Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Breslin doesn't seem like an angry man in person, but "The Church That Forgot Christ" is fueled by unquenchable bitterness and rage against the church that reared him and the vanished world of Irish Catholic Queens that fed it. He was brought up as a "stone Diocese of Brooklyn Catholic," as he puts it, and attended weekly mass for virtually his entire life. For most of that time, as a troublemaking, thumb-in-the-eye-of-power columnist for four different newspapers (the last 12 years for Newsday), he has served as New York's -- and maybe America's -- most vocal lay representative of the church's liberal, Vatican II wing. He is a social-justice Catholic, a civil rights Catholic, an anti-death penalty Catholic, a feminist Catholic, a gay rights Catholic. Once upon a time, those didn't seem like impossible or self-contradictory categories.
At his age, Breslin isn't the reporter he used to be, as he'll admit to anyone. But he retains one of the finest sets of eyes and ears in the news business, along with a unique ability to penetrate the absurdity and flat-out bullshit of so much public discourse, and his trademark staccato writing style. In the huge Aug. 29 march, when 500,000 people came out to the streets of New York to stand against George W. Bush, Breslin walked next to a college student carrying a cardboard casket as they passed a commemorative sign marking East 20th Street as Theodore Roosevelt Way:
"Of course something had to put that sign there and have it noticed on this day. For it was Roosevelt who in the end seems to have known so much and so many of the governments that followed so little.
"And here, as Sarah Kruger passed under the street sign, were the words Roosevelt thought should be commonplace in his country:
"'To announce that there should be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, it is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the American people.'
"And you could hear in the air his cry for lovely young Sarah Kruger: as she passed under his name carrying a casket: 'Bully!'"
I mention to Breslin that this article is likely to run on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, assuming that this consummate New Yorker will have something to say about that momentous event in the city's history. "I try not to pay attention to it," he says. "The anniversary is a day for exhibitionists, and for politicians trying to use it to their advantage. Who tried to use it more than Giuliani, the dog?" He uses another word, a gerund adjective, right before "dog."
"What would you want to be around it for? People I know don't care about it. I know the widow of a firefighter, and she doesn't want to hear anything about it. For me, the important anniversary came on the first Monday after the attacks, when everybody got up and went to work [after a week when the city was essentially closed down]. If their jobs were in Jersey City now, instead of lower Manhattan, then they got on the train and went to Jersey City."
In a recent column, Breslin observed that Osama bin Laden must need a new press agent, since no speaker at the Republican Convention was even willing to utter his name. "Well, one fellow mentioned it, he slipped up," he says. "It was [New York governor] George Pataki. And he had to make recompense with a scathing attack on Saddam Hussein, like he had anything to do with it."
Returning to the subject of Catholicism, I suggest to Breslin that from my limited perspective, as an "ethnic" Catholic whose ties to the church are those of blood and heritage rather than faith, the left-progressive strain of the church doesn't seem dead yet. He waves me away with a shut-up-already gesture. "There was only one person," he says. "Pope John XXIII was the only one we ever had, period. There was nothing before or after."
Maybe that's not a defensible statement on a factual or logical level, but it's the kind of emotional, electrical columnist's shorthand in which Breslin specializes. This is a guy who has done what he calls "the unthinkable" by abandoning the church of his upbringing and his forefathers. He clearly isn't alone. "The Church That Forgot Christ" is an impressionistic, anecdotal book in a vintage Breslin groove (which you either get or don't get), but if it can be said to have a central argument, it's that the current crisis in Catholicism is much wider and cuts much deeper than we now realize.
In his book, Breslin writes, "There have been four great movements in modern America that occurred without the news reporting industry knowing anything about them until they became a part of regular life. The first was civil rights, then the women, and, third, homosexuals and, last and suddenly, the crumbling of the Catholic church."
The clerical sexual abuse stories may have faded from the front page with the presidential campaign and the war in Iraq, but new cases of almost unbelievable depravity keep surfacing, seemingly by the dozen. The church now says it suspects there are something like 4,000 bad priests and 10,000 cases of abuse in the United States, which by any objective standard is a horrifying number. But Breslin insists that based on his reporting, which by its nature is anecdotal and subjective rather than scientific, he believes that's only the tip of the iceberg. The true number, he thinks, is 25,000 pedophile priests and something like 100,000 abused children in the years since 1950.
In other words, the Catholic Church in America became, at best, an institutional safe harbor for rapists and child molesters. The vow of celibacy became a cloak worn by warped and damaged men incapable of forming adult emotional attachments, who used their power and privilege to prey on the children entrusted to them by believers. It's hard to overemphasize how gravely the American church has been wounded by these last few years, or how deeply the church hierarchy, with its endless litany of lies, denials, evasions and weasel words, has been implicated.
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