denominational switching. While most people (72 percent) stay with one religion all their lives, 7 the fact remains that Protestants are a highly mobile group. Even the fabulously successful Rick Warren admits that his “purpose driven” ideas have led to splits in congregations that have adopted his message. 8 When the faithful shop, however, they typically find a home in some other Protestant camp: they are nine times more likely to switch denominations than they are to become Catholics. 9 Among the beneficiaries of this fluidity are evangelicals and smaller Protestant denominations. Those who switch do so either because they find that their church fails to engage them, or seems hypocritical or judgmental (58 percent), or because their new church offers more appealing doctrines (42 percent).
By contrast, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is nothing but orthodox, has posted impressive gains: there are more Southern Baptists than there are Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and members of the United Church of Christ combined. 10 The Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal church, is growing at a fast rate, beating out even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Catholic Church; the latter continues to grow largely because of immigrants. 11 Protestants remain the majority religion, but as Walter Russell Mead has observed, it was just two or three decades ago that “the mainline Protestants were the majority of the majority.” Now “evangelicals have become the majority of the majority.” 12
Sabotage
It is only just, from a Christian perspective, that those denominations that have lost their moorings should suffer the most dramatic decline in membership. Quite frankly, the mainline denominations have sold out: it is not the Christian faith that they seek to emulate, but secularism. Consider, for instance, that at the same time the Episcopalians were being torn apart over the election of an openly homosexual bishop, Gene Robinson, the Presbyterians in 2003 had assembled in Birmingham, Alabama, to decide what alternative nonsexist terms they could come up with to replace the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. “Mother, Child, and Womb” was one suggestion, as was “Rock, Redeemer, and Friend.” Ten years earlier, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) held a conference, cosponsored by the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and other mainline churches, where they “reimagined” God as “Our Maker Sophia” and substituted milk and honey for the traditional bread and wine Communion. 13
This is beyond silly—it is sabotage. No wonder so many mainline Protestants are bailing: the most elite members of their community have abandoned the faith. When Episcopalians gathered in Columbus, Ohio, in 2003 and refused to even consider a resolution affirming that Jesus is Lord, they proved, as Charlotte Allen said, that they are not “a serious Christian church.” 14 That is too nice: what these disaffected activists did was to stick their middle finger in the face of the rank and file. Not content to rid themselves of the faith, they are hell-bent on destroying it for everyone else.
“Every Christian group in America right now has or is experiencing cultural battle,” 15 says Deborah Caldwell of Beliefnet. She stresses, however, that division is nothing new to Protestantism. In the nineteenth century, the Methodists split over slavery and became the Northern Methodists and the Southern Methodists. It is true that over the past two centuries, many denominations have split. Father Robert Kaynor, an Episcopalian priest, cites the Congregationalists and Unitarians, Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Holiness churches, and Mormons. 16 In the 1970s, Presbyterians split over the question of women in the church, and virtually all of the mainline denominations are currently struggling over the issues of gay ministers and gay marriage. But as important as these issues are, they still don’t touch the heart and soul of Christianity the way the Episcopalians did in Columbus.
“It’s not ultimately about civil rights or peace or gender or gay rights, it’s ultimately about biblical authority” is the way Susquehanna University professor Jeffrey Mann puts it. 17 The battle over biblical interpretation is not altogether new, but it has reached a climax when some theologians don’t even bother to wrestle with biblical exegesis; fidelity to the source is a distraction to postmodernist theologians. Consider, for example, the theologians who comprise the so-called Jesus Seminar. Evangelical leader Al Mohler said it best when he noted that the Jesus Seminar “tells us virtually nothing about Jesus, but a great deal about the liberal scholars who sit around with colored beads, creating a Jesus in their own image.” In fact, Mohler insists, “The Jesus invented by the Jesus Seminar is a Palestinian smart aleck who sounds like a cynical and sarcastic intellectual.” 18
And they wonder why few are listening to their secular pronouncements. Historian Thomas Reeves has figured it out: “There’s no reason to get up on Sunday morning to go and hear a sermon about AIDS and a God who is nice. I can stay home and read the New York Times and get the same message.” Reeves, who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, is not off the mark when he says that in the 1960s liberal Protestantism “became worldly and embarrassed by the Gospels.” 19
One of the first to chronicle what was happening to the Protestant community was Dean Kelley. Writing in the early 1970s, Kelley noted that the more ecumenical the church, the more likely it was to see its rolls decline. Conversely, the more exclusive the church, the more likely it was to witness an increase in membership. Among the big winners were Black Muslims, Mormons, Southern Baptists, Pentecostals (especially the Assemblies of God), Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Orthodox Jews. The big losers were the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Unitarians, and Reform Jews. Catholics, Lutherans, and Conservative Jews occupied the middle ground. 20
Fifteen years later, in 1987, two liberal professors of religion, Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, concurred with Kelley. “Almost all the churches that retained distance from the culture by encouraging distinctive life-styles and beliefs grew,” they said, noting that “those most immersed in the culture and only vaguely identifiable in terms of their own features suffered declines.” 21 Sociologist Dean Hoge of Catholic University of America concluded in 1994 that the reason why theologically conservative churches were doing so well had to do with financial sacrifice, personal piety, and personal salvation. 22 In short, they made demands on the faithful, something the more liberal churches wouldn’t dare think of doing.
The fact is that the mainline church decline has much to do with the vacuousness of teachings, and this has been going on for over a half century. According to one study, many baby-boomer Protestants grew up in households where either “they had only the vaguest idea what their own parents—or more commonly their fathers—bel
ieved” or where “a deep commitment to the tenets of orthodox Christianity” was largely absent from their homes. 23 Some commentators today try to put a happy face on what is happening by noting that there are megachurches like St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in the Orlando suburbs that are posting big numbers, but when the growth is credited to “ministries” like the Canine Crusaders, a pet therapy program, it is foolish to say that this has anything to do with Christianity. 24 The fact is that by 2008 it could be said that “Many major mainline churches are suffering budget shortfalls.” 25 Tithing is in decline, and boycotts are growing: local churches are forwarding less money to denominational headquarters “because of disputes over national church policies on divisive issues, such as gay marriage.” 26
Surely one of the factors contributing to “Christianity lite” is the craven need on the part of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite to attain recognition and respect from the secular elite. This is hardly something new. “Liberal Protestants,” writes Tom Reeves, “ever eager to be intellectually respectable, often directly or indirectly endorsed the secular world”; 27 he was writing about events in the 1920s. Perhaps liberal Protestants tried too hard. “During the 1950s and 1960s,” says Franklin Foer, “mainline Protestantism lost its grip on the elite.” What happened, he says, was a “courageous act of noblesse oblige,” by which he means “the elite had democratized its schools and universities and given them a secular, nondenominational tint.” 28 Worse than that was the utter collapse of faith.
Secular Sabotage Page 21