Catholics have to be careful to distinguish between anti-Catholicism and anti-religion. The Catholic Church remains the single largest Christian denomination in the country. At least until the sex abuse scandals, it was the only mainline denomination that continued to grow both in numbers and in percentage of the population. Its size and dogmatic system make it an easy target for attacks, but some of these are actually attacks on organized religion in general. Catholics also have to be careful in judging the media coverage of the sex abuse crisis as motivated by anti-Catholicism. In its annual report even the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, regarded by many liberals as too conservative and defensive, praised the handling of the crisis by the Boston Globe and the New York Times. The crisis was of Church leaders’ own making, and the media rightfully reported it, although some writers admittedly seemed to take delight in their task.

Unfortunately, the failure of Catholic leadership in the sex abuse scandal contributed to its inability to get the Church’s message across on social issues and the Iraqi war. An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal queried why the pope took so long in addressing the sex abuse scandal and yet was so quick to challenge American policy toward the war with Iraq. Underlying that opinion is the erroneous notion that bishops are delegates of the pope. The two issues under consideration are, in fact, quite different. The pope intervened in the sex abuse crisis only after the American bishops had failed to exercise adequately their duties as bishops and address this domestic question themselves. As a universal moral teacher, the pope has the obligation to directly ad dress issues like war, and the imminence of war is not something that allows for delay. Whatever one thinks of the inconsistency of the papal responses, the fact is that the bishops have lost their moral voice at a time when the nation needs to hear it and when anti-Catholicism remains a fact in American life.

Just as in the nineteenth century, when American Catholics were partially shaped by an anti-Catholic culture that was predominantly Protestant, so now they are influenced by an antireligious culture that is now decidedly secularist. A century ago, Catholics embraced the defensive ghetto erected by their bishops; now many Catholics react negatively to episcopal authority. Contemporary anti-Catholicism occurs in a milieu where Catholics had been divided long before the sex-scandal crisis. Some conservatives see the solution to the problem of the contemporary Church as a more centralized papal authority, a move that would not only denigrate the office of bishop but also increase American suspicions. Others imagine that a certain period of the Church’s past represented its ideal state. Some liberals want to break from the past, whether real or imagined, to create an ideal American Church along democratic lines. In the process, some writers come close to embracing the anti-Catholic arguments of the past and present in attacking Church structure and authority rather than the abuse of authority. The proponents of neither position have a sense of history as development, but both illustrate the division within the Church that makes it so vulnerable to attacks from without.

As long as Catholicism in the United States remains loyal to the Bishop of Rome and maintains that it has the authority to teach doctrine as something objective, it will be foreign to the contemporary American ethos. Implicit in the righteous outrage against sexual abuse is the fact that bishops and priests failed to live according to the objective norms of Church teaching; their actions can be judged not only criminal according to civil law but also immoral by the very standards of the Church they were ordained to serve. Despite its weaknesses and the sinfulness of its leaders, the Catholic Church still holds that revelation and doctrine are objective. Its structure in the United States is in need of reform, especially in the areas of accountability and oversight, but reformers have to avoid seeming to adopt the premises of contemporary anti-Catholicism by rejecting the need for structure and authority.