Are Catholic and Protestant Bishops Inheriting the Wind?

In 1925 one of the world’s great religion vs. science debates took place in Rhea County, Tennessee, because a high school teacher named John Thomas Scopes challenged a state law that prohibited the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Scopes lost the “Monkey Trial” and was fined $100. William Jennings Bryan, three times a presidential candidate, was a member of the prosecution team. Clarence Darrow, a famous Chicago criminal lawyer, gadfly, and social reformer, defended Scopes.

The trial has been the subject of stage plays and a movie called “Inherit the Wind,” starring Spencer Tracy as Darrow, Frederic March as Bryan, and Gene Kelly as the cynical reporter of the period, H.L. Mencken. The title comes from the wisdom of Solomon expressed in Proverbs: “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.”

When I heard that some conservative Roman Catholic bishops lobbied Congress to strengthen anti-abortion clauses in the health bill passed by the House, I immediately thought of the exchanges about evolution in the trial and the pertinent dialogue in the play and movie scripts. Bishops who threaten excommunication and/or denial of communion for pro-choice Catholics in politics may inherit a wind that is already threatening Pope Benedict’s pulpit in St. Peter’s, now a fragile tent with its stakes driven in quicksand.

In the movie script of “Inherit The Wind,” Henry Drummond (Tracy playing Darrow) has been asked by Matthew Harrison Brady (March playing Bryan) if he considers anything holy. Drummond responds: “Yes, the individual mind. In a child’s power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘Amens!’ and ‘Holy of Holies’ and ‘Hosannas.’ An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.”

Brady: “We must not abandon faith! Faith is the most important thing!”

Drummond: “Then why did God plague us with the capacity to think? Why do you deny the one thing that sets us above the animals? What other merit have we? The elephant is larger, the horse stronger and swifter, the butterfly more beautiful, the mosquito more prolific, even the sponge is more durable. Or does a sponge think?”

Brady: “I don’t know. I’m a man, not a sponge!”

Drummond: “Do you think a sponge thinks?!”

Brady: “If the Lord wishes a sponge to think, it thinks!”

Drummond: “Does a man have the same privilege as a sponge?”

Brady: “Of course!”

Drummond (gesturing toward the teacher defendant): “Then this man wishes to have the same privilege of a sponge, he wishes to think!”

Later Drummond gets into an argument with the Southern Bible-thumping judge: “Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and make it a crime to teach it…tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers.

“And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that 16th century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!” (A reference to when the Catholic Church tortured and burned Giordano Bruno, a follower of Galileo’s, at the stake because he refused to recant the idea the Earth was in orbit around the sun. The inquisitors also cut and bound his tongue before torching him.)

The Return to Fanaticism and Ignorance by American Taliban Bishops

One of the lobbyists trying to impose the Vatican’s pro-life dictates on all the citizens of the United States is Archbishop Raymond Burke, who was transferred to Rome in 2008 by Pope Benedict XVI and given the post of Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. Basically he is the chief justice of the Vatican’s highest court. Burke has quite a reputation in the St. Louis area where he was archbishop until 2008.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) has charged Burke with importing pedophile priests into the St. Louis archdiocese in large numbers and placing them in positions where they have access to young males and females. SNAP has no record of Burke ever notifying parishioners that pedophile priests and predator-priests had been assigned by him to their churches and schools. Burke made headlines in the 2004 presidential campaign when he said he would refuse Catholic John Kerry communion because Kerry was pro-choice. Burke also warned Catholics not to “present” themselves for communion if they had voted for candidates with pro-choice leanings. In 2009 he accused his fellow bishops of helping to elect Barack Obama because of their decision to “allow” Catholics to consider other issues than abortion in voting for candidates.

There is no doubt the Vatican has established a Priest Protection Program to hide pedophiles in overseas assignments and in the bureaucratic catacombs of the Vatican. Cardinal Bernard Law, the former archbishop of Boston, is the most notorious pedophile protector in the Church so far. A close friend of Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Law was forced to resign in 2003 for protecting sexually abusive priests in the Boston archdiocese. Instead of punishing Law and making an example of him, Pope John Paul provided the errant cardinal a spacious Rome apartment, a generous monthly stipend and appointed him archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major. When Pope John Paul died, Cardinal Law was given the honor of delivering one of the nine homilies during the nine-day mourning period. Pope Benedict now shelters a bishop and a cardinal who have contributed mightily to the biggest religious scandal in the U.S.

