Opinion

Viewpoint: The anti-Catholic cartoon legacy: bigotry, dishonesty and discredit for the university

On April 1, Mike Ramsey, with the approval of The Call’s editorial staff, published a vile and offensive piece of anti-Catholic bigotry, and did it precisely on the day that Catholics remember and celebrate the origin of the Mass and the New Covenant priesthood.  The cartoon depicted a priest pouring drugs in a chalice for the purpose of sexually abusing three altar boys. The insult was plain.
An entire class of people, Catholic priests, was generically held up for ridicule as child molesters, without the slightest intention of qualification or limitation (which would have been easy to do).
Mike Ramsey knew well that he would not be allowed to get away with a similar attack on representatives of other world religions, but he gambled that this particular piece of bigotry would get through, and he was right.

After hearing some of the outrage from both on and off-campus sources, Ramsey and The Call editorial staff had a couple of weeks to reflect.  What the university community got back was Mike Ramsey’s April 22 letter, which is simply breathtaking in its dishonesty from beginning to end.  He begins with some adolescent blather that his work was a “political cartoon,” the purpose of which was to “stoke controversy and initiate debate.” First of all, the cartoon had no political message at all; it was, again, simply an expression of bigotry against Catholic clergy.  Moreover, with reference to the claim that the purpose is to “stoke controversy,” I would suggest that this is an unworthy goal.  Any boor can take the low road Ramsey took and create controversy simply by insulting people; that is hardly an aim to be respected.

To initiate debate is laudable, but one does not initiate substantive dialog with crude insults.  Instead of addressing forthrightly the actual content of his cartoon, Ramsey now changes the subject, dishonestly,  to a theme in no way present in the original cartoon, that is, a criticism of the way the bishops and the Pope dealt with the crisis.  Ramsey shed no light, giving us only inflammatory rhetoric and outright lies.

Let us begin with the false claims.  First, it is not true that Church officials are currently “cowing their victims into silence with threats of hell-fire.” Canon law grants no such authority to a bishop, and there is no conceivable church moral teaching that could possibly be construed by anyone to mean that one would go to hell for reporting the truth about abuse. It is not in fact a theme in any responsible discussion of the issue. Secondly, in response to recent media reports, the Vatican most certainly did not “blame the victims,” nor did the Vatican claim that the victims were “conspiring to bring down the Pope . . .” Third, to say that Benedict XVI is someone who believes that “infallibility means never having to say you’re sorry”  is a slur that utterly misrepresents the Pope’s attitude, as evidenced in recent, highly publicized statements of apology, most notably in his trip to Malta where he again met with victims.

Finally, he claims that “Vatican officials” have engaged in “what are unquestionably breaches of the law,” and for this are relying on “diplomatic immunity.”

The truth is that diplomatic immunity was mentioned in response to frivolous and groundless lawsuits naming the Pope. Can you imagine if every anti-American lawyer around the world could compel U.S. Presidents to come to their country to give testimony at will in civil lawsuits?  No state filed criminal charges against the Pope, and there is no credible evidence that the Pope violated civil law in the United States or anywhere else.

In at least six other ways, Ramsey is misleading, although given his abysmal level of ignorance on the subject, I am reluctant to say deliberately so.  First, he clearly suggests that the church is currently “protecting child rapists,” an inflammatory and unfair generalization on two accounts. First, as the Newman Association tried to explain to him, the bishops in the United States turned the entire situation around in the last decade, and there is no institution in the United States that has more systematically investigated abuses and run the guilty out than the Catholic Church.  Secondly, while sexual activity with adolescent males is utterly opprobrious and merits the severest penalties, it is not generally called “child rape” when committed by anyone else other than a priest.
Thirdly, the letter blurs important distinctions in time.  An honest discussion would note that the most widely publicized recent episodes (Wisconsin) were thirty-six years old, and that a similar abuse today would most certainly be handled according to the current “zero tolerance” policy.

Fourth, he grossly misrepresents the current Pope’s role in the Wisconsin cases, where a priest abused deaf boys until 1974.  It was not until 2001 that Pope John Paul II shifted responsibility for dealing with such cases to then Cardinal Ratzinger’s Office, the Sacred Congregation for the Faith, so the only issue that said Congregation was dealing with in 1998 was the far narrower question of a canonical trial. The civil authorities were fully aware of the case and had decided not to prosecute.

Ratzinger’s office gave the go ahead for the trial, but, as the 1998 meeting in Rome to discuss the case showed, it would have been very difficult to complete a case with thirty-five year old accusations, a lack of available evidence, when the priest was near death.  This had absolutely nothing to do with the legitimate complaints made against bishops who, following the therapeutic models of the times, sent abusers off to therapy and reinstated them.  Fifth, the doctrine of infallibility in Catholicism has absolutely nothing to do with any of this, as it extends solely to doctrinal matters of faith and morals under tightly defined circumstances, and in no way extends to the Pope’s administrative decisions, much less his apologies.

Finally, he claims that “they compared criticism of the Church to the persecution of the Jews. . .” Well, “they” did not. One priest did, and it was reported that the Pope clearly distanced himself from the remark, and the priest later apologized. Can The Call not find someone with even a minimum level of competence to discuss such matters?

The Catholic community will certainly survive the immature ramblings of Mike Ramsey, but there will be a negative, long-term side effect.  All honest people know that neither Ramsey nor The Call staff would have published such contemptible attacks against the other major world religions, still less against ethnic minorities.  Everyone knows that had Ramsey targeted any number of other groups, there would have been a mad dash by administrators, faculty, and student groups to denounce the outrage roundly. Note that this did not for the most part occur. The astute observer is left to wonder about the incessant talk of allegedly university-wide commitments to values such as “tolerance, “diversity,” and “multiculturalism.”

These values were clearly not in play.

-Thomas Rourke
Author, The Social and Political Thought of Benedict XVI