Let's Get Together

Thomas Sugrue--Roman Catholic journalist and author (Stranger in the Earth, Watch for the Morning)--is upset by discord between Catholics and Protestants. Unlike most Catholics who launch into print on the subject, he thinks that his own church--particularly the church in the U.S.--deserves a good deal of the blame. Author Sugrue's complaint, in the Protestant Christian Herald: the church is mixing in affairs of state and it has no business there. It began to go wrong when Christ's teachings about spiritual authority in man's subjective "inner world" began to be extended to the "outer world" of temporal power.

It was overemphasis on temporal power, says Sugrue, that led to the Protestant Reformation. The Vatican itself understands the danger of such overemphasis, he believes, but not the Catholic Church in the U.S.

Up with Religion. "Catholicism in the United States is ... booming, aggressive, materialistic, socially ambitious, and inclined to use its membership as a paranoid pressure group, threatening anyone who so much as criticizes the way it ties its shoelaces. It gives the immaculately mannered Italian nobles in the Vatican shivers of revulsion.

"Some Catholics of the United States may dream of converting their nation and joining Church and State, but if Rome gets them first, they will lose this ambition. What they need most is religion; Rome would like to give them this, and dispense with some of their belligerent participation in non-religious affairs of their community and nation.

"But American Catholicism may soon be dictating to Rome; there is suspicion, in fact, that this is already so. It may be a polite dictatorship, but where the money comes from, thence also the orders are apt to originate. Before too long there may be an American Pope, with a 'summer' residence here, and a College of Cardinals packed with local bishops. The Government of the United States might then find itself sending an ambassador to an American citizen . . .

"As an American Catholic, I am now expected to approve the idea of sending an ambassador to the Vatican. I don't. I see no good that such a move can do for anyone. It will upset non-Catholics. It will revive old suspicions of the Pope's plans and hopes. It will cheer an already over-truculent element in American Catholicism . . . The Pope is the bishop of Rome. We have an ambassador at Rome. Can he not call on the bishop as part of his job?"

Turn Off the Heat. As U.S. Catholicism has grown more & more American, Sugrue believes it has become less & less Catholic. American Catholics seem to him "overly concerned with money and sex, asking continually for one and condemning continuously the other. Love of money--even money for the erection of cathedrals--is the root of all evil, and prolonged concentration on one sin, particularly the old scapegoat sin of lust, is normally an indication that other sins are being covered up."

Another alarming tendency of U.S. Catholics, says Sugrue, is toward community separatism ("an increasing number of organizations, institutions and committees whose titles begin with the word Catholic") and censorship.

"When a member of the hierarchy condemns a book or play or movie and calls on all Catholics to boycott the condemned item, the collective power of Catholicism is being used to threaten a publisher or producer or theater owner with economic ruin unless he withdraws from the market something a bishop dislikes ... In a smaller way, Catholic groups and organizations badger newspaper and magazine editors. Any mention of anything Catholic must be favorable or the heat is on ...

"If this sort of pressure were a failure, it would be best for the Catholics. Unfortunately for them, it succeeds ... If Catholic pressure and Catholic censorship continue in the future to succeed as they have in the recent past, the Roman Catholic Church in America will be set back 200 years, back to the times of the burning of the Pope in effigy."

Down with the Fence. What's to do about it? Author Sugrue sees the best hope in the "Christians of sincerity and good will on both sides of the [Catholic-Protestant] fence, who wish that the fence did not exist." Why can't they begin to come together in small groups? "Ten would be enough for a start--five from each side of the fence . . . There would be more common ground, in fact, than there would be grounds for difference . . .

"It would be only a start, but after that, anything and everything could happen. As Americans, we are against iron curtains; we should not maintain one between ourselves, particularly one so old, so rusty, and which marks a division never intended by God to exist among men."

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