Secularism USA

As a former resident of Quebec (1970s), and in partial (and belated) response to a post by my good friend Bill (see here), I'd say I witnessed the effects of the Revolution Tranquille in declericalizing and secularizing the province. I can't quite see a parallel in the United States for two reasons:

(a) Quebec, like Ireland and Poland, was fiercely Catholic as a matter of national identity because it faced a Protestant conqueror (in the case of Poland, one that was Orthodox, later Communist, but in an Orthodox way). Remove the British and the Russians and religious fervor waned. Poland legalized abortion just a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed.

(b) The USA is a predominantly Protestant society, with a Protestant epistemology. Protestantism itself was the major secularizing force in northwestern Europe, transforming religion from an artifact controlled by a clerical caste based in Rome to an assertion of the freedom to engage in individualistic profession of an endless variety of idea systems.

The origin of secularism in Christian Europe across confessional lines lies, paradoxically, in Christianity. The Christian acceptance of nominalism in its ranks between the third and sixth centuries of our era, when missionaries started converting entire Barbarian tribes by convincing their king or chieftain sowed the seeds of secularism.


Christendom (RIP...DG!) was an edifice built on compulsory religious affiliation that never developed authentic deep roots of faith among the mass of Europeans. They were what we would call cultural Christians and nothing more. The continued existence of pagan shrines throughout supposedly Christianized Europe as late as the 12th and 13th centuries gives witness to this.

Enter industrialization and capitalism, both arguably the children of Protestantism (see Weber), and the Church and churches lost the working class. That happened in the 19th century.

What we have witnessed in our lifetime is a belated echo in America, where religion was socially compulsory, a matter of manners more than conviction. Among urban, educated Americans the compulsion has slackened to the point that religious ignorance is the prevailing coin of the realm. Maybe that's more honest.

Catholic blackmail isn't the real papal news

Catholic blackmail isn't news, but the level it has verifiably hit is. As someone who once worked within the structure, let me explain.

Blackmail runs rampant throughout the church. In our day of high public standards and behavior that falls below even the most private ethical realms of the confessional, the number of supposedly chaste and celibate clerics caught with their fingers in the sexual cookie jar is high.

Years ago, I did everything in my meager power to prevent the elevation to cardinal of one archbishop who had long been blackmailed by one then-prominent Catholic layman. Although -- deo gratias! -- the weakness in that case involved adult women.

We don't yet have a good handle on the number of clerics who died of AIDS linked to sexual contact, but I suspect that will one day shock the world.

What did you expect, that "Father" was a saint? He's just a guy. Even Joseph Ratzinger put on his Hitler Youth uniform pants one leg at a time. There are trousers underneath the ceremonial clerical dresses and underneath the clothes a full complement of testosterone.

Think you're far away from that? Next time you go to church watch the people who collect baskets. Is there one who has been doing this forever? That man, it usually is a man (just like Catholic priests are usually men), is probably skimming off the collections protected by knowledge of a sexual indiscretion committed by the pastor, or one of the priests in the parish staff.

Oldest scam in the book. Those candle- and incense-smelling men who are always in church, who are long-time church employees although they seem to do nothing. They're blackmailers.

Notice priests coming out to collect the baskets at the offertory? A countermeasure. Grab the dough before anyone else gets it.

Corruption is highest, of course, in the rich countries, where the Church is rich: in the United States and Europe. As bank robber Willie Sutton reputedly said, that's where the money is. And let's be fair, this happens in other churches, although usually it's more naked larceny.

The national office of the  Episcopal Church had a classic accountant-skims-off-millions scandal a few years ago.

But how can you embarrass the Catholic Church after the Borgia pope? A Nazi pope? Done that and seemingly no one except me wondered what the cardinals were smoking that day.

What appears to have shocked even Ratzinger out of the papacy is not mere corruption, but corruption involving bishops and those who could be pope, cardinals. Of course, corrupt bishops and even popes are not new. Any more than corrupt politicians.

What's new is that more get caught out publicly and that the public expects them to fall on their proverbial swords. Especially if the cookies in the forbidden sexual jar are boys.

Poetry eulogy proves editors aren't obsolete

Call it the case of the edited blog. In the print version of The Washington Post, there was a sober meditation on the uses and popularity of poetry, in the paper's appropriately named blog site, Compost, there was a rant.

Obviously, the blog was the brain fart of one Alexandra Petri. This young woman who professes omniscience after all of three years out of Harvard (two years less than my younger son, a fellow former Cantabrigidian), rose (descended?) in 2010 from Post intern to Post blogger. I see her byline occasionally on the op-ed page when even Eugene Robinson has nothing left to say.

Her piece in this morning's printed paper, headlined "Ode to an Obsolete Art," offered an uncharacteristically humble and sober outtake from the fact of a poem being read at the second Obama inauguration.

She calls poetry "a field that may well be obsolete." Lest one take her for her usual smart-ass self, she then declares

I say this lovingly as a member of the print media. If poetry is dead, we are in the next ward wheezing noisily.
But sometimes I worry about poetry.

I was delighted, as a journalist of more than three decades, to see that she seems to be maturing.

Reviewing the literary form's history she makes obligatory stops by Homer and Shelley. Predictably, she completely elides past the ancient rhyming and metered forms as mnemonic artifacts in a world in which most history was oral.

I would give you a link, but the moribund Post forces you to sign in to see the printed paper online (how's that for not getting it?). I just couldn't bother.

But wait!

Online, in the Compost site I found not one but two pieces, the first "Is Poetry dead?" Here is an unedited version of what saw print. Colorful, lazy and flatulently narcissistic as all blogs are (this is not journalism, folks!)

Here is the Alexandra Petri her Post patron fell in love with, all-knowing and arrogant as ever ...

Still I think there is a question to be asked. You can tell that a medium is still vital by posing the question: Can it change anything?
Can a poem still change anything?

You'll also find that the millions who spend their time commenting on newspaper websites had already given her the just recompense by the time the printed piece appeared. In her follow-up blog post ('Poetry is not dead,' says poetry), she sheepily warns that saying "poetry is dead" will result in zealots "sonetting" on one's lawn.

Petri's follow-up is a semi-chastised, quirkily funny blogiad, fine as far as it goes, but still not journalism.

The moral of the story?

Clearly, editors aren't obsolete. They can turn an online rant into a thoughtful printed piece. Not quite the lesson she intended, yet true.