Read this review. The author has quite a powerful message. For example: Catholicism was always the American Original Sin, according to the Gospel of Theodore Hesburgh, and a Notre Dame education was the baptism which washed that sin away, at least for the largely Irish population that flocked there in droves. German and Italian Catholics, in general, stayed away in droves, as Sam Goldwyn would have put it. In the end, the solution to Paul Blanshard’s Catholic Problem was disarmingly simple. It was the birth control pill. When the history of the Catholic Church in America finally gets written, it will show that all of the fierce Catholic resistance to American culture during the 1930s—from Cardinal Dougherty’s boycott of Warner Brothers theaters in Philadelphia under the aegis of the Legion of Decency to Msgr. Ryan’s defeat of Margaret Sanger before the American Congress to Father Coughlin’s attacks on usury and his defense of the working man—all collapsed over night when Hesburgh took Rockefeller money and gave Catholics permission to use birth control pills. By promoting Candida Moss’s career and book, Dan Myers and John McGreevy are only taking the Notre Dame narrative established by Hesburgh to its logical conclusion by defending the Obama administration’s decision to force Notre Dame to pay for their employees’ birth control pills, destroying Notre Dame’s last pretensions to intellectual credibility in the process. McGreevy has already shown his hand in this arena. He destroyed his own reputation as an academic historian when he wrote his “aspirational” book Catholicism and American Freedom, which was another attempt to justify the Notre Dame Hesburgh birth control regime. He then became Dean of Arts and Letters, where he proved that he could fail upward again by presiding over a 20 percent drop in the enrollment in the College of Arts and Letters. Not content to rest on his laurel, McGreevy discovered that he could do still more damage to Notre Dame’s academic reputation by promoting hot intellectual properties like Professor Moss, who went from newly minted Ph.D. to full professor in three years under McGreevy’s mentoring (“unheard of in academe,” according to one professor familiar with the case). Well, if the late Rabbi Michael Signer can earn an endowed chair at Notre Dame for producing literally nothing, i.e., not one book and not one article that was not co-authored by someone else, then why can’t someone of Professor Moss’s intellectual caliber become a full professor in three short years by producing preposterous pieces of sophistry like The Myth of Persecution?
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 18:45:55 +0000
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