You Offended Him?!
I find this story from yesterday's New York Post significant: "New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan has condemned The New York Times -- blasting the Gray Lady and its columnist Maureen Dowd for what he says are examples of unfair, prejudicial and just downright mean anti-Catholicism." Dolan was pretty apparently pretty harsh:
He singled out Dowd -- a poison-penned, Pulitzer winner and former Catholic-school girl -- for "the most combustible," "intemperate and scurrilous" "diatribe" she wrote on Oct. 25, which "rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish or African-American religious issue."
"She digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans."
"It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime," Dolan wrote. " 'The anti-Semitism of the left' is how [poet Peter] Viereck reads it."
Dolan noted that an Oct. 14 Times piece about child sex abuse in Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish community failed to demand what the paper had previously demanded of the Catholic Church: to release the abusers' names, roll back the state statute of limitations and release all records.
So why do I find this significant? Because Dolan is, by all accounts, one heckuva nice guy. New York Magazine is no friend of Catholicism, much less conservative Catholicism, but it painted a very kind picture of the bishop in a feature piece last month. It's a lengthy piece, but if you want an example of the picture it paints of the man:
His entire career, Dolan, 59, has approached the job of being a priest not as a daunting paterfamilias but as that heckuva-nice-guy you meet at some wedding who turns out to be a priest. He is what other priests call a “lifer,” someone who found his calling early and steered a course to the seminary right after grammar school (last spring, his first-grade teacher flew in to do the reading at his installation in Manhattan). He grew up in Ballwin, Missouri, the oldest of five children. His mother still lives in the St. Louis area, but his father, an aircraft engineer, died of a heart attack, in 1977–just nine months after Dolan was ordained. “He doesn't have to put on any kind of show,” says Monsignor Michael Curran, a Brooklyn priest who has known Dolan for two decades. “He's very comfortable with who he is and what he's been called to be. And he uses his personality, his human gifts, to communicate a very powerful spiritual message. Maybe a psychologist could put it better, but I think there's probably not a trace of an identity crisis in the man.”
Harsh criticism from Dolan sounds like harsh criticism from Mother Teresa. When it occurs, you oughtta listen. If a cur accuses me of being a cur, I shrug. If the kindly older fellow at my church takes me aside and tells me I'm behaving poorly, I blush and want to crawl under a rock.
Maybe it's time for Dowd to crawl under a rock.
But I won't hold my breath.
Local Corner
Plug for a new local endeavor: The Catholic Information Center of Southwest Michigan. It features the Newman's Bookshoppe (the Cardinal, not Kramer's friend), which has an impressive assortment of books. Check it out.
Family Corner
With the exception of the obnoxious-looking guy with the sunglasses, this is a good picture of my family (in Alaska, last summer):
