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Cardinal O'Malley greets President
Obama at the funeral of the late
Senator Ted Kennedy
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I’m not
saying I was always right,” he said at his Senate office. “I’ll leave that to
God and history. But I believed I was doing what I thought was right and people
didn’t just disagree with me. There was hatred. But I’m not alone in that. You
can take the last three presidents — Clinton, Bush, Obama — and people haven’t
just disagreed with them, they’ve hated them. And to me, that’s really
terrible. That’s a cancer that’s eating at our politics.”
As I would also say about Mr.
Justice Scalia on the political right, while I have not always agreed with
Senator Lieberman, I have always had a lot of respect for him because he is a
man who is not afraid to speak up for what he believes to be right. And I find
that people of small intellects and narrow spirits have met both the Justice
and the Senator with a personal animosity that is nothing less than
pathological. And if that is true for
the lesser lights, such as Justices and Senators, how much more so for
Presidents—Clinton, Bush, and Obama most of all.
I must admit that I have never
cared for Mr. Clinton personally though I think he had a successful presidency
and will go down in history as one of our better Presidents. Mr. Bush I think is a good man but was a
terrible president not only because of the disastrous policies that led both to
a national financial shambles and two immoral wars with the consequent
socio-political chaos of the implosion of the Middle-East, but even more so
because he allowed himself to be surrounded by evil persons who manipulated
their access to power for personal gain at the cost of national ruin. As a professional historian, I have no doubt
that the Senior President Bush and his predecessor, President Reagan, will be
evaluated very differently in the long-run than they have been in the
short. When archives are opened and the
definitive history of the 1980 election and subsequent presidencies of the
winning candidates can be written, Americans will be appalled at the way in
which the Republican Party undermined our constitutional government. And to
be honest and fair, the roots of the evil that like a cancer is eating out the democracy
from within our republican form of government go back further and deeper and
are not limited to one party. I only wish there were more Joe Libermans and
Antonin Scalias whose integrity I trust.
All this is a way of saying that while I while I wouldn’t buy a used car
from Bill Clinton, and I think George W was in way over his head, and while I
think Ronald Reagan and George H.W., and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft are (or were) evil people—and I don’t use that term
lightly—I don’t have any personal animosity, much less hatred, for them. I don’t wish them harm or even
misfortune. Like evil people I have
personally encountered in my life—in the Church, in academics, in business, as
neighbors, or as relatives—my disappointment in them doesn’t fester into rage
or even an abiding anger. My perception
of them as “evil” is precisely that—my perception—and I don’t expect that God
sees them the same way I do. In fact, I am
aware that if I saw them as God did I might better understand where their moral
failure—or what I perceive to have been their moral failure—comes from and
having a context for it I might better understand it.
On the other hand, the rage we see today
directed by some towards President Obama baffles me. I can understand people disagreeing with
him. I can see their being disappointed
in their fellow citizens choosing him for a second term. I can see people worrying for the future of
the country as I did under the last three Republican administrations. I can even see people not liking him, as I obviously
have disliked some of his predecessors.
What I cannot see is healthy people being enraged by everything the man
does from spending a Christmas vacation with his family to his occasional attendance
at a Church service to his appearance at a Catholic Charities benefit to his
visits to our wounded warriors to his remarks at a memorial service for the
victims of the Newtown Connecticut gun murders.
When everything an individual does inspires rage in a person, one begins
to see that the problem is not with the individual but with the person who
becomes angry.
Regular readers know that
one of my bête noires is the author
of a blog under the title of “Les Femmes.”
Twenty years ago when I worked in Northern Virginia this woman had a
certain reputation and her little home-printed newsletter circulated quarterly
among the various parishes and organizations to which she mailed it,
unsolicited and gratis. She
used it to excoriate various priests and nuns and diocesan officials that didn’t
meet her criteria for orthodoxy or whose read on canon law differed from her
own. Though “Les Femmes” entitled
themselves “Women of Truth,” she never hesitated to use lies, half-truths,
innuendos, and out-of-context quotes and stories, to pass judgment on her
spiritual betters. Over the years her
organization, never more than a handful, has dwindled down to what pretty much appears
to be a one-woman campaign to attack a range of foes from Jesuit Father James
Martin to Benedictine Sister Joan Chittester to local prelates and priests such
as Father Tuck Grinnell or Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. But these last few years, foes within the
Church have been eclipsed by an increasing and incredible personal animosity
towards not only President Barack Obama but towards his wife. When, during a question and answer period
after a talk I gave recently, I used her blog and newsletter as an example of pathological
anger hiding beneath a cover of religion, a member of the audience told me:
" I have known this
woman for over forty years. We had
children together at St X School in Y, Virginia. She is a rageoholic. For her, religion—her religion, not the Church--
is the fuel that drives her anger. Her anger
blinds her ability to see reality in any way other than she constructs it and
she constructs it to feed her anger.”
I found this insight
fascinating. A colleague of mine who is
a psychotherapist often speaks of rageoholics.
Some people, more than a few in our society, are addicted to anger even
as others are addicted to alcohol or drugs or are compulsive in their sexual
acting-out, or their use of food, or their self-mutilation. Like other addicts, rageoholics construct
their realities to support or justify their addictions. It is not that they are conscious of their
lies or deliberate in their evils—reality becomes for them that which they need
it to be to feed their addiction. The roots
of this addiction, like the roots of other compulsive behavior, can be many—incidents of abuse,
fear, depression, loneliness, anxiety or a thousand other experiences that
produce a need for whatever gratification the addiction gives or angst it
soothes. Anger releases many of the same
endorphins as sex and even as sex-addicts find their compulsions soothed by
sexual release, anger-addicts find comfort in their release of those endorphins
by giving rant to their rage. The moral
culpability for such behavior needs to go not towards the addict—whose loss of
moral freedom has been diminished by the addiction—but to those who fan the
flames of this anger. For those who find
in pseudo-Catholicism a justification for hating—not disagreeing with, but
hating—someone we must find the sources that are feeding that compulsive rage. Those who use the pulpit or the press for demagoguery
or voices like that of Michael Voris and his “Real Catholic T.V.” are the ones
who need to be held responsible for the epidemic of hatred under the cover of “religion,”
that is becoming part of the warp and woof of our society. There
is no way that the Gospel of Christ can be used to justify the sort behavior
that can swell ideological disagreement into personal hatred and as a Church we
do not want to be known for this sort of attitude. By this shall know you are my disciples—that you have love for one another. There is enough evil in the world already; we
don’t need Westboro Baptist Catholics.
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