James Carroll ,fanatical
Pope basher
one of the major advisors to VOTF at the Hynes Auditorium July 20 ,
2002
"Since 1992, Carroll. . . has
produced nearly 60 op-ed columns in the Globe criticizing the Church,
almost certainly establishing the
track record for anti-Catholic outbursts in one of the nation's top dozen
newspapers. His
attacks on the Church have also appeared in the pages of the New Yorker,
Atlantic Monthly, American
Prospect, and Boston Phoenix (the last being an alternative newspaper known for its homosexual
advocacy and explicit sex ads). . .
Carroll asserts that 'the doctrine of infallibility is like a
virus that
paralyzes
the body of the Church.'
The current occupant of the Chair of St.Peter
has become, far more than any of
his predecessors, the primary
focus of Carroll's rancor. One of his first Globe columns in 1992 was a salute to Irish singer Sinead
O'Connor for tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II on the nationwide television broadcast, Saturday Night
Live.
Carroll called the Pope 'the emblem of sexist patriarchy,' who has imposed a 'Roman captivity' on the Church, making it 'the foremost enemy of women.' "
(C.J.
Doyle of the Catholic League)
The following is a letter
to the editor of the Boston Globe concerning James Carroll's r article on
Humane Vitae.
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?30 July 2001
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Letters to the Editor
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The Boston Globe
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P. O. Box 2378
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Boston, MA 02107-2378
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To the Editor:
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In his latest polemic against Catholic moral teaching, James Carroll tells
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his readers that he did not
abandon the priesthood because of the Church's condemnation of artificial birth
control, but rather left "...for other reasons" (Dismantling the
church's structure of death, 7/24/01).
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In an April 1995 article published in The Boston Phoenix however, Carroll
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said, "There are many reasons I left, but the major event in my decision
was probably the birth control encyclical in 1968." Perhaps someday he will make up his
mind. No matter. Consistency has
never been James Carroll's strong suit.
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Moreover, Carroll conveys, by omission,
the inaccurate impression that Pope Paul VI's opposition to birth
control was unsupported in Catholic theological tradition. Nothing could be
further from the truth. The Pope
merely reaffirmed perennial Catholic teaching. Indeed, Pope Pius XI called contraception "shameful and
intrinsically vicious."
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Carroll should stop embarrassing himself
by blaming Catholicism for the
failure of his own vocation. After all, Carroll sought the
priesthood on his own terms, not the Church's, a misunderstanding of
organizational reality all the more astounding coming from the son of a
military officer. One is always
struck, not entirely without humor, by Carroll's indignation and resentment
over the refusal of the Church to surrender its core beliefs in order to
satisfy his ideological prescriptions.
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The following is a letter to the Editor of the Boston Globe Magazine from
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the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts concerning a recent article by
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James Carroll.
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31 January 2001
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Letters to the Editor
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The Boston Globe Magazine
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P. O. Box 2378
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Boston, MA 02107-2378
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To the Editor:
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James Carroll's book tells us less about the Catholic Church's relationship to
Jews than it does about Carroll's own malign obsession with Catholicism (Saints
& sinners, 1/14/01).
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Carroll has emerged as the Maria Monk of the twenty-first century, another
ex-religious and professional anti-Catholic, recounting tales about the
corruption of Romanism. What Carroll
writes is not history, but polemics, and not very credible polemics at that.
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One is forced to question yet again why Carroll pretends to remain attached
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to an institution he so manifestly despises.
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The following is a letter to the editor of The Boston Globe from the
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Catholic Action League of Massachusetts concerning James Carroll's recent
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column on salvation.
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> 21 September 2000
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Letters to the Editor
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The Boston Globe
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P. O. Box 2378
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Boston, MA 02107-2378
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To the Editor:
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James Carroll's fatuous assertion that salvation is not central to the
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message of the Christian religion is contradicted by the words of Saint Paul in
the New Testament that God "wishes all men to be saved and to come to the
knowledge of the truth," and by the immemorial tradition that "the
highest law of th Church is the salvation of souls" (The purpose of
religion, 9/19/2000).
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Beneath the threadbare pretensions of Catholicity, Carroll's religious
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ideology seems strikingly Unitarian.
With each weekly column, he further separates himself from the religion
of his baptism.
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If Carroll's purpose was to provide a dissident perspective on Catholicism, he
must be judged a failure, for he is no longer even remotely recognizable as a
Roman Catholic.
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The following is a letter to the editor of The Boston Globe from the
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Catholic Action League of Massachusetts in response to yesterday's op-ed
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column by James Carroll.
