Weigel on "the rise of the anti-Catholic Catholics" (specifically, Maureen Dowd)

From George Weigel's most recent essay, "Maureen Dowd's Catholic Problem", on National Review Online, which begins with an historical overview of (Protestant) anti-Catholicism in the U.S., and then states:

Ecclesiastes notwithstanding, there is something new under the sun in the annals of American anti-Catholicism; and that something is the rise of the anti-Catholic Catholics, self-described Catholics who make a career (or at least part of a career) out of mounting endless attacks on the Church, its settled beliefs, its leadership, and its people. Like the Nast/rationalist anti-Catholicism of the past, today’s Catholic anti-Catholicism is a left-of-center phenomenon that, in secular guise, often reflects the critiques of the Church mounted by so-called “Catholic progressives”: The Church is hopelessly sexist; the Church is hopelessly sex-obsessed; the Church is cruel to women and gays; the Church is hypocritical. And, of course and most recently, the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of child rapists and their abettors, which “fact” validates the other charges in the standing indictment just cited. ...

Dolan, you see, opposed New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s attempt to get the New York state legislature to adopt “gay marriage,” of which Ms. Dowd approves. But Dowd was not content to register her disagreement with the archbishop, who had properly described such legislation as a quasi-totalitarian extension of state power. No, the Catholic girl raised in Blessed Sacrament parish on Washington’s Chevy Chase Circle lit into Dolan — “the Starchbishop” — and the Church as a gang of hypocrites who defend marriage but deny it to gay couples; who worry about the young leaving the Church but then don’t protect the young from sexual predators; and who have tried to slough off responsibility for clerical sexual abuse by blaming it on a toxic ambient culture, a tactic Ms. Dowd unoriginally described as “Blame Woodstock.”

The last is, in fact, the key to understanding Maureen Dowd’s particular form of virulent anti-Catholicism. Ms. Dowd believes in the sexual revolution as fervently as Archbishop Dolan believes in the Creed in which he leads his congregation at St. Patrick’s every Sunday. The difference between them is that Archbishop Dolan can rationally defend the articles in the Creed, while Maureen Dowd is impervious to the massive empirical evidence that demonstrates that the sexual revolution has been a snare and a delusion for a) women, b) children, c) men, d) marriage, e) family stability, and f) the country’s political culture (cf. Clinton, William Jefferson [whom Dowd helped save in 1998]). Interestingly enough, and in this respect, Maureen Dowd is not the linear descendant of Nast and the rationalist anti-Catholics, who were more often than not the “progressives” of their day. Rather, she is the rhetorical great-great-granddaughter of Elder W. C. Benson and his 1928 anti-Catholic screed, the difference being that Benson’s fundamentalism involved notions of Biblical inspiration and inerrancy, while Dowdian fundamentalism involves an irrational and empirically unsustainable belief in the sexual revolution.

Read the entire piece. And also see Dr. Ed Peters' post, "Oh no! Maureen Dowd doesn’t seem to like me!" (June 19, 2011).

Here are a couple of posts I've written in recent years about Dowd's attacks on the Catholic Church:

• "The Vatican’s insistence on male prerogative is misogynistic poppycock" (July 18, 2010)
• Dour, unhinged, and factless, Maureen Dowd seeks papal whipping boy (March 29, 2010)
• Dowd for the Count (October 27, 2009)
• Maureen Dowd: Dan Brown is Vatican's ally (March 27, 2005)

Comments

[tioedong]

ironically, she is much more sympathetic to the Saudis:LINK...

[Joe]

Quite honestly, I know so many Catholics who think very much like Dowd. Who'd have thought 'Sex in the City' types would be perceived as the good people, an the Church as the bad, but that's where we are as a culture. I think a simpler perspective on her is simply is: "As a sexually active single woman, of course she is not going to want to Church to hold to its teaching. Any more than an Oprah is a friend of the black Church. Dowd is just more acerbic. And sadder to behold. All of this, I'd also suggest, is a fruit of the general wash out of the kiss-up to the culture of Vatican II catechesis. Makes me think of even the far more decent yet cosmopolitan 'conservative' voices who have quietly jettisoned Catholicism to one degree or another: the Sheed's kids, Chris Buckley, etc, even when they had homes striving to raise them faithful. Trying to be attractive the the world just breeds us worldliness, IYAM. If the Church is only apologetically counter-cultural, people end up forsaking Catholic culture.

[Robert Miller]

Dowd's views are ... well, dowdy.

Weigel's problem is that he takes Whig politics and culture too seriously. I really don't care a fig if someone can "prove" to me that the "Founding Fathers" were crypto-Scholastics. Neither does Maureen Dowd. Nor does anyone else.

Let's look to some real countercultural Catholic figures like Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Antonio d'Oliveira Salazar, Father Charles Coughlin and Hillaire Belloc for the real solutions to this culture's sickness. We need to break it with action.

Maureen Dowd is an irritation, a pitiful strawperson, that only Catholic Whiggery could waste time refuting.

[Gregory Williams]

"Dowdian fundamentalism involves an irrational and empirically unsustainable belief in the sexual revolution." - Wiegel

"What [people] want is to lead a utilitarian life based on principles that fit on bumper stickers, starting with the premise that the human genitals are toys"

Posted by: Charles E Flynn
http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2010/07/whatever-happened-to-wellread-intelligent-heretics.html?cid=6a00d83451b7c369e201348592ed47970c

[Nancy D.]

"Why do dissenters remain in The Catholic Church?"

Because they believe they can be an anti-catholic Catholic even though it is a self-evident truth that one cannot be anti-catholic and Catholic, simultaneously .