The voice of despair: and then none of this mattered.

Catholicism and American Freedom: A History John T. McGreevy (WW Norton & Co. 2003, 407pp.)

A LOGICAL STARTING POINT for writing religious history is one of contention. Professor McGreevy picks a contrarian Catholic student at the Eliot School, Boston, circa 1859. Thomas Whall refused to recite the King James version of the Ten Commandments, which uses "graven image" in the Second Commandment, and instead used the Catholic version. A member of the school committee wanted the boy expelled. In 1844, a similar situation in Philadelphia had resulted ha bloody riots.

McGreevy's meticulously documented book covers the period of the great Catholic immigration in America from the mid-19th century forward, an America where Protestants hated the Vatican and, by association, hated new Catholic immigrants and their priests, coming mostly from Ireland and Germany. He gives an account of philosophical developments in the American church from conservative medieval Thomism to its belated recognition of human rights. The subjects are spiritually and intellectually uplifting.

Catholic clergy were, in the main, conservative priest refugees leaving a Europe of Protestant "liberals" who flavored nationalistic, centralized governments opposed to papal authority. A notable example was Italy, the site of papal authority, where Garibaldi seized the papal states during the Italian revolution. Bismarck centralized Germany, also at the expense of papal authority. Ireland's clergy accompanied those escaping poverty and famine. But it was not a total escape. By mid-century, an anti-Catholic liberalism was embedded in America's culture, having as one of its cornerstones the enlightenment writings of Thomas Jefferson with his emphasis on freedom from religious authoritarianism. This context of Protestant liberal majority versus Catholic conservative minority produced a century's worth of "American troubles."

McGreevy shows in a book rich in historical detail that the core Catholic clergy in pre-Civil War America preferred the institution of slavery over an abolitionist movement that was Protestant-led and anti-Catholic. Consistent with this Catholic tradition, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, an otherwise outstanding jurist, authored the infamous Dred Scott decision affirming Jefferson's property concept of American slaves. But immigrant Catholics were realists, not a class of racists. Slaves were viewed as workers not far below the abused immigrant laboring class, and posed potential competition if freed. By 1839, an enlightened Vatican rejected the slave trade, and it was a sin for a Catholic to participate.

While there was no moral justification for beliefs supportive of slavery, there were historical reasons which are well plumbed by McGreevy. Much of the Catholic clergy had left a Europe that was in a state of revolution, and they feared for any similar disruption of their New World. While there was noteworthy Catholic opposition to slavery, the mainstream bishopric and clergy of antebellum America were philosophically and politically conservative, opposed revolution, and feared chaos from abrupt changes to the South's slave society. This clergy were rightly viewed as lacking in intellectualism. In fact, Protestants were convinced that Catholic educators were opposed to intellectual growth, and were particularly opposed to the sciences. This mindset led to years of refusal by Harvard's president, Charles William Eliot, to accept graduates of Jesuit colleges for enrollment at the Harvard Law School, even into the 20th century. And up to the 1960s, Phi Beta Kappa membership was denied to the University of Notre Dame because the society felt, without giving adequate reasons, that a curriculum of Thomist philosophy was insufficiently liberal to qualify for a chapter.

Thankfully, American Catholic scholarship had improved greatly by halfway through the 20th century. Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray were leading Catholic scholars of the time. Maritain brilliantly read Thomism as accepting of the importance of the human individual. This excused Catholic scholars from needlessly defending communitarianism, and permitted Catholic theology to take its place in the defense of human rights. Maritain worked to rink Catholic social thought to American democracy, and Murray fought for a revision of the church-state doctrine in the interest of advancing freedom of religion in the United States, while opposing extremisms such as Justice Frankfurter's absolute "wall of separation" between church and state.

Another intellectual great was the Jesuit John LaFarge, who became boldly critical of the church's pre-World War II endorsements of authoritative regimes in Spain (Franco) and Portugal (Salazar). He spent a lifetime battling racial segregation. In 1937, Pope Plus XI had LaFarge draft an encyclical that decried racism and anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, the succeeding Pope Pius XII chose not to release the encyclical while the Nazis were in power. But LaFarge's draft encouraged church opposition to racial bigotry soon after World War II. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Catholic parochial schools became models for racial integration. Equally important and timely, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, referred to by McGreevy as the preeminent historian of American Catholicism, wrote a controversial essay in 1955 castigating American Catholics for their anti-intellectualism. Ellis had a major influence on Catholic higher education. As a result of an intellectual rebirth, and to the consternation of some, contemporary politicians and academics, Catholic bishops in the 1980s stepped forward to take sensible positions on war and peace, and on modern economics.

