CAPTAIN COURAGEOUS TAKES THE HELM
Jerry Harkins

“It’s not like we’re in crisis; it’s not like all of a sudden we need some daring new initiatives. Thank God for the leadership of Cardinal Francis George, things are going well.”
—Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
—Lewis Carroll


I am not certain that anyone actually reads Candide these days but the Archbishop of New York might profitably be reminded that the Portuguese Inquisition hanged Dr. Pangloss for the heresy of optimism and the Vatican placed his story on the Index of Forbidden Books. You can see why. After all, if this is the best of all possible worlds, what’s the use of churches? It is precisely for this reason that most hierarchs are grim, gray pessimists and their theology is morose and pitiless. When the Pope says “God is love,” he is talking about God the Avenger who is ready to cast you into hell for eating the wrong apple. In other words, tough love. Very tough.

If the American bishops who tapped Tim Dolan last month to be the President of their Conference decided to undertake any daring new initiative, you can be pretty sure the bozos would declare pedophilia a new sacrament. There are approximately 340 Roman Catholic bishops serving some 176 dioceses in the United States. All were selected for their strict conformance to Vatican-think not for their intelligence or even their holiness. All are theological conservatives and hold mainly right wing political and social views. They think women and gays are divine errors and they automatically oppose the interests of both. At present, they are also united in opposition to health care reform and will support Republican efforts to repeal it. These views are decidedly at odds with a large majority of Americans brought up Catholic. As the result, the church in America is a dying institution. It is already dead in Europe.

Apparently, Tim hasn’t noticed. He has joined the Catholic Legion of the Otherwise Distracted (CLOD). And there are many, many distractions. For one thing, the demand for exorcisms is growing rapidly under the influence of the Harry Potter phenomenon and the church has only a handful of exorcists experienced in casting out devils. For another, the bishops need to figure out how to implement the Pope’s revival of the Tridentine Mass given the fact that the seminaries stopped teaching Latin thirty years ago. Worse, they need to figure out what the hell he was talking about when he said that the use of condoms might possibly be okay for male prostitutes. That’s a doozy. Might they be okay for male but not female prostitutes? How about male porn stars? Gays? Then we have the problem of lay people who are abandoning their parishes and starting up their own congregations unsupervised by local dioceses. Some are led by defrocked priests, others by never frocked men and—horror of horrors—women. Until The New York Times reported on this movement in Belgium, the American prelates could blithely ignore it here at home. Now, however, it’s bound to attract the attention of reporters and editors who specialize in kicking the church and other dead horses. They will find it blossoming in American dioceses right under the noses of the prelates. And, of course, there’s the troublesome question of money. It may not be a crisis that would impinge on the bishops’ happy hours but it is a pesky little speed bump which is forcing them to close schools and parishes on a wholesale basis. At the top of the agenda, however, is the apparent transmission of Hepatitis A from the communion wafers at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Massapequa Park, Long Island to parishioners attending Christmas mass. As said wafers are the body and blood of Christ, there is some concern about Jesus’ liver function. It could have been worse. Hepatitis B would have raised truly discomforting questions.

Another non-crisis facing the church is the role of women religious. As always, the nuns are virtually the only good news in Christendom but the Curia despises them as it does all women. At the moment, it is conducting two witch hunts in the United States, an “Apostolic Visitation” by the Congregation for the Consecrated Life and a “Doctrinal Assessment” by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith formerly known as the Holy Inquisition. The “Visitator” is Mother Mary Clare Millea, a canon lawyer and Superior General of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart. The Grand Inquisitor, also known as God’s Fireman, is the Most Reverend Leonard P. Blair, the Bishop of Toledo, Ohio. Both initiatives are couched in the usual Vatican doubletalk reminiscent of Big Brother. Mother Mary, for example, reminds her putative hosts that John Paul II often said the “…consecrated life, with its variety of charisms and institutions, is a treasure.” He did indeed say that but what it means in English is that women have always been a thorn in the side of the church and he worries that modernization is making them even more heretical than they used to be. So the bishops have a pretty full plate without having to worry about any daring new initiatives.

On a practical level, the church is faced with a vicious circle: it names incompetent yes-men to its hierarchy who issue absurd proclamations which make it impossible to attract intelligent men to its service. Thus, the church gets stupider and stupider and smaller and smaller. One of my favorite examples is Father Michael Cichon, pastor of the Church of the Assumption on Staten Island, who issued a fatwa denying the sacraments and religious education to the children of parents who fail to attend mass on Sundays. He enforces this by means of a bar coded identification system printed on the back of the weekly offering envelopes. Then there is the case of Thomas J. Olmsted, the wacky Bishop of Phoenix, Arizona. His Excellency recently issued a “Decree Revoking Episcopal Consent to Claim the ‘Catholic’ Name according to Canon 216” against St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center for performing a legal abortion in a case where its doctors determined a woman could not survive a fifth pregnancy. The bishop excommunicated the nun who was President of the hospital but did not order her burned at the stake. He and his advisors disagreed, you see, with the expert medical opinion which apparently conflicted with Catholic science and philosophy dating back to the thirteenth century. In any event, he was so angry that he failed to notice that the institution in question was not using the word Catholic in its name.

