The Real Scandal in Boston and Beyond
by Randy Boyagoda - April 11, 2008
Reprinted with permission.
The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture
Philip F. Lawler, Encounter Books, $25.95, 280 pages
Philip F. Lawler loves the Catholic Church as much as he hates the damage it has incurred, in recent decades, in his native Boston and in the greater United States. In Lawler's accounting, this damage, and the accompanying double demise of the Church's role in public life and of its parish rolls, owes much to the doctrinal weakness, overweening self-interest, and cultural and pastoral myopias of the U.S. Catholic bishops.
Situating much of its material in the ongoing history of Boston's Catholic culture, The Faithful Departed argues forcefully – at times too forcefully – that long before, during, and now after the 2002 public revelation of serial clergy abuse and cover-ups in the Boston archdiocese and elsewhere, American bishops have not called each other, their priests, or the greater faithful to the fullest possible living out of the gospel and the teachings of the Church in their daily lives, their parish and episcopal lives, and the greater life of the Church in postwar America.
Leaving aside bishops and scandals for a moment, the more general situation of the Church in contemporary Boston, as this book reveals it, is a variation on the situation in other East Coast cities and on the Church's situation across the Atlantic. Whether in Europe or North America, historically thriving Catholic parishes have withered in recent decades; the ranks of the priesthood and other holy orders have thinned out. These diminishments are little noticed in the greater populace, because vast swaths of people born Catholic these days have little interest in the Church beyond its utility as a charming setting for life-events: baptisms, weddings, funerals.
George Weigel, Philip Jenkins, and of course Joseph Ratzinger, as both cardinal and pope, have robustly analyzed this ongoing phenomenon in recent years. Lawler's intention is to emphasize the shock of these changes in a crucible like Boston where once, he observes, the Church exerted a "gravitational pull" such that "city dwellers, when asked where they lived, were likely to name a parish rather than a neighborhood: Holy Name rather than Roslindale, St. Brendan's rather than Dorchester."
In addition to such wistful anecdotal evidence and a more straightforward, two-century history of Catholics in the city – with a special emphasis on Catholics in local politics and the ebb and flow of ecclesial authority and public influence of Boston's archbishops – Lawler also includes his personal experience as a local Catholic and as a former editor of the archdiocese newspaper, The Pilot. He further informs his story of Boston's Catholic life with general assessments of Vatican II's variously impaired reception in the local church; the post-WWII rise of strident, secular liberalism in American public life; and notable compromises of the Catholic faith in and for national politics (from Kennedy to Cuomo to Kerry).
Much of this is already well-covered ground, and as such Lawler's contributions read like culture-war boilerplate; indeed, the weaker stretches of the book feel like pasted together op-eds and skimmed versions of more substantial works. Lawler is more distinctive when he offers a sustained focus on Boston-related matters, making the city a case-study-in-extreme of a much larger story of then-and-now Catholicism: In the 1930s, 80 percent of Boston's Catholics attended weekly Mass; in 2006, less than 40 percent. At mid-century, the archdiocese was ordaining upwards of 80 priests per year, and Richard Cardinal Cushing declared it his ambition to reach 100 annual ordinations; in 2006, five men were ordained. Across the early-to-middle decades of the 20th century, new parishes followed upon new parishes; 60 have been shut in the past six years. What happened? Much of the history and cultural critique that Lawler offers both situate and answer the question.
The most immediate answer, of course, is scandal. But according to Lawler, not the scandal that likely first comes to mind these days when the subject is the recent life of the Church in Boston:
Today it is commonplace to read that the clerical sex-abuse scandal first erupted in Boston in early 2002. Not so. Church insiders had been aware of the simmering scandal for at least fifteen years. Despite the best efforts of Church officials to keep the story quiet, sensational headlines had begun to appear in the national media by the early 1990s. What came to light in 2002 was the second scandal: the public exposure of the American bishops' negligence.
The second half of Lawler's book is his back-story, retelling, and commentary on this second scandal, complete with a detailed recreation of the cataclysmic events in Boston. As Lawler presents it, this is a sad, depressing, and occasionally shocking story of bishops who seemed more concerned for decades with image management and finances than forceful pastoral leadership; with protecting themselves and their priests instead of children and young people; with maintaining a status quo of collective denial instead of engaging in collective reckoning and reconciliation – or, at least, they seemed so concerned until hearts and minds had to contend with an onslaught of shameful and shaming front-page news, starting in Boston, and fast spreading elsewhere.
Unfortunately, in how he unfolds and comments upon these events, Lawler falters. Throughout the book's second half, the zealously liberal Boston Globe is both Lawler's most reliable villain – "a newspaper with enormous power in the local market and a relentless hostility towards the teachings of the Catholic Church" – and his basic source. He rightly observes that the Globe's zeal for the scandal story was unbridled, and that often the writing came with a "savage edge," but Lawler never addresses what would and would not have happened if the Boston Globe never broke the story in the first place. While Lawler notes that "the Globe has never been the Church's friend," the newspaper inarguably brought grave matters to light that otherwise had been kept concealed.
These exposures have occasioned necessary and long overdue reckonings within the Church, both for its bishops and its faithful – including Lawler himself, who admits that he "leaned on the Globe's reporting heavily in writing this book." In effect, Lawler substantially relies upon the Globe's revelations about the Church and consistently attacks it for the way that it attacked the Church. Leaving aside this inconsistency and the more important question behind it, neither of which Lawler adequately accounts for, the intensity of Lawler's own attacks – not on the Church, but on its American bishops – cannot help but recall at times the wider media's own aggressive enthusiasms for calling out clerical wrongdoing.
As the book nears its conclusion, Lawler calls the Church as led by the American bishops "a shambles"; he describes the most serious aspect of the 2002 scandal as "the treason of the bishops"; he declares that he loves the Church but then explains that this "does not mean unquestioning love for every institution within Catholicism, any more than the love for one's spouse would extend to a cancer within the spouse's body."
Shambles, treason, cancer: From a layman, however faithful and well-informed, against a hierarchical church, however flawed its American leadership has lately been, these terms come across as righteously hostile and indeed prosecutorial beyond Lawler's warrant. He seems to have been overcome by the sheer magnitude of failings and loss that he and others continue to write about and reckon with, and one can only hope Lawler and others will do so in the future with greater humility to mitigate the hard realities under consideration.
Lawler's own closing proposal is promising; it draws on an idea of Pope Benedict XVI's, that a "creative minority" of faithful Catholics (from cardinals to parishioners) strive together for a new springtime in the Church, which, as this book makes clear in both style and substance, is a springtime long overdue in once bright, now wintry Catholic places like Boston.
Writer, critic, and scholar Randy Boyagoda is a professor of literature at Ryerson University in Toronto.
