Response to Nicholas Kristof on the Catholic Church

In his 1 May 2010 column discussing the Catholic Church, Nicholas Kristof wrote:

Yet the church leaders are right about one thing: there is often a liberal and secular snobbishness toward the church as a whole — and that is unfair.

It may be easy at a New York cocktail party to sniff derisively at a church whose apex is male chauvinist, homophobic and so out of touch that it bars the use of condoms even to curb AIDS.

It's easy to caricature the Church in these terms. It's even easier to caricature secular criticism of the Church as "snobbishness." Both reek of straw, as in straw-man arguing.

The nuns and priests Kristof singled out in this column are supposed to illustrate why such snobbishness is misplaced. "Snobbishness," my ass. Whose delicate pinky is raised just so in the air as he pontificates (if you'll excuse the Catholic pun) on the silliness of the Church? In this country, most people take religion seriously, whether they subscribe to a particular belief or not.

In the United States, at this moment in time, it's far more likely that leaders of intolerant religious organizations will denounce, not sniff derisively at, those who have rejected organized religion altogether, than that someone will make a public statement disdaining an established religion. For instance, accusing secularists of eroding the moral foundation of society is good red meat to throw at fundraising time. It's also almost as insulting as the claim would be that the Catholic Church is responsible for all the child abuse in society. Yet the secularism-is-evil trope is acceptable in polite company, whereas the other claim is never heard not only because it's absurd, but because most people would find it repugnant.

The Catholic Church isn't the victim (of snobbishness or anything else) here.

(By the way: as Kristof noted, the Vatican's criticism of some news outlets for supposed overzealousness in uncovering the extent of child abuse in the Church's ranks is misplaced, to put it kindly. If any other organization had been accused of such activities, not only would there have been the same widespread news coverage, not only would there have been the same condemnation, but there probably would have been calls for mass arrests of the organization's top officials for malfeasance or gross negligence. In fact, by comparison to other organizations like public corporations, there is even greater reason to call high Church officials to account for this scandal. The Catholic Church exhorts its followers -- as well as non-believers -- in the most passionate terms to observe a set of moral norms. One could consider that exhortation its primary duty -- yet its officials failed to observe those norms! Not only did the abusers themselves violate them, but also, and even worse, mid-level Church officials routinely violated those norms as well, by hiding the abuse from the public.)