WHAT HAPPENS AT THE CONSECRATION
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Sad to say, many Americans are gullible. (Should I say most are?) They readily believe ridiculous things. They believe what is written in the tabloids at the checkout counter. They believe that reality shows show reality. They believe that the five events discussed on the evening news really were the five most important events of the day.
I often think Americans would be better off it they were more skeptical. Let me give examples of where skepticism would be a useful trait.
HOW COULD SHE KNOW THAT?
I'll be hiking in the Grand Canyon next week, and that reminds me of a "National Geographic" article that caught my eye early last year. It was titled "The Unexpected Canyon." The writer, Virginia Morell, began with a description of her hike down the New Hance trail:
"Someone in a hurry had made this trail, I thought, as I braced each jarring step with my trekking poles; someone eager to get past the red-orange terraces rising in tiers above the river, to get down to the sandy beaches at the water's edge. Someone eager to reach home."
"Says who?" I thought to myself. How could Morell know what was in the mind of the people who made this trail--people, not "someone," since it likely was made by many people over a very long span of time. After all, the trail descends nearly a mile to the Colorado River and is 14 miles long--not the kind of thing one guy constructs on his own.
Morell concluded from the steepness of the trail that "someone in a hurry" must have made it.
The terrain in the Grand Canyon prevents easy passage. Rim-to-river trails go where they have to go. There was not much option to build them at lesser gradients. It wasn't as though an ancient Indian said to himself, "Well, I want to have a fast commute at the end of the day, so I'll carve out a steep trail rather than a lazy, rambling one."
Morell's article wasn't bad--it had evocative passages--but the editors weren't using their blue pencils very diligently. Editors often don't, when the story has to do with American Indians. For some reason, maybe a kind of romanticism, they let their guard down and let things get into print that wouldn't see print if the story involved other people.
And what about that 14-mile long, mile-deep commute? "Someone" was "eager to reach home," opined Morell. Did she really make it to the bottom of the Grand Canyon? It's not the kind of place you'd choose for a farmstead. What little soil there is is poor. What could her imaginary "someone" grow down there? And, if his fields were on the rim of the canyon, would he choose to have his house down at the river? That would be one tough daily commute.
To me, this was a red-flag article. It was well written stylistically but made little sense factually. The editors at "National Geographic" didn't vet it very well, and I suppose most readers lapped up what Morell wrote, saying to themselves, "Yup, that must have been how it was."
Where were the skeptics among the editors and readers?
SALMON IN SAN DIEGO'S RUSHING RIVERS
There is a fine open-space park some miles from the Catholic Answers office. The park is frequented by mountain bikers and hikers. Not far from the entrance one finds a series of interpretive signs about the Indians who used to live in the area. One sign discusses their houses, another their farming methods, another their clothing. The most surprising sign explains that the Indians used to catch salmon, a staple of their diet.
Salmon? Salmon are big fish that swim upriver to spawn. I've seen them in Alaska: One salmon will keep your whole extended family in sushi for many days. Salmon are found in rivers from Alaska and Canada at least as far south as Northern California. But in San Diego?
In "Casablanca" Rick (Humphrey Bogart) is asked by Capt. Renault (Claude Rains) what brought him there. He answers, "I came to Casablanca for the waters."
"The waters? What waters? We're in the desert."
"I was misinformed."
San Diego is not quite a desert, but it is close to being one. It has one river of note, conveniently called the San Diego River, which, for almost all of its length, is a trickle. I'd be surprised if a trout could find enough water in it, let alone a salmon.
The Indians who once lived around that open-space park lived more than a dozen miles from the ocean and nowhere near the San Diego River. Where were they going to get those salmon steaks? When the interpretive signs were being fashioned, did no one say, "Huh?"
Where were the skeptics among the sign makers in the parks department?
KUNTA KINTE AND OTHER FICTIONS
Thirty years ago, the last episode of "Roots" aired on ABC. The mini-series was based on the book of the same name. The author was Alex Haley (1921-1992). The story was about Haley's African ancestor Kunta Kinte, who was brought to America as a slave.
Even years after Haley's death his book was being touted for its insights into the lives of slaves, both here and in their pre-slavery years in Africa. But there was one problem. The entire book was a fake. There was no Kunta Kinte. Haley made it all up--or, more precisely, he made up the parts that he did not plagiarize from a 1967 novel called "The African."
Of course, when "Roots" first appeared--as a book and then as a mini-series--the plagiarism wasn't widely known. But what should have been known was the improbability of the situation. Here we had Haley, for many years a writer of magazine articles, who just happened to be the only man in the country able to trace his lineage back, a century and a half, to a village in Africa. How did he manage that? Not many people asked. They were insufficiently skeptical.
REVISITING THE SPLC REPORT
My February 6 E-Letter was about a report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It concerned anti-Semitism within the Traditionalist Catholic movement. I took the report to task for its sloppy research. It was clear to me that the report's chief writer, Heidi Beirich, literally did not know what she was talking about when writing about the Catholic Church.
She got basic terms wrong--and this in a report that SPLC said took three years to produce. With all that time to devote to working up 11,000 words, you'd think there would be time to check and re-check the basic facts. Apparently not.
One of my readers sent Beirich a copy of my E-Letter. He received a reply from her, three paragraphs in all, the longest of which was simply a quotation taken from the report. The other two paragraphs didn't response to a single one of the issues I brought up. I take that to mean that she admits, by default, that my complaints were correct.
I wonder how many of her intended readers, when reading the report, were skeptical of it. I doubt many were. SPLC is the kind of organization that is successful because it knows how to fear-monger effectively. Its speciality is identifying "hate groups" and implying that the Republic is about to collapse because of them.
This isn't to say that SPLC took on a worthless topic. True, there are anti-Semites in the Traditionalist movement. I know because I've run across some of them. But the report leaves one with the impression that just about all Traditionalist Catholics are anti-Semites and that maybe a lot of other Catholics are too. That's just not true, and even the folks at SPLC should have been skeptical about leaving such an impression.
Don't they have Catholic friends? Don't they see that the Catholics they know don't harbor such prejudices? Didn't that suggest to them that maybe the report was overwritten and under-researched?
RESPONSE FROM TRADITIONALISTS
As you might expect, Traditionalist Catholic writers--on blogs and in at least one print publication--also have taken SPLC to task, saying, as I did, that the SPLC report was full of errors.
Unfortunately, what they generally did not say, or at least did not say very pointedly, is that, yes, there is a problem with anti-Semites within Traditionalism--and that they and the leaders of the movement need to distance themselves from such folks clearly and forcefully.
One thing the SPLC report got right is that there is not a strict wall of separation between run-of-the-mill Traditionalists and anti-Semitic ones. You sometimes find them in the same room.
At some conferences, for example, where none of the speakers could be accused of saying anything anti-Semitic, you still find a vendor's table sporting the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and other disreputable stuff.
I wish the Traditionalists who took on SPLC acknowledged more clearly that there is a problem within their movement and that they need to resolve it by making sure that anti-Semites are shown the door. Traditionalist leaders need to be more skeptical about some of the people at the fringes of their movement. Until they are, their movement will continue to be tarred by organizations such as SPLC.
p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at
http://forums.catholic.com
where you may post your comment in the forum dedicated to the E-Letter. You will find a thread devoted to this issue of the E-Letter. Feel free to add your comment in the form of a reply to that thread.
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