Is anti-Catholicism again becoming mainstream in America? Catholic
ridicule is fair game these days for comedians and artists, for Broadway shows
and talk radio. Once relegated in the media world to the kooky fringe of
Xeroxed screeds about the whore of Babylon, in recent years anti-Catholicism
has become a regular visitor in the hateful nastiness of online trolls.
Over the past summer, ahead of Pope Francis’ visit to the United States this
week, discriminatory, anti-Catholic bigotry has crept from online comment
sections to rear its ugliness prominently in cable TV commentary and newspaper
op-eds.
Last week Washington Post columnist, George Will, attacked Pope Francis for the pontiff’s moral teaching
regarding care for creation. I disagree with Will’s boosterism for technology,
synthetic fertilizers and fabrics, pesticides, consumerism, and
“industrialization powered by fossil fuels.” But I will not take issue here
with his claims about the purported miracles of our global economic system and
its industries.
It’s Will’s treatment of things Catholic that is more
concerning. What is profoundly appalling is the vitriolic temper of Will’s
remarks about the pope. His tone and language are shocking, coming as they do
not from a scurrilous, fly-by-night website but from the op-ed page of one of
America’s most respected newspapers. All Catholics should be disturbed. Most
shameful is the columnist’s ad hominem, sarcastic, and
demeaning ridicule of His Holiness, Pope Francis.
The moral teachings that His Holiness reaffirmed in this
summer’s encyclical, Laudato Si’—teachings preached
as well by Popes Benedict XVI and John Paul II—have been at the heart of
Catholic analysis of our responsibilities in modern life since Pope Leo XIII’s
encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. Crudely,
Will smears these traditional teachings as “Francis’s fact-free flamboyance.”
Lampooning Pope Francis for “trailing clouds of sanctimony,” Will dismisses
papal teachings as “demonstrably false and deeply reactionary” and as “woolly
sentiments that have the intellectual tone of fortune cookies.” He parades
around with the hoary banner of Galileo and against Catholic “medieval stasis.”
He demands that “Americans cannot simultaneously honor” Pope Francis “and
celebrate their nation’s premises.”
The historian Arthur Schlesinger once called anti-Catholicism “the
deepest bias in the history of the American people.” I’ve never actually agreed
with that argument. Racism, anti-Semitism, and a peculiar American misogyny are
equally deep and certainly more virulent. But, on the left and on the right,
anti-Catholicism has always had a kind of pass in otherwise polite corners of
American public life where other overt discriminatory language is disparaged.
You are certainly free to disagree with Pope Francis, Mr. Will.
You are certainly free to disagree with Catholic teachings and to contest them
in any forum. But surely you would agree that the American public square should
long ago have forsworn the ridicule of others’ religious teachings and the
person of their religious leaders.
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