Rob: / I do believe the current Pope was one of the people who was one of the point men going after them.
Frederick: Well, it doesn't surprise me, but it does go to the point, that the church is diverse, and that Liberation Theology lives, you know? They didn't entirely succeed in snuffing it out. The books are still read, the ideas are still out there, and people still live by it to the extent that they can. That's true, and that's real. And it's probably the wave of the future. Penny Lernoux, who was the longtime Latin American correspondent for The Nation magazine, and wrote a great deal about this in a wonderful book called The People of God.
Rob: I wonder, perhaps one of the people who is most visible in challenging the church right now from the bottom up, is the nun Sister Simone Campbell, who is literally on a bus tour standing up to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church for her stand on the rights of women and taking care of the poor. I wonder how the hierarchy will end up handling her.
Frederick: Well, it's not just her. She's one person--happens to head network and so she's visible and promoted by Democratic Party interests. However, if you take her out of the picture, there's a whole organization of various orders and Sisters that are the real target. The Vatican couldn't really care about Simone Campbell, honestly. It's the larger issue of the Sisters themselves doing the things that you're talking about: working for poor, standing up for the rights of women, and not necessarily agreeing with the hierarchy on a lot of stuff.
American women, including American nuns are far more outspoken than they are in other places, and not as controllable as they are in other places where more traditional male hierarchies still prevail. The clash is coming, and I don't pretend any great insight as to what the outcome will be, but the Sisters have a lot at stake, like their pensions--their right to even be a part of the Catholic Church, and they stand to lose a lot if they take the kind of stand that many of us would like them to take. You know, "Go nuns. Stand up for your rights. Speak up to those guys." But if they do, if they continue their stance, the Church will find a way to suppress and to silence them, and pick them off one by one. The Church is big and patient, and has been around a long time, and doesn't brook descent gladly.
Rob: Well, that takes me back to this bridge between Reverend Moon and the Catholic Church--not so much directly between him, but how both of them have been working ceaselessly with enormous resources to influence government, the media and what have you. What can you tell me more about the Catholic Church and its efforts to influence politics and media?
Frederick: Well, I think one of the interesting trends is that the church in the United States had to be careful for most of our history, because the United States was dominated by Protestants and Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, who thought that the Pope was the Anti-Christ (or might be), and Anti-Catholicism was a serious trend among the Nativist kinds of figures through most of our history. It's really only been in the past decade or two that the Catholic Bishops have begun to become more directly political in the United States. And they're always working their influence behind the scenes and were more powerful than it seemed, but to be overtly political, to point their finger at the President and the politicians, to call them out and deny them opportunities to speak at their colleges or to call John Carey 'not a Catholic,' and [say] the Catholics shouldn't vote for him: that kind of thing. It's just extraordinary. The church is flexing its muscles in the United States in a way that it never has before.
The bishops are arguably more out of touch with their own members than they realize, and certainly out of touch with most of American electorate. But for the most part, our media are cowed by the bishops. They're afraid to be too critical. They're afraid to point out the degree to which the bishops are overstepping, and they're afraid of being called bigots, and they're afraid of being boycotted. And the fear is palpable among politicians for similar reasons. We have not really learned how to stand up to hierarchical bullies, such as the Catholic bishops.
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