Pernicious priests

San Francisco's Roman Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is a major character in Mary Jo McConahay's Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and The Far Right. Her considerable discussion of this monarchical figure does not mention what many of us in this city know him best for: setting his cathedral's timing on its sprinkler system to deluge homeless people seeking cover under its eaves. (Yes, on public exposure, the cathedral had to decency to turn off the the spigots.) Across the Bay in Oakland, Bishop Michael Barber is also a major character. He's best known at present for seeking to declare his diocese bankrupt in order to evade responsibility for 330 pending child sexual abuse claims against former priests.

This sort of clerical cruelty drives some faithful Catholics from their church and leaves the remainder keeping their heads down while quietly participating in the rites and good works that fly under the ecclesial radar. Bless 'em.

McConahay records how right wing operatives built the infrastructure -- political and organizational -- to take advantage of clerical backlash against the modernizing thrust of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) which aimed to bring Catholicism into the modern world. A couple of backward looking popes -- John Paul II and Benedict XVI -- appointed most of the current American bishops; the resulting American hierarchy is an outlier in the Catholic world, hidebound, uncharitable, and unable to come to terms with the lives of the faithful. These clerical princes loath Pope Francis; they cannot abide or survive openness to the world as it is. In particular, in this country, they are enemies of democracy and the separation of church and state, assured that they represent all morality and truth. As the wise Sister Joan Chichester laments: "Nothing really changed after Vatican II. ..."

This book is professional investigative journalism that seeks out connections that many of its actors would prefer to keep under cover. McConahay has explored the nooks and byways of Roman Catholic reaction, following the money from Catholic billionaires into a plethora of institutions, including of course the Supreme Court. She has earned a blurb from that essential secular expert on following the right wing money, New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer.

McConahay explains how she relates to her painfilled project:

I have no animus toward the Catholic Church or its bishops. As a lifelong Catholic, including years reporting from Latin America, I have seen the extent to which my coreligionists, including bishops, have gone, even to the point of martyrdom, on behalf of other people and of justice. At the same time, I have always believed that the institution of the Church was worth investigation and critique.

Like other Americans, I was shaken by the events of January 6, 2021. I saw those hours through the eyes and ears of a reporter who has covered war, religion, and politics, both at home and in autocracies abroad. Now, in my own nation's capital, I watched in horror and disbelief at one man's exhortation to loyalists to rise up and march with him to upturn the law. I saw crosses and Bibles side by side with Confederate flags ... [I saw] how the extremists among my coreligionists exuded a sense of embattled Christianity, expressed in comparisons of supposedly repressed U.S. believers with Jews killed by Hitler.

As a reporter, indeed as a Catholic, I felt it was time to look at the U.S. Church as a key instrument playing an outsize role in the current, dangerous political moment.

If you can stomach delving into the moral sewer which is much of the U.S. Roman Catholic episcopate, McConahay offers the goods -- and that's not even dwelling on their misogyny and sexual abuse. Jesus, save us from your priests.