So when Tim says “things are going well,” you can assume that he’s in over his head and has adopted the philosophy of Alfred E. Neuman to the effect, “What, me worry?” In the real world, things are not going well at all. Consider, for example, the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York. It recently completed a project called, “Christ Jesus, Our Hope, A Diocesan Strategic Plan for Renewal.” It found that in the ten years ended in 2009, mass attendance had fallen 16%, baptisms 25%, first communions 30% and marriages 33%. At the end of the period, churches were operating at 36% of capacity and school enrollment was down 47%. Interestingly, revenues were down only 12.7% but the operating deficit was up 140% and net assets were down 375%. The financial nightmare reflects the high price of pedophilia. It will come as no surprise that Part I of the Christ Jesus Our Hope strategic plan calls for something very close to a going-out-of-business sale. The objective is not so much renewal as survival and the prospects are bleak. This is Brooklyn, the fifth largest diocese in the United States and just across the river from Tim’s own Archdiocese of New York. Out in the hinterland, things are even tougher. Eight dioceses in the U.S. have declared bankruptcy although this is pretty close to being meaningless. Some of the eight are simply trying to dodge expected tort judgments. Then there are dioceses that are in fact technically insolvent but are unwilling to open up their books to court supervision. It’s hard to know what is going on in the minds of the hierarchs.

Or take the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, the 21st largest in the country with about 731,000 Catholics in ten counties of southeastern Wisconsin. Tim may remember it because he was its Archbishop for a little more than seven years before being translated to the Big Apple. In recent years, it has closed 75 or 26% of its parishes. In the year ended June 30, 2010, contributions declined by 10% and overall revenues declined by 4%. Operating income showed a deficit of $2.1 million versus a surplus of $510 thousand in 2009. On the first business day of 2011, Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki filed for bankruptcy.

Milwaukee is not new to scandal or inept crisis management. Its former Archbishop, from 1977 to 2002, was Rembert G. Weakland, a Benedictine Abbot, a distinguished musicologist holding a Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University, and the last unabashed liberal in the American hierarchy. Under his administration, Milwaukee was probably the only diocese in Christendom whose elementary school children were taught to use condoms as part of their sex education. They were also told there is no right and wrong on such matters as abortion, contraception and premarital sex. He advocated for gay rights and women's ordination. Strangely, he was hopelessly inept at responding to the pedophilia crisis in its earliest public stages but none of this is what brought him down. Earlier in his career, he had been a practicing homosexual who had, at one point, paid $450,000 from archdiocesan funds to an extortionist with whom he had had a consensual affair decades earlier. Tim may remember all this because he was Weakland’s immediate successor. In other words, he inherited the mess. No problemo!

And then there was the little matter of the late Father Lawrence C. Murphy who sexually abused 200 boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. This went on, according to Father Murphy himself, for 22 or 24 years depending on which interview you read. From the beginning, the children tried to notify the authorities but they were largely ignored until Archbishop Weakland essentially begged Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, to defrock him. Joe refused on humanitarian grounds—Murphy was sick at the time and in fact he died two years later in 1998. Such delicacy! Tim probably does not remember this one because he didn’t arrive in Milwaukee until 2002 by which time it was old news and he is not one to rummage around in ancient history. At his mass on Palm Sunday 2010, he denounced the, “recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany, and a re-run of an old story from Wisconsin.” Stuff happens. Get a life!

One of President Tim’s first actions in his new job was to appoint Bishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of Oakland, California as Chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage. His credentials include a doctorate in canon law, the authorship of the notorious California Proposition 8 and his conduct of the first Latin mass in Northern California in 40 years. He is also one of only 17 bishops to sign the fundamentalist Manhattan Declaration. He was the perfect choice to defend marriage in that he had exactly no experience in the subject except what he read in the Vatican comic books.

It’s hard to imagine what would constitute a crisis in Timothy Dolan’s lexicon. A telegram, perhaps, from the Holy Ghost, saying, “Icebergs ahead?” Perhaps even God won’t sink this church, but stupidity and megalomania have already done so in large parts of its former domain. For too many centuries it has been dominated by a self-perpetuating coterie of old men with the social graces of two year old boys and the moral convictions of Mafia thugs. They adorn themselves in the most flamboyant frippery and relieve themselves of pretentious nonsense disguised as moral guidance. Nearer My God to Thee.