Straining to present a religion under siege.

The New Anti-Catholicism: the Last Acceptable Prejudice Philip Jenkins (Oxford University Press, 2003, 258pp.)

READING PHILIP JENKINS' The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice reminded me of a scary moment from my early childhood. We lived in Ft. Worth, Texas, near the air force base where my father worked to keep B-52s in peak condition in case the Soviets attacked. One day our landlady, a Southern Baptist, managed to frighten me even more than the godless communists who cut off missionaries' tongues and stuck chopsticks in the ears of Christian children: she told me that in the basement of the church where we Catholics went to weekly mass, priests and nuns were storing a vast quantity of weapons. At a signal from the Vatican, unpatriotic Roman Catholics in America would rise as one and take over the United States in the name of the pope. Alarmed and hurt, I told this to my mother, who serenely replied with the immortal words, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Then my family knelt down to say our nightly rosary.

My mother's sage advice would have helped Jenkins craft a more serious book. Straining mightily to uncover "the most significant unconfronted prejudice in modern America," representing "a pressing social problem," he searches out anti-Catholicism in every nook and cranny of American society, from The X-Files to the words of Roman Catholic authors themselves. Instead of producing the "scathing indictment" trumpeted by the publisher, however, all this labor results in a book that is occasionally informative, generally superficial and sometimes silly. Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, does not present what he most needs in order to prove a serious social problem: evidence of physical, material, or social harm to the millions of American Catholics. What Jenkins details is a strong, even harsh, assault on the moral and intellectual authority of an institution governed autocratically by an all-male episcopacy guided by a powerful and charismatic pope determined to uphold that authority. Tellingly, though, some of the strongest criticisms and largest protests come from American Catholics themselves. All too conveniently for his argument, Jenkins lumps these Catholic critics together with the rest of the anti-Catholics.

The book begins with a brief but informative account of the history of American anti-Catholicism. While opponents of the church have ranged from the right and left wings of American politics, Jenkins writes that "the modern distaste for Catholicism is primarily found on the left/liberal side of the spectrum, especially among feminists and gay activists." For Jenkins, what has changed is not the Catholic church, with its long-held doctrines and practices, but America, in which an expansive view of rights has led marginal or persecuted groups to claim their own place in society. Proponents of gay and women's rights have focused on the church's doctrines (opposition to abortion, contraception, homosexual activity and women's ordination) and its governance (a hierarchical structure excluding women specifically and laypeople generally).

Jenkins does not dismiss the disagreements of some feminists with the hierarchy and doctrines of the church. He argues, though, that some behavior and language has crossed the line from opposition to bigotry. The word "Catholic" becomes a careless shorthand for chauvinism, misogyny and homophobia, and the "essential features" of the religion are criticized as giving rise to evil--an evil that "cannot be prevented without fundamentally changing the beliefs or practices of the religion."

The same is true for the media, Jenkins claims: whether in print, on a movie screen or on TV, references to or portrayals of Catholics indulge stereotypes once familiar to nativists or conservative fundamentalists but now a feature of media liberalism.

Some claims of animosity are no doubt true, and unsurprising. Given Catholicism's stance on women's ordination, abortion and sexuality, it would be surprising if gay and women's activists did not clash with the hierarchy. No one can reasonably expect gay people to renounce sex or feminists to become antiabortion or accept meekly their exclusion from all serious power or ordination. Their goals would require substantial restructuring of church power, if nothing else. For its part, the church has been adamant about practices that, although not nearly as unchanging as Jenkins suggests, are still quite old and fiercely held. Angry confrontation between a powerful institution and dissenters is to be expected in a pluralistic America that has, as Jenkins admits, rather passed the church by.

Still, this is not the same as prejudice or bigotry or even anti-Catholicism, unless we identify Catholicism entirely with the clergy and hierarchy. This, however, is what Jenkins does. By extension, then, any attack on the hierarchy becomes an assault on the Catholic people. With this connection, even Catholic authors, such as feminist Rosemary Radford Ruether, or the distinguished intellectual Garry Wills, can become "anti-Catholic."

Neither external critics nor Catholic dissenters have made the mistake of identifying Catholicism with the institutions of the church. None of the ethnic slurs that once made anti-Catholicism so vicious are evident in the current round of criticism. Editorial cartoons and media programs mostly feature bishops, cardinals and priests, and many of these writers are themselves no doubt Catholic. The Catholic population itself stands in casual or formal opposition to the hierarchy on many matters of doctrine, morals and power. Particularly on matters of contraception and sexual morality, many Catholics simply ignore the church's official teachings, and the American hierarchy has tacitly acquiesced. To the extent that the Catholic population has become part of mainstream America it has become to some extent anti-Catholic, at least the way Jenkins describes it.

A BUILT-IN TENSION DOES EXIST between Catholicism and American culture, especially the America of ever-expanding rights and freedoms, and this is worth exploring. But elevating this tension into "a pressing social problem" allegedly filled with hate crimes against the church is simply absurd. Jenkins would have done better to focus on the distinction he makes early on between anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism. It might have spared Jenkins from the folly of branding Garry Wills as anti-Catholic, despite all the writing Wills has done defending and explaining the religion for 40 years. More substantially, anti-clericalism is an interesting strain throughout the history and culture of America, which perversely delights in the travails of fallen or hypocritical pastors, be they Catholic or Pentecostal (see Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker).

Above all, Jenkins might have focused on the most important issue, one he misses entirely while analyzing episodes of The X-Files or pursuing the crucial difference between real pedophilia and mere statutory rape as a way of mitigating the seriousness of the sex-abuse scandal. The real issue is the fundamental contradiction between a church governed hierarchically and autocratically on the one side, and the democratic, antiauthoritarian sentiment central to the American culture (including American Catholics) on the other. Modern American Catholics just will not obey unquestioningly, and neither the American hierarchy nor the Vatican has ever come to grips with that fact.

Neither does Jenkins. The sex abuse scandal was not a catastrophe simply because of predatory priests but because of the appearance of collusion and conspiracy on the part of bishops accountable to no one, who used their authority to hide the facts by transferring dangerous men from parish to parish, placing "reputation" over the safety of their own parishioners. That is what has so angered Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Those are the acts that have caused real harm to the church, that have brought ridicule to the hierarchy and threatened dioceses with financial ruin. If, as Jenkins suggests, even Catholics can be anti-Catholic, then perhaps the greatest offender is really a bishop: Cardinal Bernard Law.

DAVID MYERS is an associate professor of history at Fordham University and acting director of graduate studies in its history department. He is writing a book about infanticide in 17th century Europe.

This review originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Reprinted with permission.