Of Clerics and Cupidity
Fennell, J. Timothy
"Of Clerics and Cupidity" One of the many curious and disillusioning aspects of Watergate was the part played by clergymen in the burlesque. Various priests, reverends, and rabbis assured both Nixon's supporters and...
...Paul and Colson...
...Come on, Fr...
...Weren't you...
...The Sanhedrin...
...Why do they yearn for worldly power and use their priestly prestige as a tool for furthering a secular career...
...One can imagine Father Bob envisioning himself as a latter-day Leo the Great...
...McLaughlin, who originally worked as a Nixon speechwriter but later moved to Ziegler's staff of con men, retaliated by comparing his fellow Jesuit to the Sanhedrin...
...Various priests, reverends, and rabbis assured both Nixon's supporters and opponents that they were on the side of the angels and fighting God's righteous battle...
...Undoubtedly, the Drinans and McLaughlins enter the political arena with good intentions, but soon one cannot distinguish them (save for the Roman collars when donned) from the rest of the Washington boobs...
...The path to healing the spirit lies through the inspiration of a St...
...Not the corruption of a Bobby Baker or a Teddy Chappaquiddick, but rather the corruption that conservatives, discerning the growth of the Imperial Presidency, have been warning of for the last three decades...
...Then in 1075 Gregory VII insisted that the Papacy was the final authority in all temporal, as well as spiritual, affairs, and eventually the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV went to Canossa...
...As with so much of the Watergate happening, the tragic and the comic intermingled once again...
...Prior to the eleventh century the attitude of the pious Christian towards a corrupt environment was to withdraw as much as possible from the putrified world in order to avoid contamination...
...Peter and H.R...
...The alternative, reform from the top, involved an independent Papacy actively engaging in the politics of empires and kingdoms...
...Jesus and Nixon...
...The new goal, pioneered by a reform Papacy, became conversion rather than withdrawal...
...The Greeks thought the condition was madness and called it hubris...
...Francis...
...Francis of Assisi, who, while traveling among the people of the towns and countryside, worked towards the moral and spiritual regeneration of society through personal example and preaching...
...A cursory examination of the Medieval Church will illuminate the implications of the antics of Drinan and McLaughlin...
...The Bible taught it was the root of all sin and called it Pride...
...Such a comparison has two implications...
...What makes clerics like Drinan and McLaughlin utter such balderdash...
...John, surely you were jesting...
...But Canossa symbolized the start of two centuries of struggle between the Papacy and secular authorities over temporal power...
...The two most prominent men of the cloth, who all too readily involved themselves in the fray, were the Jesuits John McLaughlin and Robert Drinan (both educated at the same seminary...
...But then we should also recall that Rev...
...As the commentators never tire of telling us, a "different" kind of corruption produced Watergate...
...There were two approaches to implementing conversion which might be characterized as "reform from the top" and "reform from the bottom...
...Accordingly, just as the spiritual credibility of the medieval Papacy was gradually eroded, the moral authority of the modern politician-clerics evaporates and mingles with the rest of the turgid steam billowing out of Washington over the nation...
...Reform from the bottom was personified by St...
...Following Nixon's resignation, McLaughlin engaged in a struggle toremain on the White House staff by saying things like he hoped President Ford would not "lay a clammy hand on my shoulder" while showing Fr...
...McLaughlin considers Nixon "the greatest moral leader of the last third of this century...
...The posturing radical-chic ideologue Drinan—he introduced the first impeachment resolution in the House Judiciary Committee—unctuously implied that Nixon and his merry men represented the greatest assault on Western Civilization since Attila and the Huns...
...The Jewish religious council that indicted Jesus and later Peter, John, Stephen, and Paul...
...Well, at least Colson informs us Watergate has been his Damascus Road...
...Whereas most of the Popes of the High Middle Ages were personally pious, their public wheeling and dealing could not be distinguished from the behavior of a Frederick Barbarossa...
...The corrupting lust for secular power is not of course peculiar to contemporary clerics...
...Their role has an enduring significance which transcends the peculiar circumstances of Watergate...
...The first being that Drinan is a hypocrite...
...Conservatives are instinctively aware that the most profound dilemmas of the human condition are not solved by governments...
...John to the door...
...Very well...
...However, this objective gradually led the Church leaders to employ the tactics of secular political struggle and diplomacy...
...In a materialistic and debauched age Drinan and McLaughlin, and their counterparts in other religions, only make our time a little darker...
...However, in the eleventh century a spiritual revival began in Europe...
...In the mid-eleventh century, beginning with Leo IX, the Church waged a war against simony and incontinence...
...But the second is bewildering...
...The end sought by the Popes was idealistic: the creation of a genuine Christian society throughout Europe...
Vol. 8 • March 1975 • No. 6
