The following letter was addressed to the public editor at the NY Times regarding the article in the Times Opinion section entitled, “The Archbishop’s Blog.” I spotted the letter in the op-ed section of the November 12, 2009, issue of the National Survivor Advocates Coalition (NSAC) News.

* * *

 James A. Jenkins, Ph.D.     PSY 17650     268 Arlington Avenue Kensington, CA 94707    jjenkinsphd@earthlink.net   510.559.9963

Clark Hoyte

Public Editor

NY Times

public@nytimes.com

 

Mr. Hoyte: 

Re The Archbishop’s Blog, The Public Editor, NYT Sunday Opinion, November 8, 2009: 

Now you’ve done it!  What were you thinking? 

By exposing the thin-skinned New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s schemes to cow the NY Times you have only proven, in “clerical-world think,” how really anti-Catholic the NYT can be.

Don’t fret.  When Dolan expresses criticism for Maureen Dowd’s “hyperbole” for defending American religious women and disdain for Laurie Goodstein’s reporting about the unbelievable hypocrisy and cluelessness of priest, Franciscan community and bishop abandoning a dying young man fathered by the very same priest in a bizarre illicit relationship, Dolan is just venting a bishop’s disgusted regret of ever having allowed Catholic nuns to teach women like Dowd to even read and write. 

I wish I were joking. 

Dolan, like any good politician, really is only following the Vatican’s public relations/media playbook when trying to mitigate damning media coverage of priests’ pedophilia and ephebophilia (i.e., exclusive sexual attraction to adolescents), by whining about how unfair it is that the Catholic Church is singled out for special scrutiny by the media as opposed to other religious groups or professions (in this case, reports of child sexual abuse in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn). 

The thinly veiled attempt to deliver to American religious women a full measure of the Vatican’s special brand of persecution (“by apostolic visitation”) is deliciously Roman:  under the guise of a smarmy, unctuous concern for the state of American religious women, I suspect the Vatican is only trying to get their grubby little fingers on what’s left of the sisters’ financial and property assets as they continue to age and die.  (Cardinal Rode, who heads the investigation, is notorious for funneling money into Vatican coffers no matter how unsavory the source.) 

The hierarchs’ other favorite companion tactic is to posture themselves as modern day victims of “nativist…anti-Catholic caricature[s]” and prejudices of mid-19th century America.  This argument can only makes sense if you are the rankest narcissist. 

For the hierarchs, I guess it is any harbor in a storm.  [If you want some background for this view, run a Lexus search on Catholic Church officials responding to adverse media coverage of priestly child sexual abuse.) 

Dolan also reverts to another favorite bishops’ stratagem for undermining their in-house Catholic critics by the not-so-subtle suggestion that if one has a beef like Dowd’s, “why don’t you just leave the church?”   

How dismissive and condescending is that? 

Why should any American Catholic just leave because they resent and expose the rank hypocrisy of these bishops?  Most American Catholics have never abetted the sexual exploitation of children, or engaged in corrupted, twisted leadership, or fraudulently mismanaged millions of dollars like many, if not most, bishops.   

The hierarchs are betting that the public with its notoriously short memory will eventually forget their moral equivocation and complicity in the rape and sodomy of thousands of children.  After all, that is the Roman way:  they figure they will still be standing when all their critics have given up the ghost.

 From the Roman Catholic clerical point of view, I sense that Dolan’s real problem with Dowd and Goodstein’s critique is sourced, like most, if not all, bishops and clerics, in a primitive, most of the time unconscious, fear and loathing of women.  It is something clerics are acculturated to from their earliest seminary training.  Maybe it goes way back to their early familial relationships?

 I learned first-hand about this artifact of the clerical psyche while I served as chair of the review board of the San Francisco Archdiocese (then headed by William Cardinal Levada, now prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation of Christian Doctrine – formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition, a post previously held by none other than Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI).  The review board’s charge was to investigate allegations of child sexual abuse by priests.  I had a front row seat to clinically observe this special clerical brand of misogyny at close range.

 Dolan and his Vatican masters have a lot to fear from Dowd’s opinions and Goodstein’s reporting.  Here are two women who have a prominent and prestigious platform at the NY Times strategically placed to circumvent the vaunted media and imaging-making machine of the world’s longest standing all-male feudal oligarchy.

 As any politician in an undemocratic institution like the Catholic Church, for all his personal affability and genuine “healer” tendencies, Dolan is only trying to further ingratiate himself with the dons at the Vatican, because most certainly one day he hopes to wear the red hat of the exclusive and elite College of Cardinals, and be addressed deferentially as, “Eminenza.” 

 Sadly, it’s all the hierarchs live for.  Something they have groveled and clawed after for most of their clerical careers.

 My sainted sixth-grade teacher, Sister Adelaide, always told us to never confuse the Church for the Christ.  Sister Adelaide counseled that we should imitate Jesus by being more concerned about how well we live the Beatitudes, practice the corporal works of mercy, and a lot less concerned about what she called “Pharisees enthralled with their own fervor.”

 If American Catholics, especially those who still care enough to even associate with the church, are to endure, we desperately need Maureen Dowd and Laurie Goodstein’s continuing critique.   

We should celebrate their voice, not try to silence them. 

 

Jim Jenkins, Ph.D.

Jim Jenkins is a psychologist in private practice and a member of Newman Hall
community at the University of California, Berkeley.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Abuse and Cover Up, Church Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.