Prometheus 6   

The last prejudice?

Philip Jenkins argues that anti-Catholic bigotry is on the rise-even among Catholics

By Christopher Shea, Globe Columnist, 7/27/2003

…Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State, pretty much saw this coming. Last fall, in a much-discussed cover story in The Atlantic Monthly titled ''The Next Christianity,'' Jenkins argued that the varieties of Christian faith thriving in the Third World were far more conservative than those in the United States. The next Christianity was on a collision course with the tolerant American creed, he wrote, and Catholic liberals in particular were demographically doomed.

''If we get an African pope, as we may before not too long, Americans may look back with nostalgia to the good old days of Pope John Paul II,'' Jenkins, reached at his office in State College, Pa., said recently. The Georgetown grads may have gotten a literal glimpse of the future: Cardinal Arinze has been named as a possible successor to the pontiff.

These days, Jenkins is promoting a book that will give Catholic liberals further fits. In ''The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice'' (Oxford), he argues that many leading Catholic critics of the church hierarchy-including the historian Garry Wills and the Globe columnist James Carroll-use such ferocious language that, in rhetoric if not in deed, they've become morally indistinguishable from Klansmen and 19th-century nativists.

''In modern American history,'' he writes, ''no mainstream denomination has ever been treated so consistently, so publicly, with such venom.'' Today, he argues, an unholy alliance of feminists, homosexual activists, and radical secularists-together with a fifth column of people who call themselves Catholics but who hate the church deeply-has seized upon the sex-abuse scandal in order to drive the church out of public life once and for all.