Christianity and the American elections
Nov. 23rd, 2004 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbTHE INSURRECTION IN THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE ELECTION OF GEORGE W.BUSH, 2004
1 - THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, THE IRISH DIMENSION, AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
There is a sense in which the shift in Christian and especially Catholic mood and sentiment, which swept George W. Bush to the White House, is almost incidental to this particular candidate; and it is likely enough that any candidate who could credibly present himself as a conservative would have benefited from the same swing. In fact, since sums tell that a considerable amount of Christians voted for Kerry in spite of his various faults, simply because they were appalled at the war in Iraq, it is possible that a less hubristic and warmongering candidate might well have gained an even larger majority. The reason for this is in the evolution of American Christendom, and especially American Catholicism; of which the great pedophile scandal has been a defining moment - but not for the reasons most journalists and most outsiders would imagine.
The Catholic Church first appears in American history as a minor and endangered member of that penumbra of non-comformist Christian communities surviving in the shadow of the Congregational North and the Episcopalian South. The Founding Fathers, true to their principles, allowed the few Catholics then resident in North America to have legal freedom and their own bishop, and President Washington even turned down an offer from Rome to allow the Government to nominate bishops. Not that it made much difference at the time: there was only one credible candidate, John Carrol of Carrolton, brother of Congressman Charles Carrol who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Within this bishop's lifetime, however, things began to change swiftly.
The Thirteen Colonies were so like their mother country that the whole war of independence may be seen as an internal quarrel within a squirearchical English civilization, to which Scotland was something like an annexe, and Ireland a poor relation. Bishop Carrol was as much a representative of this culture of educated squires as his contemporaries, Washington, Jefferson, Adams; and indeed, as much as the Catholic gentry that had preserved the existence of the Church in England through three centuries of persecution, and eventually received from their fellow-squires the gift of emancipation in various stages between 1778 and 1829. (Scotland, too, had its enduring Catholic minority in the Highlands, led by lairds and loyalist clans.)
The enfranchisement of Catholics in Britain and the United States came just in time to supply an ecclesiastical structure for the shattering events that followed the genocide of Ireland in 1845-46. When the British government took the view that its Irish subjects (Ireland was supposedly a part of the United Kingdom) should be allowed to quietly starve and vanish, thus solving the Irish question at a stroke, millions of them did the obvious thing and swarmed across the sea to Britain, the British Empire, and the Americas. The Irish presence, which had long been a minor part of English Catholicism and no part at all in Scotland and America (Irish immigrants to America until then had been largely Protestants from Ulster), became, in a few years, overwhelming. Church structures formed for the need of a small group of squires, tenants and intellectuals found themselves catering to swarms of homeless and illiterate immigrants, holding on to life by their fingertips, traumatized by the horrors of famine, and hardly capable of coping in their new homes except at the lowest levels of society. The picture of John Henry Newman, the future Cardinal, a super-subtle historical and theological genius from Oxford, listening to the confession of illiterate Irish washerwomen and having to comb his hair for the lice they carried, gives a sufficient idea of what happened to the Churches of England, Scotland and America, shortly after their disenfranchisment.
In England, this was countered by the enduring influence of the Catholic squires - who included people such as the Duke of Norfolk, the highest-ranking nobleman in England after the Queen. The English Catholic culture of Lingard, Elgar, Newman, G.M.Hopkins, Chesterton, Knox, Belloc, Graham Greene, Waugh, Auden, Tolkien, was fundamentally a gentlemanly affair, heavily Oxford-influenced, and with little to do with the Irish strain in the English Church. Even the least Oxonian of them, Chesterton, visited Ireland with the same delighted tourist spirit that took him to America, Poland, Belgium, France, Italy and Jerusalem. He did not see it as a mother, not even as the mother of his Church; his Church, he insisted, was English - and so it was.
In America, however, the effect of Irish immigration was nothing short of cataclysmic. A much smaller Church - both in relative and absolute terms - found itself swelling beyond bursting point with hundreds of thousands aliens fleeing at once intolerable oppression and indescribable horror. The American Church (with the single exception of the strange and formidable convert, Orestes Brownson) had none of the cultural confidence of Lingard's and Wiseman's English Catholic movement; its instinct was not to take part in the great debates of the day, not to draw attention to itself - to build its parishes for its local members, establish schools and charities, and keep its head down. This is the reason for the general feeling at the time that the Church favoured slavery; it did not, but it hated everything that made trouble and rocked the boat - hence its nervous shying away from abolitionism, to which Brownson was, typically, the one honourable exception.
Into this straggling network of thin Catholic communities, spread across a continent, used to welcoming trickles of mostly educated immigrants from France, Germany, or Poland, come to America for political reasons; suddenly, almost from one day to the next, there poured nothing short of a magma of hundreds of thousands - millions - of dispossessed Irishmen, hungry, brawny, desperate. And the Irish who went to America developped a very different spirit from those who went to England, or even to Australia. They found that the national (federal) institutions were comparatively feeble and remote, that the institutions that really affected their lives were the powerful and highly developped local ones - city, county, and state government; and they found that, poor, illiterate, and lice-ridden as they were, their vote counted as much as that of anyone else. They set to making use of it with a will. Within a few years of having begun to come to this alien land, poor, traumatized, and despised, the Irish of America had set about colonizing the political institutions of their adopted country.
The party machine, notorious in the annals of American history, is an Irish invention, and pretty nearly an Irish monopoly. It rose like a volcano in the great cities, and already by 1860 it owned New York and was a formidable influence against the Civil War. It was a power with teeth. The disinherited masses from starving Ireland had announced their political presence and power, especially in New York, with a number of murderous riots, of which the 1863 revolt against conscription (in the course of which Irish mobs murdered dozens of innocent blacks) was the worst but hardly the last. The stereotypical Irish Democrat party member of Thomas Nash's caricatures bore a shillellagh, and did not bear it for show, either; Irish machine politicians were regularly accompanied by "shoulder-hitters", combined bodyguards and enforcers, to make sure that they got their way.
