Passing the Buck

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 2/22/07)

Readers who have fond memories of the great old Walt Kelly comic strip Pogo will also remember fondly famous words spoken by one of its characters: "We has met the enemy, and he is us." How much wisdom there was in that.
It has a corollary. Along with ducking responsibility for themselves, people often try to pass responsibility, not to say blame, to somebody else. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not unknown in the religious sphere. A couple of recent examples come readily to mind.
One concerns the ugly flap accompanying the disclosure that the newly named Archbishop of Warsaw had cooperated with the secret police back in the bad old days of communist rule. After denying the charge at first, the archbishop then admitted its truth and resigned.
There will be no casting of first stones here. Someone who hasn't felt pressures of the sort that the unhappy archbishop experienced is hardly entitled to say that he or she would have done a whole lot better in his place.
Instead, my quarrel is with people—in Poland and also in Rome—who leaped too quickly to the ramparts blaming those familiar bad guys "the enemies of the Church," and especially the media, for disclosing the archbishop's past.
Blaming enemies of the Church when things go wrong is a familiar reaction repeated time and again in many different contexts. Yes, the Church really does have enemies, and elements of the media are among them. But it's too convenient to hold those enemies at fault whenever embarrassing facts come to light. Sad to say, the archbishop was guilty as charged. It would have been better to leave it at that.
A variation on this theme was played a while back when the question was what Pope Benedict had really said about Turkey and the European Union.
A couple of years ago, the pope-to-be, Cardinal Ratzinger, told an interviewer that letting Turkey into the EU would be a mistake. In late November last year, during his visit to Turkey, Pope Benedict was reported to have done an about-face, expressing qualified approval for the idea in a private meeting with the Turkish prime minister.
The substance and the circumstances of the reports made it clear at the time that the pope had indeed said something of the sort. But that wasn't how it looked to some well-meaning papal defenders, who insisted that Pope Benedict couldn't possibly have changed his mind. In that case, obviously, the story was a fabrication of the prime minister and—who else?—those all-purpose enemies of the Church, the media. "Disinformation," one prominent papal defender sniffed.
Alas for the papal defenders, the Vatican Secretary of State apparently wasn't paying attention to them. In an interview of his own, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone spoke even more warmly of having Turkey in the EU than the pope was said to have done.
And then Pope Benedict himself extended a notably friendly greeting in an audience with the new Turkish ambassador to the Holy See, while the ambassador for his part thanked the pope for supporting Turkey's European aspirations. The quid pro quo apparently is legal recognition by the Turkish government of the country's 35,000-member Catholic community.
Incidents like these may not be enormously important in themselves, but they reflect a troubling pattern—a knee-jerk practice in some Catholic circles of blaming enemies of the Church whenever something they don't like or anticipate takes place. That was a bad idea when Pogo was in his prime. It's still a bad idea now.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

(c) Copyright 2007 by Arlington Catholic Herald