[Vision2020] Many Kinds of Catholic

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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March 19, 2012
Many Kinds of Catholic By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

If Catholicism is measured by obeisance to the pope, his cardinals and the
letter of Vatican law, then Rick Santorum is the best Catholic to ever get
this far in presidential politics.

He doesn’t just oppose abortion as a private matter of personal conscience.
He has made that position a defining crusade.

He hasn’t just been fruitful and multiplied. He has promulgated the
church’s formal prohibition against artificial birth control, yanking this
issue, too, into the public square.

On homosexuality, premarital sex,
pornography<http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/President/2012/0317/Rick-Santorum-vows-to-end-pandemic-of-pornography.-Could-he-prevail>and
more, he doesn’t just take his cues from church dictums. He trumpets
that alignment as a testament to the steadfastness of his devotion, the
integrity of his faith.

And for this he has been rewarded with a truly noteworthy level of Catholic
support.

Noteworthy because it’s so underwhelming.

Exit polling suggests that he lost the Catholic vote to Mitt Romney, a
Mormon, by 7 percentage points in
Michigan<http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/catholic-vote-costs-santorum-in-michigan/?scp=5&sq=romney%20catholic%20voters&st=cse>and
by 13 in
Ohio <http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/states/ohio/exit-polls>.
These weren’t isolated cases. In primary after primary, more Catholics have
gravitated to Romney than to Santorum (or, for that matter, to Newt
Gingrich, a Catholic-come-lately who collaborated with his third wife to
make a worshipful documentary about Pope John Paul
II<http://www.ninedaysthatchangedtheworld.com/>).


This is a hurdle that Santorum must overcome to win the primary in
Illinois, whose population is about 30 percent Catholic. And it’s yet more
proof of most American Catholics’ estrangement from an out-of-touch,
self-consumed church hierarchy and its musty orthodoxies.

For months now the adjective Catholic has been affixed to the country’s
strange contraception debate, which began when many Catholic leaders took
offense at a federal mandate that Catholic institutions provide insurance
coverage for artificial birth control.

But most American Catholics don’t share their appointed leaders’ qualms
with the pill, condoms and such. These leaders have found traction largely
among people — Catholic and otherwise — concerned about government
overreach. And the whole discussion has opened the door to plaints about
morality from evangelicals, who warm to Santorum more than Catholics do.

American Catholics have been merrily ignoring the church’s official
position on contraception for many years, often with the blessing of
lower-level clerics. When my mother dutifully mentioned her I.U.D. during
confession back in the 1970s, the parish priest told her that she really
needn’t apologize or bring it up again. Which was a good thing, since she
had no intention of doing away with it. Four kids were joy and aggravation
enough.

Despite church condemnation of abortion and same-sex marriage, American
Catholics’ views on both don’t diverge that much from those of Americans in
general. These Catholics look to the church not for exacting rules, but for
a locus for their spirituality, with rituals and an iconography that feel
familiar and thus comfortable. In matters religious, as in “The Wizard of
Oz,” there’s no place like home, and Catholicism is as much ethnicity as
dogma: something in the blood, and something in the bones.

The Catholic hierarchy, meanwhile, keeps giving American Catholics fresh
reasons for rebellion. As The Times’s Laurie Goodstein reported last
week<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/us/catholic-church-pressures-victims-network-with-subpoenas.html?ref=lauriegoodstein>,
lawyers for the church in Missouri have begun a campaign of intimidation
against a support group for victims of sexually abusive priests: they’re
trying to compel the group to release decades of internal documents.

This may be cunning legal strategy, but it’s lousy public relations and
worse pastoral care. Which isn’t any surprise.

I’ve been monitoring and occasionally writing about the church’s child
sex-abuse crisis since 1992, and most of church leaders’ apologies and
instances of constructive outreach have come about reluctantly, belatedly
or with a palpable sense from many bishops and cardinals that they were the
aggrieved, victimized ones.

As they complained about excessive media attention, they frequently lost
sight of its heinous root: a great many priests molested a great many
children, who were especially vulnerable to them — and especially damaged
by them — because they called themselves men of God. And for a great many
years, church leaders actively concealed these crimes, which continued.

For the church ever to grouse that critics make too much of this, let alone
to retaliate against victims and accusers, is galling. But it helps explain
the breach between the hierarchy — invested in its own survival, resistant
to serious discussions about the celibate culture’s role in child sexual
abuse — and everyday Catholics. They’re left to wonder where they fit into
their church and how it fits into the modern world.

They don’t really constitute a voting bloc, because their political
allegiances reflect income and education as much as creed. That’s a big
part of their resistance to Santorum.

But it’s also true that his particular Catholicism isn’t theirs. It’s the
hierarchy’s. And his poor performance among Catholics should cause
cardinals, bishops and the candidate himself to rethink the way they
approach their religion.

•

I invite you to visit my blog <http://bruni.blogs.nytimes.com/>, follow me
on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on
Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/frankbruninyt>
.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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