The cardinal had good reason for his pique. The New York Times, the New York Post and Newsday had all blamed the city’s Irish - and, implicitly, the cardinal himself - for bigotry toward a group of lesbians and gays who insisted on marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Especially hateful were columns by Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, both nominal Irish Catholics, who reviled the paraders as “puking suburban yahoos” (Hamill) and “common drunks, choking with anger” (Breslin) at the homosexuals in their midst.
How much of this was old-fashioned anti-Catholicism, how much a bashing of the cardinal himself, was hard to tell. “Anti-Catholicism is historic and endemic in the United States,” says Newsday columnist Murray Kempton, a Pulitzer Prize winner. “But there is also the anti-Catholicism of a good many liberal Catholics who enjoy disliking the cardinal.”
O’Connor singled out the press for deriding Catholics, like himself, “who dare to publicly uphold their faith.” His contentions are supported by a major new study, “Media Coverage of the Catholic Church,” to be released this week by The Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C. Based on an analysis of The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS Evening News and Time magazine over the last 30 years, the study finds that the church has been portrayed as “oppressive and anachronistic” and that media coverage has favored church critics over defenders.
The study itself will be controversial, especially for the way it confuses criticism of the hierarchy with anti-Catholic bias. But there can be little doubt that in liberal New York, the outspoken O’Connor has become a lightning rod. Even before he arrived in town, the Times served editorial notice that O’Connor’s anti-abortion views were unwelcome. “Most newspaper men and women are pro-choice,” says Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, a self-described Jewish atheist who has written an admiring biography of the cardinal. “They think that only kooks are pro-life, so they make O’Connor out to be the Genghis Khan of the church.”
To a large extent, O’Connor has himself to blame. He courts New York’s tabloid press and often speaks out before taking thought. He has refused interviews to knowledgeable journalists while naively sitting last summer for what turned out to be a harsh and skewered profile in Vanity Fair, which even the author’s liberal Catholic sources found erroneous and offensive.
But Cardinal O’Connor is not the Catholic Church. And if that church, in New York or elsewhere, suffers a bad press, the underlying reason appears to be ignorance more than malice. “Media people,” says Catholic journalist Garry Wills, “are ignorant of religion, afraid of it and try to stay away from it.” For O’Connor, however, being ignored appears to be the cardinal sin.
