Editorials / Black Cats / Mitred Moonshine

...MITRED MOONSHINE I for one am profoundly grateful to the editors of a vigorous new religious publication for explaining to me why I recently encountered a Roman Catholic priest wearing a pink suede suit...

...In Seattle Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen attempts to intimidate parishioners into withholding half their federal income taxes to protest military .spending...

...These last three instances have their counterparts all over the Republic...

...In San Francisco Archbishop John R. Quinn becomes so tumescent over the pastoral letter on nuclear arms that he announces that Catholics in the military should refuse any order to detonate a nuclear bomb or warhead...

...From Catholic pulpits there are ever fewer homilies about prayer and personal salvation and more and more tirades on matters of public policy, i.e., matters influenced by what the priests are wont to call "social justice," a perfumed phrase that they use, ever more promiscuously to anesthetize their opposition...

...These groups do not represent all women or all blacks...

...What all this means to Americans, Michael Novak, one of the editors of Catholicism in Crisis, tells us in his splendid new book, Confession of a Catholic, is that some among the Catholic "clerocracy" are now coming, albeit late, to the same left-wing enthusiasms that are increasingly considered so dubious by the American majority, while leaving most laymen befuddled and uneasy...

...In Indianapolis Archbishop Edward T. O'Meara, in a fever to place New Age clerics sharing his views on nuclear arms and other trendy enthusiasms into influential parishes, makes himself the center of public scandal by casting aside respected pastors, refusing to answer inquiries from the . media or from concerned citizens- Catholics and non-Catholics alike- and becoming publicly accused of deceitfulness and contempt for the spirit of dialogue and consultation with the laity that issued from Vatican II...

...America being America, this does not bode well for the Church...

...They are vivid examples of what the editors of Catholicism in Crisis call clericalism...

...George McGovern...

...A feminist is a liberal, albeit a loud liberal...

...Ronald Reagan's big problem is with American liberalism...

...Anti-papists, kick up your heels...

...The black leadership too is almost wholly composed of liberals favoring the same old liberal policies of ever more government, which is to say more inflation, taxation, political coercion, and economic hardship- the percentage of blacks below the poverty line in 1980, notwithstanding all the federal spending of the 1970s, was actually .3 percent higher than in 1969...

...Nationally there is indeed some modest and persistent difference between the sexes on issues, as Public Opinion magazine reported some months ago, but the gap is nothing like that found at a feminist convention and on the so-called women's issues-abortion, the ERA -there is almost no difference between men and women...

...Surely the late Jesus of Galilee knew what he was about when he made that distinction...

...What alarmed me was not the gentleman's pink suit, however, but his rampancy on behalf of vegetarianism, or was it nuclear holocaust or human sexuality...

...The April/May issue of Public Opinion provides evidence that women's groups and the NAACP are not the only special interest groups that hide their fundamental liberalism beneath a toney label...

...This is an inversion of vocations and roles...

...last month two more black cats crossed his path...

...So in our political discourse let us have some truth in packaging...

...the Church of Rome in America is about to go the way of the Shakers...

...that explains the black cats spied in his path by the press last month...

...Of course, being a man of taste, my woman friends are mainly conservatives, and they have waited a long time for a conservative President...

...But hold, these nouveau gauche are not your down-home populists with that gentle Will Rogers aura...

...Ronald Reagan's disagreement with them is on grounds of political principle, yet so successfully do they manipulate the terms of political debate in the country that Reagan is made to appear moss-backed and prejudiced while the black leadership and the feminists are made to appear as victims of his hoary bigotries...

...The NAACP and the National Women's Political Caucus were holding their conventions and both groups were hollering for amiable Ron's blood...

...There is a manifest and tangible clericalization of the Catholic church," the editors explain, "worse now than before...

...The liberalism of public interest leaders shades into profound dissatisfaction with the American social and economic order, a feeling not shared by the public," Lichter and Rothman write...

...Whatever it was that inflamed him I do recall that he had it all wrong and that he was unusually disagreeable...

...I did not allow myself to get close enough to verify the material...

...Dignity and charity seem to have vanished from large numbers of Roman Catholic priests and nuns, and now the editors of Catholicism in Crisis, a journal published at Notre Dame's Jacques Maritain Center, explain that all this is a consequence of the Catholic clergy's growing absorption with left-wing politics and style...

...Not at all...

...Christian love was not apparent in his demeanor nor was the dignity that hitherto has so often distinguished the Catholic cleric even in the eyes of scoffers...

...The New Age Catholic Church is acting just as imperiously as its predecessor of thirty years ago, but now it is hamfistedly reaching into the realm that an earlier Christian once defined, as Caesar's...

...Of course America is not Spain, and clericalism collides with one of our most famous values, the separation of church and state...

...I have forgotten...

...Increasingly the American Catholic clergy is absorbed less with personal morality and more with public matters: nuclear strategy, economics, the big picture...

...According to social scientists S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, the leaders of virtually all public interest groups, be it the Environmental Defense Fund or the American Civil Liberties Union, are thoroughly committed to liberalism and far left liberalism a+that...

...Moreover such differences as do exist have narrowed perceptibly by election day in our last two national elections...

...EDIT0RIALS BLACK CATS Last month that black cat the Washington press corps had perceived arched atop a'pile of Jimmy Carter's briefing papers slipped back toward oblivion, but that did not mean President Reagan could bask in the glow of benign news stories about low inflation and economic revival...

...Is there really a "gender gap...

...All the women in my life adore Reagan and give me very fierce looks whenever I am discourteous...

...The conclusion, always implied in the news stories and occasionally boldly stated by the pundits, is that Reagan must change his views to accommodate these liberals...

...More and more often, priests and bishops make political, economic and social pronouncements about the temporal order, to which the laity is expected solely to react...

...They represent liberal women and liberal blacks...

...The reason the Reagan Administration is so disrelished by these groups is not that Ronald Reagan is opposed to women and blacks but that these groups are overwhelmingly liberal and he is a conservative...

...The evidence goes far beyond my lone sighting of a priest in a pink suit...

...Given liberalism's policy failures I cannot blame the various special interest groups of the Left for con-fecting esoteric new labels for the same old hokum, but the press ought not to allow itself to be bamboozled...

...It is loosening its hold on men's souls and heading along the same glorious path into oblivion once trod by the Hon...

...This time the press corps was warning of the catastrophe he faces because of "the gender gap" and the alienation of blacks...

...Thus do not expect these New Age clerics to be from the Mother Teresa of Calcutta mold...

...The pundits were reporting that unless he changes his policies he will be a goner with both groups...

...Well, if memory serves, John Anderson was once a Republican, and there are liberal Republicans still, even as there are still flying fish and fish that survive outside of water...

...It does bode well, however, for those American Catholics who would like to follow their own muse on matters of personal morality...

...Never is it suggested that they should change their views to accommodate him...

...Possibly the suit was pink velvet...

...At the National Women's Political Caucus much was made of the fact that 35 percent of the 400 head of feminists in attendance were Republicans...

...Well, in this glorious age of truth and candor I certainly wish we had some truth and candor...

...The fact is that all the issues favored at the convention-from the Equal Rights Amendment to the nuclear freeze-are liberal issues...

...In a word conservatism continues to be treated as a second-class political position, while liberalism is accorded hushed reverence, so much so that it can dictate to the press how it is to be described...

...In Michigan, Sister Agnes Mary Mansour heaves aside her vows and leaves her order rather than give up the directorship of the state's Department of Social Services, an agency administering Medicaid payments for some 12,000 abortions yearly, all murders in the eyes of the Church...