Picking On the Big Kid.

The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, by Philip Jenkins (Oxford, 288 pp., $26)

The biggest and richest kid on the block is a whiner if he complains that he is being mocked. Conventional playground wisdom extended to the theater of civilization applies that protocol to the Catholic Church. But in modern Western European history, and in most of the American experience, Catholics were decidedly not the most influential part of the social spectrum: In the 19th century, the coffin of Pope Pius IX was nearly hurled into the Tiber, and the New York Times recorded his death in a few paragraphs on an inside page. After being kidnapped by Napoleon, Pius VI died virtually bankrupt -- and at the end of World War I money was borrowed to pay for the funeral of Benedict XV.

The Catholic Church has not always been the biggest or richest kid on the block, but she has been on the block longer than anyone, and she prefers not to whine. (Of course, were the Catholics now enslaved in Sudan or tortured in China to whine, they would be ignored by CNN and the Boston Globe anyway.) This new book on anti-Catholicism as a fashionable prejudice is not a whine or a whimper, but a sober little list of facts, and that may make it hard to ignore. Saint Paul was not whining when he insisted on being heard as a citizen of Tarsus, the equivalent of invoking First Amendment rights.

At a time when some writers deny the existence of liberal bias in the media, Philip Jenkins -- a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University -- challenges anyone to deny that it is politically correct to be at odds with Catholicism in public discourse. Arthur Schlesinger (Sr., that is) called anti- Catholicism the most deep-seated prejudice in the American conscience, and Peter Viereck called Catholic-baiting "the anti-Semitism of the liberals." The latter may be an archaic statement now that mercurial liberalism seems to be stoking the fires of a new anti-Semitism, but it points nonetheless to an undeniable and enduring phenomenon: The enemy of the liberal is anyone -- be he Catholic, Jew, etc. -- who believes in something more permanent than the liberal's belief in impermanence.

Jenkins is well aware of legitimate weaknesses in current Catholic life, as he has authored an important work on the recent moral scandals (which book also testifies to the largely overlooked scandals on a greater scale in other institutions). Nor does he have a religious axe to grind. He is in fact a lapsed Catholic who became an Episcopalian in the late 1980s and now thinks of himself as "a small-c catholic." In matters theological, or just logical, this raises questions; but Jenkins is not writing a theological tract. His cultural study, while not saying anything very new, is an objective and irrefutable catalogue of biases that have fizzled in the soporific waters of our present culture when they have been cited occasionally and individually.

The problem Jenkins describes has a long history. The more virulent strain of anti-Catholic bigotry has fed off a lot of hatreds: In Europe it was largely ideological, and in the United States it took on a particular animus of the provincial. This old-fashioned anti- Catholicism still churns in the Bible Belt, but it has been reduced by bonding between Catholics and Evangelicals in the face of secular assaults on the moral fabric and natural law. Anti-Catholicism today is the fever of secular liberalism, whose causes include radical feminism, homosexualism, and the materialist progressivism of academe. This bigotry is so widespread and deep that it has been largely unnoticed: As Chesterton said, some things are too big to be seen.

Just as current world political conflicts have exposed and nearly legitimized anti-Semitism from the lands of old Vichy to the modern American campuses, so fashionable social engineering has given new vitality to those who see the Catholic Church as the obstacle to Man Come of Age. Pro-abortionists present the right-to-life movement as draconian religiosity, "gay pride" parades attack Catholic cathedrals and desecrate the Blessed Sacrament to the bemusement of judges, the same media that promoted "sexual liberation" affect and incite scandal when it corrupts the clergy, dissident Catholics are trucked out as the voice of authentic Catholicism, art and public entertainments ridicule creeds without censure, and crude Hollywood uses goofy-priest caricatures as the modern replacement for watermelon-guzzling blacks. If all this confuses the public as it is intended to do, the media invite some desiccated gnostic like Garry Wills to give you an alternative Smiling Catholicism, with the unction of Sidney and Beatrice Webb explaining the Russia of Tomorrow.

The current crisis in the Catholic Church will have an effect as rejuvenating as it will be reforming. The humiliation will be a corrective to the triumphalism that equally marked the demagogueries of populist ranters like Father Coughlin in the 1930s and the euphoric progressivists of the Vatican II era. It will also stimulate a re- examination of the comfortable pact that the Church made with secular culture after World War II. Some older folks will find it hard to confess that the Kennedy election was the low point and not the high point of Catholicism in America, but the low point it certainly was, for it required that a Catholic jump through the liberals' hoops. Kennedy did not prove that a Catholic can be elected president; his repudiation of any imagined papal dictation proved rather that a Catholic who acts like an Anglican in the last stages of terminal trendiness can be elected president.

This is my reading, not that of Jenkins. His job -- and he does it thoroughly -- is to uncover the depth of irrationality that the Catholic faces, and should expect to face more violently, if he will be authentic. There will be many others like Daniel Goldhagen, embarrassing even those sympathetic to his thesis by the unrelenting dishonesty of his diatribes against Pius XII, and Maureen Dowd, writing at hysterical pitch about clerical degeneracy and doing so in the newspaper that has become a hymnal of moral deconstruction.

Philip Jenkins makes no predictions. That is wise. At the turn of the Third Millennium, those who predicted the end of history and an endless horizon of rather boring peace and prosperity are now hiding their dithyrambs. A clergyman once unhelpfully said that you should not prophesy unless you are sure. We can be sure of at least three things. One, this bigotry will not die easily, and the more it is rationally exposed the more it will lash about precisely by the energy of its irrationality. Two, the Catholic hierarchy will have to develop leaders capable of self-reform, for at the moment many of them were not trained for this kind of engagement and seem as bewildered as Louis XVI inviting the mob in for cocoa while the head of the Princess de Lamballe was outside the window on a pike. Three, those who believe will be brought before kings to testify and they will have to give an account of themselves. The third is the safest prediction, because it is given on the authority of a scripture even more influential than an editorial in the New York Times.