But unresolved issues remain, and the more troublesome ones involve sex and death. These challenges require dealing with contraception, abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide and sterilization. In the 1960s, as lay Catholics found their voices, contraception became the first issue of controversy. Vatican II had not addressed the use of contraceptives and yet it was apparent that many, if not most, Catholic families were using modern means of birth control, intelligently, to limit family size. Contraception does not involve the taking of life and should have been easily dealt with. But after the death of Pope John XXIII, contraception was addressed in a controversial encyclical, Humanae Vitae, proclaiming that reproduction was the primary purpose of conjugal sex. It was a backward step. By 1965, the Supreme Court struck down a state law that made the use of contraceptives illegal in marriage. After the Griswold decision, there was no civil law to stop Catholics from practicing contraceptive birth control. This left the ludicrous result of resolving personal questions of birth control in confessionals with sympathetic priests. Murray further undercut Vatican authority when he wrote that there was a principle of freedom of conscience in

religion, and that persons of other faiths could support the use of contraceptives in marriage.

Abortion still remains the most divisive issue, particularly after the 1973 decision of Roe vs. Wade, which was not expected to be as far reaching in treating abortion as a right of privacy. Catholic politicians were put in a quandary in their support or non-support of abortion. The Kennedy family met with theologians to try to iron out some common ground, The safest political position was to argue justification for abortion in cases of rape, incest or immediate danger to the mother. But church bishops and most clergy do not publicly accept any exceptions. A logical corollary to their universal sanctity of life position is church opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide. Another logical extension should be an enlightened opposition to capital punishment, which the Vatican and European countries now oppose. The church's unequivocal position on the sanctity of life leaves little doubt of its consistent positions on euthanasia and suicide, though there could he nuanced moral judgments in extreme cases. Contraceptives seem to be in another category. The ongoing debate over birth control suggests to McGreevy a "frail church struggling to distinguish permanent truths from contingent applications." (p293)

McGreevy makes no mention of Opus Dei (evangelize at the work place) or Traditionalist Catholicism (Latin Tridentine Mass), movements opposing Vatican II which had corrected short comings in church doctrine, liturgy and practices. One example is expunging references to Jews as Christ's killers, a troublesome tradition that Traditionalist Catholics are possibly reviving (perhaps unintentionally) in a motion picture, "The Passion." McGreevy may have concluded that these "movements" are historical oddities not deserving of mention, and if so, there is no disagreement here.

The current American church history is one of scandal involving juvenile sexual abuses and hierarchical cover-ups of sociopathic, pedophilic, sexual abusing clerics, at the expense of the entire American Catholic laity. The hard work described by Professor McGreevy had moved the church from reactionary, pro-slavery, anti-intellectual conservatism to enlightened moderate conservatism, while flirting with liberalism along the way. It seemingly ends in a heap of ashes with the priestly sex scandals of the 21st century. It is despairingly summed up by McGreevy: "And then none of this mattered." (p289) Professor McGreevy devotes only five informative pages of history to the scandal and its causes. A fundamental cause cited by McGreevy, with which I agree, was John Paul II's resolve to appoint only bishops not amenable to changes in church teachings on sexual issues, and who also were disinclined to even discuss celibacy and sexual orientations, a policy that led to ignoring and even protecting sexually abusive priests. McGreevy explores these phenomena not to justify but to explain a practicing clergy that was "blind to the suffering of Catholic young people." (P293)

Called "a crime of power, not passion," the priestly scandals may become a marker for structural change to come (e.g. women priests and married priests). It may one day be reduced to a historical footnote alongside papal bastardy, papal intrigue and murder, and papal induced cruelties of the Crusades, an Inquisition, and the Thirty Years War. Stated another way, the great personages of American Catholic history such as Jacques Maritain, John Courtney Murray, John LaFarge, end John Tracy Ellis, do matter despite this horrible scandal. And McGreevy offers the best reason why his account of history deserves respect. Catholicism offers an alternative to the cult of "ethical individualism" which recognizes no authority beyond self, which honors the libertarian marketplace, and which marginalizes "solidarity," a major church theme that provides dignity for society's most vulnerable members.

Nor should Professor McGreevy despair of the church's resiliency. In the worst locale of the scandal, Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law was replaced by the highly respected Franciscan priest, Archbishop Scan P. O'Malley, and the tenor of the scandal has changed (at least in Boston) for the better. It almost seems like a liturgical second coming that O'Malley arrives and immediately offers a substantial settlement. He even appears prepared, if necessary, to sell valuable church properties to pay the bill. This certainly augurs well for the future history of the American Catholic church.

RICHARD L. SIPPEL is a federal administrative low judge at on independent regulatory agency in Washington, D.C. He occasionally reviews books for The Federal Lawyer, a legal journal.