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19 April 2000
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Letters to the Editor
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The Boston Globe
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P.O. Box 2378
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Boston, MA 02107-2378
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To the Editor:
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Holy Week is the most solemn time in the liturgical year for Christians. It is also the time of year when Boston
area Catholics can look forward to yet another revisionist polemic by apostate
James Carroll, aimed at the deconstruction of the traditional Catholic Faith
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(Forgiveness on Holy Week, 4/18/2000).
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Since September 29, 1992, Carroll has penned more than fifty-five columns
criticizing the Catholic Church, Catholic teaching, or Catholics - almost certainly
a record for an op-ed writer in a major American newspaper. The celebration of the Christmas and
Easter Holy
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Days seem to especially provoke his hostile obsession with the Church,
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impelling him to ventilate his dysfunctional religiosity.
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These repetitive and hackneyed attacks only serve to underscore Carroll's
disconnection from the Church, and the increasing marginalization of aging,
sixties era dissidents from the life of the Catholic community. Although the tedious and tendentious
predictability of Carroll's columns does little to stimulate intellectual
interest, one point from April 18th's op-ed is worthy of mention. Carroll's rejection of the accuracy and
the authenticity of the Gospels exposes the fraudulence of his claim to be a
Catholic.
The following is a rather lengthy article about Boston Globe columnist James Carroll, written by C. Joseph Doyle, Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, and appears in the March 2000 issue of The Catholic World Report. While it is lengthy, I strongly urge you to print it out and read it at your leisure. It is far and away a definitive chronicle of the Catholic-bashing journalist. Moreover, it is expertly researched and written in Joe Doyle's inestimable style It is well worth the read.
?Vichy Catholic
A Boston-based columnist who
still insists that he is a Catholic
has risen to prominence through his
repeated attacks on the Church.
Over the two
millennia of Catholicism, apostasy has taken many forms.
Sometimes it has entailed formal
conversion, for reasons spiritual or material, to another religion. Often it
has been a pro forma attempt at physical self preservation, as in the case of
the early Christians who burned incense to the genius of the Emperor, or the
British Catholics who acknowledged the Queen's supremacy by law
established. In the last two
centuries, Catholics have witnessed the quiet loss of faith of those who follow
a fashionable skepticism, preferring Darwin and Spinoza to Augustine and Aquinas. Occasionally, some ex-Catholics, like
the historian Will Durant (who was reconciled to the Church on his deathbed),
could write with admiration, even affection, about Catholicism.
Things are
different today. There is a new
generation of apostates who
repudiate the authority of the Church
and the doctrines of the faith, who reject Christian morality, and who embrace
all of the calumnies
heaped upon the Church, but who remain
nominally Catholic. Their market
value, public influence, and social and professional rewards are contingent
upon their ability to maintain at least the pretense of Catholicism.
Collaborating with the enemies of the Church, they have become a kind of Vichy
Catholic.
Frances
Kissling, the putatively Catholic front for the abortion
industry, is the most shameless example
of this genre. John Cornwall, the
assassin of Pope Pius XII's reputation, is another. Surging to prominence in this ignoble category however, is
author, ex-priest, Boston Globe columnist, and Harvard lecturer James Carroll,
who combines a visceral hostility to the papacy with a respectability to which
Frances Kissling could never aspire.
Unlike the others, Carroll has a regular forum in a major American
newspaper, and in the country's premiere institution of higher learning, based
from which he ca carry on his relentless polemic against the Faith.
Since 1992,
Carroll - who is also the author of nine novels and a
collection of poems - has produced
nearly 60 op-ed columns in the Globe criticizing the Church, almost certainly
establishing the track record for
anti-Catholic outbursts in one of the
nation's top dozen newspapers. His
attacks on the Church have also appeared
in the pages of the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, American Prospect, and Boston
Phoenix (the last being an alternative newspaper known for its homosexual
advocacy and explicit sex ads).
Carroll's
recurring theme is the essential malignancy of the orthodox
Catholic Faith or "calcified,
totalitarian Catholicism," as he describes it in his 1996 autobiography,
An American Requiem. For Carroll,
the
Church is one of history's principal
causative agents of social evil:
poverty and overpopulation in the Third
World; violence in Northern Ireland; war in the Balkans; the oppression of
women; historic persecutions of
pagans, Jews, and Muslims; and even the
rise of Nazism, can all be
attributed to Catholicism. The papacy, "the crumbling edifice
of monarchical Counter-Reformation Catholicism," is, as the embodiment and
guarantor of the traditional faith, the chief obstacle to Carroll's
de-Christianizing notion of reform.