In the course of the later nineteenth century, violence in American politics moved outwards from the centre of Democrat machine power. Disregarding the South, which is a matter to itself, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was industrial workers from first- or second-generation backgrounds, generally not Irish but Italian, East European, or Jewish, who tended to riot; imitating unconsciously the earliest form of political activism discovered by the dispossessed Irish, but in a different environment and in the service, more often than not, of Trades-Union and Socialist political groupings. The Italian immigrant groups quickly developped their kind of political violence into organized crime, followed into this by a not inconsiderable amount of Jews. (It was Jewish gangsters, rather than Italians, who built the most remarkable contribution of organized crime to American life, I mean the gambling and prostitution capital, Las Vegas.) It is even possible that the stranglehold that the Irish political machines had on city life in half a dozen cities may have made all the difference, and that if the Italians, rather than the Irish, had been the first wave of Catholic immigrants to America, the organization of influence and violence that became Cosa Nostra would have evolved, instead, into another Tammamy Hall.
Why are cops, in the American stereotype (and not infrequently in reality) of Irish descent? Because the police force was one of the primary channels of party machine patronage. A strapping young fellow, one of ten brothers, not readily employable, with no great skills or experience, speaking English with an atrocious and perfectly unintelligible brogue, often not very literate, but hefty with Irish bulk, could easily be turned into a low-ranking policeman, and become the channel by which a perfectly legal wage reached a large Irish family - which in turn contributed twenty votes in an important ward. (It is perhaps worth remembering that, until the nineteen-thirties and the image boost provided by the highly publicity-conscious FBI, the police were regarded by the average American with tolerant contempt. The Keystone Kops provide a fair idea of what middle-class Americans in the 1910s and 1920s thought of their police; a similar description, sometimes more biting, can be found in George Herriman's comic-strip masterpiece KRAZY KAT.)
Though mostly Democrat, the Irish approach to politics could cut across party lines. Nobody will really understand what was going on, all the time, in twentieth-century American political history, who does not reflect that the supposedly liberal Kennedy family were, one and all, friends of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and that no Kennedy was ever heard to say a bad thing about the most notorious liberal ogre of them all. They understood each other: thrusting, macho, hard-drinking politicians who gained their seats by minding their wards and getting their votes out, and never letting gentlemanly feelings interfere with ambition.
The endurance of the phenomenon is what is astonishing about it. Hated by all the responsible forces of America, to the point where "Tammamy Hall" has passed into the language to mean squalid and inexcusable political corruption, investigated by dozens of judges and dozens of committees, condemned again and again, Tammamy Hall dominated the politics of New York City for fifty years. The grandchildren of journalists who had editorialized against its nefarious influence in the age of Boss Tweed (1860s-70s) were still investigating its iniquities a decade into the new century.
Other great cities went the same way. Everyone knows about the Daley dynasty in Chicago; but the most significant battlefield to the Irish themselves, and their sweetest triumph, was Boston. This was the spiritual and political heart of Yankeeland, the city of the Pilgrim Father dynasties, the Lowells, the Cabots, the Lodges; of Harvard; of Transcendentalism, Unitarianism and Brahminism. For something like a century, Boston was the scene of an epic, silent but savage struggle between old money and Irish power, between Yankee vague-religionism and Irish muscular Catholicism; and it was not till the thirties and forties that the Irish triumphed completely. For decades after, Boston was managed by a Democrat caucus which excluded the old dynasties, left to cultivate their distinction outside their seats of power. If anything ever marked the triumph of Irish muscle in American politics, it was this; and it is no coincidence that the first American Catholic president was a Boston Irish machine politician who had learned his politics in the city wards.
In all this, the position of the Church was slightly anomalous. It could not for shame be a mere part of the various city machines; one doubts whether the machine politicians would even have wanted it to. What is more, it could not be exclusively Irish. It had, by its nature, to find place for Yankees, Frenchmen and Franco-Canadians, Germans and Austrians, Czechs, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Filipinos, Mexicans and other Hispanics, Chinese and Japanese - to mention only the leading ethnic groups. And while the Irish party machines were in the main Democrat, the same could not be said of other ethnic groups; the Italians, for instance, were fairly evenly split, and the most famous (if untypical) Italian politician of the time, Fiorello La Guardia, was a reforming Republican.
At the same time, whenever the Irish ethnic group needed to put its best foot forward, the Church was that foot. Catholic Bishops and Archbishops can be pretty impressive people, and at any rate they carry the seal of a formidable institution, respected (as one respects a loaded gun) even by its enemies. The Bishop, normally an educated man and certainly one used to the courteous use of power, could get access in places where the rough-and-ready local Boss, whatever his political reach, would have been turned out on his ear. It was inevitable that the bishop would become involved, however innocently, in the political interests of those among his flock who happened to be Bosses.
And the Church itself was extensively colonized by the Irish. Whenever an Irish family had an unusually clever child, they tended to send him to the seminary. In similar circumstances, an Italian family would send their children to law school, and a German one to any one of half a dozen socially prestigious courses from medicine to the Army. Especially at the beginning, the priesthood was the only career that the shattered and illiterate Irish could imagine for a bookish or intelligent young man, or even woman. I would say that no other immigrant groups, not even the dirt-poor Jews and Italians of the late nineteenth century, ever reached America in such a state of physical and moral destitution and ignorance as the first Irish generation; their circumstances simply cannot be imagined today except in places such as Darfur. They really did not know any literate trade at all except priest: army officer, doctor, sea captain - to mention a few careers that other ethnic groups would have had in mind - were beyond their imagination.
The result is that, for over a century, the Irish of North America have punched considerably above their weight in Church affairs. There were no more Catholic Irish than Catholic Italians or Catholic Germans or Catholic Hispanics, and yet, after the third quarter of the nineteenth centuy, they constantly dominated the American bench of Bishops. It is not too surprising that the American Catholic bishops were often described as "the Democratic Party at prayer".
Finally, there is the inevitable factor of the power and influence of the party machines. The Church would not remain forever in a secondary and subservient position in American society; but, while a determined neighbourhood could manage to set up a parish or even a children's school, for such things as Catholic universities and large-scale diocesan activity there could be no substitute for large-scale finance and steady political support. Without political support, Cardinal Manning, in spite of his great successes, his prestige, and his tremendous energy, was unable to establish either a British Catholic University or the network of diocesan seminaries he envisaged. The American Church was more fortunate; but that success came with the shadow of patronage. When the Church worked to set up its own universities and charities and avoid being dependent on Protestant or agnostic ones, these universities inevitably became part of the network of patronage and social contact at the high levels of party organization.
