Imagine Catholics were walking into pop concerts and blowing up children. Picture the scene as extremists drive vans into a crowd of people or self-detonate on an underground train while citing the catechism. Play that vision in your mind for a moment: young men shouting the name of the Trinity as they shoot people at random in a shopping mall.
Now imagine an intellectual class rushing to the airwaves to insist that motives remained unclear. Meanwhile, a gigantic voluntary PR machine of global reach kicks into motion on behalf of the clergy, who remain mysteriously quiet about the whole thing. While all this is going on, ordinary Catholics go about their business and the rest of us are encouraged to worry on their behalf about a possible backlash.
If any of this is hard to imagine, it’s because our expectations would run in the other direction entirely. So much so that few in the Church would dare respond in any way other than perpetual contrition – the media and intellectual class nagging them into near madness, implicating them in the terrible actions they neither committed nor condoned.
We would hear other Catholics condemning the fanatics in their midst morning, noon and night. The public disavowal from Catholic priests, politicians, and celebrities would be deafening and unanimous. Every parish newsletter in the country would become a counter-terrorism pamphlet. The Pope would barely get through breakfast before issuing another statement. Nobody would need to ask where the moderate Catholics were, because we would be unable to hear ourselves think over the sound of them. We’d be bored with it, frankly. Here they go again, we’d say. Yes, we get the message: you don’t want any association with it, you condemn it utterly. Duh.
Would anyone say it was bigotry to ask why men invoking Catholic doctrine kept murdering children? Would people on discussion panels and newspaper op-eds insist that the real problem was “Catholicophobia”, a word so obviously absurd you’d have to be drunk on communion wine to say it with a straight face?
Do you really doubt any of this? Westerners are pretty good at apologising and worrying out loud for the sins of the past, after all. We’ve heard practically nothing else for decades. Why would this be any different? And what if we swapped out Catholic for Protestant or Quaker? Nothing changes.
How about Muslims?
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