"A Hate Much Loved and Lied About"

Michael Pakenham (not a Catholic) reviews the new book by Philip Jenkins (a former Catholic), The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice:

Is a need to hate essential to the human condition? No. But history and contemporary life insist that hating has beguiling charms. Denying them is a main job of civilization. That job's not being done very well these days.

For the moment, put aside African-Americans, Jews, Latinos and other traditional hate targets and consider the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

The most elegant description of anti-Catholicism I have read is John Highham's: "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history." That surgically precise diagnosis is quoted in The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice by Philip Jenkins (Oxford, 288 pages, $26)....

Jenkins has taken on a topic that I thought on first blush would be annoying to the point of embarrassment, to either side, and hardly the stuff of a long and detailed book. To the contrary, he accomplishes a fascinating tale, exploring the depths of the consciousness of this country - diverse forces that weave together the history of the civilization that we share....

Jenkins gives particular attention to a 1979 play and later television show by Christopher Durang, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All, which received an Obie and has often been revived on stage. Its ridiculing of the Church and its values, he argues, might be legally prosecuted as a hate crime if the target were anything but the Catholic Church. And that leads him to the core essence of the entire book: "The case of Sister Mary provokes a simple question: why can Catholicism legitimately be attacked in such outrageous terms by the American media, while other racial, social and religious traditions remain exempt?"...

(Thanks, Carl.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 05/14/03 10:44:26 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.