Future of the Past
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post
Wednesday, April 6, 2005; Page A19
At first glance, it looked to be a triumph of the human spirit. There,
at a joint news conference last week in Jerusalem, stood the patriarchs
of the rival faiths of the Middle East — Israel’s chief rabbis,
the deputy mufti of Jerusalem, leaders of the Catholic and Armenian
churches — Jews, Muslims and Christians, together at last.
And the cause that had united them? A gay pride festival scheduled
for August in Jerusalem. The leaders of religious orthodoxy had come
together to help ban the festival. Interreligious harmony reigned as
historic enmities gave way to a common loathing of homosexuals.
We have seen the future of the past. The photograph of the clerics
that ran in the newspapers may some day be viewed as an artifact
of the founding of the Orthodox International. Globalization is
bringing modernization and the demand for equality to the doorsteps
of the most traditionalist societies and enclaves. Orthodox faiths
are not accustomed to interreligious cooperation — there is no God
but their own, after all — but in the threat of secularism, they
find themselves with a common enemy and a range of common hatreds.
If Orthodox International had a founding father, it was John Paul II,
who spent much of his papacy endeavoring to reconcile the various
orthodox Christian faiths. When such churches threatened to forsake
orthodoxy for the siren call of human equality, he did not hesitate
to intervene in their deliberations — warning the Anglicans, for
instance, not to ordain gay priests.
John Paul’s orthodoxy, I fear, will quite overwhelm the humanistic
aspects of his legacy. In Africa, John Paul’s church is a tribune
for economic justice — for debt forgiveness, for a global economic
order that seeks to enhance, not destroy, workers’ rights. It is
also a vehement opponent of birth control and condom distribution,
even as an AIDS epidemic ravages the continent. That such a church
could call itself “pro-life” is sophistry of the highest order.
The church that John Paul took over in the late ’70s was home to
many priests, theologians, bishops and even cardinals who were
seeking the common ground between church traditions and modern
egalitarianism. The church that John Paul made and leaves is home to no
such discussion. The vibrant intellectualism of the Vatican II era has
been driven outside the church walls. Where once the Catholic Church
had such engaged and vigorous leaders as Chicago’s Cardinal Joseph
Bernardin, today it is suffused with John Paul’s party-line hacks.
The effects of such hackery are already apparent. A veteran union
organizer I know, who has worked over the years with any number
of bishops and priests on behalf of low-wage workers all the way
back to the farm workers’ grape boycott, tells me that he’s now
encountering Catholic clerics who are withholding their support from
such struggles. The problem, it seems, is that the organizer’s union
backed the pro-union but pro-choice John Kerry for president. Though
John Paul is identified with the cause of workers’ justice, the church
he built is increasingly willing to discard such concerns when they
run counter to the strictures of orthodoxy.
Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has argued that we are now
engaged in a clash of civilizations that pits the liberalism of the
West against the orthodoxy of Islam. Huntington’s on to something,
but I think he has located his fault line in the wrong place. The
opposition to liberalism — Jeffersonian liberalism, with its belief
in science and, correspondingly, human equality — extends well beyond
the backwaters of Islam. It includes the church that the pope bequeaths
us, the Protestant Christian Right, the Orthodox rabbis of Israel.
The blue state-red state division in the United States is increasingly
a global reality as well, and just as it sunders nations, it can also
at least partially erase some preexisting borders. In the Middle
East, it’s not just onetime orthodox rivals who look increasingly
alike. My friend Jo-Ann Mort, one of the keenest observers of Israeli
society, has noted the similarities between the young, nightclubbing,
pro-democracy demonstrators in Beirut and the young, nightclubbing,
pro-peace demonstrators in Tel Aviv. The real Green Line in Israel
and Palestine may one day separate the red and the blue.
A specter is haunting modernity. Powered by tradition, by a misogyny
and homophobia for which a future pope will one day apologize as
surely as John Paul did for the church’s anti-Semitism, the Orthodox
International marches forth to do battle against liberalism, invoking
ancient beliefs against the claims of a common humanity.