Tuesday, May 13, 2008
New York's greatest living newspaper columnist says the Catholic Church, corrupted by sexual scandal and creeping right-wing ideology, is dying out in America. And he sheds no tears.
Sep 11, 2004 | Jimmy Breslin wants to start his own church. He's had enough of the old one after almost 74 years, and who can blame him?
When you look back over the career of New York's consummate common-man columnist -- one of the best at cramming characters, emotion and sense of place into a 650-word rectangle of newsprint that Gotham has ever seen -- his break with the Roman Catholic Church has been a long time coming. It wasn't exactly the sexual abuse scandal itself that sent Breslin over the edge, although he's been covering it with intense and deepening anger for the last two years. Instead, he says, it was one of the scandal's side effects: discovering that one of the American church's most prominent men of God was a niggling, pedantic little man.
"A couple of things did it," Breslin tells me in his gargling-with-glass Queens accent. "I think, most of all, it was reading the transcripts of Cardinal Egan, when he was the bishop up in Bridgeport [Conn.], quibbling over the classification of a young man who was abused." That would be Cardinal Edward Egan, who was appointed archbishop of New York, and hence de facto leader of the American church, despite his indirect implication in an especially seamy scandal at his former diocese in Connecticut.
"They were in court over the issue of -- did the priest bite his penis or did the kid bite the priest's penis? It was confusing," Breslin says drily. Egan objected to the opposing attorney's reference to the young man in the case as a child, since he had been a college freshman at the time. "He was testifying, Egan, and he wondered whether they should call this kid a child or a young man, because he was a student at Sacred Heart College. Basically, he was quibbling over the classification of a young man who was involved in a sexual act with a priest."
When you sit and talk with him, Breslin is a rumpled but guarded presence; like so many reporters, he keeps his own counsel. But here he sits up straight in his chair and spreads his hands wide, in a classic pose of street-corner argumentation. "Well, come on!" he says. "What are you, a cheap defense lawyer in Queens Criminal Court? Or what are you? Are you a church leader? Someone who can rise above this? No!"
Later in the same testimony, Egan went even further. He proposed the novel idea that bishops and other figures in the church hierarchy could not be held responsible for crimes committed by priests, because priests were private contractors rather than employees. To even the most firmly lapsed of ex-Catholics, this was a shocker: The men uniquely entrusted with the role of mediating between God and man, uniquely empowered to transform a translucent cracker into the flesh of Our Savior, had the same legal status, according to the archbishop, as traveling encyclopedia salesmen. "That was enraging," Breslin says, now quiet again. "Such an outright, blatant lie."
I visit Breslin on a brilliant summer morning at his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side to talk about the eccentric and highly personal new book that marks his farewell to Catholicism, "The Church That Forgot Christ." The housekeeper lets me in; Breslin isn't there. He arrives a few minutes later, damp from a morning swim and a shower, still wearing a robe and flip-flops, and offers me coffee. He lives with his wife, former New York City Council member Ronnie Eldridge, in one of those brand new luxury penthouse apartments that looks like a furnished suite at the airport Hilton. At first it seems like a funny place to encounter the quintessential voice of the outer-borough working class. But as a friend of mine observed later, it's exactly the kind of digs the outer-borough working class would live in if they could afford to.
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