CATHOLICISM FOR DUMMIES : How the pundits get it wrong.

You would think that merely reporting the truth about the sexual abuse of children by priests and the cover-up of those crimes by the hierarchy would be damning enough. The facts more than speak for themselves. Could the church's harshest critics ask for a villain more incorrigible than Cardinal Bernard Law?

But many pundits find the facts inadequate to their sense of outrage, and that suggests that their real complaint is with the Catholic Church itself, and especially with the supposedly archaic practices of clerical celibacy and hierarchical governance. Most exasperating are those commentators who would not normally weigh in on Catholic issues, but have taken the sexual-abuse scandal as an opportunity to join the chorus of denunciation. These ersatz theologians display a predictable combination of prejudice and ignorance. I have in mind two articles in particular: a New Yorker editorial (April 1) by Hendrik Hertzberg, and a column by Bill Keller in the New York Times ("Is the Pope Catholic?" May 4).

Hertzberg is no slouch, and while his New Yorker editorials sometimes betray a certain smugness, he is rarely uninformed or less than incisive. Not so when it comes to Catholicism. In his "Comment," Hertzberg began by making a simple factual error. All Catholic priests, he informed his readers, take a vow of poverty. Not so. Priests in religious orders do, but diocesan priests do not. Perhaps all priests should, but most don't. Hertzberg's initial error rendered moot the editorial's conclusion calling attention to the discrepancy between how vows of poverty and celibacy are "unevenly stressed." If nothing else, Catholic hypocrisy is not quite as all-pervasive or "ironic" as the New Yorker asserted.

Hertzberg himself stressed the supposed "common sense" connection linking celibacy and sexual abuse. But, as anyone trying to become informed about the matter knows, there is no sociological evidence suggesting that celibates are more likely to abuse children than are married men. In fact, what evidence there is suggests the opposite. Hertzberg substituted a fashionable incomprehension over celibacy for an analysis of the problem at hand. Perhaps the priesthood should include "men and women, married and single," as the editorial suggested, but that argument sheds little light on the steps that need to be taken to protect children from predators.

Celibacy may appear to be a bizarre idiosyncrasy or worse to a New Yorker opinion writer, but it is a practice present in almost all cultures in all times and places. It has a deep, if counterintuitive, resonance across religious traditions. To compare the expected demise of priestly celibacy to the collapse of murderous political regimes like apartheid or Soviet communism, as Hertzberg does, is a remarkably parochial view for such a cosmopolitan magazine. After all, I seem to remember that one celibate Polish priest played a rather large role in ending Soviet tyranny.

While Hertzberg at least tried to be fair, Bill Keller's fulminations were a jumble of half-baked analogies and hoary canards. Keller was especially vehement, and ill-informed, about John Paul II, whom he gratuitously described as "infirm," "unintelligible," and someone we should all "pity." Keller went on to charge the pope with endemic "hypocrisy," presiding over a reign of Soviet-style suppression, and leaving little more than a legacy of distrust. "This is a crisis of the pope's making," Keller says of the sexual-abuse scandal, while questioning whether John Paul has any concern for the victims at all.

That John Paul has contributed to the erosion of trust between the laity and hierarchy through the selection of company men as bishops is undeniable. But most American Catholics, like most people throughout the world, think this pope is a more complex and impressive figure than Keller seems capable of imagining. Whatever John Paul's faults, he is no fraud. Does that mean Catholics agree with him about episcopal authority, sexual morality, or the ordination of women? Of course not. But neither are they likely to see him as the dictatorial head of a poor man's "Kremlin," as Keller preposterously describes the Vatican. Keller, who calls himself a "collapsed Catholic," is stuck in a time warp, where the church's moral stature is still synonymous with the "Crusades and the Inquisition." Sounding like that venerable anti-Catholic bigot Paul Blanshard, he casts the church as a bastion of reaction in the "larger struggle within the human race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism." Guess what side Keller is on.

If only history and life were so tidy. The news that the Catholic Church, and especially this pope, has been a powerful force for human dignity and rights around the world apparently has yet to reach Keller. Instead he denigrates John Paul II's role in the fall of Soviet totalitarianism by dismissively inserting the adjective "godless" before "Communists," thereby hinting that John Paul's opposition to the Soviets was merely religious and self-interested. Opposing communism for theological reasons is something to be mocked. That John Paul has a sophisticated philosophical view of why atheism undermines human freedom and dignity seems to have eluded this collapsed Catholic. Keller might ask if John Paul's views about "godless Communists" are more anachronistic or philosophically dubious than the convictions of those who thought it a good idea to found this nation on the "self-evident truth" that all men are created equal and "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." Or are natural rights really nothing more than "nonsense on stilts"?

With similar carelessness, Keller attributes to John Paul the "most austere, doctrinaire view of sexual ethics." Wrong again. The pope is not the unenlightened puritan Keller supposes, but actually something more perplexing: he's a hopeless--and hopelessly abstract--romantic on the subject. Those who disagree with the pope about contraception, as I do, still have an obligation to get him right. The fact that celibate priests have committed crimes seems to have absolved many critics of their intellectual responsibility.