[Update: The good folks at America have decided to make Bishop Curry's article and the letters responding to it free. Christmas in January!]Last month I noted an unwieldy and finally disappointing article by Bishop Thomas J. Curry in the November 20 edition of America, "The Best and Worst of Times." Curry, an auxilliary of Los Angeles, took Catholic scholars and writers to task for having imbibed the anti-Catholicism of their ambient professional cultures. Without the slightest hint of irony, he claimed, "The insularity of Catholic commentators renders them largely incapable of locating Catholicism, past or present, within the larger American context." He even named names, including Commonweal contributors Paul Lakeland and Peter Steinfels.Several readers have responded, and to its credit, America has printed several pages of their letters to the editor. Here's what Peter Steinfels wrote:

As someone who has admired writings on church-state issues by Bishop Thomas J. Curry, I was extremely disappointed as well as personally offended by his recent article, The Best and Worst of Times (11/20).

Consider his articles rhetorical strategy. On the one hand, it is a paean of praise for American Catholics past and present: their fidelity, vitality, endurance, heroism, resistance to secularism and so on. On the other hand, it uses that heroic record to discredit a broad but undefined set of critical Catholic commentators (evidently including me) who are accused of disparaging these Catholics, aiding and abetting a secularist ethos and subscribing to an anti-Catholic agenda. This is, I submit, the logical equivalent of the White Houses technique of smearing Democratic critics of the Iraq war by accusing them of insulting our troops in the field and aiding terrorism.

Who are these dominant Catholic commentators? Bishop Curry doesnt really say. He mentions Paul Lakeland, myself, Voice of the Faithful and the Leadership Roundtable on Church Management. He relies on Philip Jenkins to specify another half dozen, some of whom write only occasionally on Catholicism and some of whom do show a weakness for traditionally anti-Catholic themes. But mainly he targets conveniently unnamed (and unquoted) other Catholic writers and Catholic historians along with Catholic academia, most Catholic commentary and modern Catholic scholarship.

Any honest list of major Catholic commentators would have to include at least a dozen or two dozen additional names. It would have to include conservatives who often voice worries very similar to those of liberals (Bishop Curry names only liberals). It would have to include priests and even a few bishops as well as lay people (Bishop Curry names only lay people). It would include some of the people he cites favorably, Andrew M. Greeley above all, but also John McGreevy and Richard John Neuhaus.

Had Bishop Curry been asked to name his targets (perhaps by the editors of America?) rather than exercising a free hand to tar a broad, unidentified group, it would have shown either (1) that his sweeping charges of disparagement, ignorance, crypto-secularism, anti-Catholicism, etc., etc., simply do not apply to most of them or (2) that he is talking about a rather narrow and distinct subset, who have often been criticized by others.

While I can think of more pleasant things than to be publicly charged by a bishop with pursuing an anti-Catholic agenda, what is genuinelydiscouraging is the way this kind of accusation disguises the basically self-justifying and defensive character of Bishop Currys argument.

He finds it gratifying to receive affirming responses when questioning those present at the parishes he visits. But leaving aside the possibility, which must have occurred to him, that parishioners are not always totally candid with visiting bishops, wouldnt it be at least as relevant to have the response of the large and increasing percentage of Catholics who are not present?

It is widely believed that were it not for immigration the number of American Catholics would be shrinking as a percentage of the population, if not in absolute numbers. The percentage getting married in the church is declining. Less than 10 percent of Catholics under 40 worship weekly and are also otherwise involved in their parishes. The recent National Study of Youth and Religion discovered Catholic teenagers falling significantly behind other Christian adolescents on many measures of religious belief, knowledge and practice.

There is nothing wrong with singing the praises of the Catholic people, as long as it does not serve to obscure these disturbing realities and as long as it is not used to bludgeon as anti-Catholic those who raise questions about current Catholic leadership, including that of the bishops, and our apparent difficulty in doing anything else but stay the course.

Incidentally, Bishop Curry complains that Philip Hamburgers outstanding book, Separation of Church and State, with its impressive findings about anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States, received little notice from Catholic academics and went unmentioned in the index of the two-volume report of the American Catholics in the Public Square project, which I helped direct. Could that have something to do with the fact that the Hamburger book was published after the project completed its major conference on anti-Catholicism? Anyone not merely interested in a debaters point but actually reading those volumes will find Bishop Currys caricature of Catholic commentary severely challenged.

For what its worth, virtually the first major notice of Professor Hamburgers book was an enthusiastic column I wrote for The New York Times in July 2002. Bishop Currys air of superior knowledge is embarrassing.

Peter Steinfels

You have to read the rest of these letters.