Editorial Institutional bigotry

By Anne Cadwallader

It took presumptive GOP presidential nominee George W. Bush’s ill-advised visit to Bob Jones University in the days before the South Carolina primary to put a spotlight on that school’s long tradition of Catholic bashing. The fallout from the Bush visit came hard and fast. It included the reopening of a dormant national debate on the nature and extent of anti-Catholic bigotry in this country, a phenomenon that many Americans, until recently, thought had died with the ascendancy of JFK. In what was clearly an effort to get beyond this uncomfortable issue, House Speaker Dennis Hastert last week appointed a Catholic priest, Father Daniel Coughlin of Chicago, to be House chaplain. The decision came just four months after GOP leaders ignored the recommendation of its own advisory panel and chose an Episcopalian minister for the post over a Milwaukee priest.

It is, of course, the responsibility of everyone, politicians especially, to expose bigots whenever and wherever we find them. In the case of Bob Jones University, the bigotry there has long been known to Irish Catholics. The school’s cozy relationship with the leader of the DUP, the Rev. Ian Paisley, upon whom it has conferred an honorary degree, is proof enough. But there’s more. Its website denounces the Catholic church as "a satanic counterfeit, an ecclesiastic tyranny over the souls of men, not to bring them to salvation but to hold them bound to sin and to hurl them into eternal damnation.

"She is drunk with the blood of the saints of God whom she has harassed and persecuted, imprisoned, massacred and destroyed," it continues, quoting Bob Jones Jr., the university president. "The monstrous abomination that is Rome has, like a vampire, fattened on the lifeblood of men and nations."

One can’t help wondering whether Paisley and Jones share a speechwriter.

This week, four congressmen — Democrats Sam Gejdenson of Connecticut, Richard Neal of Massachusetts and Joe Crowley of New York, and Republican Peter King of New York — wrote Jones asking him to "sever all professional contacts" with Paisley after they learned that the Roaring Reverend had taken part in yet another Bible conference at the school. That message of intolerance for intolerance was an important one to send, though it wasn’t particularly courageous. Indeed, leave it to politicians to try to score points by jumping on an issue (in this case anti-Catholicism) after it has already had a wide public airing. Also leave it to politicians to go after the easy target (in this case Paisley) rather than ingrained institutional bigotry. To do the latter would require actual leadership.

Paisley, by the congressmen’s own count, "has made more than 50 trips over the last 30 years" to speak at the university. But during that time many more of their colleagues, Democrats and Republicans alike, have also genuflected at the Bob Jones altar.

The congressmen know that Jones won’t jettison Paisley, no more than Paisley would ever embrace Gerry Adams. If they really want to show their mettle, they’ll follow up their Paisley letter with one denouncing that incubator of bigotry itself: Bob Jones University.