December
13, 2002, 6:45 p.m.
The Boston Disease – What remains after Cardinal Law.
“It
was not only the Catholic clergy that was at fault. So also were we, the
laity.”
Michael
Novak
National
Review Online
There
is a uniquely tribal quality to Boston, more so than in any other major
American city, even among others in the northeast.
Bostonians
don't take to outsiders easily, and don't allow them to become insiders easily,
either. And Bostonians are themselves divided into tribes that to this
day seem to mix with one another as little as necessary. The Late George
Apley and other novels by John P. Marquand dramatized the feeling quite
well, and it hasn't yet entirely faded.
When
I first went to Boston (oh my!) just over 50 years ago, fresh from high school,
I recall visiting the home of a classmate in Quincy and being met at the door
by his very sweet Irish grandmother. Welcoming me warmly she was a little
puzzled by my name.
"Novak?"
she gently asked, "What sort of name is that?"
"Slovak,"
I replied in as sprightly as voice as I could muster.
"Oh,"
she said thoughtfully. "Well, that's nice, too."
"And
you, Mrs. Sweeney [not her real name]," I countered.
"Have
you lived your whole life here in Quincy?"
"Ah,
no!" her eyes flashed merrily. "I was born out west."
She
added as a clarifying afterthought: "In Worcester."
I
figured out after a while that I had to explain to people why Boston is called
the Hub of the Universe. The rest of the world is moving.
It
so happened that a few years later, when I was in graduate school at Harvard,
my brother married a young woman from Ireland who had relatives in
"southie" (i.e., south Boston). For the relatives, in those
days, Harvard was another country and spoke another tongue.
By
accident, we also had friends who moved in the circle of the old WASP families,
from whom various governors of the commonwealth had come, and that too was a
different world: banking, investments, an especially interesting veteran
of the CIA with vivid personal adventures overseas, insurance, etc.
"Everyone
in Boston votes Republican," one young woman told me with total
self-assurance, not adverting to the total dominance of the Kennedys in Boston
politics.
But
then I realized she meant "everyone that matters," and in her frame
of reference was being quite accurate.
Others
of our friends were younger Catholic professionals (lawyers, surgeons)
in
Wellesley and Newton, which was still another world.
During
a season like Christmas, my wife and I often found ourselves visiting a
stunning array of these enclaves, made poignantly aware by the nuances of jokes
and humorous asides of potential conversational land mines to be avoided.
Boston seemed to me a region of islands, an archipelago of mutually mistrustful
rivals. A fascinating and lovable city, but a little more content in its
multiple insularity than one would have liked.
Wouldn't
a kind of open meritocracy have been easier on everybody, without so much
reliance on who had which roots?
One
of my teachers, the beloved David Reisman, warned me more than once about the
fierce anti-Catholicism that seeped from the roots of the ancient trees in
Harvard Yard and Boston Commons, "the ghosts of Puritan Boston." This
pervasive anti-papist feeling was compounded by generations of ethnic rivalry
(and not only on this side of the ocean), and again by monetary differentials,
and differences of manners. Not to put to fine a point upon it, the later
arriving Irish and Italians were looked down upon, and not really liked, by the
old-timers. You can see this genteelly put in one of Emerson's essays,
invidiously describing the faces of the Irish of Boston, as compared with the rosier
faces of London.
The tragic fall of Cardinal Law has brought all these old memories to the surface. His fall is tragic because it was through a weakness of his own (a weakness internal to one of his virtues) that he did himself in. He believed it a bishop's duty to be a father to his priests, to be especially compassionate to them, to nurse them along - and he did so, the record shows, most unwisely, and in the end destructively, both of some of them and of himself, and of the reputation of the archdiocese.
Meanwhile,
he lost sight for far too long of the gaping wounds inflicted on vulnerable
young people, on families, on the confidence and trust of the laity. His
priests kept letting him down, he became preoccupied with the priests, he
forgot the flock they were pledged to have been guarding. Some few
shepherds - but far too many for any one place - ran with the wolves.
A
bishop is not merely a company commander, in charge of officers immediately
below him; his foremost duty is to his people, all of them, to protect them
from the wolves and guide them, to instruct them, and to bring them to
holiness.
The
reputation for lax discipline that had started long before Cardinal Law's time
did not compel his immediate attention on his arrival in Boston. In fact,
he never did really, deeply challenge and uproot it.
