Sense and Sensibility

And You Thought ‘The Magdalene Sisters’ Was Bad

I wanted to be furious at “Angels and Demons.”

I wanted to be angry because I was tired of the hoary anti-Catholic hokum that Dan Brown and Ron Howard keep spewing to captive audiences. I couldn’t understand why audiences would rather gobble up convoluted conspiracy theories than nibble on a few facts. It isn’t like the Roman Catholic Church was bereft of juicy indignities. (Renaissance Rome, anyone?)

But Brown’s incense-and-intrigue Gothicism was beginning to grate. First, because it inflamed what historian Arthur Schlesinger once called “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” anti-Catholicism; and second, because its slipshod approach to history is one too many Americans accept as Gospel.

I was actually finding myself in sympathy with the tetchy William Donahue of the Catholic League, who accused Ron Howard, director of “The DaVinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” of “smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales.”

And then the report came out.

The report is the “Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse,” a 2,600-page Gothic saga of depravity, dread and shame that rivals anything Brown could produce. It lays bare 60-years of appalling abuse by priests and nuns on tens of thousands of children placed in their care.

The report, nine years in the making,  details a climate of terror “created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment,” rampant in institutions for the destitute and unwanted. These were the places you were sent if you were poor, or your parents were ill. These were places you to which you were dispatched if your mother committed adultery or beat you with a broom. These were the places you were sent to be helped.

These were the places that would erase your shame.

What happened in these foul institutions? According to the report:

 Nuns stripped children naked and beat them with pokers. Children were punched, flogged and set upon by dogs, according to the report. They were routinely forced to perform oral sex. One of the more than 1,000 anonymous victims reported being “tied to a cross and raped whilst others masturbated at the side.” Girls were molested in confessionals – one, even on an altar.

The abuse, which the report characterized as “endemic,” occurred with the collusion of the Irish Department of Education, which the report authors’ condemned as “toothless.” One of the members of the report’s investigating committee resigned, accusing the education department of stonewalling.

The release of the report, which covers a period between the 1930s and the 1990s, was fiercely debated. The Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys, filed a successful lawsuit to suppress the abusers’ names. We don’t know their names But they sound something like this: Monsters. Criminals. Rapists. Hypocrites.

I want to be angry at Dan Brown but his silly contrivances and pallid “illuminati” conspirators seem like cartoon characters compared to the clerics of Ireland. Apologists will haul out their calculators and tell you that the percentage of abusive priests isn’t any worse that garbage collectors, or paralegals or newspaper columnists.

But the people who should speak up loudest about this anathema are not the atheists or the Darwinists or the secular humanists. They are Catholics – specifically Irish-Catholics, like myself – who cannot help but be revolted, incensed and humiliated by priests, brothers and nuns who gutted the childhoods of Irish children and left them unable to tell  whether these men and women of God were angels – or demons.

The Double-edges Sword of Identity

 A Jewish friend of mine is a worried.

Her daughter has fallen for a man who would be considered a “catch” by almost any measure: Tall, dark, handsome, erudite and considerate [Dash] he is a young man in a lucrative profession with an auspicious career ahead of him. But there’s a catch to this “catch.” The young man is not Jewish. He’s Hindu.

For my friend, this presents a problem. If the romance proceeds apace, will her daughter’s Jewish identity erode? This is a prickly issue for Jews, who have endured the Inquisition, pogroms and the Holocaust. To lose another Jew to the fancy of romance can seem a little capricious. This is far more portentous than my marriage to Protestant [Dash] an occasion for excommunication in my grandfather’s day that merited a shrug from my father.

I thought about my friend’s conflict in relation to two recent events that have underscored the difficulty in preserving one’s cultural identity in the face of a rising tide of homogenization. The first was the release of “Unaccustomed Earth,” by Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who writes about the chasm between expatriate Bengali parents and their American-raised children. The second was last year’s Irish rejection of the monumental Lisbon Treaty, which the European Union is promoting to reconstitute its cumbersome bureaucracy.

The events may appear unrelated. What, after all does a wistful Bengali immigrant have in common with an Irish electorate mucking up the clunky works of the European Union? More than you might expect.

The Irish, who have benefited from millions in EU subsidies, remain peevish about all this “European” business, worrying that Ireland has struck a Faustian bargain that will dilute not only Ireland’s political voice, but its identity. They’re not the only ones. Nobody but the poorer European countries seem aflutter about their “European” identity. As my Irish cousin says, “Who’s Irish anymore?”

A similar question might be asked of the characters in Lahiri’s novel “Unaccustomed Earth.” As she did in her debut collection of stories,”Interpreter of Maladies,” Lahiri wrestles with melancholy of the Bengali immigrants, struggling to inculcate their culture in the hearts of their defiantly Americanized children. It is a battle that leaves them with a longing for an identity they had taken for granted.

The Indian father of the title story is baffled by his tow-headed grandson, who has yet to see India and seems more comfortable in an L.A. mall. “The more the children grew, the less they had seemed to resemble either parent-they spoke differently, dressed differently, seemed foreign in every way,” Lahiri writes.

This, I think, is what we fear most when we talk about an erosion of cultural identity [Dash] that the people who come out of us will have nothing in common with us. We will have no points of communion, no exceptionality of experiences that we use as a shorthand to communicate. Something of our cultural essence will slip away.

Because her faith is important to her, I suspect my friend’s daughter will cling to her religious identity, regardless of whom she marries. But I suspect she grew up in a household that was less redolent of the Jewish heritage than that of her mother, just as my own Irish-Catholic girlhood was less dogmatic and definitive than my grandmother’s. Inexorably, we distance ourselves from the particularity of our culture, to an agreeable indistinctness.

What that means is that today I am free to be enriched by my friendships with Jews [Dash] friendships my grandparents would never have considered. But a certain intensity of identity is gone, and we cannot be surprised by those who continue to mourn it.