I Can't Swallow it

In the October issue of First Things, Joseph Bottum attempts a portrayal of Catholic culture in America over the past thirty years. His thesis has two claims: first, that the revival of Catholic culture in America has formed around the pro-life movment; and second, that the antipathies of liberal vs. conservative, leftist vs. traddie are so 1980s, so locked in the past that they will not determine how Catholic culture in this country moves forward.

To illustrate how his thesis is borne out in the lives and views of young, intelligent, serious Catholics, Bottum recalls the conversation he had during a car ride with some college aged Catholics in Orange County. He describes these Catholics as "serious Catholic kids—daily communicants, pro-life marchers, soup-kitchen volunteers, members of perpetual-adoration societies", and of special note, one of them, reaching the end of the ride, is found to have Bottum's thesis in his mouth:

“You remember how, you know, the old hippie types used to say, ‘Never trust anyone over thirty’? Well, they were right. Only it was their own generation they were talking about,” the thin, quiet one in the back announced as we pulled up to the hotel. “You can see it clearly out here in California. That whole generation of Catholics in America, basically everybody formed before 1978, is screwed up. Left, Right, whatever....The best of them were failures, and the worst of them were monsters.”

What a wise, world weary youth! Fully possessed of Bottum's wisdom, and at such a young age!

While Bottum begins the article by describing the influences of the pro-life movement upon the reformation of Catholic culture, he spends most of the article detailing the mishaps of Catholic movements, Left and Right, in America since the end of the Second Vatican Council. The obvious conclusion he presents to his readers is, as we've already heard from the sage young man, that the best of them were failures and the worst were monsters. This is not to say that there were no good Catholics in America during the whole of this time, only that the larger Catholic culture was in steady decay until it was given new life by the pro-life movement, John Paul II, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).

Bottum points his finger at the usual suspects: the bishops, the bishops' bureaucracy, the Call to Action folks and, most recently, the abuse scandals. But he also takes aim at traditionalists, singling out the Seer of Bayside, Msgr. Gommar De Pauw, and Fr. Nicholas Gruner as representatives of the movement. Then, having lined up the bad guys, Left and Right, Bottum imagines that the two sides have cancelled each other out in a sort of matter / anti-matter annihilation. What we're left with is, I take it, the Catholic culture of First Things, Joseph Bottum, Richard John Neuhaus, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).

Since I have neither the expertise nor the interest necessary to examine his characterization of the Left in Catholic America, I'll confine myself to some remarks about his cursory treatment of traditionalists.

The issue which most traditionalists would identify as being at the heart of their movement is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in its Tridentine rite. But the missal of St. Pius V is nowhere mentioned by Bottum as an issue worthy of consideration in itself. He merely recalls in passing the flight of "badly catechized" parishioners from St. Mary's by the Sea to Our Lady Help of Christians "whose only attraction appears to be its Tridentine rite."

Bottum does not seem to think that access to the Tridentine rite of the Mass played much of a role in the formation of the traditionalist movement in America. Though he mentions the Tridentine Mass in connection with Msgr. De Pauw, the other two traditionalist figures indicted by Bottum are Fr. Gruner and the Seer of Bayside, only indirectly connected to the old Mass, and both of whom he represents as having a cultish though now fading following.

If Bottum were asked to account for the apostolates of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter and the Institute of Christ the King which dot the country, filled with young families and many vocations, would he be left pointing at Fr. Gruner and the Seer of Bayside? What would he say about Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P. who, in a book printed by Ignatius Press, says that the restoration of the Tridentine Mass is the way out of the liturgical crisis? I do not to mention the liturgical writings of Cardinal Ratzinger. There is something in the liturgy of the Mass which people care about passionately, and for good theological reasons.

Yet Bottum does not slow down long enough to consider the merit of the issues close to traditionalist hearts. He writes as though he is planning to read his article to the choir: we already know that John Paul is Great, we know how brilliant the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) is, we know that lefties are dirty and that traditionalists are crazy - long live our New Order!

