Anna Quindlen: from the '60s to the '90s
Santora, Alexander M.
ANNA QUINDLEN: FROM THE '60S TO THE '90S STILL A CATHOLIC ALEXANDER M. SANTORA REV. ALEXANDER M. SANTORA, a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism and an intern at Commonweal,...
...QUINDLEN: Right...
...SANTORA: In what way...
...SANTORA: Do you think that's happening more and more...
...QUINDLEN: He has gone out of his way to appoint conservative bishops to very prominent and visible positions and to at least permit if not urge them to enter into public dialogue on the most divisive and, yet in some ways, most private social issues of the day...
...It really is far-and-away the best institution in handling those things in this city and, in my opinion, in this country...
...I see very clearly in America now 10: 14 February 1992 Commonweal that there are two Catholic churches: the church of the people and the church of the hierarchy...
...I certainly think that the church has showed no inclination to do that...
...SANTORA: In what way...
...SANTORA: On the issue of abortion, you come down on the prochoice side...
...You talk about Hunthausen and Curran and Untener...
...I write for me...
...There was a feeling—what good did books do you...
...SANTORA: I'm not sure how to gauge your feelings about the church...
...Is it in relationship with other families...
...QUINDLEN: I would suggest that all across the world the church do exactly what Archbishop Rembert Weakland did in Milwaukee...
...I look at U.S...
...Is it just their whimsy or do you think that's how you're perceived...
...When we first arrived here in Hoboken, we shopped around a little bit because the priest in the first church we visited was extremely conservative...
...SANTORA: Do you find yourself closer to Mario Cuomo's understanding of abortion...
...My two older children go to private school in Manhattan and their sister will follow them soon...
...But sit back and listen so that it could understand why it seemed to be in opposition to so many of its people on this issue...
...Eventually we settled on a parish here in Hoboken, but now we own a weekend house in Pennsylvania and that's where we go to church...
...My experience growing up half the time in an Italian household with my grandparents was that it was profoundly anti-intellectual...
...But none of the events in this book ever happened to anybody that I know...
...QUINDLEN: No, I think the press has historically covered the Archdiocese of New York because it is in New York in a more concerted way...
...Part of what Archbishop Weakland was saying is look, I'm a man and I've never been married...
...I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia called Drexel Hill...
...QUINDLEN: I understand why the church takes that position...
...Sometimes people will say, well, do you feel like you're a women's columnist...
...There was one line in there—there's an Italian saying: It's a stupid man who makes his son better than he is....Being Italian-American myself, I never heard this...
...But I will not disavow them...
...It had this mysterious air about it...
...But we can live with the fact that they add an extra sentence to the end of the "Our Father" every time they say it...
...SANTORA: How about the Catholic schools here in Hoboken...
...The milieu is autobiographical...
...You write about the nuns who left because of the Vatican pressure on them—Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey...
...I can't figure out what Catholic church these people come from...
...For me the sixties was the beginning of this staid sense of a fault line in all kinds of established institutions and extended families...
...SANTORA: There was a study released in March [1991] about Catholic bashing...
...ALEXANDER M. SANTORA, a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism and an intern at Commonweal, is a priest at St...
...QUINDLEN: If the cardinal of New York is the sort of self-effacing, low-profile type that Cardinal Terrence Cooke was, you don't find that much written in the press about the Catholic church...
...QUINDLEN: I think it depends on the parish and the church...
...I come to where I am from a bedrock of having to memorize the entire Baltimore Catechism —and still remember large chunks of it—and having to acquaint myself in full with the work of all four evangelists...
...I want to understand what it's like for these people...
...He said, "No, no...
...QUINDLEN: No...
...QUINDLEN: He baptized all of them...
...I have no wish to resurrect any of those forms or rituals for my own sake or the sake of my children...
...SANTORA: You wanted to get married in the church and at the time you weren't sure about having children...
...SANTORA: What do you see is happening...
...I would never live anywhere else if I had my druthers...
...Luke's [in Greenwich Villages is this wonderful sort of family atmosphere...
...The irony, it seems to me, is that the church of the people in some ways has never been stronger because the church of the people is a church of choice...
...That's a change...
...Is it just that the church has been too behind the times in that area...
...You certainly take the liberal end of the church spectrum...
...Commonweal 14 February 1992: 13...
...It's when people are really in disagreement with you that they tend to sit down and compose a letter...
