About this whole Catholic-trashing thing--I offer the following, [View all]

[Jackpine Radical]

stolen from another listserv.

Personally, I have an idiosyncratic set of beliefs that fit nowhere, and are tolerated in few places besides my Unitarian conclave. Perhaps as a result of this, I have no particular bone to pick with anyone over their religious beliefs except where those beliefs infringe on the right of others.

In that context, I note that most American Catholics pay little attention to Rome when it comes to matters of birth control, abortion, and homosexuality, and yet they find enough value in the Church to retain their identification with it. Historically, the Catholics have been a mainstay of political liberalism in the US.

The Church provides a very broad spectrum of political opinion, from Scalia to the Berrigans. Let's quit trashing the Berrigans, the Liberation Theologists and the Catholic Workers and recognize that they are not Opus Dei.

Nuns have been a pretty liberal force in this country, as have Catholics in general. There is a tradition of activitism--Berrigan brothers, nuns in Central America, the IrishCatholic political machine which spawned the Kennedy's, McGovern, McCarthy, etc.

The suspicion raised by Catholic tradition, which tends to be more intellectual than Protestant tradition, is nicely explored in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, written about the time of Adlai Stevenson's presidency. Most intellectual movements are Catholic rather than protestant--the enlightenment, egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution, structuralism, existentialism, rennaisance, even the beginnings of the modern incarnation of feminism (e.g., Second Sex) came out of France or Italy. Anglos and Protestants are pretty much dominant in the anti-intellectual realms--e.g., they produce good economists and scientists and Wissenshaft (sp) but lousy artists and intellectuals and except for Shakespeare, indifferent novelists. The I Catholics have produced the best writers (Joyce, Cervantes, Dante and Tolstoy, rates, if you will 2 to 5) ) as well as the basis for progressive liberal thought, with the Irish dominance of politics (e.g., the Kennedy's).

Hofstadter, incidentaly, also wrote the essay Paranoid Style in American Politics which sometimes is cited today to describe the current climate.

So, despite what seems like the intransigence of the modern church, something about Catholicism has created most of the progressive Western thought, except of course for the Jews who really reinvented culture with Freud, Marx, and Einstein. They also have dominated in the arts--given the rennaissance in Italy and France, ese may seem like sweeping over generalizations, in an area where it is politically incorrect, to generalize, but anyway, that's my perception. So, liberal critiques of Catholicism seem to me pretty baseless. Its like an Italian family. The father is supposed to be charge, but matriarchy rules.