ZING!

Maureen Dowd is not amongst my favorite opinion writers, but, at times, she gets it exactly right. I remember her commentary on the Republican members of the US House Judiciary Committee whose members voted to impeach Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair. Dowd described them thusly in the New York Times:

What a tableau. Henry Hyde lumbering across the marbled halls from the House to the Senate, allegedly more in sorrow than in anger, leading that pack of gray-haired, gray-faced, gray-suited and gray-spirited fogies. These self-appointed Torquemadas of the birds and the bees looked more like gouty Florida retirees hurrying to get to that early-bird buffet.

I've never forgotten her words.

Her opinion column in the New York Times today is another instance of Dowd getting it right.

If the Vatican is trying to restore the impression that its moral sense is intact, issuing a document that equates pedophilia with the ordination of women doesn’t really do that.
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The casuistic document did not issue a zero-tolerance policy to defrock priests after they are found guilty of pedophilia; it did not order bishops to report every instance of abuse to the police; it did not set up sanctions on bishops who sweep abuse under the rectory rug; it did not eliminate the statute of limitations for abused children; it did not tell bishops to stop lobbying legislatures to prevent child-abuse laws from being toughened.

There is no moral awakening here. The cruelty and indecency of child abuse once more inspires tactical contrition. All the penitence of the church is grudging and reactive. Church leaders are merely as penitent as they need to be to protect the institution.
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Stupefyingly, the new Vatican document also links raping children with ordaining women as priests, deeming both “graviora delicta,” or grave offenses. Clerics who attempt to ordain women can now be defrocked.
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After the Vatican launched two inquisitions of American nuns, it didn’t seem possible that the archconservative Il Papa and his paternalistic redoubt could get more unenlightened, but they have somehow managed it.

Letting women be priests — which should be seen as a way to help cleanse the church and move it beyond its infantilized and defensive state — is now on the list of awful sins right next to pedophilia, heresy, apostasy and schism.

Dowd quotes Garry Wills in the New Republic:

In The New Republic, Garry Wills wrote about his struggle to come to terms with the sins of his church: Jesus “is the one who said, ‘Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest, you did to me.’ That means that the priests abusing the vulnerable young were doing that to Jesus, raping Jesus. Any clerical functionary who shows more sympathy for the predator priests than for their victims instantly disqualified himself as a follower of Jesus. The cardinals said they must care for their own, going to jail if necessary to protect a priest. We say the same thing, but the ‘our own’ we care for are the victimized, the poor, the violated. They are Jesus.”

Maureen Dowd is Roman Catholic, as is Garry Wills. Ah, but I hear the voices who will say, "What kind of Catholics are Dowd and Wills, if they speak such words about their church?" In return, I ask, what kind of Catholics would Dowd and Wills be if they did not speak such words of truth about their church?

A few more columns of this caliber, and Dowd might make it onto my favorites list.

Read the entire column.