As a convenient
target of opportunity, Pope Pius XII is,
unsurprisingly, the subject of Carroll's
hackneyed criticisms. Carroll
characterizes Pius XII as "a narcissistic, power-hungry manipulator,"
and the "avatar of papal absolutism" in an October 1999 review of
John Cornwall's book, Hitler's Pope in the Atlantic Monthly. He goes on to say that the "modern
ideology of papal power .... helped make the hatred of the Jews so lethal in
this century .... "
It is the
Petrine office itself, however, which most exercises Carroll's spleen. Regurgitating the myth of The Deputy
again in an April 7, 1997 New Yorker article entitled "The Silence,"
Carroll asserts that "the doctrine of infallibility is like a virus that
paralyzes the body of the Church."
The current occupant of the Chair
of St. Peter has become, far more
than any of his predecessors, the
primary focus of Carroll's rancor.
One of his first Globe columns in 1992 was a salute to Irish singer
Sinead O'Connor for tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II on the nationwide
television broadcast, Saturday Night Live. Carroll called the Pope "the emblem of sexist
patriarchy," who has imposed a "Roman captivity" on the
Church, making it "the foremost
enemy of women."
Carroll was
even less inhibited in a 1995 Boston Phoenix article, "The
Pope Is Wrong," whose subtitle
refers to the Vicar of Christ as "a narrow-minded man obsessed with sexual
issues and hypnotized with celebrity." Carroll goes on to describe John Paul as a
"disaster" who has "disgraced the Church" and has become
"the chief subjugator of women." The author characterizes himself as a Catholic who is a
dissenter from a "messianic pope's omnivorous certitudes."
James Carroll, 57, is
the son of the late Air Force Lieutenant General
Joseph
F. Carroll, who was the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a top
advisor to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and
a
key figure in the US Air Force bombing campaign in Vietnam. Before
entering
the service, Joseph Carroll had been an agent in the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, and a confidant, of legendary FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.
Born in Chicago,
James Carroll went to high school in Germany, attended Georgetown University,
and eventually entered St. Paul's College, the Paulist seminary in Washington
,to train for the priesthood. At
St.
Paul's,
according to his autobiography, Carroll learned about biblical historical
criticism, embraced as a priestly ideal the Jesuit radical Daniel Berrigan,
read Hans Kung (whom he later believed should have been made pope), and
discovered the therapeutic value of shouting obscene curses, out of earshot, at
his religious superiors.
Conflicted over what he described as the "doom of celibacy,"
Carroll relates how he spent the evening before entering the seminary roaming
the streets of New York in an unsuccessful quest for a prostitute. Carroll
would later describe his life as a priest as that of "an avowed eunuch in
a narrow bed alone."
Ordained in
1969, Carroll spent the next five years as the Catholic
chaplain at Boston University, where he
participated in illegal protests in support of Communist victory in
Vietnam. Forced out as chaplain in
1974 after the nun with whom he worked "celebrated" Mass in his
absence Carroll would later admit that he counseled Catholic students to use
contraceptives, and regularly > concelebrated Mass with an Anglican
minister. After abandoning his orders and his vocation, Carroll would
marry outside the Church before he was laicized; he mentions in his
autobiography that he thus incurred the penalty of excommunication - a fact
which has not deterred him from regularly identifying himself as a member of
the Catholic Church.
Carroll would
claim he left the priesthood because of Pope Paul VI's
encyclical reaffirming traditional
Catholic opposition to artificial birth control, saying the Pope was "in
the grip of a savage Catholic neurosis
about sex." Yet Humanae Vitae was issued in 1968, a
year beforeCarroll was ordained.
An April 1997 Boston Globe article on Carroll offered a different
explanation for his decision to leave the priesthood, saying that he was unwilling
to give up social activism - although he was deeply involved in social activism
throughout his brief priestly career.
Whatever actually motivated him to leave the priesthood, the decision
evidently brought
upward
social mobility, in the form of a home on Boston's exclusive Beacon Hill, a
summer cottage on Cape Cod, positions at the Boston Globe and Harvard's Kennedy
School of Government, and an education for his children at the elite,
historically Protestant Milton Academy.
Although
Carroll asserts that he is a dissenting Catholic, his religious views and
beliefs might be more accurately categorized as high-church Unitarian. In his book and in his Globe columns,
Carroll tells us that the Virgin birth was an "impossibility," that
the nativity narratives and the Resurrection were mythic, and that Our Lord
never considered himself divine.
Carroll even recoils from the public display of the cross, calling its
display in Bavarian classrooms "an exclusionary symbol." Quoted in the Harvard University Gazette
regarding the controversy over the papal cross that stands at Auschwitz,
Carroll said that when he saw that cross, "I felt like I was in the
presence of something obscene."
