German chancellor Angela Merkel decided to intervene. “This should not be allowed to pass without consequences,” she said. “The Pope and the Vatican should clarify unambiguously that there can be no denial and that there must be positive relations with the Jewish community overall.”70
While searing to the Pope and wounding to Catholics, the episode was instructive. Many Catholics awoke to the realization that they were deluding themselves in assuming their church’s critics were acting in good faith.
There is a cultural conflict in the West between Christianity and secularism. At issue is who has moral authority in the modern world. Secularists seek out clashes with the Church in which they can claim the moral high ground and force Rome repeatedly to capitulate. They look upon such Church troubles as Williamson’s views as opportunities to force Rome into one apology after another until the Church’s moral authority is wholly eroded. Georg Ratzinger, the Pope’s brother, who came to his defense and called Merkel a theological ignoramus, had the correct instinct.
The Pope and the Vatican, having done all they could do, declared the matter closed. Yet when Benedict visited Israel and Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, the nation’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, he was subjected to a barrage from rabbis and politicians for not apologizing for the Church’s role in or for Pius XII’s alleged complicity in the Holocaust, even though both Catholic and Jewish scholars have declared these accusations to be malicious lies.
RETURN OF A CHURCH MILITANT?
By late 2009, U.S. bishops decided things had gone so far in the culture and politics that appeasement had to yield to confrontation on moral precepts. When the House debate on health care was at its hottest, the Catholic bishops issued a stunning ultimatum: impose an absolute ban on tax funding for abortions, or we will call for the defeat of the entire Pelosi-Obama health care bill.
Message received. The Stupak amendment, named for Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, outlawing all federal funding, direct or indirect, for abortions, was passed with the support of sixty House Democrats, to the astonished rage of the pro-choice caucus. Said Stupak: “The Catholic Church used their power—their clout, if you will—to influence this issue. They had to. It’s a basic teaching of the religion.”71
No Democratic member was more upset than Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, the son of Edward Kennedy and nephew of JFK, who proceeded to bash the Church for imperiling the greatest advance for human rights in a generation.
Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin responded, accusing Kennedy of an unprovoked attack on the Church and demanding an apology. Kennedy retorted that Bishop Tobin had already told him not to receive communion at Mass and ordered diocesan priests not to give him communion.72
“False!” the bishop fired back.
Bishop Tobin said he had sent Kennedy a private letter in February 2007 indicating that he ought not receive communion, as he was scandalizing the Church, but he had not instructed priests to deny him communion.
As Rhode Island is the nation’s most Catholic state, Kennedy fell silent, but received a parting shot from Bishop Tobin: “Your position is unacceptable to the Church and scandalous to many of our members. It absolutely diminishes your Communion with the Church.”73
The clash made national news. And Bishop Tobin’s public chastisement of a Catholic politician who carries the most famous name in U.S. politics was made more significant because it seemed to reflect a new militancy in a hierarchy that had been largely AWOL from the political arena for decades. Soon after, Kennedy, facing a tough reelection, announced he would not run again.
Other bishops have begun to challenge our Lords Temporal. Archbishop Donald Wuerl informed the Washington, D.C., city council that rather than have Catholic social institutions recognize same-sex marriages and grant gay unions the rights and benefits of married couples, he would shut these institutions down and let the city take them over. When the law passed, Catholic Charities of D.C. ended its foster care program to avoid placing children with same-sex couples.
Archbishop Dolan sent an op-ed to the New York Times charging the paper with anti-Catholic bigotry and using a double standard in judging the Church. Commenting on the “horrible” scandal of priests abusing children, said the archbishop, the Times demanded the “release of names of abusers, rollback of the statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency.”74
When the Times “exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuses in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish Community … forty cases of such abuses in this tiny community last year alone,” the district attorney swept the scandal under the rug while the Times held up the carpet. Archbishop Dolan singled out a “scurrilous … Times diatribe” by columnist Maureen Dowd “that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had she so criticized an Islamic, Jewish or African-American” faith. Dowd, he wrote, “digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription … into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics and his recent welcome to Anglicans.”75
Dowd’s column reads like something out of the Menace, the anti-Catholic Know Nothing newspaper of a century ago, said the archbishop. The Times refused to publish Archbishop Dolan’s stinging rebuke.
Nor are these the only signs of a new Catholic militancy that was first manifest when scores of bishops denounced Notre Dame for inviting Obama to speak at the 2009 graduation and receive an honorary degree.
In an address to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in 2009, Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s highest court, said, “In a culture which embraces an agenda of death, Catholics and Catholic institutions are necessarily counter-cultural.”76
Exactly. Catholicism is necessarily an adversary culture in an America where secularism has captured the culture, from Hollywood to the media, the arts and the academy, and relishes nothing more than mockery of the Church of Rome. In a sign of Vatican approval of their defense of the Church and Faith, in October 2010, Archbishops Burke and Wuerl were elevated to the College of Cardinals.