2 - THE GENETIC MUTATION OF THE IRISH MACHINE LEADERSHIP, 1960-1970, AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE CHURCH
There is a general impression, encouraged by the famous Edwin O'Connor novel THE LAST HURRAH (and the film of it, which features a breathtaking performance by an ailing Spencer Tracy), that Irish-Democrat machine politics died out in the fifties, made redundant by the powers of suburbanization and television. That is not true: they did not die out, they transmogrified. The tribal network of contacts, friendships, common attitudes, common views, developped over a hundred years of common political experience, simply moved from the crowded working-class districts of the old towns to the suburbs. The goal of the party machines and their members had never been in any way to overturn the ancient Yankee institutions, but to guarantee a place - and a powerful place - in them for the Catholic Irish; a people who, we should remember, did not altogether have a place in their own home, as long as the English Ascendancy lasted.
All through the fifties, it was clearly in sight. This was the period when Hollywood celebrated the Catholic Church - and celebrated, specifically, its most ecclesiastical aspects, with heroes who were priests and even Cardinals. We all remember Spencer Tracy and Bing Crosby in dog collars, Tracy, especially, managing a convinction that depended not only from a serious personal faith but from the actual fact that he had once seriously considered the priesthood as a career. Some of those movies were excellent, too: but the important thing is that they celebrated what seemed at the time to have been the full naturalization and Americanization of the Catholic Church. The machines had achieved their old and unstated goal: the Irish were now fully American, with no serious shadow of separation or incomprehension. (It probably helped that, some time before this, the immigration from Ireland, which had been a flood through most of the nineteenth century, fell off to a trickle. By 1950, the average American "Irishman" was three generations removed from the old country, and had the kind of postcardish view of it shown in John Ford's famous THE QUIET MAN.) The final triumph of the Irish was the election of a young machine politician from Boston, whose own father's business dealings had been more than dubious, to President of the United States of America.
But this acculturation had another side, one clearly shown by John F. Kennedy's promise never to let his religion "interfere" with his discharge of his public duties. (Since then, a number of malevolent tongues have pointed out that it did not much interfere with his private life, either.) In other words, this Irish aristocrat, whose family replaced the Lodges and Lowells as American royalty in the popular imagination, promised in effect to be different in no fundamental way from the rest of the republican elite of the country. The Catholic specificity was implicitly given up, and the same spiritual institution celebrated in all those forties and fifties Hollywood movies was effectively discarded as part of the final Irish machine power grab.
One thing that needs to be appreciated as part of this is that the major Irish contribution to the culture of Catholicism in the English-speaking world is tribalism. There is this strange notion that you are born a Catholic; hence the bizarre concept of the "lapsed Catholic", one that is quite unknown to most Catholic countries. In Italy as in Mexico, in India as in Germany, a Catholic is a person who believes what the Church believes and attends its functions. I am a Catholic; my brother, born in my same family and educated in the same schools, gone to Church like me as a child, and incidentally very dear to me, is not - and with no nonsense about being "lapsed". He has decided that, for various reasons, membership of the Church does not suit his views, and has left it. I have not. It is as simple as that. But in Britain, and even more in America, there has been a tendency to think of "Catholics" more in terms of birth, and even more of childhood experiences and family connection: it defined you more as a "Catholic" that you had gone to school with nuns and served as an altar boy. This is obviously the result of three centuries of persecution survived, of Catholicism handed down from father to son like a token of national identity, and even more of exclusion of the enemy; we know who we are because we know who they are.
What triumphed in the fifties, then, was not actually necessarily the Catholic Church in America as such, the Church that contained members of fifty ethnic groups, but the tribal "Irish" identity with its ecclesiastical reflections and its social bonds. That is not to say that Italians or Hispanics or others were left behind - this was a time of prosperity for all, and the Italians certainly did well enough - but rahter that, as the Irish had invested disproportionately in political success and ecclesiastical advancement, so they benefited disproportionately. It was their universities, their dioceses, their culture, that reached the centre, and, at the same time, that normalized itself.
For the two things went together. Along with the drive to political power came a strong drive to be normalized. For Catholic universities, this meant becoming respectable in the world of American academia, and specifically to become friendly to large big-business foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. For individuals, it meant that their social contacts became predominantly those of their professional environment rather than the tribal background; a typical case of this being Spencer Tracy's long relationship with the Yankee atheist Katharine Hepburn - they were colleagues.
The only thing that explains what happened to the Catholic Church in America in the sixties and seventies is the tribal mentality. Men and women were led away from anything recognizable as Catholic teaching by the mere social climate; yet, taking the Church with its buildings, its schools, its institutions, as an inevitable and natural part of their lives, their instinct was not to leave it, but to drag it along with themselves. In Italy, the conflict between secular fashion and the Church was played out as a direct head-on clash, in two historic popular referendums on divorce and abortion, both of which the Church lost. (The Pope resolved to lay down the challenge knowing that the Church would lose, but holding it more important that its position against these innovations should be quite clear.) In America, by contrast, there was no defining moment or parting of the ways. The Church, being still largely "the Democratic Party at prayer", just turned itself over to the same influences and ideologies that conquered the Democrats in the famous McGovern primaries of 1968 (the ones which guaranteed Nixon a second term in office). People convinced themselves that there was something good, something elevating, about this slippage, something that would renew and cleanse the Church; but in fact they were more concerned with being respectable in the eyes of outside bodies, especially those that controlled the media - our old friends the intellectual-worker class. They wanted to behave in a way that resonated with the prevailing prejudices of this class, which were and remain very alien indeed to the Catholic ethic.
The power of the intellectual-worker class over public opinion is very important in this context. They are able and willing to present the Church as a diabolical conspiracy of oppressors, and in this they resonate with far older prejudices. I have a friend who is a perfectly, even naively typical member of this class; and she hates the Church. Her reasons are highly modern; but her language and arguments - most of them too dead even to answer - are those of her Protestant forebears. She has nothing positive in common with them: no philosophy, no belief, no values. But in hating the Church she is at one with the worst of Luther and his successors; there is nothing she will not believe and very little she will not support. And the power of the intellectual-worker class over the means of communication, which I described earlier, mean that they have long been able to make the Catholic mass feel isolated, cut off from things, lost in some sort of Robinson Crusoe island while real life took place without them. This is not an argument, but a matter of presentation; but it has been hugely influential Certainly the "renewers" of the sixties and seventies took it very seriously.
The ideology of the intellectual-worker class, I mean of those members which are not in conscious revolt against its tenets, can be defined as a vulgar analysism, a hankering after witchdoctor explanations of people and things. As its work is in the areas of the intellect, it is on the use of the intellect that it forms its self-respect; and its ideology is a constituent part of its self-respect. The intellectual-worker class welcomed Marxism, which gives a considerable amount of fuel to vulgar analysis; but it welcomed with even more enthusiasm the new doctrines of psychoanalysis - Freud first, Jung later - which offered a practically infinite capacity for analyzing to death and beyond. And when the Church, especially if not exclusively in America, decided to go out and "meet modern culture", this was the culture it met.
