'WHAT I THINK ABOUT THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH': The 'Catholic' Catholic Problem:
Pfeffer, Leo
THE CATHOLIC CATHOLIC PROBLEM
LEO PFEFFER
'What I think about the Roman Catholic Church'
Second in a Series
There used to be a standing joke in my family. When-ever I felt that my daughter should...
...it will be a human rather than a divine institution, or, to put it somewhat more felicitously, an institution whose divineness is measured by its humanness...
...But Andrew Greeley is a wise and careful scholar and should know better...
...in the lat-ter instances, orthodoxy was but one of many voices reflecting the faith, in the former there were no alter-natives...
...it was for good reason that the Chancery in New York was known as the Powerhouse...
...It will emerge from it a different Church...
...such con-trol of one human being over the life and liberty of another was abhorrent to me...
...In the course of studying the decisions of the Supreme Court declaring anti-child-labor laws unconstitutional, I learned that efforts to overrule them by constitutional amendment failed because of opposition by what I deemed the un-holy alliance of the National Association of Manufac-turers and the Catholic Church...
...ultimately it did, but until then I suspected that basically it agreed with him...
...In reading the accounts of the many congre-gation vs...
...More important, it will seep down from the bishops to the priests and religious and thence to the faithful...
...That it should come to this...
...I know it's none of my business, but you asked, didn't you...
...Until Pearl Harbor the Church was apologetic in respect to Italian fascism and practically mute concern-ing Naziism...
...My daughter was young, and perhaps not too smart...
...To me the Church was much too nationalist, a stance immortalized by Cardinal Spellman's response to a question regarding his position of the United States in Vietnam: "I fully support everything it does...
...My daughter's error was less egregious than Greeley's, for the truth of the matter was that I did not like the Catholic Church as I did not like the military and the South, and for pretty much the same reasons...
...In the fifties it was the bedrock of Mc-Carthy's power...
...What do I think about the Church today...
...Bigness is neutral...
...I agreed with both...
...priest and bishop battles in the 19th century I always rooted for the former, but the latter always won...
...In 1964 President Johnson prevailed upon a reluctant Congress to enact a historic civil rights law which for-bade racial and religious discrimination in voting, em-ployment, public accommodations and education...
...Moreover, although Msgr...
...I would vote, with varying degrees of en-thusiasm, for Robert Drinan, Justice William Brennan, Eugene McCarthy, Senator Philip and/or Jane Hart, Dorothy Day, Theodore Hesburgh, and almost any mem-ber of the editorial board of Commonweal, although I would not necessarily want my daughter to marry them...
...During the same period, I often found it necessary to defend Orthodox Jewish storekeepers who were sum-moned to court for violating the Sunday closing law...
...if it came from his minister, it was put in his file and considered with other character references...
...Let me name a few...
...The progress is irreversible...
...I voted for John Kennedy in 1960 and would have, with some reserva-tions, voted for Robert Kennedy in 1968, had he been nominated...
...but that was enough...
...Therein lay the basic difference between the Catholic Church and Ortho-dox Judaism or fundamentalist Protestantism...
...I could multiply instances-I have already noted the Church's veto of the anti-child labor amendment and of aid to Loyalist Spain-but I have indicated enough to explain my belief that during that period the Catholic Church was one of if not the single most powerful polit-ical force in the nation...
...The Catholic Church was not merely big...
...I fear a universal Church, even a watered-down one...
...Session after session bills were introduced, sent to committee and were never heard from again...
...the military too has an escape clause: soldiers are required to obey only the lawful orders of their officers...
...I could never accept the Church's demand that all priests take a lifelong oath of obedience...
...The Queen in Alice's Wonderland claimed she sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast, but I'm sure Alice didn't believe her...
...Bigness, too, was a bugaboo to me...
...bigness itself may not be badness...
...when the enemy is charging you cannot take a vote on whether to fight or retreat...
...2. Collegiality is the wave of the future...
...all the Church can do is to place and pay for its own advertisements offering an alternative to abortion...
...Nixon and the ITT may be right...
...I could go on, but I've said enough to express my feelings about the Catholic Church today...
...At that time the only legal ground for divorce in New York was adultery and I soon learned of the sordidness and perjury that almost always accompanied this type of litigation...
...I did not like it because it was monolothic and authoritarian and big and frighteningly powerful...
...One provision, Title VI, stated, in the formula used through-out the act, that no institution or program receiving fed-eral funds shall discriminate on grounds of race, color, religion, or national origin...
...I don't think any Pope will dare to try to exercise it in the future...
