An Exercise in Spigotry

POLITICS, POWER, AND THE CHURCH by Lawrence Lader (Macmillan: $22.95; 320 pp.)

A hundred and fifty years ago, anti-Catholicism was a thriving enterprise. Books telling of young girls lured away to orgy-ridden convents, tracts warning of papal plots to crush American liberties with the votes of fast-breeding Catholic immigrants, were best sellers. Not only hack propagandists but some notable Americans contributed to this stream of literature--Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of telegraphy, for example, and the distinguished New England preacher Lyman Beecher. They were doubtless sincere in their fears but they let prejudice and ignorance twist fact into fantasy.

“Politics, Power and the Church” may be pale and genteel by 19th-Century standards, but it is unmistakably in the same tradition. “The development of Catholic power,” it begins,” . . . has followed a careful design.” The first stage of this “careful design” involved the creation of urban political machines “as much at the service of the hierarchy as the political bosses.” The latest stage has been a successful grab for “national power,” achieved through alliance with Protestant Fundamentalists. We are only on Page 1.

Lader marches through all the issues of public morality and church-state tension that have been the stuff of recent controversy: abortion; public subsidies for parents choosing religious schools; church teaching on marriage, divorce, and birth control; church wealth, media power, and Vatican financial scandals. As a Catholic layman and editorialist I have been at odds with official church positions in several of these areas, but in no case do I find that Lader has given readers anything resembling a fair presentation of the arguments on both sides and the principles at stake. Lader mixes one-sided and often dubious interpretations of constitutional theory with choice examples of overbearing behavior by local church officials, many drawn from the ‘40s and ‘50s, even as far back as the 1920s. His language is loaded: The hierarchy “violently” opposed the ERA; church opposition to homosexual acts is based on a “twisted” interpretation of Scripture and consists of “furious denunciations”; a Conservative cardinal is an “unrelenting bullyboy.” Of course no one on Lader’s side of these debates is ever found campaigning “violently,” issuing “furious” denunciations, or being “unrelenting,” let alone a bullyboy.

Lader’s selection of facts, anecdotes, and authorities is as loaded as his language. For intermittent stretches of the text, he sets Catholicism aside entirely to denounce--I hesitate to say “furiously”--Fundamentalists. Indeed, on the last page of his book he invokes what is meant to be an ominous 1850 declaration about converting all of American by a Catholic archbishop (a statement that was actually considered notoriously aggressive even in its time); but then afraid “it may be easy to dismiss” such 130-year-old braggadocio, Lader caps it with a 20-year-old “Mormon work” prophesying a “Mormon takeover of the United States.” So whom are we to fear? Rome? Salt Lake City? Will the next Pope be a Mormon? Whatever is operating here, it’s not logic.

There are other logical problems with Lader’s thesis. It is a staple of this kind of literature, for example, that church officials never pursue their controversial policies out of sincere conviction but rather from cold calculations of power. Thus the hierarchy’s interest in immigration legislation does not spring from any straightforward concern for Latino parishioners but reflects the fact that with “other ethnic groups mainly limiting their children through birth control . . . the expansion of the Catholic constituency depends on Hispanics.” The Vatican can “greatly strengthen its base in the United States . . . with a new flood of job-seeking immigrants.” The same concern with swelling the Catholic population explains the church’s opposition to abortion and “the Vatican grip on marriage, divorce, and the family.” Yet one of Lader’s chief complaints is that the church campaigns for the whole society, and not just Catholics, to reject abortion. And by his own testimony the church’s refusal to recognize remarriage after divorce is driving away many of the faithful. Neither position, then, makes sense in his narrow terms of population and political power.

But damn the logic, full steam ahead. Lader’s image of the church is of a monolithic, authoritarian machine that is implacably reactionary and self-aggrandizing. “The Pope rules a bureaucracy as supreme monarch, the largest in the world: 4,000 archbishops and bishops, 400,000 priests, and almost one million nuns and brothers, controlling a worldwide constituency of 855.6 million people.” It is an evil empire, challenged only by a small but brave group of rebellious dissidents. Does this image really explain why Catholic bishops may be welcomed at the White House and in Fundamentalist circles when it comes to abortion and school vouchers but sharply criticized when it comes to the hierarchy’s positions on nuclear weaponry and economic rights? Does it explain why the bishops’ pastoral letters on these latter topics were so openly drafted, debated, and revised? Does it explain why even the Pope has had to compromise and proceed gradually in promoting his particular strategy for the church? Wouldn’t it be easier to admit that the church is far less monolithic and far more decentralized than Lader assumes, and that Catholics are not now--indeed, never were--the compliant tools he imagines? When a Catholic like Phyllis Schlafly campaigns against abortion or the ERA, Lader makes her part of the church’s “careful design;” when she disagrees with the bishops on nuclear weaponry, he has no explanation except for her apparent wrong-headedness. What about the possibility that she is simply a Catholic citizen who can think for herself and not a robot agent of the bishops--just like a Gov. Mario Cuomo, whose pattern of agreement and disagreement with hierarchical policies is quite different?

Lader, of course, approves of the Catholic bishops’ stances on nuclear war and economic justice, just as he approves of liberation theology, Catholic feminism, and any other religious activism in “progressive” causes. Despite a few lame efforts to explain why these political efforts (and their liberal Protestant, but not Fundamentalist, counterparts) do not run afoul of the strict church-state separation he invokes at other times, it is apparent that he has no real theory of how religion and politics should relate. He just turns his approval on or off like a spigot depending on what he thinks of the cause at hand. The absurdity of this spigotry is revealed when he contrasts the “divisiveness” of the Catholic hierarchy’s stances to the supposed anti-slavery consensus hammered out by the 19th-Century Abolitionist clergy. Not even the admission that “finally . . . it took the bloodiest of civil wars to . . . abolish slavery” provokes him to rethink his comparison.

If the term spigotry puts one in mind of a less pleasant word, the connection is entirely appropriate. The Catholic church is a large, influential, and very human institution. There are many valid and substantial questions that can be raised about its teachings, its internal structure, and its public role, and there is no shortage of places where those questions are being currently debated, both by Catholics and non-Catholics. Readers looking for a thoughtful, fair-minded treatment of politics, power, and the church will not, however, find it in this book.