...QUINDLEN: He makes news...
...The only other possibility is to move back to New York, which I can't afford, or to move out to the burbs, which I can't bear...
...Going out into a world where you would leave your family was a negative, unacceptable thing...
...And Catholics were afraid to write about the church for fear of being seen as bad Catholics...
...I take exception to the church's position on abortion...
...I was trying to pick up that sense of the time when the fault line started to appear...
...No one really appreciates how much the church in New York does to house the homeless, to feed the hungry, to help the pregnant, to raise the babies...
...I know that this is not exactly mainstream in a lot of ways...
...QUINDLEN: I don't know...
...Is it passing something on to your children...
...QUINDLEN: Public school is not an option for us here because I don't think the public schools are good enough...
...But with "Life in the 30s" I had told people about how my children were delivered, about what it was like when my mother was dying, about my father...
...I grew up in the suburbs at the tail end of the sixties...
...It is a church, to some large extent, of people my age who after turning away from the church, perhaps in their teens or twenties, have willingly come back to give their children something that they feel was important and useful...
...I'm sorry...
...It will have a great deal to do with who the next few popes are...
...We didn't want them to go to a real high pressure private school and St...
...SANTORA: What kind of resources do you use on a regular basis...
...I love New York City...
...SANTORA: What would you offer as a way for the church to teach on abortion...
...SANTORA: What prompted you to come to Hoboken...
...I write a column like a novelist writes a column...
...The Catholic church was not set up with that sole mission...
...So, it's a freely embraced form in a way that I feel is much, much healthier than the old strictly obligatory church...
...QUINDLEN: I think that's how I am perceived...
...Aloysius Parish in Jersey City, New Jersey...
...There have been Catholic columnists for years and they haven't written about the church...
...SANTORA: Let's suppose tomorrow you were appointed to the College of Cardinals...
...If the press didn't cover O'Connor, you still think he'd be news...
...QUINDLEN: At the end of the day...
...I think John Paul II has had an enormous negative effect, negative on the church in America particularly...
...Fifty-one percent of the readers is pretty good...
...I'm a product of a marriage where dad was Irish and mom was Italian...
...I would keep it legal because I think sometimes it's the right thing to do....I just think there are times when you weigh bringing a completely unwanted child into the world versus terminating what at that point is not a child but is a burgeoning life...
...This was the closest I could get to living in New York City...
...I agree with you that there are some Italians who promote that kind of inbreeding, but I just wondered where you got that phrase from...
...I think child care and family planning and abortion and homelessness and some of those things are really going to be some of the most pivotal issues of the next ten years and I certainly feel I can go on writing about them forever...
...They were marvelous teachers and incredible role models...
...SANTORA: Where do you see the church going...
...QUINDLEN: No...
...Our sitter always leaves at 5 o'clock but usually by that time I've gone into the city and picked them up...
...I think columnists tend to outstay their welcome and start to do bad imitations of themselves...
...Most of my priest connections were with Jesuits...
...When a bishop denies the sacraments to an elected official because of their stand on a public matter, I despair...
...The other thing is that there's a religious component to their education...
...SANTORA: How much of Object Lessons is autobiographical...
...QUINDLEN: No...
...SANTORA: You have a real eye for description...
...QUINDLEN: Could you imagine...
...Short of that, there's a generation of Catholics who will never be the way you are...
...I can't quite remember when it was that suddenly we didn't have to wear hats anymore...
...SANTORA: Do you see yourself addressing any constituency or being a voice for anyone in particular...
...Pastors who say individual conscience is not important: Here is your list of sins...
...SANTORA: Your column "Public & Private" changed your life, put you in the spotlight...
...I read Newsweek and Time, and People magazine every week...
...SANTORA: One column you did on Bensonhurst, you really came down hard on Italians...
...When I was writing "Life in the 30s," I was writing Object Lessons...
...Suddenly one of the uncles would move away...
...SANTORA: So, you don't take exception to the church's position on abortion...
...QUINDLEN: That's so complicated by so many different answers...
...QUINDLEN: I think it's first of all people who rely on their own consciences to tell them the difference between right and wrong...
...Certainly I've seen thriving parishes where there's a holistic approach to families...
...LEXANDER M. SANTORA: Where did you grow up...
...They spend so much time at school that I want them with me those hours that they aren't at school...
...It wasn't just that I was in the spotlight, it was like I was in the spotlight naked...