...I vividly remem-ber when, some two decades later, Cardinal Spellman led shovel-carrying seminarians into a cemetery to break a grave-diggers' strike for a living wage...
...I was moderately active in the civil rights movement during this period and my recollection, fallible as it is, was that there was a general consensus that the Catholic Church was drag-ing its feet...
...Voltaire said that "If there were one religion in Eng-land, its despotism would be terrible...
...4. Humanae Vitae or no Humanae Vitae, contraceptive family and population control is a recognized responsibility of Catholics, and this by and with advice and consent of the priests...
...The only significant oppo-sition came from the Catholic Church...
...Finally, the Church was politically powerful...
...In this country the only state that voted for McGovern was the one whose capital and largest . city is Boston...
...The progress is irreversible...
...I con-sidered ignoble the part it played in shaping American ., policy in respect to the Spanish civil war...
...I was ambivalent about this, indignant that it should be so, yet somewhat pleased that the underlying assumption was probably correct...
...On the way from the subway station to my office I daily passed a parochial school, and often saw the children in the street lined up in sepa-rate classes as they marched in...
...THE CATHOLIC CATHOLIC PROBLEM LEO PFEFFER 'What I think about the Roman Catholic Church' Second in a Series There used to be a standing joke in my family...
...I was aware of the con-science escape clause...
...There are, and many too...
...Popular sovereignty will yet come to the Catholic Church...
...The justices," he said, "are not anti-Catholic in the way the Nativists or the Know Nothings of a century ago were (although I should not be inclined to make the same charitable judgment about Leo Pfeffer...
...all the boys wore dark blue trousers and white shirts, all the girls dark blue jumpers and white blouses...
...New York newspapers carry daily advertisements of abortion clinics...
...The Atonement Franciscan (Graymoor) Friars joined a Protestant-based coalition to vote their corporate stock against investment in South Africa...
...that among the children outside the par-ochial school on the way to my office there are only a sprinkling of black faces, and none of the children, white or "black, seems to be poor...
...During that period it was widely be-lieved that if a civil servant whose loyalty (as the term was then defined) was under investigation brought a testimonial letter from his priest, that ended the matter...
...Security for civil rights," he said, "must be the same as for religious rights...
...In my early years as a Struggling practitioner of law I occasionally got a divorce case...
...For almost two decades I worked with a large group of organizations, Jewish, Protestant and civic, to get the law changed to exempt Sabbatarians who kept their business closed on Saturdays...
...Stephen Kelleher lost his judicial post for saying so, divorce and remarriage are coming to Catholics, and this too will be with the advice and consent of the priests...
...But it was not only for what it stood for and did not stand that I did not like the Catholic Church...
...For example, I do not like it that the American Church has, with barely a whimper, yielded to Vatican objection to the very sensible experiment of first com-munion before first confession...
...The Boston Archdiocese, in an effort to prevent its schools from becoming refuges for children of families seeking to escape racial integration in the public schools, has followed the example of other dioceses and declared a moratorium on transfers except at "normal entry" classes...
...As a doctrin-aire there-is-to-good-war-or-bad-peace type pacifist, there is nothing about the military that I like, but next to the fact that its business is killing people what I like least about it is its authoritarianism...
...At the very last minute, without notice or debate, the word "religion" was deleted because its presence would prevent federal financing of Catholic parochial schools...
...With monolithity goes authoritarianism...
...I do not like it that the Church opposes the Equal Rights Amendment for women...
...Are there any things about the Church that I do like...
...I found it difficult to understand why the Church could not silence Father Coughlin...
...it is excit-ing, and I like it.manness...
...The difference is that the hassidim of one rabbi need not accept-and indeed vigorously deny-the infallibility of other rabbis, and the overwhelming majority of Jews, who are not hassidim and in fact not Orthodox, deny the infallibility of any rabbi, and this without fear of excommunication or loss of salvation...
...In the first place, it stood for what I opposed, and opposed, or at best was neutrally silent, about what I stood for...
...The latter justified its opposition on the ground that the amendment would infringe upon parental rights, but to me a more plausible explanation was the Church's natural affinity with the economic haves against the have-nots...
...How do you make yourself believe the impossible...
...all the teachers were white and all wore the same nuns' habit...
...But this misses the point, which is that a church has no right to demand such an oath of obedience...
...I was too young to vote in the 1928 election, but I wept when Al Smith lost...
...I do not like it that papal infallibility and Humanae Vitae are still defended by the Vatican...
...it consists in the one case in a multiplicity of interests and in the other in a multiplicity of sects...
...Madison echoed the thought...
...Yet, I could understand the obligation of obedience in the military...
