New York's greatest living newspaper columnist says the Catholic Church, corrupted by sexual scandal and creeping right-wing ideology, is dying out in America. And he sheds no tears.
By Andrew O'Hehir
Jimmy Breslin wants to start his own church. He's had enough of the old one after almost 74 years, and who can blame him?
When you look back over the career of New York's consummate common-man columnist -- one of the best at cramming characters, emotion and sense of place into a 650-word rectangle of newsprint that Gotham has ever seen -- his break with the Roman Catholic Church has been a long time coming. It wasn't exactly the sexual abuse scandal itself that sent Breslin over the edge, although he's been covering it with intense and deepening anger for the last two years. Instead, he says, it was one of the scandal's side effects: discovering that one of the American church's most prominent men of God was a niggling, pedantic little man.
"A couple of things did it," Breslin tells me in his gargling-with-glass Queens accent. "I think, most of all, it was reading the transcripts of Cardinal Egan, when he was the bishop up in Bridgeport
, quibbling over the classification of a young man who was abused." That would be Cardinal Edward Egan, who was appointed archbishop of New York, and hence de facto leader of the American church, despite his indirect implication in an especially seamy scandal at his former diocese in Connecticut.
"They were in court over the issue of -- did the priest bite his penis or did the kid bite the priest's penis? It was confusing," Breslin says drily. Egan objected to the opposing attorney's reference to the young man in the case as a child, since he had been a college freshman at the time. "He was testifying, Egan, and he wondered whether they should call this kid a child or a young man, because he was a student at Sacred Heart College. Basically, he was quibbling over the classification of a young man who was involved in a sexual act with a priest."
(snip)
I mention to Breslin that this article is likely to run on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, assuming that this consummate New Yorker will have something to say about that momentous event in the city's history. "I try not to pay attention to it," he says. "The anniversary is a day for exhibitionists, and for politicians trying to use it to their advantage. Who tried to use it more than Giuliani, the dog?" He uses another word, a gerund adjective, right before "dog."
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