Letter to the Editor: Reardon’s unjustified beliefs

n We are not offended by Dennis Reardon’s polemic (“Returning insensitivity to the Catholic Church,” page 7, Oct. 27) against the Catholic Church, simply bewildered that something so stupid and unsophisticated could be published in a respectable newspaper. Although he would like to evade responsibility for its contents by admitting the attack is “unfair,” that just won’t do. We take his words seriously because they represent a crude version of critiques he seriously thinks should be leveled at the Church. His words project troubling ideas. Reardon’s column displays an inability to grapple with others’ worldviews, poor logic and a problematic view of historical change.

Reardon’s goal is to “return insensitivity” to the Church because if it felt the “sting of such criticism from an equally authoritative and largely followed institution” it might change its ways. Unfortunately, Reardon does not seem to have noticed that the American political and cultural landscape does not lack critics of Catholicism. In fact, the problems Reardon has with the Church (its views on contraception, homosexuality, past anti-Semitism and abortion) are precisely those that many, many opinion makers (from Maureen Dowd and Andrew Sullivan to the editorial board of The New York Times) also happen to criticize, sometimes harshly. Reardon is boldly blazing a trail on the interstate. Why did he not mention the sexual abuse scandals? Would it have made it all the more obvious, in light of the extensive coverage, that his polemic was half-thought out and warmed-over?

Were Reardon to actually grapple with the Catholic Church’s beliefs, instead of telling us that its pronouncements are simply “unfair, arrogant and self-righteous,” he might have written a worthwhile column. Does Reardon condone practices he believes murderous if they can be shown to reduce AIDS in Africa? Now, we don’t agree with the Church that abortion is murder, but we don’t expect an institution to condone what it views as murder.

It is in his comments about Israel that Reardon exhibits a sloppy understanding of history and causality. He posits that the Church may be held culpable for Israel’s terrorist woes because of the anti-Jewish climate it fostered in Europe. Supposedly, Catholic persecution encouraged Jews to seek a homeland in Palestine. This analysis fails to grasp the distinction, identified by Hannah Arendt, between “religious Jew-hatred” and the “secular 19th-century ideology” of anti-Semitism. (Arendt called this distinction obvious; Reardon leads us to doubt her confidence.) Of course the actions of the Church, as an institution, during the Holocaust were not honorable. The point is that Catholic incitement of hatred against Jews has waxed and waned since the establishment of the Church, but Zionism, the desire for – and organized movement to establish – a Jewish state, is a phenomenon of the 19th century. It was a response to (and version of) exclusionary ethnic nationalism. The forces that provoked it and made it attractive to some Jews really do not include the Catholic Church. The nature of the “discrimination and hate” that drove Jewish emigration was not religious or Catholic; it was “racial” and ethnic and of a piece with 19th-century secular thought.

Ascribing blame to the Catholic Church, which supposedly necessitated the establishment of Israel, for the terrorism Israel weathers, implies that Israel’s existence is sufficient to explain the violence. Here, Reardon assumes that the violence is the inevitable response to Israel’s presence, but the history of Jews and Arabs or Muslims in the Middle East belies this. This neglects (and even deflects blame from) the confluence of forces that might explain the intractable violence in the Middle East, such as Arab anti-Semitism; the rise of Islamist ideology; or Israel’s military actions at the time of its founding and since 1967. Doesn’t the view that Israel’s existence is a sufficient cause for terrorism in fact legitimate the anger and hate Reardon wishes to preach against? Jews and Muslims or Arabs have not always been at each other’s throats in the Middle East, and so the existence of a Jewish state alone cannot explain the violence. Blaming the institutions in Europe that helped make it at times unlivable for Jews implies that terrorists are legitimately provoked by Israel’s presence and even exculpates the practitioners of violence.

David Beffert Research Associate Global Public Policy Institute Berlin

Anthony Cantor CAS ’01 Ph.D. Student Department of History University of Toronto