Perhaps
he never even diagnosed it. Perhaps, having peered into it, he gave up,
not finding in himself the Herculean moral strength a real housecleaning would
have entailed. Perhaps he hoped to change it by small steps and gradual
degrees.
I
have learned from friends in Boston these days that from the beginning
Cardinal
Law faced four huge moral deficits in the Archdiocese of Boston.
The
first
is an unusually tribal and mutually protective, ranks-drawn-up clergy, circling
around its own three-generation tradition of moral fault; a pattern of
"weakness" or "corruption" in some few, but covered over
and unpoliced by the others, in a long-standing and defensive posture.
The
second
is a 40-year period of massive moral dissent from Catholic moral teaching,
especially in regard to sexual and "gender" questions, in the
principal Catholic institutions of learning in Boston, including conspicuously
Boston College and the (Jesuit) Weston School of Theology. This fairly
systematic dissent, through which some have boldly called the theology of Pope
John Paul II (and Paul VI before him) wrong, mistaken, and based on untruths,
has had the inevitable effect of weakening the sense of right and wrong in
those faced with severe sexual temptations. It is hard enough to show
fidelity when right and wrong are clear.
But in the mists and fogs of inner uncertainty, driven rapidly ahead by passion, one most easily jumps the curb, smashes into trees, plunges over cliffs.
Third
is a
laity in very large numbers living in open dissent and rebellion, and
encouraged in this by many clerical voices - even among their own pastors -
first on many small things but gradually on many increasingly large things,
too. In fact, one can hardly be certain, listening to them parade their
utterly self-confident convictions, why they don't become Congregationalists
(and elect their own pastors), or Baptists, or Unitarians, or, at least
Episcopalians. They seem to abhor the most-distinctive features of the
Catholic Church, most notably full communion with Peter, the bishop of
Rome.
They
seem embarrassed also by her traditional and not-at-all-new teachings of
embodied personhood, the physical/sacramental nature of reality, the full and
rich sexuality of Catholic teaching (expressed in so many great works of
literature, painting, and music down the ages), the nature of matrimony, and
most obviously the tradition of celibacy and chastity as high ideals affecting
the lives of all. Does it go without saying that the First Family of
Catholicism in Massachusetts is led by Senator Kennedy, and that his open and
unrebuked dissents down the years have taken a great public toll on the faith
of others?
Finally, least significant but
not unreal, the aforementioned bitter and unrelenting anti-Catholicism of
Boston's elites and the media over which they seem to have almost total
control. To be sure, these elites are no longer purely, or even mostly,
Brahmin. On the contrary, liberals of all stripes stand upon the heights,
looking down upon the Church they find most contemptible, that lowly stumbling
block to their own ambitions. Included in their number, alas, is a fairly
large number of anti-Catholic Catholics.
And
the worst thing about the recent, rushed disclosures of the sins of the
Catholic Church of Boston is that they have dramatically verified the darkest
Maria Monk suspicions of Boston's oldest elites, concerning the inexorability
of Catholic moral corruption.
I will leave for another time
any mention of the McCarthyism in the legal procedures involved in forcing
these revelations out into public for public delectation (calling to mind the
practice of public humiliation in the stockades in the Commons of old).
These procedures, many of them gross violations of due process, Boston's elite
have here tolerated, because aimed at the Catholic Church. They would
never tolerate these abuses were their own interests threatened. I leave
these to the conscience of the Boston legal community, which will one day pay
for these precedents.
Providentially, it is better for the Catholic community that the worst abuses come to light now, all at once, so that no one will ever doubt how bad things have been, or fail to gauge their exact dimensions. One day, comparisons will be made with other institutions in Boston and elsewhere.
Even if many recent procedures have been unjust, still, this is a wound that the Catholic community gave itself. It can be blamed on no one else.
Some
years ago, a priest called me aside after one of my lectures in the Northeast
and begged me to write something about the spread of homosexual abuses of young
men by priests. He described it as a scourge, covered over and protected
by those priests who knew better but were uncertain of being backed up by their
bishops, if they reported their confreres. I was stricken by his
remarks. I did not doubt him, but I did not have the evidence he seemed
to have. All I had was hearsay. I couldn't see how to proceed.
My
interlocutor was right. Something needed to be done. I left it for
others.
Do
you agree with me, that we all have reason to stand accused in our own
consciences for our role in abetting, and refusing to confront, the
"sexual revolution" of the last 40 years? It was not only the
Catholic clergy that was at fault. So also were we, the laity.
May
God have mercy on us all.
mailto:Editor@FaithfulVoice.com