Donohue's crusade Intellectual scorn for Catholicism is not the same as old-time bigotry
Jr, David R Carlin
OF SEVERAL MINDS DAVID R. CARLIN, JR. DONOHUE'S CRUSADE Tilting at the wrong windmill One of the most entertaining characters on the current American Catholic scene is William A. Donohue, who...
...It wants to establish a moral equivalence between the former and the latter...
...If some movie or TV program has a plot line that may be construed as anti-Catholic, you can be sure Donohue will promptly issue a press release anathematizing the offender...
...Like John Wayne, we don't claim to be smart, but we do claim to be fair...
...In short, there is something un-American in Donohue's attempt to silence critics of Catholicism by labeling them bigots...
...So you can't silence us by threatening to expose our opinions as erroneous, but you can shut us up in a minute by redefining those opinions as forms of bigotry...
...It would like the former to vanish just as thoroughly as the latter has...
...But the silenced critics won't go away...
...It may silence the philosophical opponents of Catholicism-especially the secularist critics, who are foes not so much of Catholicism in particular as of Christianity in general...
...DONOHUE'S CRUSADE Tilting at the wrong windmill One of the most entertaining characters on the current American Catholic scene is William A. Donohue, who heads the semiparanoid organization named The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties...
...A very different variety of philosophical anti-Catholicism is common today among secularists...
...The trouble with the Donohue nose, however, is that it fails to distinguish between two radically different phenomena that may both be given the "anti-Catholicism" label...
...Nature has endowed Mr...
...If we are to defend the faith effectively, we have to see the enemy out in the open...
...The secularist critique takes the form of a conditional syllogism with the conclusion suppressed: "If Christianity is true, then so is its moral code...
...The rules say we mustn't discriminate against the other fellow on the basis of creed, but we're perfectly free to disagree with the creed itself, even to disagree strongly...
...Who can blame him for desiring heavenly peace and quiet...
...They are less likely to view Catholicism as a perverted form of Christianity, more likely to view it as a quite authentic form...
...Instead of making an explicit, head-on attack on Christianity, it attacks indirectly, campaigning against traditional Christian moral rules and values...
...Once upon a time this was quite common in the United States, though it seems rare nowadays...
...We Americans commit intellectual errors with a perfectly good conscience, but we recoil from bigotry...
...But the United States is not paradise, nor is it meant to be...
...Silenced, their criticism goes underground or takes more subtle forms...
...but it continues to flourish at the fundamentalist end of the Protestant spectrum, where the Reformation still lives...
...Just when political correctness is going out of fashion," they will say, "the Catholics, with their characteristic ineptitude at reading the signs of the times, have decided to jump on the bandwagon...
...Once upon a time this was widespread among Protestants mindful of their Reformation heritage, who considered Catholicism a perverted form of Christianity, presided over by a papacy that was symbolized in holy Scripture by the Whore of Babylon...
...Therefore Christianity is false...
...It is meant to be an open society, in which people are free to argue for and against a wide range of ideas and values...
...But its moral code is false...
...and perhaps Mr...
...But since they regard Christianity in general to be false and dangerous, this concession of authenticity hardly gets Catholicism off the hook...
...Here is where Donohue's nose goes wrong...
...On the one hand there is discriminatory anti-Catholicism...
...Perhaps heaven is like that...
...the secularist section of the American nation is now too large and too influential for that to happen...
...But Donohue isn't the first to play the un-American bigotry card...
...Donohue with a very sensitive nose, capable of sniffing anti-Catholicism on every tainted breeze...
...On the other hand there is philosophical anti-Catholicism...
...This is the kind that tries to keep Catholics out of good jobs, schools, apartment buildings, social clubs, etc...
...One trouble with his strategy is that, if it catches on among Catholics, it will make us look foolish in the eyes of our more sophisticated non-Catholic neighbors...
...For decades now we've all been in danger of being called "anti-Semitic" if we found fault with the government of Israel, or "racist" if we criticized affirmative action, or "sexist" if we disapproved of abortion, or "homophobic" if we considered homosexual conduct immoral, and so on...
...Since liberal Protestantism has largely lost touch with its Reformation heritage, there is now little of this kind of thing found among liberal Protestants...
...A more serious trouble is that the strategy may actually succeed...
...And the rules are supposed to be the same for everybody: If, for example, secularists are not free to criticize Catholicism, then Catholics are not free to criticize secularism...
...It's the old political correctness game, and Donohue has decided Catholics ought to play it...
...This is the kind that considers the Catholic church to be the teacher of false doctrine and morality-and not only false but dangerously so...
...Donohue, in yearning for an America in which no one ever has a harsh thing to say about Catholicism, is yearning for heaven...
...Catholics, including many in the clergy, generally underestimate the strength of the anti-Christian element in contemporary American culture...
...I suppose it would be pleasant if no one ever had an unkind word to say about any idea, value, or institution that is dear to one's heart...
...Now, given the rules of American pluralism, the discriminatory species of anti-Catholicism is taboo, but the philosophical species is legitimate...
...It is not the least of the faults of the Donohue strategy that it encourages the foe to hide behind trees and bushes...
...It smells just as many bad odors in philosophical objections to Catholicism as in discriminatory objections to Catholics...
...In fact, he's very much a late-comer to the game...
Vol. 124 • May 1997 • No. 10