...I never want to do that...
...A group like NARAL was set up with one goal only: to see that abortion stays legal in the United States...
...What I was probably doing at that level was illuminating a different kind of sixties...
...QUINDLEN: To be honest with you, by the end of the school day, I want them home...
...The most important thing was family...
...The fault line has now given us an entirely, radically different society than we had when I was growing up in terms of the roles of women, the roles of the church, the roles of the community and of the family...
...That seems to me so much in the spirit of Jesus that it almost doesn't need to be talked about and for him then to have to be unconsidered for an honorary degree by direction of the Vatican...
...Sometimes, you talk about the rules, as you just did, something as simple as not wearing a hat can be cataclysmic...
...QUINDLEN: Yes...
...My husband, too...
...Or in the church...
...SANTORA: Do you see Hoboken in your future, too...
...My mother was from South Philadelphia, which was predominantly Italian...
...That's like saying would it be news if we didn't cover the president of the United States...
...And you're seen as authoritative...
...SANTORA: Well, people probably find that you resonate with their lives more than the hierarchy does...
...When it does that, then people who are commenting on those issues have no choice but to write about the church...
...I read a lot of books and pick up a lot of stuff from there...
...It suddenly seemed to me that a law that was so important that you would turn around in the car and go back home to fulfill it really didn't mean anything...
...Did you shop around for a parish...
...Every time he would approach on that level, the hair on the back of my neck would rise...
...And I grew up with this idea that heaven might not be a place but might be a continuation of your brain waves after your body...
...No, I don't...
...The thing for me is that I clearly was not educated as a classic Catholic school kid because I've had discussions with my husband and friends about the fact, for example, that I grew up with some sense that you were able to tell if something was a sin if you personally thought it was wrong or not...
...QUINDLEN: What does that tell you...
...Many pastors think that child care for small children is best done at home by mothers, totally in opposition to the prevailing ethos or economic needs of people...
...SANTORA: A recent issue of Spy magazine called you an avatar of common sense and Cardinal O'Connor a fake avatar of common sense...
...QUINDLEN: I don't really know...
...The key difference is that the church has made it its business over the last fifteen years to enter aggressively into public dialogue on some of the most important issues affecting this country...
...That light gets buried under the bushel of discussion about Satanism and rock music and exorcisms and condoms and things which, it seems to me, do not serve the primary mission...
...And people give money to +hat organization for one reason only, 12: 14 February 1992 Commonweal and that's to see that abortion is legal in the United States...
...O'Connor's constantly saying things we haven't heard before...
...I know that there are Italian households in which children are urged to better themselves and to move on and Mario Cuomo would be the first person to tell you about such a household...
...He kept trying to involve me in courses on natural family planning...
...I look at a whole mess of alumni magazines, most of which have become general interest magazines...
...Of course, it wouldn't...
...QUINDLEN: It's in the introduction to a book by Helen Barolini called The Dream Book, a collection of writing by ItalianAmericans...
...The two of them were being worked on at the same time...
...But if I am that wouldn't bother me one bit...
...Its primary mission seems to be to keep alive the teachings of Jesus...
...I just don't get it...
...Were you working through the Irish-Italian combination and the ethnic setting and finding yourself at a different point...
...The mail I get whenever I write about Catholicism, about abortion, about gay people is so full of hatred and judgment from people who inform me that they are Catholics as opposed to me, who is not a real Catholic...
...SANTORA: How long do you see yourself doing "Public & Private...
...QUINDLEN: Well, I think that's part of it but I think more of it is the simple fact that they realize how many people are acting in opposition to the church doctrine that the hierarchy is intent on hammering home time after time after time...
...I talk to my friends constantly— most of whom are in the newspaper business...
...And because there are three of them, they tend to a do a lot of stuff together...
...And I think the proper person to make that determination is the person who is carrying that burgeoning life in her body...
...And that, therefore, we have to look at it in a different way than it is either one thing or the other...
...I know exactly what you're talking about and I think that's a real difficulty...
...The one thing I would say is that I tend to write about what we have come, unfortunately, to call women's issues...
...To sit back and listen to some of the distress and the complaints and what has become antipathy...
...That was a classic way in which you learn everything about a subject and discard that which you think is nonsense...
...You mentioned how the priest saw your heart and later on baptized two of your children...
...And then I would appoint Rembert Weakland archbishop of New York...
