You Suffer, We Get the Credit

Several years ago, at the March for Life in Washington, some boys from a Catholic school in Kentucky were being harassed by a native American protester and by a group of black activists, taunting them and refusing to let them be. One of the boys, having in vain confronted the protester, stood like stone, taking the abuse, while some of the others cheered, and a few of them decided to give tit for tat, taunting the protester in turn. It should have been greeted with a shrug and a reminder to those who did respond in kind that there are better and more Christian ways to deal with revilement. 

Instead, people across the country leapt to condemn the boys, and even to fantasize about making them objects of their violence, especially the one among them who showed some real courage and restraint. That was to be expected, given the general contempt wherein boys are held—boys, I mean, who have the ordinary and natural feelings of boys. What I did not expect, and what at the time I could make no sense of, was the speed with which their bishop joined in rushing to judgment, far from defending those members of his flock from the general odium, far even from attempting to understand the situation the particular boy was in.

I think I can now make sense of it, though I do not like the sense it makes. As I write, Catholics in America are treated to the unedifying spectacle of what I will call transferred Samaritanism. Suppose the Pharisee, seeing the beaten man at the side of the road, and noting a Samaritan working in the fields nearby, were to call the fellow over and demand that he behave in an open-hearted and inclusive way. 

“Let’s see your purse,” says the Pharisee. “Here, take some of these coppers, go and tend to that man in the ditch, and take him to your house. When he gets better, he will want to share your work and your remuneration, which means, of course, that you and your family will get somewhat less than what you get now, but that is just a part of the life of charity that you must live. In fact, the man may end up replacing you entirely, and then think how happy you must be!”

“But if you’re so eager to help,” the Samaritan protests, “why don’t you let him have your position instead of mine?”

“Moi?” says the Pharisee, for I imagine that into every human language a little French must fall. “Oh, I would gladly do so,” he says, “but you see, he’s a peasant as you are, and so he has to do the kind of work you do. I can’t help it. Those are just the facts.” And he hugs himself for his generosity.

“So you have no feeling for me at all?”

“Look,” says the Play-Actor, “let’s get this straight. I put up with you, and you ought to be thankful for that much. You’re a Samaritan, right? Thick in the head, always thinking of yourself, rough and crude, sticking up for your kind. We don’t like you. Shut up and be charitable already.”

There is the key. It is not alone a lack of affection or sympathy for such people as the working class in America—I mean here specifically those who voted for Mr. Trump in the recent election; the “deplorables,” as Mrs. Clinton called them, the “bitter clingers,” as Mr. Obama called them. It is an active antipathy. If such people are hurt by a glut of cheap labor coming from illegal immigrants, that’s icing on the cake.

I am not speaking about everybody here. Still, a consistent mode of behavior, one that hurts the Church you are charged to help to flourish, suggests a consistent underlying passion. In this case, it is not only an ordo amoris out of kilter but an ordo contempti, and in some, an ordo odii. The American Church in my lifetime, as an institution rather than as individual priests or bishops here and there, has done nothing to keep the indigenous working class in the fold, and has especially done nothing to keep such men as many of those high school boys will grow up to be, if they are not going on to college. Men who work with their shoulders and backs don’t listen to feminist scolds, male or female, whose hands are as smooth as their words are shrill.   A mode of behavior, one that hurts the Church they are charged to help to flourish, suggests a consistent underlying passion. In this case, it is not only an ordo amoris out of kilter but an ordo contempti, and in some, an ordo odii. Tweet This

And that saps the vigor of the Church. Where did the American Church once get all her vocations to the priesthood? Where, I mean, before the elitism of the college-educated set in after Vatican II—when priests and religious sisters sure that they knew better obliterated one form of popular piety after another and devastated the churches the people had long cherished? In my small town, which I guess was typical in this regard, the Church got them from an energetic, faithful, and multi-ethnic working class; roughly fifty, from my town’s incorporation in 1876 to 1965.  I count only three since then.

You cannot get priests unless you appeal to men, and you cannot do that unless you actually like their company, and by that I emphatically do not mean the company of the occasional effete and effeminate. But feminism is a luxury belief, as is, in the United States, a high-toned costless pretense of charity regarding the influx of millions of people, many of them men thus detached from their families, to depress the labor market at its low end. All men who do manual labor understand the point, and a Church that blithely ignores their situation says to them, implicitly, “Get lost.” Those men would include the excellent house painter whom I hired this summer, a young Brazilian-American who wanted Trump to win.

But perhaps certain American prelates, among them the most vocal in support of the influx, do not really want to see those vocations rise, because the young men who now take their faith seriously do so after having had their fill of the posh ordo odii, in school, in college, and from the political-entertainment complex. They have witnessed how it all leads nowhere, this confusion of the sexes, the denial of the gifts men bring, and the collapse, even in the Church, of what nature and common sense and observation show, that the sexes are made for one another, mutually, and are of no meaning otherwise. They would rather work on a construction crew than play mah-jongg and sip coffee with an elderly clique of priests who secretly envy them their faith and their energy and wish they would go away, or grow up finally to be as jaded and ineffectual as they are.

Sum it up so. Young men, in particular those in the class without the luxury opinions, would be grateful if once every generation some high prelate in the American Church might notice that they exist, defend them against the opprobrium which is regularly heaped upon them (and their wives), and stand up for their welfare. I suspect, actually, that things in this regard are beginning to change. None too soon.