Papists!

Liberal conformists of the last century such as Walter Lippmann and John Dewey viewed the “American mind” as incompatible with, even inimical to, the Catholic mind. Reading Philip Jenkins’ sometimes surprising litany of American enmity for the Catholic Church (and for “poor and ignorant” Catholics, too), it is hard to escape their conclusion.

Still, the long-troubled marriage between America and the Catholic Church must, it seems to this writer, be mended, for the sake of the nation’s soul and the good maintenance of her freedoms. America needs a strong Catholic Church as a prophetic antidote to a pragmatist’s hell in which no moral limits restrain the autonomies of the stock market, the laboratory, the state, and now (it seems) human nature itself.

Evangelical Protestants know well enough what separates them from Rome. There is the bogeyman of Justification, not to mention doubts about the extent of the pope’s task in governing the Western Church, all the fuss over Mary, and a good deal more. In Jenkins’ account, these theological problems—by no means trivial matters, however much subject to distortion in debate—do not rate much attention except insofar as they play lesser parts in the larger drama of American nativism, egalitarianism, and—lately—an absolute insistence upon unalloyed sexual license. For it is as participants in the American experiment that many readers will discover unexpected and unexamined anti-Catholicism—what Jenkins calls “the last acceptable prejudice”—in the nation’s cultural foundations and in every stage of its history to the present.

The prejudice that greeted waves of Catholic immigrants in the 19th century is well documented, but Jenkins shows how anti-Catholicism continued to thrive in the period before Vatican II, well after the violent nativist passions of an earlier era had cooled. Even as American Catholicism enjoyed increasing respectability, cultural influence, and political clout, disaffected nuns and monks who had renounced their vows traveled from city to city relating fantastic tales of sexual liaisons (facilitated by tunnels that joined monastic residences and underground chambers where the aborted children of the steamy trysts were buried). In the 1930s and ’40s, critics fabricated connections between fascists in Germany and Spain and the Catholic hierarchy, and in the immediate postwar years the church was routinely portrayed as a threat to American democracy—a familiar theme recycled for the early Cold War era.

That was the old anti-Catholicism. A radical shift came after Vatican II with the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae. Just as the sexual revolution was gaining momentum, particularly for feminists and homosexuals, and just when progressive Catholics thought they had left the old ways forever behind in the wake of the Council, the church’s hierarchy got right into the beds of millions of married Catholics, upholding what had been the traditional and universal Christian teaching on the use of contraceptives since the faith’s inception. For the first time in the nation’s history, anti-Catholicism was fueled in part by massive dissent within the church’s own ranks, a pattern strengthened by the reluctance of the American bishops to enforce the church’s teachings in the decades following Humanae Vitae. The church’s sons and daughters were becoming good Americans.

George Weigel has pointed to the comprehensive social vision that is the inheritance of all Catholics, that the Catholic Church (quoting Jenkins now) “claims the right to speak authoritatively on any and all issues affecting the human condition.” Of course, this is at great odds with American notions of the individual’s radical independence from religious authority of any kind. Traditional Catholics are often more consistent than their Protestant counterparts in recognizing that their first citizenship lies with another sovereignty than the one claimed by the United States. This loyalty to Christ’s kingdom gets orthodox Catholic leaders like John Paul II in trouble with media and cultural élites who desperately desire to ensconce the sexual revolution as a permanent accomplishment of American public life, pushing the envelope out from abortion in the ever-more ambitious designs of biotechnology.

The poet and historian Peter Viereck saw similarities between more recent forms of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism: “Every conformist group has its own equivalent of the scourge of anti-Semitism, a scourge inflicted on any minority it dare not understand for fear of having to think things through. Your ‘Jew’ (your slacker, your spoilsport, your inconvenient non-booster) is whoever distracts you from your television set. Or who asks ‘why’ instead of ‘how.’ Catholic-baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals.”

That Catholics force Americans to think about things they would rather not think about rings true. If I could intimate a calling to Catholics in this culture, it would be to embrace the mantle of that people who will insist on waking the nation up from its technological stupor and idolatry to moral pragmatism, insisting that Americans ask the “why” questions before moving on to “how.”

Christians need the Catholic Church for more than the connection it affords to the earliest traditions of prayer, Scripture study, and ordered Christian life. Its unyielding stand on issues affecting life is a complete ethic, upholding—in the face of a culture of death—the dignity of every man from the moment of conception. As the American experiment, with unbridled hubris married to runaway consumerism, appears to be heading toward Huxley’s Brave New World, this might be a good time for both Catholic and non-Catholic Christians to pay attention to what the Vatican has been writing the past few decades about the nature of the human person, the beginnings of new life, and the urgent need to limit procreation to the marriage bed. It would be one way of repenting from the anti-Catholicism that Jenkins ably catalogues in these pages.

It is a pity that episcopal incompetence, negligence, and downright corruption have undermined the church’s effective witness in these areas at a time when its clear voice is wanted, but these failures do not negate the truth. Sexual scandals, alas, are nothing new in Christian History or, in particular, in the Catholic Church’s life in America. It is a long-held fear, going back centuries, that the church aids and abets homosexuals and pederasts. The 19th-century American cartoonist, Thomas Nast, published a depiction of bishops whose miters had turned to crocodile jaws, devouring children.

The current clergy scandals are appallingly real, and they have shaken American Catholicism to its core, reviving old slanders and giving fuel to those who want to remake the church in the image of the world. But rather than side with those who seek to exploit this crisis, non-Catholic Christians ought to join their Catholic brothers and sisters, demanding accountability—any evasion here will only compound the sin—but also kneeling at the altar, praying for renewal and resurrection.

Jenkins sees anti-Catholicism as a social problem that requires intervention and active identification of bias to eliminate prejudice, but I hope that the church does not welcome a call to play victim. While other groups may be expected to defend their seat at the American table tooth and nail (and others ought to uphold their right to do so), the church has no need of a Catholic version of the naacp or Anti-Defamation League to defend its claims in the public square. It should rather lean on the Man of Sorrows who is acquainted with grief. He alone is able to preserve the church in the truth.

The New Anti-Catholicism concludes with a nightmare scenario in which the Catholic Church, by means of an imagined Vatican III, “substantially becomes a mainline Protestant denomination,” in which the monarchy of the pope is rejected in favor of mere episcopal symbols who adorn a not-so-subtle congregationalism, where abortion, homosexuality, and all the desiderata of the sexual revolution are hallowed by a priesthood of men and women. Jenkins recognizes this would amount to Unitarianism and rightly asks: Who needs it? I hope his book finds many Americans who agree.

Kenneth Tanner is an ordained minister in the Charismatic Episcopal Church and serves on the staff of Touchstone magazine. He is coeditor of a collection of essays in honor of Thomas C. Oden, Ancient and Postmodern Christianity (InterVarsity Press).