It was one specific element which drove this attempt at change; an element which was confused in the first place, because of its mistaken identification of ethnicity with religion, and therefore thought that its religion, like its ethnicity, should change with the culture. (Ireland itself is hardly the same now as it was fifty or a hundred years ago; its torn-off limbs on the other side of the ocean, even less so.) But it was this network of friendships and relationships, shared experiences and shared identities, with its enduring habit of backing each other, that was responsible for nine-tenths of what happened to the American Church between 1960 and 2000. I repeat: the party machine never was, is not, and never will be, identical with the Church. Wherever else the Church may have been an instrument of a party (France comes to mind), that was literally impossible in America, because of the sheer diversity of contributions from different backgrounds.
However, the attempt went very deep across a very large landscape. Psychologists from the leading schools were invited to make studies of Catholic clergy. These people regarded a full and correct human development as involving successful sexual activity (at the time, with the opposite sex, although this stipulation was removed from the American Psychological Association in 1973); the results of examining a group of people who were sworn to celibacy were predictable. The application of psychological testing famously destroyed a whole convent of nuns, and generally drove a generation of priests and nuns to a sexualized view of the world that made nonsense of their whole vocation. Some resisted; some made compromises; and a certain amount embraced the sexualization of the clergy with enthusiasm.
Where that happened, it took a strange shape. The destruction of that convent had been an omen of things to come, for when the supposedly latent sexuality of the nuns was unleashed, it took the form, not of an ordinary desire for men, but for each other. It became a spectacular burst of lesbianism (which has supplied the American lesbian movement with some of its most enduring and embittered poster children). And for some reason, the sexualization of the priesthood took the shape, not of priests with girlfriends - although quite a few cases took place - but of a spectacular rise in the number of homosexual priests.
For this there are, I think, reasons. Priests who fell in love with women had the option to get themselves laicized and marry the object of their affection; and this, notoriously, happened on a huge scale in the sixties and seventies. But priests who took this road were out of the clerical loop: they took up new responsibilities, a new life, often had children. If they were, as many were, left with a lasting bitterness against the ecclesiastical structure, it was a bitterness that had little opportunity to develop into action - they were in general no part of the Church structure. The more successful they were in their new life (and therefore, ex hypothesi, the more able and promising), the less opportunity they had to cultivate it. Certainly a good deal of capable clerics were lost to the Church this way; but it was, on the whole, a clean break, that did the ecclesiastical structure less harm than what was not lost.
The priest, religious, or nun, who, on becoming sexualized in one of the many ways that the Sixties afforded, found that his attraction was to his or her own sex, was in a different position. To give up the vocation and habit (and the profession and living they afforded) for that reason would have meant to have to admit it in public, or else to leave the impression of having "left under a cloud". And while the view of homosexuality was rapidly changing at the time, there was still plenty of opposition to it, especially if your starting point should happen to be the Catholic Church. This discouraged outright breaks. On the other hand, the communal religious life placed potential clerical homosexuals constantly near a large number of members of their own sex. Sooner or later, the inevitable happened, and two or more people of similar mind met.
People who form a social group tend to develop a self-justifying ideology, even a political program. In the case of what might be called the underground homosexual movement in the American Church, it is difficult to quote a clear statement of what this was, because it was rarely stated with any clarity - for obvious reasons; but its results may be followed in events. One thing that happened was that homosexual priests colonized many seminaries, screening out orthodox candidates and fostering a new generation of either sympathetic or wholly homosexual candidates to the priesthood. This placed a tight bottleneck at the entrance to the priesthood, and may be held to have largely caused the celebrated "crisis of vocations" which so many people ascribed to the out-datedness of the Church's teaching on sexuality. The fact is that, far from being outdated, the people who were recruiting priests were losing candidates for being way too much "with it".
Not that this bothered them. Another part of what might be called the unstated plan was to use the collapse in priestly numbers that was caused largely by their own behaviour to alter the roles and power relationships at ground level. This was openly theorized and aggressively practiced on the ground, especially in certain dioceses. Rochester and Albany in New York State, and Springfield in Illinois, became notorious for this sort of thing. It became noticeable in the seventies and eighties that priests tended to be replaced in their duties, not even by deacons, but by laymen and women with the rank of Extraordinary Eucharistic Ministers. The role of these figures is, in Church law, to assist the priest when there are really too many communicants at Mass for one person to deal with alone; but in the seventies and eighties one heard of ex.ministers taking the Sacrament to sick and dying parishioners, preaching, and otherwise replacing the priest, even in situations (such as parishes with three or more priests) where it was hard to see what the special need being met was.
It is well known that the violent rise of Women's Lib was in the main a consequence of the over-sexualized atmosphere of the sixties, where "sexual liberation" reduced, for a while, young female members of the movement to providers of free sexual services; although their hostility, once raised, was directed, not at the actual exploiters, but at society at large. Whether there is a similar link between the sexualization of the Church in this period and the rise of an incredibly virulent and extreme clerical branch of Woman's Lib, especially but not exclusively among nuns, I am not clear; but it is certain that such a phenomenon took place. Several American orders became breeding-places, not merely for ecclesiastical insurrection, but for outright assaults upon Christianity. It is not only a matter of lesbian nuns, but of Wiccans and goddess-worshippers ensconced in the ecclesiastical structure and receiving stipends for doing the work of nuns - educating children, caring for the sick, praying to the God of the Christians.
By the nineties, the various aspects of the assault upon the Church had become clear enough, but people were not yet altogether ready to see the underlying pattern. And resistance had arisen. Father Peter Stravinskas thundered against the abuse of ex.ministers; Paul Likoudis fulminated against the intrusion of Jungian pseudo-spirituality in Christian schools and churches (unwisely relying, however, on the testimony of Richard Noll, who is a Freudian, an atheist, and a worse enemy of the Church than C.G.Jung ever was); and the rise of the formidable media operation EWTN gave Likoudis and others a platform to reach millions of ordinary Catholics.
However, this grassroots movement had almost no response among the authorities. In 1995, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of the tiny diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, excommunicated in writing the members of several schismatic, pagan or masonic organizations; the fact that this was even necessary is astonishing, but even this tiny step caused a kerfuffle in which many people seemed to be saying that it should be Bishop Bruskewitz, rather than the Freemasons, who should be driven from the Church. So far as I can remember, no Bishop followed his example. The time wasn't ripe yet.
