On The Right - problems in the Catholic Church, answering machines and e-mail, and Israel's military policy - Column

William F. Buckley, Jr.

Can the Church Survive?

NEW YORK, MARCH 29

Time magazine's cover line is "Can the Catholic Church Save Itself?" Author Frank McCourt is quoted: "The church is going to lose children and families, and it's doing this to itself. If this all continues, the church will disappear."

On this thought, a Catholic might say: If the Church disappears, it will be God's fault. Christians believe that He founded the Church. If it is to disappear because of scandalous behavior by a cohort of American priests, then perhaps the whole idea of Christianity was, after all, an epiphenomenon. One that lasted a very long time, but proved of insufficient stamina to survive.

It becomes clearer every day that the fraternity of American critics has discovered sin. The uproar today has substantially to do with clerical ineptitude. The bishop who did not report the priestly abuser to the police is being held responsible for incremental abuses, much as a parole board might be held responsible for letting out someone who then reengages in crime. You can't sue a parole board, but you can sue a diocese, and this is being widely done.

But people are also asking for new distillations of policy, social, civil, and theological. We begin with celibacy. Almost everywhere we are told that Catholic reliance on it for its clergy should end. Perhaps it should, though we are left wondering why this should have taken 20 centuries to discover; yet there is no obvious appetite to probe what it is in these years that anachronizes the call to celibacy. There is no reason to suppose that the libido was less active in the year 1902 than today. What is acknowledged, but not very deeply explored, is the quite general conviction that sex is king. Then there is the accompanying question of homosexuality, or, more reliably mentioned, homophobia. Fifty years ago, in my own college with an undergraduate body of 5,000 male students, one could not recall a single homosexual. Now, they are expected to march in the St. Patrick's Day parade. And we know, too, that there were indeed homosexuals on campus. They were certainly not encouraged to give rein to their impulses; perhaps better said, they were intimidated in the matter. Resentment is firm against homosexual advances toward children, but the question is not explored whether that crime -- which was then, continues to be, and will be in the future, a sin -- has increased in proportion to the toleration of the practice at an adult level.

At the civil level, we gravitate to the conclusion that episcopal responsibility for order in religious communities cannot be relied on any more. Cardinal Egan of New York has said that henceforth he will relay all reported abuses to the police, but advises that he will do so only when the family of the aggrieved consents: It is by no means proved by the scandals that every adolescent boy or girl is willing to take the stand to describe what happened, and submit to the cross examination of the insurance company's lawyer. What certainly will happen is an end to the forlorn conviction by many dioceses that psychological counseling was all that was required to protect against the recurrence of the crime.

The dominant sadness of the day is the bereavement of the Catholic community over the triumph of sinful temptations in so many men prepared to give over their lives to the spiritual service of others. Which teaches us -- what, exactly? Fr. Andrew Greeley accosted the question some years ago, commenting, "The question is not whether the Catholic leadership is enlightened but whether Catholicism is true. A whole College of Cardinals filled with psychopathic tyrants provides no answer one way or another to that question." And the most direct answer to the question posed by Time magazine on its cover: "Search for the perfect church, if you will; when you find it, join it, and realize that on that day it becomes something less than perfect."

Are People Being Rude?

NEW YORK, APRIL 5

Do you have e-mail? Do you have a telephone-answering device?

I ask because I am intrigued by an observation recently heard. Proposition One: If you don't have a telephone-answering facility, you are just plain rude. Not intentionally, but de facto.

Proposition Two: If you don't have e-mail, you are being a premature Luddite. Full-grown Luddites reject e-mail facilities because they reject the whole idea of technological advances. They reject them not as the original Luddites rejected invention: The British agricultural workers tore up textile labor-saving devices on the grounds that they caused unemployment. A premature Luddite is not someone who rejects inventions per se, but someone who doesn't get around to exploring their usefulness and lets them pass by his life, simply unnoticed.

But begin with the telephone, because the absence of message recorders is, indeed, an act of incivility. The narrative here is pretty plain. If you are calling somebody who isn't home, the burden of having to call again and -- sometimes -- again and again because a recording wasn't at hand to advise that she was away until the end of the month makes your burden unnecessary, annoying, and sometimes even cruel.

When dealing with telephones, a diplomatic question is posed. If you are calling Alice to tell her that her house is on fire, the consequences of her inattention are pretty emphatic. If you are calling to say that you can't be there for the bridge game tomorrow, either you have to keep calling until she answers, or she will find herself responsible for the empty chair.

That's when the call-ee suffers from the failure to provide a facility for leaving messages. If the caller is ringing to wish someone a happy birthday, the frustration is that of the initiator. He has either to call again later, or run the risk of forgetting to do so; and the party of the second part is someone whose day might otherwise have been brightened. If the Emily Post people haven't gotten around to listing an answering machine as a social obligation, they are derelict, and should be -- called. Classify this column as one such call.

Now the e-mail business is trickier. If a person is simply determined not to sign on to e-mail, it's probably that he is refusing to use a computer. Now a lot of people are simply afraid of computers. They fear that technical problems will overwhelm them. They don't know how to touch-type, and their hunt-peck is irresolute; and anyway, you have to plug things in and you have to move arrows around the screen and you have to remember to push that button not the other and you know that halfway through, your letter will suddenly vanish from the screen and - - the hell with it.