Governor Al Smith and President John Kennedy Had it Right

The first two U.S. Catholics to run for president had to make it clear what role their church would play in making political decisions for the 75 percent who were not Catholics. Governor Al Smith of New York said: “I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and equality of all churches, all sects and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe in the absolute separation of church and state and in the strict enforcement of the Constitution, that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

John Kennedy developed this theme further in his 1960 campaign: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant or Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the national Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source (such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops)...where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”

Now we not only have a Catholic Church which has the official position that it is the only true church – that all non-Catholics will go to hell – but it is also trying to force its pro-life policies on all U.S. citizens. When Kennedy ran for president he had to keep repeating that the Vatican was not going to run the United States through a Catholic representative. Evidently that is no longer “operative.”

Is the Gallup Poll Wrong?

Actually, if the American people listened only to a few loud-mouthed bishops running around threatening Catholic politicians with the withholding of communion and excommunication from the church, one might get the wrong impression of American Catholics.

The Gallup Poll organization analyzed surveys called Values and Beliefs taken in 2006 through 2008. These polls indicate that U.S. Catholics are as liberal as the non-Catholic population. When asked if abortion is morally acceptable, 40 percent of U.S. Catholics said “Yes” while 41 percent of non-Catholics said “Yes.” When asked if medical research using stem cells obtained from human embryos is morally acceptable, 63 percent of Catholics said “Yes”while 62 percent of non-Catholics said “Yes.” In six other major “moral” areas Catholics are often more liberal than non-Catholics.

Percent of moral acceptability, Catholics versus non-Catholics: is the death penalty morally acceptable? 61 percent of Catholics and 68 percent of non-Catholics think so. Sex between an unmarried man and woman? Catholics, 67 percent, non-Catholics, 57 percent. Divorce: of Catholics, 71 percent approve; of non-Catholics, 66 percent. 61 percent of Catholics and 52 percent of non-Catholics think it’s all right to have a baby outside marriage. 72 percent of Catholics and 59 percent of non-Catholics approve of gambling; and 54% of Catholics and 45% of non-Catholics think homosexual relations are morally acceptable.

The Gallup Poll on these topics indicates that many committed Catholics are at odds with the Vatican on these issues. Historian Arnold Toynbee states an important human dilemma in this single sentence: “We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.”

The old gray men in Vatican, Lutheran, and Anglican church residences have never taken the advice of women and don’t seem to have a clue about Toynbee’s point. They seem to make judgments about women and sex based on the advice of St. Augustine: “Nothing is so powerful in drawing the spirit of a man downwards as the caresses of a woman.” With that attitude, no wonder Catholic priests pretend to be celibate.

Catholic writer Anna Quindlen has summed up the attitudes of Catholic bishops in a devastating paragraph: “We didn’t understand, some of the bishops say now, about the pedophiles among them, moved from parish to parish, with fresh choirboys to importune and then hush. We thought they could change. We thought they could be cured. We didn’t know…. They didn’t know what it was to bear a half-dozen children, to turn away at night not because of coldness but because of mother fatigue.

“They didn’t know what it was like to drag along in the harness of a dreadful marriage, dying by inches. But no birth control, no divorce. No self-abuse, no petting, no impure thoughts. The bishops gathered wood for this current conflagration every time they turned away from this human condition to emphasize wayward genitalia. They must be amazed at how harshly they are now judged after all those years of deference when they were allowed to make their own laws.”

Accurate or not, demographers estimate that 100 billion humans have lived and died on Earth since the “first” man. Medical experts estimate that about 15 percent of human pregnancies end in miscarriage. If we believe in “life at conception” (whatever life “is” at that point), that means we have billions of unbaptised miscarried Catholic babies circling like dust mites in Purgatory, doomed forever, as Shakespeare wrote, “to walk the night.” I understand the Vatican is now working on this problem!

Other population experts agree that at least five percent of the Earth’s population is gay. That means a minimum of five billion gays have traversed the Earth since the first Steve. I would like to dedicate a couple of lines from “Inherit The Wind” for Catholic, ELCA, and Anglican bishops to think about:

Drummond (to Brady): “It’s a shame we don’t all possess your positive knowledge of what is right and what is wrong.”

Brady: “I do not think about things I do not think about.”

Drummond: “Do you ever think about things that you do think about?”

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