What I Told the Bishops

Wall Street Journal ^ | Sept 15, 2003 | Peggy Noonan

[polemikos]

A week ago today Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, Bishop Wilton Gregory, the head of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Council, and a handful of bishops met in Washington with a few dozen Catholic laymen to discuss the future of the church. The official name of the conference was "A Meeting in Support of the Church," but everyone knew the context.

[polemikos]

Ping
Noonan at the Bishops meeting

[nickcarraway]

BUMP

[nickcarraway]

ping

[jocon307]

I read this, and it seems to me to be just rather a lot of blather. At the end she basically sounds like a lefty. Maybe she should have stuck to her already prepared remarks.

[St.Chuck]

"Come on in, it's awful!"

It's aweful as well.

[RobbyS]

Lefty? Sell all you have and give to the poor? You don't remember the right young man who cam to Jesus and asked what he had to do to be perfect?

The main point, it seems to me, is that these men are comfortable with the liberals they sat with earlier but not with these people. I feel like wringing the Cardinal's neck. Bob Dornan calls him "the coackroach" because of the way he scurries around and ducks out of sight when things get tough.

[jocon307]

"...these men are comfortable with the liberals they sat with earlier but not with these people..."

That's probably very true, but since that whole first meeting was so hush-hush we may never know for sure. I just cannot figure out what is going on with the Church. It just seems to have been taken over by a cadre of self-protecting, child-moslesting, homosexuals. I feel very betrayed by all that has happened, after having for years defended the church against scurrilous charges such as all priests are pervents. Now, of course it has not been alleged, or shown, that all priests are perverts, a good number of them have been proven far more perverse than anyone imagined was possible. The bishops knew it, and failed to act. In toto, it seems.

Now, it seems plain to me that this debacle certainly stemmed from the liberlizations in the church in the 1960s. Now that might be false, since proximity is not causation, but it seems like a plausible theory. One possible solution to the current quagmire (to borrow that word for a moment) would be to return to a prior orthodoxy, and see if it works. Yet the liberals urge more liberalism. And, as you say, the Bishops seem comfortable with the liberals. But, right at this moment, I don't know what they would dare try and do about it though, as everyone is so furious with them. I imagine they are watching the current crisis in the Episcopal church very closely.

So Peggy Noonan may yet get to see her plan through, as the current round of liberlism as weakend the church, an addtional round might just finish it off, and the priests and bishops will be truly, actually, poor and will have to go get real jobs and life in affordable housing with the rest of us.

And I guess you & I will get stuck going to Lutheran mass!
(Only kidding, of course I hope this doesn't happen, but the Bishops seem deaf as wood and thick as bricks on this whole situation.)

[dsc]

"That meeting, alas, was secret, and they had invited only those who might be characterized as church liberals. The story leaked, as stories do. Many, I among them, thought that holding a secret meeting to discuss a scandal borne of secrecy was ham-handed and tin-eared, at best. Why were only those who share one point of view asked to attend? Why was there no follow-up in terms of a statement from the participants on what was discussed, suggested, declared?"

Now, see, that's why I would like to be filthy rich.

Because if I were, the complete text transcript of that meeting would be all over the Internet, the complete audio transcript would be looping on one of my radio stations, and the complete AV transcript would be played once a day on all my TV stations.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Anyway, I regained my composure and concluded my remarks with some hard advice. I said the leaders of the church should now--"tomorrow, first thing"--take the mansions they live in and turn them into schools for children who have nothing, and take the big black cars they ride in and turn them into school buses. I noted that we were meeting across the street from the Hilton, and that it would be good for them to find out where the cleaning women at the Hilton live and go live there, in a rent-stabilized apartment on the edge of town or in its suburbs. And take the subway to work like the other Americans, and talk to the people there. How moved those people would be to see a prince of the church on the subway. "They could talk to you about their problems of faith, they could tell you how hard it is to reconcile the world with their belief and faith, and you could say to them, Buddy, ain't it the truth."

I didn't know if this had hit its mark until the meeting was over, when an intelligent-looking and somewhat rotund bishop spoke to me as I waited for a cab. I was trying to rush to the airport and make the next shuttle home.

She says it all with such impassioned ferver, but she does not live it herself.

Peggy - get off the Shuttle and go ride Amtrak or Greyhound home, like a normal person. First, you might discover that most people, even the working poor, don't live in rent controlled apartments.

[LadyDoc]

Peggy Noonan does ride the subways.

She has an essay in her book on 911 discussing an incident in the subway...

However, when one has a kid, the flight from Washington to NYC is faster, and AMTRACK is almost as expensive...so the "poor" way to travel is to take a bus, which takes forever, and would not be cost effective.

[american colleen]

I'll second that... she does ride the subway system in NYC.

I know someone who attended the meeting and she is a housewife - her yearly family income is certainly less than 50K and she took the shuttle home herself.

Peggy might have left the "rent controlled apts" out and mentioned that maybe the bishops might live in a rectory somewhere (most have a lot of extra room these days!) - like Bishop O'Malley opted to do in Boston. It does mean a lot.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Peggy Noonan does ride the subways.

