Editorials/The Worst Book of the Year/Fathead Bishops
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
FATHEAD BISHOPS I f, like me, you have had diffi- cultyy finding the actual whereabouts of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's nationally televised talk show, help is on the way. There is calamity abroad in...
...The Rev...
...Frank LoBianco of Our Lady of Visitation Roman Catholic Church urges that parishioners ignore "the country's call to duty" because "It takes a lot of love to forgive those who are evil and unjust to others...
...doubtless 1992 will be too...
...In Paramus, New Jersey, Msgr...
...Jackson's protest is not unique...
...Alas, no veterans organization is so public-spirited...
...The barbarities committed by ourenemies vindicate our resort to arms...
...Perhaps Msgr...
...A goodly number of clergy are also seizing the moment to parade their moral superiority before us...
...Linda Kimmelman of the Asbury United Methodist Church asks rhetorically "Why war...
...Sometimes a point of view simply petrifies in time, as the clergy's anti-war blah surely has...
...Yet America's mainline clergy are doing more than merely neglecting to respond to evil...
...Well, being on the immoral side of a political issue is not new to mainline churches...
...For the anti-war clergy 1991 is 1968...
...Jackson is even now rising up from his own creeping obscurity to make one last lunge at celebrity...
...That point of view is no longer capable of discernment or of any fresh cognition whatsoever...
...Kimmelman...
...They have repeatedly fired on a non-combatant nation, Israel...
...They are hamming it up, reiterating all the vacuous platitudes of yesteryear, as though the Gulf were Vietnam and Vietnam had made war unconscionable and forever futile...
...Thus the greasepaint moralizers again 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 afflict us...
...Ha, ha, Rev...
...Ask yourself, if the primary export of Kuwait were broccoli and not oil, would we be in this war...
...According to Alan Wisdom of Washington's Institute on Religion and Democracy, "Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the majority of mainline churches and most of the Catholic Bishops opposed force in the Gulf under any circumstances likely to arise, and their anti-war posture went far beyond that taken by the Democratic leadership...
...Naturally, he opposes our military action in the Gulf...
...Have they ever heard of sins of omission...
...He has spoken out against the war with his usual bullet-proof pieties that any response to Saddam other than Elysian passivity would be "immoral," "counterproductive," and so forth and so on...
...For decades the mainline church of the Soviet Union accepted Stalin and his successors...
...But to those who see the world as it is, some wars are eminently moral...
...Jackson has already leaped to exploit it...
...But the Rev...
...In violation of international law and of the conventions of decency, Saddam's troops invaded Kuwait...
...They now commit brutal war crimes against prisoners of war...
...America's mainline churches were not particularly notable in opposing slavery...
...that is a good one...
...LoBianco would have us disband the country's police forces and instead patrol the mean streets with professionally trained forgivers flushed with love...
...Bold acts of forgiveness will pacify them, and there will be smile buttons everywhere...
...Still, from comfortable pulpits the clergy sing of virtue...
...Confronted by history with a new script and a new cast of characters, its thoughtless adherents can summon only the bromides that echo in their unchanging past and motionless present...
...Once again they present themselves as moral colossi, supposedly engaged in some brave act of truth-telling urgently needed before the combined forces of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars carry them from their pulpits and consign them to a martyr's death...
...and responds cleverly, "Because human greed, lust for power and national self-interest are alive and well...
...There is calamity abroad in the world, and the Rev...
...and, if his protests are gaudy enough, perhaps someone somewhere will be able to find his television show...
...In Croton-on-Hudson, New York, the Rev...
...In past wars they have used weaponry banned by international law...
...and they aim not at military installations but at civilian neighborhoods...
...Let Saddam's rapists and brigands continue their evildoing in Kuwait City...
...They have tortured, raped, and pillaged...
...But if broccoli provided the energy to run hospitals, to heat schools, to run a country, surely we would have some moral obligation to ensure the flow of broccoli at stable prices...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