In November 2010, Archbishop Dolan was elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the voice and face of the Church in America. In the balloting for vice president, Archbishop Chaput was runner-up to Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, an outspoken adversary of same-sex marriage. Said the Reverend Thomas Reese of Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown, “This is a signal that the conference wants to be a leader in the culture wars.”77
QUO VADIS?
If Catholicism is losing faithful to other religions or to no religion, most Americans will ask: What has this to do with America or with us? Why is this not merely the Church’s problem?
The issue Pope Benedict was raising on that Good Friday, warning against Europe becoming a “desert of godlessness,” was this. If Europe has ceased to be a moral community and the “values and norms that held societies together and drew people to higher ideals” are being “laughed at and thrown overboard,” what holds Europe together? What holds the West together?
In 1899, Pope Leo XIII condemned a heresy called Americanism. The Pope feared that, with the separation of church and state, the rise of liberalism and the celebration of individualism, Catholics would come to rely on secular ideas alone in building their new nation, and fail to incorporate the spiritual values and social teachings of Christ and his Church. While Leo XIII admired America, and America’s bishops, clergy and faithful were patriotic, the Pope feared where secularism might lead the great nation rising on the far side of the Atlantic. “At least since the time of Leo XIII,” writes columnist Russ Shaw, “American Catholics have faced a choice between assimilation and counter-culturalism.… Notre Dame’s invitation to Obama comes from the assimilationist heart of Catholic Americanism. The outra
ge it has produced is counter-culturalism’s response … the argument will go on.”78
However, as America cuts her Christian roots, at some point that argument ends and a secession of the Catholic heart from the culture and country begins to take place. For whatever the conflict between Catholicism and America a century ago, that conflict is becoming irreconcilable in the age of Obama. For, increasingly today, principled opposition to embryonic stem cell research, abortion on demand, gay marriage, euthanasia, and assisted suicide puts one outside the American mainstream. To traditionalist Catholics, this is not the country we grew up in. This is a different country. And given where America is headed morally and culturally, we are not far from a day when traditionalist Catholics will be saying, “This isn’t my country anymore.”
In November 2009, nine U.S. archbishops joined the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America and 135 Evangelical, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox Christian leaders in signing the Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience. We pledge, the signers said, that “no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence”:
We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, [or] treat them as marriages or the equivalent.79
“The dangers to religious liberty are very real,” said Princeton’s Dr. Robert George, a Catholic who, with Evangelical Charles Colson, coauthored the declaration.80 Is an era of Christian civil disobedience ahead?
Catholicism remains a house divided. Secessions of the heart from our own country increase. In “This Blessed Land,” the first chapter of his book USA Today, Reid Buckley, brother of William F., confesses, “I am obliged to make a public declaration that I cannot love my country.… We are Vile.”81
To love one’s country, one’s country ought to be lovely, said Burke.
Can anyone say unequivocally that that is true today?
AN END OF CHRISTENDOM?
Before the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, in which Constantine was to engage the legions of the Emperor Maxentius, he saw a sign of the cross emblazoned in the sky. Above the cross were the words “In Hoc Signo, Vinces,” “In this sign thou shalt conquer.” Constantine’s victory ended three centuries of persecution. Confirmation that Christianity was the emergent faith of the empire came with the death of Julian the Apostate, Gibbon’s hero, who had gone to war to restore the pagan gods. “Galilean, thou hast conquered!” said the mortally wounded Julian.
After the fall of the empire, Catholicism inherited the estate, united Europe, and gave the continent its culture and identity. For a thousand years Catholicism held Europe together as its Christian peoples resisted invasions which could have ended our civilization. The threats were legion. As Hilaire Belloc wrote:
The Mohammedan came within three days march of Tours, the Mongol was seen from the walls of Tournos on the Saône in France. The Scandinavian savage poured into the mouths of all the rivers of Gaul, and almost overwhelmed the whole island of Britain. There was nothing left of Europe but a central core.82
The Christian core survived and in the last year of the eleventh century, crusaders marched into Jerusalem. The unity forged by the Church lasted another four centuries. Then came the great sundering of Christendom. Martin Luther, England’s Henry VIII, and John Calvin introduced a Reformation that led to massacres and martyrdoms from St. Bartholomew’s Day to the Thirty Years’ War to Oliver Cromwell’s slaughter of the Irish Catholic resisters at Wexford and Drogheda.
That Europe retained a Christian character as late as the twentieth century was seen in 1914, when British and German soldiers came out of their trenches to sing Christmas carols and exchange gifts in the No Man’s Land. It would not happen in 1915 or 1916, the year of Verdun and the Somme. What Napoleon had said remained true. Every European war is a civil war.
The twentieth century produced more Christian martyrs than any other. Between 1917 and 1960, there was Lenin’s Communist revolution and the rise of the fanatically anti-Christian Bolshevik state, the anti-Catholic Mexican revolution, Hitler’s Reich, a Spanish civil war in which bishops, priests, and nuns were murdered by the Madrid regime, and the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban revolutions, all of which sought to eradicate Catholicism and Christianity. When the Red Army poured into Central Europe to stay for a half-century, Catholics and Protestants suffered the same persecution as had the Orthodox in Russia.