ThThere isn't much one can do about the deprived, except perhaps call them on the phone and stroke them. But there are other species, which we call The Defiant. It may stretch the imagination, but it is true that 100 years ago there were people who would not step foot in an automobile; and of course there are those who even now will not fly.

But the social implications of e-mail aren't given due notice. Those who use e-mail know instantly what is meant by this. The ability to call up a name, bat out a sentence or two, dispatch the message free of charge, and send copies to one or more friends or associates, is a facility for the user that is hard to overestimate and thoughtless to disdain.

What about the prospective recipient? If you know that 20 people are going to write you one or more times in the course of a year, is it not benevolent to make their act easier? The postal mailbox (an invention of Anthony Trollope) was a painkiller; a contrivance that diminished a labor of life, the daily trip to the post office. Doesn't it follow that e-mail diminishes the menial side of correspondence? Think how many more letters Abigail Adams might have written, how much more time saved, if she and her friends had had access to e-mail.

Such objections as that e-mail makes you liable to unwelcome intrusions (in the trade they call these "spam") are phony. The mailbox can bring you 20 unwelcome objects for every one you want to read. It is much more cumbersome to open, glance at, and throw away a piece of unwanted mail than to extinguish life on the screen -- Zip! Zap! It's gone!

Well, granted there is a lot of road noise in modern technology. Yet every now and then we should doff our hats to it. Herewith mine.

Sharon's Contribution

NEW YORK, APRIL 12

My vote is that General Sharon's offensive is the stupidest campaign in recent memory. Defined here as a campaign that has: solved nothing, increased Israel's problems, intensified Palestinian hatred of Israel, estranged many Europeans and Americans, and fanned Islamic hostility. What is General Sharon up to?

What he said was that he was determined to destroy the "infrastructure" of the suicide terrorists.

Well, how do you do that?

We Americans are trying to do that to al-Qaeda. This involved a war on the government of Afghanistan, a nation formally identified with terrorists it sheltered, trained, and dispatched to do their grisly work. The U.S. in effect declared war on the Taliban government and pursued that war as best it could. Having toppled Kabul, our anti- terrorist forces are now deployed here and there, doing such things as raiding a terrorist nest in Pakistan and hauling in a suspected leader.

Sharon's policy is scorched-earth. Under his command, the Israeli army has engaged not in isolating the infrastructure of the suicide terrorists. What he is engaged in is wanton damage. The New York Times's Serge Schmemann, reporting from Jerusalem, tells it in a dispatch on Thursday with a memorable lead:

"The images are indelible: piles of concrete and twisted metal in the ancient casbah of Nablus, husks of savaged computers littering ministries in Ramallah, rows of storefronts sheared by passing tanks in Tulkarm, broken pipes gushing precious water, flattened cars in fields of shattered glass and garbage, electricity poles snapped like twigs, tilting walls where homes used to stand, gaping holes where rockets pierced office buildings." And he uses Sharon's missionary mandate without apparent irony: "It is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state -- roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines -- has been devastated." How's that for retaliation for the Passover massacre?

What Sharon has been doing is to give way to Israeli rage. The rage is hot, deserved, and purposive. But to proceed on the assumption that water and electricity lines and schools and hospitals are vital organs of terrorist excursions is untenable except on an understanding that General Sharon hasn't articulated. If you say: The poison that animates the suicide bombers is endemic in every stick and stone that make up the West Bank, then it would follow that a destruction of everything and of everybody standing would follow, as an inoculation would serve to chase down the infection in any part of the diseased body. Sharon hasn't ordered his soldiers to mow down every Palestinian standing, but his artillery and air force haven't been discriminating -- there is no way to be entirely discriminating in a military offensive designed to find something that can't be found, namely the fuse box that causes an 18-year-old Palestinian girl to arm herself with a bomb and detonate it in an Israeli mall. There aren't, sitting about, neat paramilitary kiosks with explosives and rosters of willing terrorists. The search for these was bound to be fruitless, rather like looking for the infrastructure of lechery in Gomorrah.

General Sharon might have sent in a platoon, pulled out Arafat and his 100 lieutenants, and executed them on the entirely reasonable grounds that they embodied the terrorist movement in the West Bank. A bullet into the heart of Arafat is not a wayward contribution to the search for the infrastructure of the evil and genocidal war against Israel. So Palestine would be left leaderless? Such a problem would be that of the Palestinians who have tolerated Arafat for so many years.

What has been done is to enhance and even legitimize Palestinian grievances. "After four days of heavy fighting," the Times dispatch goes on, "the Casbah, as the centuries-old warren of shops and homes at the center of [Nablus] is known, has been utterly destroyed."

How would we feel in analogous circumstances? What happened to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1864 at the hands of General Sherman was perceived through the lens of a great civil war, a surrender of the losing side, and the heart and mind of a magnanimous national leader who sought to heal the wounds of a nation torn asunder. Such elements aren't there in the Mideast. Sharon has wounded the State of Israel incalculably, causing ache and pain not only to Palestinians, but to his people, and to friends of Israel everywhere.

-- Universal Press Syndicate

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