Dragging Hay Bales and Agendas into Church

Peggy Noonan and Nicholas Kristof want to fix the Catholic Church. With Noonan writing for the Wall Street Journal and Kristof writing for the New York Times, neither columnist needs parchment on a door in a university town to float thesis statements, but both of them should have done more homework before pontificating as they did.

For a column published April 17, Noonan used her coffee-klatch writing style to revisit an essay from 2002 in which she had criticized church leaders up to and including then-pope John Paul II for being out of touch or stupidly careerist (as the cardinals shepherding Catholics in Washington, D.C. and Boston at the time proved to be). Using her eight-year-old column as a launch pad, Noonan suggested that the Vatican needs new blood. Of the men there, she wrote, “they are defensive and they are angry, and they will not turn the church around on their own.”

Well. With respect to the abuse scandals that people are talking about, Pope Benedict has already accepted the resignations of several bishops and pledged to muck out the stables. The pope’s recent meeting with victims of clerical sexual abuse in Malta proved yet again that his instincts, at least, are pastoral rather than defensive. Whatever anger he has seems focused on those priests who betrayed their vows to the detriment of everyone around them. Noonan wrote nothing specifically about the current pope, which is a shame: she ought to remember that the “Panzerkardinal” and “Rottweiler” nicknames that Joseph Ratzinger once wore with more grace than they deserved were given to him by opponents within the church who feared his intelligence and his willingness to emulate You-Know-Who in throwing miscreants out of the temple whenever necessary.

Few things are more frustrating than watching a columnist joust with a straw man. Noonan wants grumpy pastors to step aside for joyful ones, but is there anyone out there who really thinks that angry old priests will turn the church around on their own?

When she’s not pulling straw out of her hair because her own rhetoric knocked her over, Noonan knows as well as anyone else that change in the church has theological implications, which is why devout Catholics usually look to the Holy Spirit for that, rather than to the next crop of pastoral appointments from local bishops. Moreover, tried-and-true prescriptions like “Reform your lives and believe in the gospel” apply to Christians of all ages; the gospel has perennial currency that faded slogans like “Question Authority” do not.

Why would Peggy Noonan –-of all people-- make me reach for my trusty sword? Her writing shades toward sweetness rather than sarcasm, but it can still be muddle-headed. The problem here is twofold. First, as John Haas did an excellent job of showing just last week, Noonan did not acknowledge work that has already been done. Second, she mixed good and bad advice. “Most especially and most immediately,” Noonan wrote at full boil, Church leaders “need to elevate women.” The irony in calling for institutional housecleaning and then describing it as women’s work seems to have flown right over her head.

Beyond that, the ambiguity in her main recommendation seems dishonest. Noonan is not often coy. She could have written that “we” need to elevate women, but instead she wrote that “they” should do that. She has senior clerics in mind, but gave herself wiggle room, because she’s not keen to admit that many women already hold leadership positions in the Church. Noonan also seems uncomfortable with honest conversation about what elevating more women to leadership positions might actually mean. In other words, Noonan concealed her hand, and then overplayed it.

Recall that in 1994, her favorite pope reaffirmed the longstanding teaching that for reasons that cannot be reduced to “patriarchal privilege,” the Church has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood. Noonan remembers that. She also knows that some other Christians think differently, and so she segued from a call for “elevating” women to a less-controversial assurance that any women involved with decision-making in chancery offices would question attempts to transfer priests with a history of abuse.

I like the mama bear imagery that Noonan wants to bank on, but you can transpose that assertion into politics to see how empty it is. Mike Brown and Alberto Gonzales “failed upward,” but so did Janet Reno and Jamie Gorelick. And while there are men who must be reckoned conniving and exclusionary, the same could be said about some women.

That brings us to Nicholas Kristof. On April 18, he devoted his New York Times column to a description of the two Catholic churches that he has encountered while searching out grist for his metaphor mill. One Catholic Church is a grassroots organization that comforts people and saves lives around the world, while the other is an old boys’ club with posh digs in Vatican City.

If you’re a nun who drives a Jeep along heavily-rutted roads to visit orphans, Kristof respects you, but if you’re a bishop who “obsesses” over dogma, Kristof won’t give you the time of day -- and this despite the fact that obsessing over dogma of a different kind is part of his job at the best-known bastion of secular materialist journalism.

The dualism here brooks no rebuttal. Priests who want to build condom factories in the Vatican to “save lives” rank in his estimation with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, but anyone who thinks “sheepdogs” still have roles to play in what some of us call the "economy of salvation" must be part of the problem.

Kristof claims to admire “a Church that Mary could love,” and he’s pretty sure that the one we have now makes her cry. Even if he’s right, you’d think he'd have more respect for Jewish mothers, especially that one. Yet Kristof treats the mother of Jesus like a hothouse flower. He can’t find the “steel magnolia” in the Infancy narratives, or the Wedding at Cana, or the scene at the foot of the cross where Jesus died. Fresh from auditing one of those Dan Brown classes in How to Make Church History Sound Like a Conspiracy, Kristof ignores Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to cite Gnostic texts (!) and mutter about the allegedly willful mistranslation of the New Testament letter from Paul to the Romans, which of course downplayed the one-and-only mention of a female “apostle” named Junia.

What fresh hell have we here? Saint Paul thanks a woman named Junia in Romans 16:7, alright, but over at Touchstone magazine, where they take their exegesis seriously, I learned from a book review by John Hunwicke that her “apostleship” isn’t the open-and-shut case that Kristof thinks it is. Junia is “well-known among the apostles” in the same way that a later writer might say that “William the Conqueror is well-known among historians.” Moreover, the on-again, off-again controversy over her gender likely owes more to Martin Luther than to any first-team defenders of those Scary Dudes in Rome: “It is probably due to [Luther] that some north European Protestant translations went for ‘Junias’ (masculine), while versions in Spain and Italy, where the dead repressive hand of Romish tyranny had more influence, stayed with ‘Junia’ (feminine),” Hunwicke explains mischeviously. No one seems to have been discomfited by Junia’s gender in Christianity’s first 16 centuries. Egad! It’s another brick in the wall, and another reason to be skeptical of the Nick Kristof theory that early Christian transition from “house churches” to public spaces was bad news for women.

What Noonan and Kristof do not seem to grasp is that church-fixing is something like barn-building. Neither task requires aiming slingshots at old men or appealing to The Feminine Mystique. Mary had the right perspective way back when, at that wedding party where the wine ran out and she looked from her son to the catering staff before telling them to “Do whatever He tells you.”