1 - THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, THE IRISH DIMENSION, AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
There is a sense in which the shift in Christian and especially Catholic mood and sentiment, which swept George W. Bush to the White House, is almost incidental to this particular candidate; and it is likely enough that any candidate who could credibly present himself as a conservative would have benefited from the same swing. In fact, since sums tell that a considerable amount of Christians voted for Kerry in spite of his various faults, simply because they were appalled at the war in Iraq, it is possible that a less hubristic and warmongering candidate might well have gained an even larger majority. The reason for this is in the evolution of American Christendom, and especially American Catholicism; of which the great pedophile scandal has been a defining moment - but not for the reasons most journalists and most outsiders would imagine.
The Catholic Church first appears in American history as a minor and endangered member of that penumbra of non-comformist Christian communities surviving in the shadow of the Congregational North and the Episcopalian South. The Founding Fathers, true to their principles, allowed the few Catholics then resident in North America to have legal freedom and their own bishop, and President Washington even turned down an offer from Rome to allow the Government to nominate bishops. Not that it made much difference at the time: there was only one credible candidate, John Carrol of Carrolton, brother of Congressman Charles Carrol who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Within this bishop's lifetime, however, things began to change swiftly.
The Thirteen Colonies were so like their mother country that the whole war of independence may be seen as an internal quarrel within a squirearchical English civilization, to which Scotland was something like an annexe, and Ireland a poor relation. Bishop Carrol was as much a representative of this culture of educated squires as his contemporaries, Washington, Jefferson, Adams; and indeed, as much as the Catholic gentry that had preserved the existence of the Church in England through three centuries of persecution, and eventually received from their fellow-squires the gift of emancipation in various stages between 1778 and 1829. (Scotland, too, had its enduring Catholic minority in the Highlands, led by lairds and loyalist clans.)
The enfranchisement of Catholics in Britain and the United States came just in time to supply an ecclesiastical structure for the shattering events that followed the genocide of Ireland in 1845-46. When the British government took the view that its Irish subjects (Ireland was supposedly a part of the United Kingdom) should be allowed to quietly starve and vanish, thus solving the Irish question at a stroke, millions of them did the obvious thing and swarmed across the sea to Britain, the British Empire, and the Americas. The Irish presence, which had long been a minor part of English Catholicism and no part at all in Scotland and America (Irish immigrants to America until then had been largely Protestants from Ulster), became, in a few years, overwhelming. Church structures formed for the need of a small group of squires, tenants and intellectuals found themselves catering to swarms of homeless and illiterate immigrants, holding on to life by their fingertips, traumatized by the horrors of famine, and hardly capable of coping in their new homes except at the lowest levels of society. The picture of John Henry Newman, the future Cardinal, a super-subtle historical and theological genius from Oxford, listening to the confession of illiterate Irish washerwomen and having to comb his hair for the lice they carried, gives a sufficient idea of what happened to the Churches of England, Scotland and America, shortly after their disenfranchisment.
In England, this was countered by the enduring influence of the Catholic squires - who included people such as the Duke of Norfolk, the highest-ranking nobleman in England after the Queen. The English Catholic culture of Lingard, Elgar, Newman, G.M.Hopkins, Chesterton, Knox, Belloc, Graham Greene, Waugh, Auden, Tolkien, was fundamentally a gentlemanly affair, heavily Oxford-influenced, and with little to do with the Irish strain in the English Church. Even the least Oxonian of them, Chesterton, visited Ireland with the same delighted tourist spirit that took him to America, Poland, Belgium, France, Italy and Jerusalem. He did not see it as a mother, not even as the mother of his Church; his Church, he insisted, was English - and so it was.
In America, however, the effect of Irish immigration was nothing short of cataclysmic. A much smaller Church - both in relative and absolute terms - found itself swelling beyond bursting point with hundreds of thousands aliens fleeing at once intolerable oppression and indescribable horror. The American Church (with the single exception of the strange and formidable convert, Orestes Brownson) had none of the cultural confidence of Lingard's and Wiseman's English Catholic movement; its instinct was not to take part in the great debates of the day, not to draw attention to itself - to build its parishes for its local members, establish schools and charities, and keep its head down. This is the reason for the general feeling at the time that the Church favoured slavery; it did not, but it hated everything that made trouble and rocked the boat - hence its nervous shying away from abolitionism, to which Brownson was, typically, the one honourable exception.
Into this straggling network of thin Catholic communities, spread across a continent, used to welcoming trickles of mostly educated immigrants from France, Germany, or Poland, come to America for political reasons; suddenly, almost from one day to the next, there poured nothing short of a magma of hundreds of thousands - millions - of dispossessed Irishmen, hungry, brawny, desperate. And the Irish who went to America developped a very different spirit from those who went to England, or even to Australia. They found that the national (federal) institutions were comparatively feeble and remote, that the institutions that really affected their lives were the powerful and highly developped local ones - city, county, and state government; and they found that, poor, illiterate, and lice-ridden as they were, their vote counted as much as that of anyone else. They set to making use of it with a will. Within a few years of having begun to come to this alien land, poor, traumatized, and despised, the Irish of America had set about colonizing the political institutions of their adopted country.
The party machine, notorious in the annals of American history, is an Irish invention, and pretty nearly an Irish monopoly. It rose like a volcano in the great cities, and already by 1860 it owned New York and was a formidable influence against the Civil War. It was a power with teeth. The disinherited masses from starving Ireland had announced their political presence and power, especially in New York, with a number of murderous riots, of which the 1863 revolt against conscription (in the course of which Irish mobs murdered dozens of innocent blacks) was the worst but hardly the last. The stereotypical Irish Democrat party member of Thomas Nash's caricatures bore a shillellagh, and did not bear it for show, either; Irish machine politicians were regularly accompanied by "shoulder-hitters", combined bodyguards and enforcers, to make sure that they got their way.
In the course of the later nineteenth century, violence in American politics moved outwards from the centre of Democrat machine power. Disregarding the South, which is a matter to itself, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was industrial workers from first- or second-generation backgrounds, generally not Irish but Italian, East European, or Jewish, who tended to riot; imitating unconsciously the earliest form of political activism discovered by the dispossessed Irish, but in a different environment and in the service, more often than not, of Trades-Union and Socialist political groupings. The Italian immigrant groups quickly developped their kind of political violence into organized crime, followed into this by a not inconsiderable amount of Jews. (It was Jewish gangsters, rather than Italians, who built the most remarkable contribution of organized crime to American life, I mean the gambling and prostitution capital, Las Vegas.) It is even possible that the stranglehold that the Irish political machines had on city life in half a dozen cities may have made all the difference, and that if the Italians, rather than the Irish, had been the first wave of Catholic immigrants to America, the organization of influence and violence that became Cosa Nostra would have evolved, instead, into another Tammamy Hall.