...SANTORA: Do you think there was something deeper going on in writing this kind of novel...
...QUINDLEN: Any of us has a nostalgia for certain forms and rituals with which we grew up...
...I was educated by very liberal nuns and priests, by Holy Child nuns who tend to be extremely welleducated and intellectually rigorous...
...Not the sixties of sexual revolutions and Woodstock and antiwar demonstrations because that's not the sixties that I experienced...
...Randall Terry [of Operation Rescue], who is not someone that I admire very much, says that if you believe that abortion is murder you have to treat it like murder...
...SANTORA: What about the other side, the prochoice side that spends much more—take the National Abortion Rights League...
...The first time I ever said this to my Commonweal 14 February 1992: 11 husband, he looked at me like I had lost my mind...
...SANTORA: That's a danger today that the hierarchy is not seen as authoritative in a wider sense...
...That it is, as Sandra Day O'Connor once called it, "potential life...
...In its work with the poor and the disenfranchised the church does fabulously...
...This whole idea that we were always opposed to abortion is just nonsense...
...There's no doubt that I am in the liberal mainstream of Catholicism and that the people in the church whom I have the most affinity for are the most liberal...
...It's an Episcopal school...
...QUINDLEN: You can read hundreds of letters from them in my file drawer...
...But I really felt that the private schools in Manhattan are just about the best schools I've ever visited in my life...
...The New York Times, the Daily News, Newsday, the New York Post, the Newark StarLedger, and the Jersey Journal...
...Columnists from the New York Times were mentioned...
...That's one of the few things Randall Terry's ever said that makes sense to me...
...QUINDLEN: When you get negative mail, you've got to remember that people in agreement with you tend to finish their cup of coffee and go off to work...
...It's people who feel that they've developed through their attendance at church and through their attention to the Old and New Testament, a personal relationship with Jesus and what his lesson can teach them about behaving towards all people in their lives...
...I kept wanting to say to him, "Father, my parents used natural family planning which is why they had five children...
...SANTORA: That church: Is it all done within the family...
...Those are issues that directly affect my life and those are issues that are historically underreported...
...NARAL's primary mission is one thing...
...QUINDLEN: To some extent...
...On the other hand, you also take the liberal side of church issues...
...They commit a lot of money and resources to get their point across...
...To try to understand that here are a group of unmarried men handing down dogma on an issue which will never touch them in any sort of intimate way—handing it down to people whom it touches every day...
...SANTORA: Do you think the children miss something in not going to school with the kids they play with...
...Their attitude toward the most useful kind of dialogue just blows my mind...
...When you get up in the pulpit in St...
...QUINDLEN: I'm going to stay...
...But I'm sorry to say that some of the sentiments that I see in these letters, I see reflected in hierarchical responses...
...You do an op-ed page column and then people ask you to give speeches and ask for your opinion on whether we should send troops to the Persian Gulf...
...My experience of South Philadelphia and Bensonhurst is that it is not very much like [that...
...SANTORA: What's involved in that church of the people...
...There's a whole generation of Catholics growing up right now who will not learn everything about the church in any way, shape, or form approximating the way in which we learned...
...We make news on the basis of anybody saying anything we haven't heard before...
...I think that there's an enormous chasm between the church of the hierarchy and the church of the people...
...SANTORA: Isn't that the same as the press giving Al Sharpton a pulpit, even though it's a street pulpit...
...I read all the magazines I can get a hold of...
...But the fact of the matter is that I had heard things much like it growing up, which is one of the reasons why I used it...
...I think the church has shut its eyes to any evidence to the contrary...
...It seems to me that the Catholic church's primary mission is something quite different...
...First, there are many, many pastors who don't agree with that sort of approach...
...There are some nice private schools in Hoboken...
...Not change its position, not even articulate its position...
...SANTORA: What do you think is the future of the church...
...QUINDLEN: No...
...The prochoice movement, of which I am part, has failed to do that adequately too...
...Is that why the hierarchy is trying to pull back, trying to claim for itself once again authentic Catholic teaching because they feel there have been too many voices, such as theologians or commentators like yourself, that seem to be educating Catholics and they're afraid that they can't control that...
...First of all, because I miss them and, second of all, because I intend to be an important influence on their characters...
...That it is something in the middle...
...There is a list of what the sins are...
...Would you say that you're closer to that...
...QUINDLEN: I'm a novelist...