If Bottum pauses at all, it is to make sure that we know how bad certain folks are, I mean, the Fr. Gruners of this world, you know, guys crazy enough to think that things still look suspicious in Russia, that "communism" might be gone, but that Russia's errors are not. Crazy. Then there was that Malachi Martin looney bird: in a series of fiction and non-fiction works in the 80s and 90s, he said that the American Church was filled with child-molesting, satan-loving priests and bishops. Crazy. At least we know Martin was wrong about the satan-loving part, for we saw how contrite the bishops were when they were caught by their erstwhile buddies in the leftist media, and then closed and sold parishes to pay for the boyfriends and catamites.

While quacks like Gruner and Martin were peddling their fare in America, and while the American bishops were just trying to keep their noses clean and the books straight (so says Bottum), John Paul was reigning Greatly in Rome, and he or his designated subordinates appointed or promoted the likes of Joseph Bernardin, Rembert Weakland, Roger Mahony Matthew Clark, Howard Hubbard, and even Orange County's own Tod Brown. Tell me about these men, Bottum, and then tell me that traditionalists (and everyone else for that matter) do not have a fair question or two for Rome.

In the usual Novus Ordo apologetic writing style, as exemplified by the authors at First Things, by George Weigel, by Michael Novak, etc., Joseph Bottum fails to draw a connection between the men in Rome and the men in the chanceries of America. The Holy Father can do no wrong, and though some bishops in America have been very naughty, they meant well: they were only trying to keep the finances sound and at least a priest in each parish, even if that priest's delicate tastes were for one, "forma insignis viridique iuventa" (though I doubt these priests scrupled about the former so long as the latter condition was fulfilled).

In the end, this "see no evil" philosophy comes across as both dogmatic and effete. First, as dogmatic, because it does not tolerate views of what has happened in the Church other than its own; other views, even conservative views, are represented as destructive to the Church. We at the Cornell Society for a Good Time, in contrast, pride ourselves on compassion and an openness to a diversity of views: I may not be in total agreement with the parishioners at St. Mary's by the Sea who left for Our Lady Help of Christians, but I can very well understand why they did, especially after they were threatened with excommunication for kneeling before the Lord of the Universe. Something is deeply wrong, not with them, badly catechized though they may be, as Bottum sneers, but with those who appointed the bishop, with the bishop, with his chancery, and with the priest, Martin Tran.

Second, the philosophy comes across as effete when we read Bottum's reaction to the story of Fr. Rod Stephens in Orange County:

To follow the . . . story is to suffer a kind of motion-sickness, your sympathies batted back and forth until you have no sympathy left for anyone. . . You start outraged at a priest who cohabits . . . But then you learn that it all came out because . . . Your outrage returns when you find out . . . But your teeth start to ache when you discover . . . On and on the story goes, the whole thing enough to make you want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head.

What? Crawl into bed? You mean, like Fr. Marcel Maciel, a John Paul favorite and the founder of the Novus Ordo golden children, the Legionnaries of Christ, crawled into bed with some of his seminarians? No, surely not, but what possesses Bottum to write in this fashion? It's as though his nerves were unglued by a certain disorder . . .

Fr. Rod Stephens is a publicly recognized sodomite who pursued policies destructive to the diocese in Orange County. There's no question about sympathies, unless we mourn over a man who, if he remains unrepentant, will burn in hell. Our reaction to the situation ought to be one of righteous anger and then of prayer, not going to bed and pulling the covers over our head.

What man in this situation goes to bed and pulls the covers over his head? While Bottum's heart strings were being tugged in so many directions by Rod Stephens' story, he had not swooned away so far as to be unable to smear the "right-wing protesters, complete with banners, who paraded for photographers in front of the bishop’s residence." "Right-wing" is not here used as a term of approbration, as the intelligent reader may have surmised. In slapping on this label, Bottum is distancing himself from those who were praying the Rosary in front of the bishop's residence, those who were hoping by prayer and public witness to recall the bishop to his senses.

Instead - do you know what happened? - the bishop called the police and asked the cops to enforce a relatively unused law, a law which says that those protesting the actions of abortion workers (i.e., murderers) cannot come within a certain distance of the murderers' homes. Crazy. Those right-wingers, up to no good again, and all the while, bringing down Catholic culture in America.

