Catholic Civil War Rages On

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Sidewalks with Tom Deignan

Catholic Civil War Rages On

August 21, 2008

Sidewalks by Tom Deignan

THIS past week’s episode of the excellent AMC cable TV series Mad Men, set among advertising executives in the early 1960s, featured a new character, a handsome young Irish American priest named Father Gill. Father Gill is new to the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn parish where striving Peggy –- the show’s young secretary-turned-copy writer -– grew up, before heading for the bright lights of Manhattan.

Peggy’s family has embraced Father Gill. In one scene he is invited over for dinner, along with the “O’Neills, Callahans and the Caseys,” who sit in the living room, not far from a portrait of John F. Kennedy, whose election to the presidency was a main plot line in Mad Men last season.

For all the love in the air, you can smell trouble brewing. Father Gill is not a rigid old white-haired authoritarian priest, the kind that has haunted Irish Catholics for decades.

No, he’s young, traveled the world and even plays various musical instruments favored by the kids.

In other words, Father Gill is the kind of priest many old school Irish Catholics would come to despise, with their folk songs and touchy feely ways of dealing with sin.

Father Gill even seems, well, tolerant, of Peggy’s most serious, secret sin. Though Mad Men is set in 1961, just when the world’s Catholic leaders were about to begin the historic meetings in Rome which would produce the modernizing reforms now known as Vatican II, Irish and other Catholics are still struggling to comprehend what all these changes mean.

Some see a church that has gone too soft, others a church unable to face its own sins.

Call it a “civil” war, meaning people are not lobbing bombs, are still willing to debate. But it is certainly a war.

As we speak, for example, the finishing touches are being put on a $190 million new cathedral in downtown Oakland, California, the Cathedral of Christ the Light.

The facility includes a reflection garden dedicated to victims of sexual abuse by priests. Who could argue with that?

Well, quite a few people actually. One parishioner told The New York Times that’s setting up “these little gardens for people to stroll around and feel nice is one of these feel-good California-style exercises.”

Father Thomas Doyle added, “To me, it’s an empty gesture.”

Irish American David Clohessy, the well-known national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said, “It’s easy for church officials to make symbolic gestures like this, in part — without being cynical — because it’s good P.R. But prayers and memorials are not a substitute for real, concrete change.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising Irish Catholics would find themselves at odds over a heart-wrenching issue such as abuse in the priesthood. But even broad issues central to Catholicism tend to cause problems.

Bobby Kennedy’s daughter Kerry recently interviewed dozens of prominent public Catholics, including Irish Americans Frank McCourt, pundit Peggy Noonan, actor Martin Sheen, comedian Bill Maher, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, for a new book called Being Catholic Now: Prominent Americans Talk About Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning (Crown).

The only simple thing you can pull from all of these interviews is that few people agree what it means to be Catholic in American anymore.

“I am reconciled to the oblivion that is coming,” a skeptical McCourt says. Sheen recounts a touching story of his return to his religious roots (and a welcoming priest), while Maher simply calls for the church’s abolition.

Cardinal McCarrick adds, “I don’t believe you can be authentically Catholic without being committed to the social doctrine of the church.”

This all might seem like mere fodder for Sunday morning or barroom debate. However, once again, Catholics are perhaps the key voting bloc in the looming election.

Irish Americans and other Catholics in Pennsylvania are so prized that Alleghany County Democratic Committee chairman Jack Burn recently said he hopes that Senator Barack Obama not only visits his state more often, but also make sure he speaks to the local Knights of Columbus and other Catholic groups.

It’s safe to say not many people would have predicted a year ago that KoCs would have played a key role in the campaign.

Then again, what if the local KoC is filled with members who think like Bill Maher?

(Contact Tom at tomdeignan@verizon.net.)

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