Well, finally we're back from a whirlwind trip to the Great State for the wedding. Reflecting on that hilarious story I heard this weekend, which included the sentence, "She brought her boyfriend home, her brother slept with him, and he ended up marrying her mother," I said to Julie, "Why is that funny? It's actually a moral horror. But we all laugh at it. How come?"
Julie said: "Because everybody knows what a bad deal it is. Nobody is really threatened by it down here."
"Ah," I said. "So what you're saying is that if people started to think that that was an interesting and diverse lifestyle choice, it would cease to be funny to the people who now laugh at it."
"Yes, pretty much."
I thought later about Flannery O'Connor's observation that one saving grace of the South is people still know it when they see a freak.
Driving one long stretch of the highway with the kids sleeping and Julie's head buried in a magazine, I thought again about the dust-up over my Neuhaus posting on Friday. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't posted it then, so soon after his death. I didn't intend it to be angry, or score-settling, or anything more than an observation about the man he was, prompted by reading Damon Linker's remembrance, which brought to mind the sad occasion of a break, of sorts, with a priest and an intellectual who meant a lot to me. I have heard from enough of you whose judgment I respect to realize now that I should have waited a decent interval before posting that, and I'm sorry I didn't. Before Fr. Neuhaus's final illness, I'd been thinking about how to respond to his criticism of me in what would become his final FT column, specifically the point he made -- with which I disagree, but not entirely -- that there are some things that shouldn't ever be known. He was talking about the Church sex scandal, and on that I disagree with him. But his broader point -- that some knowledge ought to be forbidden -- is worth taking seriously, and I'm still wrestling with it. So the episode between him and me and his calling me repeatedly during the spring of 2002 to try to get me to go easier on the Church was already on my mind when he passed away, and I was intending to write about it anyway. But I did have rotten timing, which I regret now.
Writers have a kind of autism, I think. One of the most cautionary tales ever about the writing life is the example of Truman Capote, who instantly lost most of his friends after he wrote an infamous short story that was a thinly veiled dish session, repeating scandalous New York gossip. He was shocked that his friends all dropped him for telling tales out of school. He said something like, "Didn't they know I was a writer?" -- blaming them for not being more discreet around him.
Capote's is an extreme example, but I think many of us writers don't have a good sense of these things. Julie says to me from time to time, "You have to remember that for most of us, life is not material." There is rarely a time when I'm not writing, if not in actuality, at least in my head. She'll catch me in a fugue state, writing in my mind a description of what just happened, or something going through my mind. You can imagine how deadly it is to have a blog if you're this sort of person. Anyway, I say that writers are semi-autistic because we live in our heads so much, and forget sometimes that, as Julie puts it, life for most people is about living, not merely the stuff of art and craft. Most people can't establish the analytical distance that is second nature to a writer.
What's ironic is that I was made to think about it this weekend in relation to Fr. Neuhaus and the sex-abuse scandal, which was such an emotional and spiritual wreck for me precisely because it was quicksand; I couldn't maintain my foothold of analytical distance from it, and it took me under. Occupational hazard, I guess.
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So, what happened? The culture became less tolerant of child molestation, for reasons which are unclear to me, and the bishops were late catching up with this cultural change.
Hardly. What happened was media became more pervasive. You now hear of things from across the nation as if they were in your neighborhood. A sexual abuse scandal is an individual thing, a nationwide pattern of sheltering child abusers is quite another. Back in the day a story like Adam Walsh's would have been limited to Florida, but as media exposes us to more and more it became a national story, and launched a father's career as a media star. Ditto Natalee Holloway.
The bishops were late catching up, but only with the effects of media. Just like the cop who shot the kid in an Oakland subway over New Year's was late catching up with the fact that he'd be caught on two cameras, despite the lessons of Rodney King.
The cultural change is in our media.
On another front, I heard the most conservative thing I've heard in a long time on the radio this morning, essentially "The problems we face are new, but human nature is not." Of all the people on earth, that was Hillary Clinton at her Senate confirmation hearing. Knock me over with a feather.
Sig, you're off a little; I just turned 40. I was almost ten when Pope Paul VI died; I remember it vividly. I grew up in the Chicago area and from there moved to Atlanta, and I was in the eighth grade before a teacher ever mentioned the mysteries of the Rosary--none of my previous Catholic school teachers had ever bothered to teach that. Of course, we hadn't learned the Ten Commandments, either, or much about salvation history or who Jesus was. Many of the catechetical materials used in my classrooms gave the idea that Jesus didn't ever really know Who He was, and struggled with His identity; I recall a high school textbook in which Jesus admires His cousin, John, and wonders if John is the Messiah.
Daniel, when have I ever said the problem was homosexuality in the priesthood? The problem was, and still is, faithlessness and unchastity. Which is not surprising, because that's the same affliction that characterizes the laity in America: the demand that unchastity be redefined as a virtue, and the further demand that faithlessness be accepted as "my truth is different from your truth, but it's all good," in the mad dance of relativism.
Thanks for sharing about your experience, Erin. I believe you. It's just that I'm not so sure that was universally true. You'll get no argument from me that the Church of the 80s and 90s left much to be desired, but I didn't experience the same things you did as my children were going through religious education during that time. Our pastors all seem to have been fairly conservative--though, in my view, inadequate in other ways.
I was brought up Old School, as you might say- -memorizing the Baltimore Catechism, being marched off to Penance (no nonsense about "Reconciliation") every Saturday, wearing a hat in church, etc. etc. The nuns taught us to say the Rosary, all right. However, my father, who was a very right-wing Catholic, thought the Rosary and other forms of Mariolatry were debased folk-religion--sentimental, womanish, and theologically inferior. The Rosary was for old women. Hence I never said the Rosary until I was approaching middle age. There are lots of different ways of being a Catholic, even a right-wing Catholic.
Erin, you asked: "when have I ever said the problem was homosexuality in the priesthood"
Here's your comment from earlier:
"So the first time I heard that a priest had left the priesthood to pursue a gay lifestyle, I had no trouble believing it. The first time I heard of a couple of priests sharing a rectory--and more--one of whom liked to parade around in high heels and stockings and sporting an earring, I had no trouble believing it."
You've made similar comments like this in the past when discussing the sex scandal, suggesting the predators were gay and that the reason it occurred was because there was such acceptance of gays in the priesthood. IOW, the "lavender menace" argument quite common in certain circles of Catholicism.
Daniel, I do think the widespread acceptance of the sin of homosexual activity has had its part in the Scandal. But where does that acceptance come from?
I think it comes, in large part, from priests and the laity who follow them who have decided together that there is nothing sinful about any use of sex, inside or outside of marriage, contraceptive or not, vow-breaking or not--so long as the participants are adults seeking self-actualization and not behaving "selfishly," a concept which is conveniently never defined.
So Father never says anything about the pastor's girlfriend or the congregation's widespread mortally-sinful use of contraception, premarital sex, or other viciousness, and in turn neither the pastor nor the congregation says anything about Father's occasional forays to the gay bar. And when a new priest is assigned who seems to like the company of younger boys than the gay-bar visiting priest whose boyfriends are at least 18--well, the culture of "You ignore my sin, and I'll ignore yours, and we'll all go to Hell merrily together" keeps working as advertised.
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