The latest priest-scandal scapegoat

Fri, 29 Mar 2002 18:01:00 +0000

One remarkable fact about the priest sex-abuse scandal is that conservative and liberal Catholics have been united in their anger and sorrow about it. So it was disturbing this week -- during an already sorrowful Holy Week, the sacred seven days leading up to Christ's resurrection on Easter -- to watch some conservatives try to scapegoat liberal Catholics for the church's current crisis.

In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, Penn State religious studies professor Philip Jenkins blamed the scandal at least partly on the influx of "activist, feminist and gay groups" who supposedly gained power in the church since the 1960s. Not only have those activists fomented the trouble, Jenkins claimed, but now they're trying to take advantage of it. Encouraged by the media, which is itself profiting from "American fascination with clerical scandal" by hyping the priest sex story, Jenkins says, liberal Catholics are using the crisis to push their agenda -- especially their goal of ending the tradition of an all-male, celibate priesthood.

Then on Wednesday, Catholic League president William Donohue went after New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd -- a practicing Catholic who nonetheless has written critically about the church's stonewalling in sex-abuse cases -- lumping her with a cabal of "radical feminists" who have "long hated the Catholic Church."

New York’s ground zero of grief

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 21:04:00 +0000

When politicians and celebrities visit ground zero to pay tribute to the spirit of New York, they're probably not thinking of the tree-lined streets of northern Staten Island, or the tracts of new row houses that have sprouted up around the infamous Fresh Kills landfill in the island's southwest corner, where World Trade Center debris is being trucked. The city's least-populated and most suburban borough is home to neither the glamour nor the power that the world associates with Manhattan. But it, along with the Rockaways, is the city's ground zero of grief.

Nearly 200 Staten Island residents, in a borough of about 400,000, lost their lives Sept. 11. Of that number, 81 were firefighters. Two months after the terrorist attack, small shrines of flowers and the artwork of school-children decorate the borough's firehouses, and firefighters still are gathering in their dress blue uniforms outside the borough's churches, still saluting widows holding their husbands' helmets, still eulogizing fallen brothers. To add to the horror, the remnants of Staten Island's Rescue Company 5, decimated on Sept. 11, were sent to the Rockaways on Nov. 12 when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed, killing at least 260 people.

Salon.com > Terry Golway

The latest priest-scandal scapegoat

New York’s ground zero of grief