...I'm not afraid of being seen as a bad Catholic...
...You don't get to decide...
...But it really seems to me that the nineties is going to be a time when the issues that I care about most passionately are going to be at the forefront of American consciousness...
...All they have to do is see the oversell about birth control...
...To bridge that gap it has to be more ears and less mouth...
...And second of all, because I know that I represent many, many Catholics out there who feel the same way that I do...
...I mean that's one of the things that the church does that makes me crazy...
...SANTORA: You structure your day so that there's always time Commonweal 14 February 1992: 9 to be with them...
...QUINDLEN: I do...
...route when people are starving in the streets in the United States...
...Do you think there is Catholic bashing in the press...
...route and trying to...
...A lot of what I am already passing on to my children is substantially different from a lot of what I think of was the rule for kids...
...It's the Catholic church that ends with Leviticus—people who have never heard: love one another as I have loved you...
...It is a choice of people who don't feel compelled to go to church every Sunday...
...QUINDLEN: Right...
...Unless my husband manages to talk me into this after all these years, I'm going to stay put...
...SANTORA: Do you come across people like that...
...Do I think that is why the pope placed the current occupant in that job...
...Parishes that have child-care centers, parishes that have really excellent schools, parishes that have programs for adults that bring all of that together...
...The Holy Child nuns may want to disavow me...
...ANNA QUINDLEN: I was born in Philadelphia...
...I think there are sometimes when one gives way to the other...
...SANTORA: Cuomo says he's not [in favor of abortion] but he would keep it legal because there's no consensus...
...I'm Catholic...
...People say to me all the time, "Why do you have to write about the church...
...Who could have anticipated John XXIII and the incredible contribution he made to the church...
...Or didn't mean anything anymore...
...QUINDLEN: I already felt like I was in the spotlight from "Life in the 30s...
...QUINDLEN: Not much at all...
...But that was a change in my life as cataclysmic as Woodstock...
...Life in the 30s" was where I became public property...
...But that's a nostalgia for something that's over...
...You criticized the bishops for going the p.r...
...QUINDLEN: My husband is a New Jersey native...
...judge not that you not be judged...
...And brain waves...
...Isn't it possible that this is neither nonlife nor life...
...SANTORA: Do you think it's possible for you to pass Catholicism on only because you've gone through the institutional phase as a child and that has given you the foundation to be able to pass it on...
...Patrick's Cathedral and talk about how you're personally aware of priests performing exorcisms, you're making news...
...You don't decide...
...SANTORA: What's your institutional connection...
...If he's the kind of guy that Cardinal O'Connor is I mean, the idea that Cardinal O'Connor could take to the pulpit and say some of the things that he says and not think there's going to be public reportage of those things is preposterous...
...QUINDLEN: No...
...I never heard about the brain waves...
...I don't think that's possible for all parishes...
...Also people are no longer afraid of the church...
...And they try to rewrite history...
...if you disobey any of these tenets, you are in big trouble...
...QUINDLEN: I read six newspapers a day...
...Non-Catholics were afraid to write about the church because they felt they didn't really understand it...
...Yet, you've also indicated that you agonize over the fact that people have to resort to this...
...Catholic and Commonweal all the time...
...You didn't think of them as being viable...
...So that's how we wound up here...
...Certain magazines...
...First of all, because I know that I am a good Catholic...
...Shut its eyes, as it so often does on the hierarchical level, to the grey area...
...There is this mindset: the best thing you could do for your son is get him a job in the same place where you're working so that he could live near you and you can keep your family unit intact...
...SANTORA: So, you don't think the press has a role in glorifying the kinds of things he says...
...SANTORA: Why did you choose that...
...I think it's the center of the universe...
...Absolutely, I have no doubt about it...
...Does it have any contact with the institutional parish or church...
...I don't understand how anybody can take issue with what Rembert Weakland did in Milwaukee—just saying let's bring people together to talk about this so I can listen to them...
...I think people used to be afraid to write about the church...
...QUINDLEN: No, no...
...QUINDLEN: No, I criticized the bishops for spending $5 million to go the p.r...
...He went to Rutgers' Law School and knew he was going to practice law here and didn't l ike the idea of being a carpetbagger...
...So, there is education going on in the family and the church at a variety of different levels...
...my father was from West Philadelphia, which was predominantly Irish...
...SANTORA: Is this a sign of a pluralistic church...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 3