Why are cops, in the American stereotype (and not infrequently in reality) of Irish descent? Because the police force was one of the primary channels of party machine patronage. A strapping young fellow, one of ten brothers, not readily employable, with no great skills or experience, speaking English with an atrocious and perfectly unintelligible brogue, often not very literate, but hefty with Irish bulk, could easily be turned into a low-ranking policeman, and become the channel by which a perfectly legal wage reached a large Irish family - which in turn contributed twenty votes in an important ward. (It is perhaps worth remembering that, until the nineteen-thirties and the image boost provided by the highly publicity-conscious FBI, the police were regarded by the average American with tolerant contempt. The Keystone Kops provide a fair idea of what middle-class Americans in the 1910s and 1920s thought of their police; a similar description, sometimes more biting, can be found in George Herriman's comic-strip masterpiece KRAZY KAT.)
Though mostly Democrat, the Irish approach to politics could cut across party lines. Nobody will really understand what was going on, all the time, in twentieth-century American political history, who does not reflect that the supposedly liberal Kennedy family were, one and all, friends of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and that no Kennedy was ever heard to say a bad thing about the most notorious liberal ogre of them all. They understood each other: thrusting, macho, hard-drinking politicians who gained their seats by minding their wards and getting their votes out, and never letting gentlemanly feelings interfere with ambition.
The endurance of the phenomenon is what is astonishing about it. Hated by all the responsible forces of America, to the point where "Tammamy Hall" has passed into the language to mean squalid and inexcusable political corruption, investigated by dozens of judges and dozens of committees, condemned again and again, Tammamy Hall dominated the politics of New York City for fifty years. The grandchildren of journalists who had editorialized against its nefarious influence in the age of Boss Tweed (1860s-70s) were still investigating its iniquities a decade into the new century.
Other great cities went the same way. Everyone knows about the Daley dynasty in Chicago; but the most significant battlefield to the Irish themselves, and their sweetest triumph, was Boston. This was the spiritual and political heart of Yankeeland, the city of the Pilgrim Father dynasties, the Lowells, the Cabots, the Lodges; of Harvard; of Transcendentalism, Unitarianism and Brahminism. For something like a century, Boston was the scene of an epic, silent but savage struggle between old money and Irish power, between Yankee vague-religionism and Irish muscular Catholicism; and it was not till the thirties and forties that the Irish triumphed completely. For decades after, Boston was managed by a Democrat caucus which excluded the old dynasties, left to cultivate their distinction outside their seats of power. If anything ever marked the triumph of Irish muscle in American politics, it was this; and it is no coincidence that the first American Catholic president was a Boston Irish machine politician who had learned his politics in the city wards.
In all this, the position of the Church was slightly anomalous. It could not for shame be a mere part of the various city machines; one doubts whether the machine politicians would even have wanted it to. What is more, it could not be exclusively Irish. It had, by its nature, to find place for Yankees, Frenchmen and Franco-Canadians, Germans and Austrians, Czechs, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Filipinos, Mexicans and other Hispanics, Chinese and Japanese - to mention only the leading ethnic groups. And while the Irish party machines were in the main Democrat, the same could not be said of other ethnic groups; the Italians, for instance, were fairly evenly split, and the most famous (if untypical) Italian politician of the time, Fiorello La Guardia, was a reforming Republican.
At the same time, whenever the Irish ethnic group needed to put its best foot forward, the Church was that foot. Catholic Bishops and Archbishops can be pretty impressive people, and at any rate they carry the seal of a formidable institution, respected (as one respects a loaded gun) even by its enemies. The Bishop, normally an educated man and certainly one used to the courteous use of power, could get access in places where the rough-and-ready local Boss, whatever his political reach, would have been turned out on his ear. It was inevitable that the bishop would become involved, however innocently, in the political interests of those among his flock who happened to be Bosses.
And the Church itself was extensively colonized by the Irish. Whenever an Irish family had an unusually clever child, they tended to send him to the seminary. In similar circumstances, an Italian family would send their children to law school, and a German one to any one of half a dozen socially prestigious courses from medicine to the Army. Especially at the beginning, the priesthood was the only career that the shattered and illiterate Irish could imagine for a bookish or intelligent young man, or even woman. I would say that no other immigrant groups, not even the dirt-poor Jews and Italians of the late nineteenth century, ever reached America in such a state of physical and moral destitution and ignorance as the first Irish generation; their circumstances simply cannot be imagined today except in places such as Darfur. They really did not know any literate trade at all except priest: army officer, doctor, sea captain - to mention a few careers that other ethnic groups would have had in mind - were beyond their imagination.
The result is that, for over a century, the Irish of North America have punched considerably above their weight in Church affairs. There were no more Catholic Irish than Catholic Italians or Catholic Germans or Catholic Hispanics, and yet, after the third quarter of the nineteenth centuy, they constantly dominated the American bench of Bishops. It is not too surprising that the American Catholic bishops were often described as "the Democratic Party at prayer".
Finally, there is the inevitable factor of the power and influence of the party machines. The Church would not remain forever in a secondary and subservient position in American society; but, while a determined neighbourhood could manage to set up a parish or even a children's school, for such things as Catholic universities and large-scale diocesan activity there could be no substitute for large-scale finance and steady political support. Without political support, Cardinal Manning, in spite of his great successes, his prestige, and his tremendous energy, was unable to establish either a British Catholic University or the network of diocesan seminaries he envisaged. The American Church was more fortunate; but that success came with the shadow of patronage. When the Church worked to set up its own universities and charities and avoid being dependent on Protestant or agnostic ones, these universities inevitably became part of the network of patronage and social contact at the high levels of party organization.
2 - THE GENETIC MUTATION OF THE IRISH MACHINE LEADERSHIP, 1960-1970, AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE CHURCH
There is a general impression, encouraged by the famous Edwin O'Connor novel THE LAST HURRAH (and the film of it, which features a breathtaking performance by an ailing Spencer Tracy), that Irish-Democrat machine politics died out in the fifties, made redundant by the powers of suburbanization and television. That is not true: they did not die out, they transmogrified. The tribal network of contacts, friendships, common attitudes, common views, developped over a hundred years of common political experience, simply moved from the crowded working-class districts of the old towns to the suburbs. The goal of the party machines and their members had never been in any way to overturn the ancient Yankee institutions, but to guarantee a place - and a powerful place - in them for the Catholic Irish; a people who, we should remember, did not altogether have a place in their own home, as long as the English Ascendancy lasted.