...I was repelled by the idea that any human being could claim infallibility in any area, much less in the universe of faith and morals, and repelled even more by the arrogance of condemning to eternal damnation those who did not believe it...
...The point is that one may disagree with a position felt strongly about by the Catholic Church and by most Catholics without being an anti-Catholic bigot, just as one may disagree with America's policy in respect to Israel without being an anti-Semite...
...I was aware too that in the Church there was an option not present in the military: a priest could always take off his Roman collar and walk out...
...it is excit-ing, and I like it...
...I did not like a catholic Catholic Church any more than I would have liked a catholic Protestant, Jewish or Islamic church...
...I do not like it that the Catholic Church is flirting with the Anglican and Lutheran churches and no doubt others and will soon be ready to discard much doctrine including even infallibility, as part of the bride price for a union...
...it claimed and strove to be catholic...
...Had he said what I would have liked to hear, I probably would have condemned the Church if it tried to silence him-but who said critics have to be consistent...
...Think of what would have happened had Humanae Vitae been pronounced ex cathedra...
...3. The Church is purging itself of its extreme antiCommunism and ultra-nationalism...
...It was the pre-John XXIII-Vatican II era, and it was during this period that my feelings towards the Catholic Church were formed...
...each group was monosexual...
...The Magna Carta was originally given by King John to the nobles for their benefit alone, but ultimately it belonged to all the people...
...but there are thirty, and therefore live in peace and happiness...
...I go further and suggest that one is not necessarily anti-Semitic because he does not like the State of Israel nor anti-Catholic because he does not like the Catholic Church, even though there is strong and practically universal identifi-cation between Jews and the State of Israel and Catholics and the Church...
...In short, I still do not like it, but I do not like it less than I did not like it during that period, and the reason is that, while it is still what it was before, it is considerably less so, if you can make out what I mean...
...it can be used for good as well as for evil...
...It is going through a period of sturm und drang...
...When-ever I felt that my daughter should not have something she wanted she threatened to marry a Catholic army officer from Alabama...
...And there are many other things about the Church that I still do not like...
...Andrew Greeley expressed some-what the same idea in a syndicated column published in 1971 after the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional laws providing state funds for parochial schools...
...Everybody recognized it, but all efforts to-wards reform ran up against invincible Church oppo-sition...
...5. The Church is slowly but surely becoming aware that it has a social conscience...
...Priests and nuns are beginning to organize...
...We Jews have long prided ourselves for our self-proclaimed leadership in the struggle for racial equality, but I am not aware of any Jewish parochial school which has closed its doors on pupils who are running not to God but away from blacks and Puerto Ricans...
...Perhaps my memory is at fault, but I do nol remember any year when the annual statement of the National Catholic Welfare Conference was devoted to the subject of equality for blacks...
...If the Equal Rights Amendment does not get the additional few states for adoption, it will not be because of Catholic Church opposition...
...The Church was monolithic not only in its doctrines but in its instrumentalities...
...To me the only good church was a congrega-tional one...
...Cardinal Mindszenty was removed by the Vatican and the New York Times reported that the Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro denounced rigid anti-Communism and rejected charges of Communist infiltration of the Church...
...1. Papal infallibility is de facto dead...
...Try to imagine this in the days of Cardinal Spellman, who was able to banish from the city such an innocuous motion picture as The Miracle...
...All the children were white...
...so too, will congregations...
...I could not understand the great silence of the Church on the civil rights revolution of the fifties and early sixties...
...Religion, however, is something else again...
...it is enjoyed to a degree that even Pius IX would have envied by many hassidic rabbis...
...if it came from his rabbi, it was thrown into the wastebasket...
...The Pope does not have a monopoly on the prerogative of infallibility...
...I have, however, an uneasy feeling that its capacity for evil outweighs its capacity for good...
...High prelates played a significant role in the success of the anti-Farrah boycott and are playing a similar role in the lettuce and grape boycotts...
...Just as I believed that the state must be the servant and not the master of the people, so I believed that the church should be the servant of the faithful, not their master...
...if there were only two, they would destroy each other...
...My first confrontation with a position taken by the Church occurred while I was at law school...
...New York, the state with the largest Catho-lic population in the nation, did reform its divorce law, did exempt Sabbatarians from the Sunday closing law, and was one of the few states in the Union to enact what was practically an abortion-on-demand law...
...By "that period" I mean the years when Pius XI and Pius XII reigned over the Catholic world and Cardinal Spellman ruled in the United States...
...There is, however, a world of a difference between the Church of today and of IS years ago...
Vol. 102 • August 1975 • No. 10
