It may be tempting to dismiss much of the Catholic-bashing that goes on by thinking, “Oh, it’s only an isolated incident,” or, “Catholics will only make it worse by over-reacting.” And it may indeed seem, as these incidents are filtered our way by the press on occasion, that undue criticism of the Catholic Church isn’t that big a deal.
But Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights president William Donohue thinks it is a big deal, and, after reviewing the Catholic League’s 1999 Report on Anti-Catholicism, it’s difficult to argue with him. The 58 pages chronicle a disturbing array of attacks in the U.S. against the Catholic Church, from the arts to the workplace to government to media. Taken in toto, it’s incontrovertible evidence of the fact that, in this country, anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry.
Some of the more outrageous examples make the national news. Ted Turner did when he scolded the Pope regarding birth control and imitated a “Polish mine detector” by stamping his foot. The Weinstein brothers did when they released the movie “Dogma,” whose female protagonist, a descendant of Jesus, works at an abortion clinic.
What the Catholic League’s report shows is the quotidian, unremarked-on viciousness that pervades our society. Like Conan O’Brien, host of NBC’s “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” resolving “to have more respect for my Catholic upbringing,” then approaching an actress dressed as a nun and punching her in the face.
For a copy of the 1999 Report on Anti-Catholicism, contact the Catholic League at 1011 First Avenue, New York, New York 10022; phone 212-371-3191; fax 212-371-3394; on the web, www.catholicleague.org.
In the mainstream media, anti-Catholicism becomes relevant only as a political football. Much hay was made in February and March over Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush appearing at Bob Jones University in South Carolina. (The university has long been on the record as considering the Catholic Church a satanic cult. It had a policy against interracial dating, which was changed in the face of criticism generated by Bush’s appearance.) Even more hay was made of rival John McCain’s making hay of Bush’s appearance, though McCain’s campaign had also sought a speaking engagement there.
In late February, Bush finally took the opportunity of an appearance at the Catholic Charities in Cleveland, Ohio, to apologize: “My regret is that I didn’t speak out against anti-Catholic bias when I had the opportunity to do so. I had the mike.”
As usual, Catholic presidential candidate Alan Keyes was lost in the uproar. In a February 14 speech at Bob Jones U., Keyes—as usual—didn’t pull any punches in front of his Fundamentalist audience:
“I actually think that I am the most unlikely spokesman for moral conservatism in America that you could ever want to find. I am. And I’ve wondered about it, sometimes. You know, sometimes you will just be sitting to yourself, ‘Lord, what are you doing here? Because I really don’t understand.’ . . .
“But then why on earth would God take a black, Roman Catholic Christian and send him out in order to inspire the hearts of people whom the whole world believes to be against blacks and Roman Catholics, in spite of their Christianity [e.g., the people of Bob Jones U.]?
“Has it occurred to anybody yet that if this is a challenge for me, it is also a challenge for you? That I stand, in my very person, requiring that before you can do what God wants, you will have to struggle with the demons of everything that stands between you and what God wants.
“If the demon of racial prejudice stands between you and what God wants, then I’m here to challenge you: You won’t get what you want for this country until you cast that demon out. If the demon of sectarian bigotry stands between you and what God wants, you won’t get what God wants for this country until you cast that demon aside. . . .
“And how do we do it? Do we have the power to do this on our own? I don’t think so. I think there are certain demons, as Christ has told us, that can only be cast out by that prayer and fasting which throws us utterly on the power and the mercy of God.
“And this is what I think is going to be needed in America right now. People need to stop calculating, stop reading the papers and looking at the polls, and go to those places in our hearts and in our lives where we stand before our God, in all humility, acknowledging that we know not, and can do not as we should.
“And when we are stripped bare of everything the world considers to be power, and have nothing to hope in, and nothing to rely on, except the true power of our God, Jesus Christ, in that spirit of prayer let us consider what it is that we must do. Not for ourselves. Not even for our country. But so that our God may say to us: ‘Well done.’”
This item’s been in our in-basket for a couple of months, but it’s just too whimsical to discard. It seems a drunken guest destroyed the Christmas peace of a community of British monks who were forbidden by their vow of silence from asking him to stop singing.
The Cistercian monks of Caldey Island, three miles off west Wales in Great Britain, endured Raymond John’s renditions of “Silent Night,” other carols, and hymns for the twelve hours of their Great Silence last Christmas Eve. John, 58, often visits at Christmas to avoid temptation to drink, since alcohol is banned at the monastery. But when he arrived on the mail boat on December 23, he was already three sheets to the wind and carried vodka and brandy as presents for the teetotaling monks.
Fr. Daniel van Santvoort, the abbot, said, “We are normally pleased to see him and he generally stays until mid-January, but this time he seemed very agitated. We observe the Great Silence from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., so we could not tell him to hush.”
John, who was fined £50 for drunkenness back on the mainland, said: “Everything’s a bit of a haze. I was deeply embarrassed and took the first boat back to Tenby. I won’t be going back [to Caldey Island].”
“Raymond is a good man and I have never seen him like that before,” said Abbot van Santvoort. “But he will be welcome to return to us.”
The sanctity of life has a corollary in the tenacity of the living. It’s ironic in this age—when the relatives and doctors of patients in seemingly hopeless condition are sometimes quick at the plug—that the advancement of medical science is racking up an increasing number of “miraculous” recoveries.
