By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
The Watters’ World segment of Bill O’Reilly’s nightly program on Fox News remains a guilty pleasure of mine. This is the part of the show when O’Reilly’s reporter Jesse Watters interviews “average Americans” to illustrate how out of touch they are with the issues of the day. It can be staggering to hear what they don’t know.
Why do I say a “guilty” pleasure? Because I know that Watters is mocking these people and that they are not a representative sample of the country. The interviews are designed for entertainment value, to give the audience a laugh. Still, one can’t help but be astonished when one person after another cannot identify pictures of Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and Joe Biden, as happened on a recent show.
I recently came across another example of how clueless modern Americans can be, this time specifically regarding Catholics. It was an Associated Press story about an early April incident on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington. This is no backwater college. IU is a prestigious research university, the flagship of Indiana’s university system, the home of the famous Hoosiers of basketball fame.
The news accounts tell of a series of emails and twitter exchanges among alarmed IU students, warning each other to be careful because, as one student tweeted, “There’s someone walking around in KKK gear with a whip.” A residence hall adviser followed up with a warning: “I would recommend staying indoors if you’re alone.” One stouthearted student decided not to take this menace lying down. Maybe had seen a lot of Matt Damon movies. He strode into the campus yogurt shop where the Klansman was last reported.
No Klansman. No whip. He found a Dominican friar, Fr. Jude McPeak, enjoying his cup of yogurt. The KKK “hood” was his white habit, his “whip” the black rosary that Dominicans wrap around their belt. Fr. McPeak was lifting and flicking his rosary as he fingered the beads on his way back from a meeting with students, a regular part of his ministry.
Perhaps we should not be all that surprised by this incident. We are not living in the America of the mid-20th century, where Catholics and Catholicism were prominent parts of the culture. I would wager that even atheists back then went to see films such as Going My Way and Boys’ Town, with Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy portraying lovable priests in clerical garb. They were also likely to be familiar with Loretta Young’s and Ingrid Bergman’s portrayal of nuns in Come to the Stable and The Bells of St. Mary’s.
This was just the tip of the iceberg. There were “singing nuns” and “flying nuns” and distinctly Catholic characters on the radio and weekly television programs and in the popular literature of the time. Many American neighborhoods had CYO athletic leagues and parish dances, open to the entire community. Catholic parishes sponsored Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, often with many non-Catholics members. I am not saying that everyone liked us, but they knew who we were.
Does what happened in Indiana mean that we are now seen as alien to the mainstream of American life? I wouldn’t go that far. I would wager that many IU students are laughing at their classmates’ overreaction. But I will say that things have changed now that the country’s demographics have changed.
The Chinese and Pakistani kids in your children’s or grandchildren’s public high school chemistry class may never have seen a Dominican or Franciscan friar in a full cassock. A movie still of Bing Crosby portraying “Fr. O’Malley” in Going My Way would mean nothing to them. If they saw an old newsreel of a basketball player making the Sign of the Cross at the foul line, as quite a few Catholic players did back in the 1950s, they would wonder if he had a nervous tick.
What does all this mean for us? Certainly not that we should go into a shell, as if we were living in a section of Syria controlled by ISIS. Things are a long way from that. (But we should keep in mind what has happened to Christians in Muslim-controlled areas of the Middle East.) Quite the contrary: We should be resolute in our insistence that we have no obligation to remove the external signs of our Catholicism from the public square, even if they are alien to the experience of non-Christians. It is their problem rather than ours, if logic and a sense of fairness mean anything in this matter.
The mainstream of American life need not become a “safe space” to accommodate every individual who claims to be uncomfortable with signs of Christian belief. And it is not hysterical or fear-mongering to raise the possibility that such a demand might be made. Muslim groups in Switzerland have demanded the removal of the white cross from the Swiss flag. A complaint has been registered with the Washington, D.C., Office of Human Rights by a professor from George Washington University, contending there are “too many crosses in every room of Catholic University.” He argues this is a “human rights violation that prevents Muslim students from praying there.”
That said, it makes sense for Catholics to keep in mind these days that newer immigrants to the United States cannot be assumed to know and understand what we are all about. This may mean that we have to interact with them with the same frame of mind as that of missionaries in a foreign land, with patience and a willingness to explain our beliefs, rituals, and sacramentals more methodically than with non-Catholic fellow citizens in the past.
If a Protestant neighbor in the past made a rude comment about altar boys and nuns, it would not be unreasonable for us to conclude that his intention was to insult Catholics, and to act accordingly. A more patient approach would be advisable for someone like the college kids in Indiana distraught over the sight of a friar fingering his rosary beads, where genuine ignorance rather than ill will seemed to be on display.
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