The New Anti-Catholicism by Philip Jenkins Anti-Catholicism in America by Mark S Massa
McCarraher, Eugene
SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE The New Anti-Catholicism The Last Acceptable Prejudice Philip Jenkins Oxford University Press, $27, 258 pp. Anti-Catholicism in America The Last Acceptable Prejudice...
...Evangelical or secular, anti-Catholicism, Massa suggests, can be a sign that Catholics are doing something right...
...In this vast and surging sea of infidels and heretics, Jenkins sees a motley but coherent pattern of anti-Catholic bigotry, energized, he claims, by the sexual and gender politics that have come to define the American left since the 1960s...
...24.95, 272 pp...
...columnists at the New York Times and the Nation...
...Massa's chapter on the debate between Blanshard and John Courtney Murray is the most incisive treatment ever of L'affaire Blanshard...
...And I'm glad to see someone pillory the lightweight and theologically illiterate Maureen Dowd, the Peggy Noonan of liberal journalism...
...Jenkins also deserves applause for dismissing the soft-headed notion of "hate speech" and for excoriating the phony, homogenized "pluralism" routinely invoked by liberals...
...Not that Massa celebrates this trait unequivocally...
...Massa's examination of Chick's popular Web site-home of such classics as "the Death Cookie," a parody of the Eucharist-is a model for theological analysis of popular culture...
...And because he culls so much of his evidence from academia and the culture industries, he obscures the genuine diversity and sophistication that characterize feminist, gay, and lesbian opinion about Catholicism...
...When secularized, Blanshard's sort of dialectical imagination became the moral and metaphysical universe in which "democracy" acquired religious authority once ascribed to the church...
...The main currents of American culture have been 'dialectical'-read Reformed Protestant- in that they are skeptical and even dismissive of tradition and authority...
...Anti-Catholicism in America The Last Acceptable Prejudice Mark S. Massa, S J Crossroad...
...By conceding that "of-fensiveness" depends on an "individual's capacity to take offense," he risks making anti-Catholicism (or any other kind of bigotry) a matter of sensibility...
...Whether or not they are "prejudiced," non-Catholics rightly perceive, Massa contends, that Catholics do indeed "see a different world than the one many Americans accept as normative and self-evidently 'real.'" Drawing on theologian David Tracy and sociologist Andrew Greeley, Massa argues that Catholics exhibit an "analogical imagination" that stresses community, institutional expression of faith, and the sacramental character of everyday life...
...Such has been "the (blessed) lot of the saints in every age...
...Yet, as Massa writes, Peale's tribalism, Chick's conspiracy delusions, and Swaggart's vilification all constitute a "more extreme version" of much that is already there in evangelical religious culture...
...Although the chapter on Blanshard will confirm conservatives in their suspicion of liberal "tolerance," Massa devotes the bulk of his book to the history of evangelical Protestant anti-Catholicism...
...These three chapters-on Norman Vincent Peale and the 1960 presidential election, the anti-Catholic cartoons of "Jack Chick," and the career of Jimmy Swaggart-make for both comic and unsettling reading...
...the Know-Nothingism of the 1850s...
...Thus, anti-Catholicism "is rooted in a profound intellectual tradition of Christian theology"-an assertion that makes for the delicious irony that Christopher Durang and Katha Pollitt are the heirs of John Calvin and Cotton Mather...
...Jenkins demonstrates conclusively that anti-Catholic stereotypes and caricatures abound in contemporary liberalism...
...Both Jenkins and Massa affirm the prevailing explanations of American anti-Catholicism: Protestant fear of Catholic religious culture...
...Dubbing anti-Catholicism "the most significant unconfronted prejudice in modern America," Jenkins commences a sweeping and pugnacious remonstrance against contemporary detractors of the faith...
...It's good news, he writes, that "Catholicism doesn't completely fit into the lively experiment that is the United States, and probably never will...
...Much about the priest scandals can be explained, he thinks, by the "analogical" tendency to trust too uncritically in the good will and judgment of hierarchies...
...For every George Marsden or Mark Noll, there are five of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson...
...And Mark Massa- co-director of the Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham and the author of For God, Country, and Notre Dame (1999), a fine study of American Catholic culture after World War II-concludes that a good deal of anti-Catholic "prejudice" reflects, however invidiously, a reaction to real characteristics of Catholic faith...
...cable and network TV executives and performers...