In January, Dr. Anna Bågenholm, 29, told how she was brought back from the dead after she had been trapped under ice for nearly an hour and a half. She fell into a river when skiing down a waterfall gully near Narvik in north Norway last May. Her head and upper body became wedged below the ice and her companions could not get her out. She was seen to be struggling below the ice for 40 minutes before she became still, and it was another 39 minutes before two rescuers from the hospital arrived. She was extracted when her colleagues cut a hole in the ice downstream and pulled her clear. Though she was clinically dead at the scene, she was given oxygen.
At the hospital, Dr. Bågenholm’s body temperature was 13.7°C—more than 23 degrees below normal. She had no heartbeat, no blood circulation, was not breathing, and her pupils were widely dilated and unresponsive to light. She was ventilated and given a cardio-pulmonary bypass, her blood being warmed before it was returned to her body. She then needed her blood to be oxygenated outside her body when her lungs would not work. She was technically dead for three hours.
An hour after arriving at hospital her heart started beating again. Her resuscitation took a total of nine hours and she needed intensive care for another month, followed by months of rehabilitation. Prof. Mads Gilbert, who led the team that saved her life, said, “We think she was breathing for the first 40 minutes in an air pocket in the flowing water. So she was taking in oxygen as her body slowly cooled down. She was also extremely fit. But we had lots of very narrow escapes with her: Her lungs failed, her kidneys failed, her intestines failed.”
Through intensive rehabilitation, Dr Bågenholm has regained the use of her limbs and was back skiing at Christmas with her ski sticks taped to her hands as she improved her ability to grip.
Prof. Gilbert said, “The message to doctors from this remarkable survival is: Don’t give up.”
And, for another twist on “Don’t give up,” how about this case: A comatose Brazilian woman who was on life support for five months gave birth February 10 to a healthy baby boy. Doctors performed a Caesarian section on Neide Neves dos Santos, 24, to save her baby, Vitor, in her thirty-second week of pregnancy, about eight weeks before she would have reached full term.
“The baby is healthy, though he weighs only two kilograms [4.4 pounds],” said a spokesman at the public hospital in a Rio de Janeiro suburb. “Everything has gone smoothly.” The mother, who breathes only with a respirator, suffered severe brain damage in August after she had a convulsion and stopped breathing for several minutes. During hospital exams, doctors discovered she was ten weeks pregnant. His grandmother will raise baby Vitor, since the identity of the baby’s father is not known.
In early March, Adolf Eichmann’s diaries were made public after being guarded by the Israeli government for almost 40 years. (Eichmann, a Nazi SS lieutenant colonel, was executed in 1962 in Israel for “crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity.”) Eichmann wrote the diaries in the months following his death sentence.
Among other things, the pages put the lie to the charge that Pope Pius XII did nothing in October 1943 when the Nazis began to deport Jews from their “ghetto” in Rome. The Nazis occupied Rome at the time, and the Church was the only institution that had the courage to denounce the Nazis’ actions.
Eichmann wrote that on October 6, 1943, “General Keppler, SS commander in Rome, had received a special order from Berlin: He had to arrest 8,000 Jews who were living in Rome to deport them to northern Italy where they would be exterminated.
“At that time, my office received the copy of a letter that I immediately gave to my direct superiors, sent by the Catholic Church in Rome, in the person of Bishop Hudal, to the commander of the German forces in Rome, General Stahel. The Church was vigorously protesting the arrest of Jews of Italian citizenship, requesting that such actions be interrupted immediately throughout Rome and its surroundings. To the contrary, the Pope would denounce it publicly.
“The Curia was especially angry because these incidents were taking place practically under Vatican windows. But, precisely at that time, without paying any attention to the Church’s position, the Italian fascist government passed a law ordering the deportation of all Italian Jews to concentration camps.
“The objections given and the excessive delay in the steps necessary to complete the implementation of the operation resulted in a great part of Italian Jews being able to hide and escape capture,” Eichmann wrote. It is historical fact that many of them hid in convents—some even in the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo—or were helped by men and women of the Catholic Church.
In the heart of Canada’s “Silicon Valley,” one hour west of Toronto, stands the city of Waterloo, buttressed by two of Canada’s leading academic institutions, the University of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University.
In the open-air cafés and shops you can buy the best coffee, the latest software or applied engineering manual, or a how-to yoga book. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a simple devotional pamphlet on how to pray the rosary, Fr. Drexelius’s classic, Heliotropium, or a single copy of This Rock magazine. For those things, you’d have to drive to Toronto.
It is here, in what Canadian Catholic novelist Michael O’Brien would call a “flatland,” that God provides a great opportunity—an opportunity to take up the Holy Father’s call to embark upon a new evangelization in the form of a Catholic café-resource shop.
Imagine a network of hip, informal cafés with scheduled Catholic speakers and musicians, a Catholic audio-video library, and a solid collection of Catholic print and media. Imagine too an array of handmade goods from and in support of Catholic missions, all within a comfortable, non-confrontational culture-of-life atmosphere.
This is the dream of the Café Cova Project, a group of Waterloo Catholics that is trying to buy a local shop with the intention of making it into such as oasis. If the effort takes hold in this post-Christian town with its two heavy-weight universities, wouldn’t it work elsewhere? Those interested in the project may contact the Café Cova Project in care of Richard Marchak at 519-570-3635, or via e-mail at marchak@stmaxmedia.com.
A cappuccino with your L’Osservatore Romano?