[Vision2020] Here Comes Nobody

[Art Deco]

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May 19, 2012
Here Comes Nobody By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

WASHINGTON

I ALWAYS liked that the name of my religion was also an adjective meaning
all-embracing.

I was a Catholic and I wanted to be catholic, someone engaged in a wide
variety of things. As James Joyce wrote in “Finnegans Wake:” “Catholic
means ‘Here comes everybody.’ ”

So it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on
loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. Rather than
all-embracing, the church hierarchy has become all-constricting.

It was tough to top the bizarre inquisition of self-sacrificing American
nuns pushed by the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law. Law, the former head of
the Boston archdiocese, fled to a plush refuge in Rome in 2002 after it
came out that he protected priests who molested thousands of children.

But the craziness continued when an American priest, renowned for his TV
commentary from Rome on popes and personal morality, admitted last week
that he had fathered a child with a mistress.

The Rev. Thomas Williams belongs to the Legionaires of Christ, the order
founded by the notorious Mexican priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, a pal of
Pope John Paul II who died peppered with accusations that he sexually
abused seminarians and fathered several children and abused some of them.

The latest kooky kerfuffle was sparked by the invitation to Kathleen
Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, to speak at a graduation
ceremony at Georgetown University on Friday. The silver-haired former
Kansas governor is a practicing Catholic with a husband and son who
graduated from Georgetown. But because she fought to get a federal mandate
for health insurance coverage of contraceptives and morning-after pills,
including at Catholic schools and hospitals, Sebelius is on the hit list of
a conservative Catholic group in Virginia, the Cardinal Newman Society,
which militates to bar speakers at Catholic schools who support gay rights
or abortion rights.

The Society for Truth and Justice, a fringe Christian anti-abortion group,
compared Sebelius to Himmler, and protesters showed up on campus to yell at
her for being, as one screamed, “a murderer.”

“Remember, Georgetown has no neo-Nazi clubs or skinhead clubs on campus,
nor should they,” Bill Donohue, the Catholic League president, said on Fox
News. “But they have two — two! — pro-abortion clubs at Georgetown
University. Now they’re bringing in Kathleen Sebelius. They wouldn’t bring
in an anti-Semite, nor should they. They wouldn’t bring in a racist, nor
should they. But they’re bringing in a pro-abortion champion, and they
shouldn’t.”

Washington’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl called the invitation “shocking” and
upbraided the Georgetown president, John DeGioia. But DeGioia, who so
elegantly defended the Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke against Rush
Limbaugh’s nasty epithets, stood fast against dogmatic censorship.

Speaking to the graduates, Sebelius evoked J.F.K.’s speech asserting that
religious bodies should not seek to impose their will through politics. She
said that contentious debate is a strength of this country, adding that in
some other places, “a leader delivers an edict and it goes into effect.
There’s no debate, no criticism, no second-guessing.”

Just like the Vatican.

Twenty-eight years ago, weighing a run for president, Mario Cuomo gave a
speech at Notre Dame in which he deftly tried to explain how officials
could remain good Catholics while going against church dictums in shaping
public policy.

“The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or
church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party
chairman,” he said.

I called Cuomo to see if, as his son Andrew weighs running for president,
he felt the church had grown less tolerant.

“If the church were my religion, I would have given it up a long time ago,”
he said. “All the mad and crazy popes we’ve had through history,
decapitating the husbands of women they’d taken. All the terrible things
the church has done. Christ is my religion, the church is not.

“If they make the mistake of saying that a politician has to put the church
before the Constitution on abortion or other issues, there will be no
senators or presidents or any other Catholics in government. The church
would be wiser to take the path laid out for us by Kennedy than the path
laid out for us by Santorum.”

Absolute intolerance is always a sign of uncertainty and panic. Why do you
have to hunt down everyone unless you’re weak? The church doesn’t seem to
care if its members’ beliefs are based on faith or fear, conviction or
coercion. But what is the quality of a belief that exists simply because
it’s enforced?

“To be narrowing the discussion and instilling fear in people seems to be
exactly the opposite of what’s called for these days,” says the noted
religion writer Kenneth Briggs. “All this foot-stomping just diminishes the
church’s credibility even more.”

This is America. We don’t hunt heresies here. We welcome them.


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