...the artists and promoters of Piss Christ, Sensation!, and Stigmata...
...Jenkins's seven-chapter bill of indictment names a host of offenders: feminist biblical scholars...
...That's a fine and courageous point to make in the face of efforts to demonstrate that Catholics, too, can be "good Americans" who pile up money and salute the flag...
...Moreover, though he grants "room for humor and satire" that "raises important questions or deflates extremist positions," Jenkins never delineates how large the room should be, or even how we're supposed to measure it...
...Recalling Sinead O'Connor tearing up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live, Jenkins forgets the negative public response that effectively ruined her career...
...and liberal democratic fear that the church would abolish religious and political freedom...
...the American Protective Association and the Ku Klux Klan...
...Massa's perception of Blanshard's covert religiosity enables him to appreciate, as Murray wrote of his antagonist in a harsh but impeccable judgment, that liberal "open-mindedness" often disguises "a closure of mind and an edge of antagonism that would be the envy of a Bible-belt circuit rider...
...Catholics suffer derisive comments that would be immediately and rightly condemned when directed at Jews, Muslims, or racial and sexual minorities...
...Noting the recent spate of antipapal books, he offers a comparative (if not always convincing) assessment of their scholarly shortcomings, especially those of the inept and scurrilous Daniel Goldhagen...
...He condemns the contemptuous treatment accorded the prolife Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey by the Democratic Party establishment in 1992, but doesn't ask why Casey was subsequently invited to express his views by the Village Voice, hardly an outpost of the curia...
...ACT-UP church invaders and transvestites in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence...
...Philip Jenkins-a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State, and the author of The Next Christendom (2002), a provocative book on the coming (conservative) victory of African, Asian, and Latin Christianity-isn't Catholic (any longer-he's now an Episcopalian...
...If there's one fault in Massa's book, it's his failure or reluctance to draw the conclusion, justified amply by his evidence, that fundamentalist-evangelical Protestantism, not "secular humanism," has been and remains the largest, most toxic reservoir of anti-Catholicism in contemporary America...
...Often understood as "secularist" bigotry against Catholicism, Blanshard's opposition to "Catholic power" depended, Massa demonstrates, on a conception of "American freedom" that retained a considerable moral and intellectual residue of Calvinism...
...In all three cases, an evangelical fusion of individualist theology and "cultural bullying" illustrate the "dark underside" of the dialectical imagination...
...The dialectical imagination affirms individualism, private judgment, and an instrumental approach to reality...
...When they arrive at the present, however, Jenkins and Massa part company decisively...
...Eugene McCarraher, a frequent contributor, is an assistant professor of humanities at Villanova University...
...nativist fear of contamination by the unwasped masses...
...Still, Jenkins mars his worthy defense, playing fast and loose with a good deal of his material...
...Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures (1836), a lurid blend of religious polemic and soft-core porn...
...The main problem, concealed by and reflected in the proliferation of detail, is that Jenkins never clarifies the distinction between "prejudice" and serious disagreement...
...As Jesus warned the disciples, be wary when all men speak well of you...
...Both authors open with surveys of the history of American anti-Catholicism, from the colonial era, through the protracted and occasionally violent antagonism between Protestants and Catholics that marked the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the entente cordiale of ecumenism that bolstered cold-war culture...
...Can't you take a joke...
...One would be wrong...
...Eugene McCarraher nudging by the near simultaneous appearance of these two studies, by respected scholars, with the same subtitle, one would think that a novel and especially virulent strain of anti-Catholicism runs rampant through the land, and that two defenders of the One True Church have finally said, "Enough...
...and the career of Paul Blanshard, whose American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949) enjoyed the imprimatur of John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, and other paragons of liberal righteousness...
...Evangelical anti-Catholicism makes many Catholic intellectuals very uneasy, eager as they are to be political allies or "ecumenical" academic colleagues...
...Massa's insight into the theological nature of anti-Catholicism gives his study an interpretive breadth and coherence lacking in Jenkins's compilation of outrages...
...Both recount familiar episodes in this sordid tale: Puritan abhorrence of "the Whore of Rome" (implanted at an early age in "Break the Pope's Neck," a popular game among the virtuous urchins of the City on a Hill...
...On this point, Massa sidesteps the whole issue of "prejudice" and changes the subject by looking at anti-Catholicism through a distinctly theological lens...
Vol. 130 • September 2003 • No. 15
