Yesterday I caught some of Andrew Sullivan’s appearance on Charlie Rose from the night before. He said he had stopped attending Catholic mass because the child abuse scandal sickened him, he said the church hierarchy was corrupted by it and he did not understand the absence of accountability for the pope who as an archbishop had reassigned a priest who had abused boys to another parish where the abuses continued, and he said that he was pursuing his own Christian faith in a more personal manner, through meditation and reading. Now they have put up the transcript:
this moral institution aided and abetted and committed the rape and abuse of countless thousands of innocent children. Now, if any institution did that it would be beyond belief. But that the church, the representative of Jesus, would be doing that, has done that and hidden it and defended it, and no one has really taken responsibility….
I have stopped going to mass because the anger and the frustration overwhelms me, and those are things I don’t want to feel when I’m there.
How much of Sullivan’s great witness on the Israel/Palestine conflict in recent years has come out of his disillusionment with his own religious authority, I wonder.
Also consider his comments in light of how rigid Jewish identity construction is in the political realm. Sullivan’s falling away from Catholicism is a little bit conventional; you hear these ideas being openly expressed. But how many MSM Jews denounce Zionism on Charlie Rose? Oh you are allowed to be a Buddhist and marry a non-Jew, no one will draw the line there, but cheer the Goldstone Report? Who has done that in the mainstream? Beinart expresses dismay with AIPAC. He is firmly a liberal Zionist. That’s about as far as things go. At J Street’s conference, Goldstone was denounced from the rostrum by a big liberal rabbi.
Sadly, Sullivan made no references that I heard to Israel/Palestine. But this, regretting his bad judgment on the Iraq war:
I’ve been marinated in neoconservative thought for a long time so all of this made sense to me. But I did not —
CHARLIE ROSE: “Marinated in neoconservative thought”?
I had. I edited “The New Republic.”
He could a tale unfold…