All through the fifties, it was clearly in sight. This was the period when Hollywood celebrated the Catholic Church - and celebrated, specifically, its most ecclesiastical aspects, with heroes who were priests and even Cardinals. We all remember Spencer Tracy and Bing Crosby in dog collars, Tracy, especially, managing a convinction that depended not only from a serious personal faith but from the actual fact that he had once seriously considered the priesthood as a career. Some of those movies were excellent, too: but the important thing is that they celebrated what seemed at the time to have been the full naturalization and Americanization of the Catholic Church. The machines had achieved their old and unstated goal: the Irish were now fully American, with no serious shadow of separation or incomprehension. (It probably helped that, some time before this, the immigration from Ireland, which had been a flood through most of the nineteenth century, fell off to a trickle. By 1950, the average American "Irishman" was three generations removed from the old country, and had the kind of postcardish view of it shown in John Ford's famous THE QUIET MAN.) The final triumph of the Irish was the election of a young machine politician from Boston, whose own father's business dealings had been more than dubious, to President of the United States of America.
But this acculturation had another side, one clearly shown by John F. Kennedy's promise never to let his religion "interfere" with his discharge of his public duties. (Since then, a number of malevolent tongues have pointed out that it did not much interfere with his private life, either.) In other words, this Irish aristocrat, whose family replaced the Lodges and Lowells as American royalty in the popular imagination, promised in effect to be different in no fundamental way from the rest of the republican elite of the country. The Catholic specificity was implicitly given up, and the same spiritual institution celebrated in all those forties and fifties Hollywood movies was effectively discarded as part of the final Irish machine power grab.
One thing that needs to be appreciated as part of this is that the major Irish contribution to the culture of Catholicism in the English-speaking world is tribalism. There is this strange notion that you are born a Catholic; hence the bizarre concept of the "lapsed Catholic", one that is quite unknown to most Catholic countries. In Italy as in Mexico, in India as in Germany, a Catholic is a person who believes what the Church believes and attends its functions. I am a Catholic; my brother, born in my same family and educated in the same schools, gone to Church like me as a child, and incidentally very dear to me, is not - and with no nonsense about being "lapsed". He has decided that, for various reasons, membership of the Church does not suit his views, and has left it. I have not. It is as simple as that. But in Britain, and even more in America, there has been a tendency to think of "Catholics" more in terms of birth, and even more of childhood experiences and family connection: it defined you more as a "Catholic" that you had gone to school with nuns and served as an altar boy. This is obviously the result of three centuries of persecution survived, of Catholicism handed down from father to son like a token of national identity, and even more of exclusion of the enemy; we know who we are because we know who they are.
What triumphed in the fifties, then, was not actually necessarily the Catholic Church in America as such, the Church that contained members of fifty ethnic groups, but the tribal "Irish" identity with its ecclesiastical reflections and its social bonds. That is not to say that Italians or Hispanics or others were left behind - this was a time of prosperity for all, and the Italians certainly did well enough - but rahter that, as the Irish had invested disproportionately in political success and ecclesiastical advancement, so they benefited disproportionately. It was their universities, their dioceses, their culture, that reached the centre, and, at the same time, that normalized itself.
For the two things went together. Along with the drive to political power came a strong drive to be normalized. For Catholic universities, this meant becoming respectable in the world of American academia, and specifically to become friendly to large big-business foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. For individuals, it meant that their social contacts became predominantly those of their professional environment rather than the tribal background; a typical case of this being Spencer Tracy's long relationship with the Yankee atheist Katharine Hepburn - they were colleagues.
The only thing that explains what happened to the Catholic Church in America in the sixties and seventies is the tribal mentality. Men and women were led away from anything recognizable as Catholic teaching by the mere social climate; yet, taking the Church with its buildings, its schools, its institutions, as an inevitable and natural part of their lives, their instinct was not to leave it, but to drag it along with themselves. In Italy, the conflict between secular fashion and the Church was played out as a direct head-on clash, in two historic popular referendums on divorce and abortion, both of which the Church lost. (The Pope resolved to lay down the challenge knowing that the Church would lose, but holding it more important that its position against these innovations should be quite clear.) In America, by contrast, there was no defining moment or parting of the ways. The Church, being still largely "the Democratic Party at prayer", just turned itself over to the same influences and ideologies that conquered the Democrats in the famous McGovern primaries of 1968 (the ones which guaranteed Nixon a second term in office). People convinced themselves that there was something good, something elevating, about this slippage, something that would renew and cleanse the Church; but in fact they were more concerned with being respectable in the eyes of outside bodies, especially those that controlled the media - our old friends the intellectual-worker class. They wanted to behave in a way that resonated with the prevailing prejudices of this class, which were and remain very alien indeed to the Catholic ethic.
The power of the intellectual-worker class over public opinion is very important in this context. They are able and willing to present the Church as a diabolical conspiracy of oppressors, and in this they resonate with far older prejudices. I have a friend who is a perfectly, even naively typical member of this class; and she hates the Church. Her reasons are highly modern; but her language and arguments - most of them too dead even to answer - are those of her Protestant forebears. She has nothing positive in common with them: no philosophy, no belief, no values. But in hating the Church she is at one with the worst of Luther and his successors; there is nothing she will not believe and very little she will not support. And the power of the intellectual-worker class over the means of communication, which I described earlier, mean that they have long been able to make the Catholic mass feel isolated, cut off from things, lost in some sort of Robinson Crusoe island while real life took place without them. This is not an argument, but a matter of presentation; but it has been hugely influential Certainly the "renewers" of the sixties and seventies took it very seriously.
The ideology of the intellectual-worker class, I mean of those members which are not in conscious revolt against its tenets, can be defined as a vulgar analysism, a hankering after witchdoctor explanations of people and things. As its work is in the areas of the intellect, it is on the use of the intellect that it forms its self-respect; and its ideology is a constituent part of its self-respect. The intellectual-worker class welcomed Marxism, which gives a considerable amount of fuel to vulgar analysis; but it welcomed with even more enthusiasm the new doctrines of psychoanalysis - Freud first, Jung later - which offered a practically infinite capacity for analyzing to death and beyond. And when the Church, especially if not exclusively in America, decided to go out and "meet modern culture", this was the culture it met.
