Picking On the Big Kid.("The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice")(Book Review)

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 ...