James Carroll Takes a Swing at the Church

Left-wing Catholic dissident James Carroll wrote a scathing attack on the USCCB for the Daily Beast blog, accusing the bishops of a “new know-nothing fundamentalism” and drastic shift to the political right for adhering to basic Catholic principles on abortion, the deliberate destruction of an innocent human life, which is an intrinsic evil. I don’t know what disturbs me more: the article itself, or the outpouring of vicious, no-holds-barred anti-Catholic hatred that follows in the com-boxes.

Carroll whines as if the entire moral platform of the USCCB is literally dictated by officials from the Republican Party, which anyone who is actually familiar with their positions on a number of issues from immigration to health-care reform (which they strongly support, minus abortion funding, to the chagrin of many conservatives) knows is somewhere between hysterical and brain-damaged. Carroll longs for the days when the Catholic Church in America was, at least in his one-sided view, completely subordinated not to the Republican political agenda but the Democratic one. Supposedly that would not be an unwelcome intrusion of the Church into political affairs, but an example of a good little boy who does as he’s told by the powers that be.

Of course Carroll’s nostalgia for the “good old Church” neglects the fact that in the days of FDR, abortion was not the political issue it is today, and no one but communists and anarchists believed that the right to murder one’s own offspring was a necessary condition for social justice. The very notion, in its brutality and hypocrisy, would have horrified as many Catholic leaders and laypeople then as it does today.

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