I stand corrected. I wonder how often?

However, when one has a kid, the flight from Washington to NYC is faster, and AMTRACK is almost as expensive...so the "poor" way to travel is to take a bus, which takes forever, and would not be cost effective.

Actually, Amtrak is much cheaper and just as fast, door to door. There have been plenty of "races" to show this. The people on the Shuttle going DC to NY are people who think they need to look important. The people concerned about money (the large majority of ordinary travellers and businesmen) ride on Amtrak.

[Desdemona]

A few little points:

Amtrak doesn't quite go everywhere. And when it does, frieght has right of way, thus making one late. Forget making arrangements, unless they eschew cell phones, too. Right now, train travel is charged by the mile and it isn't cheap. It's also, in my experience, far more comfortable than coach on an airplane. Sardines have more space.

I haven't riden the bus in so long because it's fairly dangerous in this part of the country, I wouldn't know about it.

As for the mansions - what do we really know of the living space in them? There aren't many people who really know. The first floor is decorated for official visiting (and also employed a lot of people who did the work). I understand the one here is fairly spartan on the second floor. It also, in building it, employed a lot of people who were able to feed their families and is less than a block from the Chancery. The Chancellor lives in what was the grooms' apartment over the stable (it's now the garage) and he and the archbishop walk to work. The cardinal's residence and estate out in county, OTOH, was sold years ago. Their cars - it wouldn't surprise me if one of the dealers here provided them. Our public transportation would not be adequate for their needs. It's not adequate for anybody's.

There's a lot of ways to think about this and I think Ms. Noonan is being a bit short sighted in some of her statements. It's all well and good to see these men out in the trenches, but their jobs are as administrators and teachers first. Plus, it just seems to me that in rejecting the "trappings," the work of love in the name of Christ by the carpenters, builders, plumbers, etc., is also rejected - and doesn't employ them. Is that what Christ would have wanted?

[NYer]

The cardinal and the bishop were said to be embarrassed when news of their meeting broke. Those often characterized as conservative asked for a similar meeting; the cardinal and the bishop obliged.

Does anyone know who decided which bishops would attend this meeting and why they were chosen?

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Amtrak doesn't quite go everywhere. And when it does, frieght has right of way, thus making one late. Forget making arrangements, unless they eschew cell phones, too. Right now, train travel is charged by the mile and it isn't cheap. It's also, in my experience, far more comfortable than coach on an airplane. Sardines have more space.

All I was getting at is that Amtrak is cheap and convenient from DC to NYC - no comment about the rest of the country. It has trains every half hour, the ride is just 3 hours long, and the cost is less than half that of the plane. Peggy was lecturing, lecturing, lecturing, then she goes and does exactly what she says the Bishops should not. This gets filed under the "stones and glass houses", and "motes in your brothers eye, beams in your own" file in my book.

If the Bishops are somehow bad for not giving up their mansions and cars, Peggy is bad for wasting $200 on an airplane ticket that she could have given to the poor had she ridden the train.

As for the mansions - what do we really know of the living space in them? There aren't many people who really know. The first floor is decorated for official visiting (and also employed a lot of people who did the work).

The bottom floor is well appointed for visitors and entertaining (many Bishops hold fundraising dinners and parties at their mansions that help keep the dioceses running). The bedrooms are usually spartan.

Their cars - it wouldn't surprise me if one of the dealers here provided them. Our public transportation would not be adequate for their needs. It's not adequate for anybody's.

Usually the case. Tax write-off plus Episcopal brownie points. The Bishop's would waste a huge amount of time riding the bus and subway around in major cities.

[Desdemona]

A lot of statements on the sumptousness of the mansions, etc., frustrate me to know end because they are based totally on the concept of image. That isn't what the office of bishop is about.

I also happen to know that in my own archdiocese, ALL work done on church property is to be done by approved, bonded, Catholic companies and that many times it is done either gratis or at a discount. I can't imagine insulting fellow Catholics over image.

[RobbyS]

I begin to think of the scandal as a blessing. We now know that the enemy is within the walls and so they cannot insiduosly take over the place as they did the ECUSA. They have, evidently, taken over the major "Catholic" universities, but now that has been countered by the starting of new Catholic schools. It would be great if the alumni of Notre Dame and Georgetown and Boston college et al.would think about sending their money to Ave Maria. Strip the devil of his mask and he is easier to deal with.

[RobbyS]

Deal Hudson probably had a lot to do with it.

[TotusTuus]

A lot of statements on the sumptousness of the mansions, etc., ...

In any event, all this nonsense about where the Bishops live is missing the point concerning what should be of concern to current problems in the Church. Re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic is the last of our problems.

The fundamental call of the Bishops as successors to the Apostles of "Teach, Rule, Sanctify", and their abysmal failure to do so, seems to me to be the issues that the Bishops need to be grappling with.

I'm surprised that Peggy was so pedestrian in her comments to the Bishops.