It was one specific element which drove this attempt at change; an element which was confused in the first place, because of its mistaken identification of ethnicity with religion, and therefore thought that its religion, like its ethnicity, should change with the culture. (Ireland itself is hardly the same now as it was fifty or a hundred years ago; its torn-off limbs on the other side of the ocean, even less so.) But it was this network of friendships and relationships, shared experiences and shared identities, with its enduring habit of backing each other, that was responsible for nine-tenths of what happened to the American Church between 1960 and 2000. I repeat: the party machine never was, is not, and never will be, identical with the Church. Wherever else the Church may have been an instrument of a party (France comes to mind), that was literally impossible in America, because of the sheer diversity of contributions from different backgrounds.
However, the attempt went very deep across a very large landscape. Psychologists from the leading schools were invited to make studies of Catholic clergy. These people regarded a full and correct human development as involving successful sexual activity (at the time, with the opposite sex, although this stipulation was removed from the American Psychological Association in 1973); the results of examining a group of people who were sworn to celibacy were predictable. The application of psychological testing famously destroyed a whole convent of nuns, and generally drove a generation of priests and nuns to a sexualized view of the world that made nonsense of their whole vocation. Some resisted; some made compromises; and a certain amount embraced the sexualization of the clergy with enthusiasm.
Where that happened, it took a strange shape. The destruction of that convent had been an omen of things to come, for when the supposedly latent sexuality of the nuns was unleashed, it took the form, not of an ordinary desire for men, but for each other. It became a spectacular burst of lesbianism (which has supplied the American lesbian movement with some of its most enduring and embittered poster children). And for some reason, the sexualization of the priesthood took the shape, not of priests with girlfriends - although quite a few cases took place - but of a spectacular rise in the number of homosexual priests.
For this there are, I think, reasons. Priests who fell in love with women had the option to get themselves laicized and marry the object of their affection; and this, notoriously, happened on a huge scale in the sixties and seventies. But priests who took this road were out of the clerical loop: they took up new responsibilities, a new life, often had children. If they were, as many were, left with a lasting bitterness against the ecclesiastical structure, it was a bitterness that had little opportunity to develop into action - they were in general no part of the Church structure. The more successful they were in their new life (and therefore, ex hypothesi, the more able and promising), the less opportunity they had to cultivate it. Certainly a good deal of capable clerics were lost to the Church this way; but it was, on the whole, a clean break, that did the ecclesiastical structure less harm than what was not lost.
The priest, religious, or nun, who, on becoming sexualized in one of the many ways that the Sixties afforded, found that his attraction was to his or her own sex, was in a different position. To give up the vocation and habit (and the profession and living they afforded) for that reason would have meant to have to admit it in public, or else to leave the impression of having "left under a cloud". And while the view of homosexuality was rapidly changing at the time, there was still plenty of opposition to it, especially if your starting point should happen to be the Catholic Church. This discouraged outright breaks. On the other hand, the communal religious life placed potential clerical homosexuals constantly near a large number of members of their own sex. Sooner or later, the inevitable happened, and two or more people of similar mind met.
People who form a social group tend to develop a self-justifying ideology, even a political program. In the case of what might be called the underground homosexual movement in the American Church, it is difficult to quote a clear statement of what this was, because it was rarely stated with any clarity - for obvious reasons; but its results may be followed in events. One thing that happened was that homosexual priests colonized many seminaries, screening out orthodox candidates and fostering a new generation of either sympathetic or wholly homosexual candidates to the priesthood. This placed a tight bottleneck at the entrance to the priesthood, and may be held to have largely caused the celebrated "crisis of vocations" which so many people ascribed to the out-datedness of the Church's teaching on sexuality. The fact is that, far from being outdated, the people who were recruiting priests were losing candidates for being way too much "with it".
Not that this bothered them. Another part of what might be called the unstated plan was to use the collapse in priestly numbers that was caused largely by their own behaviour to alter the roles and power relationships at ground level. This was openly theorized and aggressively practiced on the ground, especially in certain dioceses. Rochester and Albany in New York State, and Springfield in Illinois, became notorious for this sort of thing. It became noticeable in the seventies and eighties that priests tended to be replaced in their duties, not even by deacons, but by laymen and women with the rank of Extraordinary Eucharistic Ministers. The role of these figures is, in Church law, to assist the priest when there are really too many communicants at Mass for one person to deal with alone; but in the seventies and eighties one heard of ex.ministers taking the Sacrament to sick and dying parishioners, preaching, and otherwise replacing the priest, even in situations (such as parishes with three or more priests) where it was hard to see what the special need being met was.
It is well known that the violent rise of Women's Lib was in the main a consequence of the over-sexualized atmosphere of the sixties, where "sexual liberation" reduced, for a while, young female members of the movement to providers of free sexual services; although their hostility, once raised, was directed, not at the actual exploiters, but at society at large. Whether there is a similar link between the sexualization of the Church in this period and the rise of an incredibly virulent and extreme clerical branch of Woman's Lib, especially but not exclusively among nuns, I am not clear; but it is certain that such a phenomenon took place. Several American orders became breeding-places, not merely for ecclesiastical insurrection, but for outright assaults upon Christianity. It is not only a matter of lesbian nuns, but of Wiccans and goddess-worshippers ensconced in the ecclesiastical structure and receiving stipends for doing the work of nuns - educating children, caring for the sick, praying to the God of the Christians.
By the nineties, the various aspects of the assault upon the Church had become clear enough, but people were not yet altogether ready to see the underlying pattern. And resistance had arisen. Father Peter Stravinskas thundered against the abuse of ex.ministers; Paul Likoudis fulminated against the intrusion of Jungian pseudo-spirituality in Christian schools and churches (unwisely relying, however, on the testimony of Richard Noll, who is a Freudian, an atheist, and a worse enemy of the Church than C.G.Jung ever was); and the rise of the formidable media operation EWTN gave Likoudis and others a platform to reach millions of ordinary Catholics.
However, this grassroots movement had almost no response among the authorities. In 1995, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of the tiny diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, excommunicated in writing the members of several schismatic, pagan or masonic organizations; the fact that this was even necessary is astonishing, but even this tiny step caused a kerfuffle in which many people seemed to be saying that it should be Bishop Bruskewitz, rather than the Freemasons, who should be driven from the Church. So far as I can remember, no Bishop followed his example. The time wasn't ripe yet.