In a rare moment of self-reflection, Bottum recalls a debate at Georgetown University between the indefatigable Americanist Michael Novak and feminist Monica Helwig. To Bottum, it was

"like an old couple locked in a bickering marriage: forgotten occasions suddenly remembered, dead quarrels fanned back to flame, until we seemed to be back at the 1976 Call to Action conference in Detroit, the low point in post-Vatican II American Catholic unity—nothing learned, nothing gained, nothing advanced in thirty years."

But immediately returning to praise his neoconservative compatriot, he reassures us that, yes, indeed, progress has been made. As George Weigel tells us, from the churning cauldron of American Catholicism has emerged "the maturation of Catholic social thought." And though such awkward self-praise distracts, you are almost tempted to believe that the neoconservative crowd has indeed brought us somewhere profound; that just beyond the horizon lies a cohesive sociopolitical worldview that is entirely Catholic, and supported by everyone in the Church except those who spend their evenings bitterly tearing up pictures of the Roman Pontiff.

But his imagery betrays him. If that tiring, frequently rehashed debate between feminist Catholicism and effeminate Catholicism suggests anything, it is that neither side is willing to give up the political and cultural inheritance of the seventies. Whether their rhetoric takes its spiritual booster shot from the "Culture of Life" or the "Culture of Personal Dignity", what is being obscured here is the same: the dogma of the Faith. If the rebirth of Catholic culture is to be accomplished, while the wider Church still slides downward in self-demolition, it will require, as it always has, the spirit of sacrifice and the will to cut off those elements which have crept into our mindset not fully in accord with the teachings of Christ.

Interestingly, Bottum begins with this very idea, and a description of the 1950s which reminds one of some of Bishop Williamson's more obscure arguments.

The arcanery of decorations on albs and chasubles, the processions of Holy Water blessings, the grottos with their precarious rows of fire-hazard candles flickering away in little red cups, the colored seams and peculiar buttons that identified monsignors, the wimpled school sisters, the tiny Spanish grandmothers muttering prayers in their black mantillas, the First Communion girls wrapped up in white like prepubescent brides, the mumbled Irish prejudices, the loud Italian festivals, the Holy Door indulgences, the pocket guides to Thomistic philosophy, the Knights of Columbus with their cocked hats and comic-opera swords, the tinny mission bells, the melismatic chapel choirs—none of this was the Church, some of it actually obscured the Church, and the decision to clear out the mess was not unintelligent or uninformed or unintended.

Without worrying ourselves about Bottum's twisted view of the Council, we ought to ask a few pointed questions about this wonderful replacement Catholic culture which he thinks is beginning to make its entrance. Yes, many of his allusions are signs of hope: these enthusiastic college-age Catholics stubborn to defend the Pope of Rome, praying for an end to abortion, and proudly engaging their peers. Still, as a member of this younger Catholic generation I know that we have been abused. Not just by our dear, gentle priests and forgetful Bishops, but by a new and imperfect evangelization. It is an evangelization that makes compromises with a world that is eager to corrupt - through an evil popular culture which so many only partially reject, through false conceptions of human dignity and religious freedom, through laxism and liberalism, and all of the other manifestations of the uber-heresy of Modernism. And yet Bottum has the gall to suggest that crouching about with the Call to Action folks, poorly catechized and mean in spirit, are those evil traditionalists, ruining Catholic culture for everyone.

Joseph Bottum is the one bringing down Catholic culture in America. I am disgusted by his writing - besides this article, his piece about the death penalty comes to mind as an equally effete essay - just as I have long been leary of the magazine which he edits, First Things. Between the universalism advocated by Neuhaus and its indulgent ecumenism, which refuses to call all men to the fullness of the truth which is found only in the Catholic Church, it is a thoroughly impious publication - in my opinion.

Still, First Things is a force to be reckoned with in the battle for the Catholic Church in America on account of its money, its writers, and its readership. Bottum's piece was interesting, though infuriating, and I encourage you to read it for yourselves to see what he said. Committed as we are in this Society to dialogue and to the vision of a seamless garment of American Catholicism sewn from a rich diversity of opinions, I could not let the occasion of his article pass without saying that I, for one, think that he is wrong about the future of American Catholicism, and that his error springs, in part, from his misunderstanding of Catholic traditionalism in this country.

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