With the collapse of Communism came an end to the persecutions of Christianity in Europe and a revival of Christianity in Russia. But in Islamic, Hindu, and Sinic cultures, the story is different. Though not so brutally as did Mao, China still persecutes Christians. In South Asia, it is not the governments that carry out the persecutions but the fanatics.
In August 2009, seven Christians in Gorja, Pakistan, were burned alive, their homes demolished by Muslim mobs seeking revenge for an alleged desecration of the Koran.83 Christians, at three percent of Pakistan’s population of 170 million, are the largest religious minority in the country.
Early in 2011, Shahbaz Bhatti, minister for religious minorities, the only Christian in Pakistan’s parliament, was dragged from his car and assassinated. For twenty-five years Bhatti had fought the country’s blasphemy law, under which death is the prescribed punishment for insulting the Prophet.
Bhatti, a Catholic, had come to the defense of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death after farm hands accused her of blasphemy.
Shortly before his martyrdom, Bhatti had said, “These Taliban threaten me. But I want to share that I believe in Jesus Christ, who has given his own life for us. I know what is the meaning of [the] cross, and I am following the cross.” Wrote columnist Michael Gerson, “[h]e followed all the way to the end.”84
In September 2009, the London Times reported on the “worst anti-Christian violence” in India’s history. In Orissa state, said local officials, “Hindu fanatics tried to poison water sources at relief camps holding at least 15,000 people displaced by mob violence.” Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Christ were beaten as they took four orphans to an adoption center.
“The Catholic Church said that at least 35 people—many of them burnt alive—had been killed by Hindu extremists in Orissa since August 23.”85 By October, Sky News was reporting, “Tens of thousands of Christians have been made homeless after an orgy of violence by Hindu hardliners.”86
More than 300 villages have been destroyed and more than 4,000 homes in violent attacks, which have been going on since August and show no signs of stopping.… Nearly 60 people have been killed, 18,000 injured, and there are scores of reports about gang rapes, including of one nun. Fourteen districts in the area have been affected and more than 200 churches burned.87
This was a Hindu pogrom against Catholics. From the West, there was only silence.
Early in 2010, seven churches in Malaysia were vandalized or firebombed to protest a court decision allowing Christians to use the name of Allah when referring to God.88 Muslims in Iraq have assassinated priests and bishops and bombed churches to drive out Christians whom they consider collaborators of the American “Crusaders.” Half the Christians of Iraq, whose ancestors have lived in Mesopotamia almost since the time of Christ, have fled. In a story in the UK’s Catholic Herald headlined “Middle East May Soon Be Empty of Christians,” Beirut’s Chaldean Bishop Michel Kassarji warned, “The Arab and Muslim countries have to make a serious move to stop the extermination of the Christian existence in Iraq.”89
After midnight Mass in Naga Hamady, Egypt, forty miles from Luxor, on the eve of the Coptic Christmas, January 7, 2010, six Christians were machine-gunned to death and ten were wounded outside church. The massacre was revenge for an alleged rape of a Muslim child in November that had led to five days of rioting, arson, and destruction of Christian property.90
On the eve of All Saints, November 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. As Fr. Wassim Sabih finished Mass, eight gunmen stormed in and ordered the priest to the floor. As Fr. Sabih pleaded that his parishioners be spared, they executed him and began their mission of murder.91
When security forces broke in, the killers threw grenades to finish off the surviving Catholics and detonated explosive-laden vests. The toll was two priests and forty-six parishioners killed, and seventy-eight wounded, with many in critical condition after losing limbs. This was the worst massacre of Christians yet. For the Assyrian Catholics known as Chaldeans, whose ancestors were converted by St. Thomas the Apostle, the U.S. liberation has brought eight years of hell.
Forty-eight hours later, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia issued a bulletin: “All Christian centers, organizations and institutions, leaders and followers are legitimate targets for the (holy warriors).”92 In the following month, a dozen more Christians died. “By one estimate only 5,000 of the original 100,000 Christians who once lived in Mosul remain.”93
After midnight Mass, New Year’s Day, 2011, at Saints Church in Alexandria, Egypt, 21 worshipers were blown to pieces and 97 wounded by a suicide bomber in the worst anti-Christian violence in a decade. Sherif Ibrahim saw the aftermath: “There were bodies on the streets. Hands, legs, stomachs. Girls, women and men.… We are going to die here. But our churches are here. Our lives are here. What will we do?”94
In March 2011 some ten thousand Christians in western Ethiopia were forced to flee when their homes were invaded and fifty churches burned by Muslims after a Christian allegedly desecrated a Koran. Federal police sent to the region were overwhelmed by mobs.
The Islamist group Kawarja was apparently behind the pogrom. “We believe there are elements of the Kawarja sect and other extremists who have been preaching religious intolerance in the area,” said Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.95 Attacks on Christians have been reported across Ethiopia, where Muslims now make up a third of the population.
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