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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Isn't the church hierarchy, I ask Breslin, now making common cause with its longtime adversaries, the Protestant fundamentalists of the Christian right? "Well, the bishops are more comfortable with them, I think," he says. "Execution, they say they're against it." He makes a growling, throaty noise I take to be laughter. "They're for it! Why don't they stop lying? The war in Iraq, they hardly whisper about it. The pope says he spoke out against it. Well, I'm unfamiliar with the stridency of his demands that the war end. I don't see any social good they do these days."
If you want a clear and cogently argued discussion of the current crisis in American Catholicism, or a journalistic history of the clerical abuse scandal so far, you'll want a different book, maybe Garry Wills' "Why I Am a Catholic" or Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett's "Gospel of Shame," or the riveting "Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church," by the staff of the Boston Globe. "The Church That Forgot Christ" is something else, something very much in the Catholic tradition: I'd call it a lamentation.
Most vividly, Breslin's book offers a quasi-nostalgic tour of his old stomping grounds, amid the semidetached houses of Irish and Italian Queens, from Woodside to South Ozone Park, from Forest Hills to Jackson Heights. It's a world that has all but disappeared; a generation ago Queens was still the homeland of New York's "white ethnics," while today it is one of the most diverse places on the planet. (Elmhurst Hospital reportedly has access to interpreters for more than 150 languages, including Hmong, Albanian, Bengali and Yoruba.)
Breslin recalls many of the people and places of the old Queens tenderly, but he doesn't exactly miss it. When he returns to the parochial school in Richmond Hill where he was educated and finds that many of its students, and many neighborhood residents, are now Sikh immigrants, he seems positively delighted. "I thought they were great," he tells me. "I didn't know anything about their religion, but they told me that they believe men and women are equal, people of all faiths are equal." In other words, whatever their issues and problems may be, at least they're not the same old sour Irish Catholics.
His book has been criticized for its intemperate remarks about the Irish and their American great-grandchildren, but if Jimmy Breslin is not qualified to make those judgments, then for the love of God, who is? "You can blame the church's condition on the Irish, who gave us total religious insanity," he writes. "They are a race that sat in the rain for a couple of thousand years and promoted the most crazed beliefs in personal living outside of the hillbillies."
Of course those are deliberately outrageous statements, and they don't reflect the most nuanced understanding of Irish history. But I defy any Irish or Irish-American person to read them and not laugh the bitter laughter of recognition. Breslin is right that the Irish who came to America were the poorest of the dirt-poor, the wariest of a wary race, the likeliest to follow orders, ask no questions and do whatever was necessary to get along. While Ireland itself has blossomed in the last generation, Irish-Americans as a whole remain a conservative, conformist group, a race of insurance salesmen, accountants and sentimental drunks.
"You couldn't have the religion they were running unless you had a lot of impoverished peasants to follow you," Breslin says. "Peasants who do what they're told." The church hierarchy may believe it has a new generation of peasants to dominate -- immigrants from Latin America, Africa and the Philippines now form the bedrock of the American church -- but there is clearly a problem. The hierarchy and the priesthood are still overwhelmingly composed of aging Irish-Americans, and the supply of young men willing to take a vow of chastity to enter a dubious profession whose prestige is shattered has evaporated. (Many dioceses have begun importing young priests from Africa, which has created new racial and cultural dilemmas.)
Breslin remembers being at a church luncheon a few years ago when the late Cardinal John O'Connor, then the New York archbishop, offered to personally drive any interested young man to the seminary. "There were, I think, seven men training for the priesthood in the New York archdiocese at that time," Breslin says.
"It's a lifestyle that has been demolished by the steady change in the pages of the calendar. You can't ask young people today to lead such a cold, restricted life. There was an era when a mother with four children in Queens proudly sent one of the sons off to become a priest. It was like becoming a congressman or senator, a tremendous thing. The family was proud and the kid was proud. He wasn't in there to hide from sex, he was in forward motion, he was doing something. Now that's gone. We don't get that anymore."
In his book, Breslin dares to imagine a renewed and liberated vision of the Catholic faith. His faith and the Roman Catholic Church as it now exists, he writes, are different things, "separate and unequal." He imagines people holding masses in their homes, around the kitchen table, leaving the priesthood and the hierarchy behind. He imagines Catholics who cast off the church's wealth and grandeur, following the example of a certain Jewish carpenter who wore cast-off clothes, slept rough and threw the money-changers out of the temple. (When I suggest that from the point of view of religious history this idea of an intimate and personal Christian faith already exists, and that it is called Protestantism, Breslin doesn't want to hear it.) He imagines a new church in which the priesthood is open to men and women, married or single, gay or straight.
He imagines himself ending his career as a priest or bishop in this new church. Reading his book, I thought he was kidding, but as he talks about it now I can see that he isn't. "My wife -- she's Jewish, but forget the religion for a minute -- if we were at a parish, we'd get housing," he says. "And it's good brick housing usually. I would do the sermons. She's a politician, she could do the social work wonderfully. It would be a good, productive life, one you could be proud of and enjoy."
It's a wistful, genial image -- the aging but unquenchable newspaperman-turned-priest with the Jewish wife, ensconced in the good brick housing and noble social work of a modest Queens parish. But Jimmy Breslin knows the Catholic Church will not be redeemed in this way, not in his lifetime or mine. His housing will continue to be a Manhattan high-rise and his sermons will appear three times a week in the pages of Newsday.
He pauses and you can see the sadness of a man who has left the church of his fathers behind, late in life. Could the current Catholic hierarchy do anything, I ask, to get him back? He shrugs. "They can go. Just go."