In perhaps his most vile remark about the Faith, he once described the
Virgin Mary, in a 1995 Globe Column, as "the mascot of her gender's
subjugation."
Carroll's lack
of fidelity to Catholic truth is matched, and possibly
exceeded,
by his lack of respect for historical truth - as is evident from the
misadventures that characterize his writing when he recounts episodes from
Church history. In both his
autobiography and his newspaper column Carroll claims that Pope John XXIII
accepted as accurate the slanders against Pius XII contained in Rolf Hochhuth's
play The Deputy. Later he would
admit that this report - for which there is no substantive evidence - is based
on a story that was "possibly apocryphal."
In his 1997 New
Yorker article, Carroll asserted that the First Vatican Council defined papal
infallibility to bolster a Pope who had just been stripped of his temporal
sovereignty over the papal states.
Yet as every student of European and ecclesiastical history knows,
infallibility was proclaimed just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian
War, which resulted in the evacuation of Rome by its French garrison, leading
to the subsequent seizure of the Eternal City by the army of
the
Kingdom of Italy. Pope Pius IX had not lost his temporal power - he was still
the ruler of Rome - on July 18, 1870, when the First Dogmatic Constitution in
the Church of Christ was passed by the Ecumenical Council and confirmed by the
Supreme Pontiff.
An even more
troubling example of Carroll's sense of accuracy and journalistic ethics is his
willingness to malign the reputations of those who are no longer able to defend
themselves. Alluding to a recent
biography of Boston's Cardinal William O'Connell, Carroll states that the
prelate was a homosexual. An
ordinary reader would infer from Carroll's remark that the biography had provided
evidence for that charge. Yet the
biographer, James O'Toole - who wrote critically of O'Connell in his work
Militant and Triumphant - actually raised and rejected the charge, pointing out
that its source was a corrupt ex-priest who had been cashiered by Cardina
O'Connell
Similarly,
without citing a scintilla of evidence, Carroll blandly suggests in An American
Requiem that the late Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York was a pederast. For Carroll, it seems, history is
something to be manipulated, revised, and distorted, to give substance to his
bigoted resentments against the Church and its "repressive, deceit ridden
culture of celibate clericalism."
James Carroll's dissent from Catholic moral teaching evidently includes
an unusual reading of the Eighth Commandment.
Indeed, Carroll seems to have a
propensity for simply making things up as he goes along. In a 1995 Boston Globe column, Carroll
excoriated the Croatian Catholic hierarchy for allegedly failing to condemn
atrocities committed by their own side during the recent warfare in the
Balkans. Yet Cardinal Franjo
Kuharic of Zagreb had told Croatian fighters in 1992: "If a Serb burns
your house, protect his house; if a Serb kills your father, protect his
father." And in 1993, Cardinal
Kuharic criticized the attacks made by some Bosnian Croats against Muslims,
saying they were "responsible for all the damage done to the international
standing of Croatia."
In a 1994 Globe
column, in which he claims that the murder of abortionists "logically
follows from the Pope's own moral absolutism on abortion," Carroll
suggests that the Church is not serious in its opposition to abortion because
she fails to invoke the penalty of excommunication for those who procure an
abortion. Yet the Code of Cannon
Law (1398) states: "A person who procures a successful abortion incurs an
automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication."
It was oncesaid
of the Bolshevik Revolution that it allowed mediocrities to become
important. One would find it hard
to imagine that a Catholic of such mundane talents as an author, such tedious
predictability as a columnist, and such crude prejudice, amateurish ability,
and callous and reckless disregard for the truth as an historical essayist,
would achieve Carroll's degree of celebrity and professional standing - were he
not wholly subservient to the dominant secular culture. Certainly no faithful Catholic would be
accorded a weekly column in the Globe, and given free rein to write regularly
on religious issues.
While James Carroll postures as a
dissenter and onetime anti-war activist, his life has been one of bourgeois
conformity. He marched against the
war in Vietnam when it was in vogue to do so. He left the priesthood and religious life when thousands of
others did. He safely supported
liberal politics while moving in the Boston-Cambridge nexus of publishing,
journalism, and higher education.
Now he bashes the Church from the prosperous security of the Boston
Globe. A child of privilege,
Carroll is as much a part of the establishment as his father was while serving
in the Pentagon.
In considering
the strange case of James Carroll, marked by so much
hypocrisy
and pretension, there is one thing that can be said about previous generations
of apostates. They, at least, had the integrity to leave.
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