Dear Daniel,
Daniel, you wrote "you do defend
the Church … and go off on tangents, such as the relationship of the Church
with Nazism, which have little to do with the direct personal experiences your
memoir describes."
Not true. And, alas, you missed a big
chunk of why the book exists.
I'll summarize God through Binoculars. I was a poor, dyslexic, cleaning lady.
I did something such folk rarely do: went to a prestigious grad school and got
a PhD and applied for tenure-track jobs.
At every turn, as a grad student and as
a job-seeker, powerful people communicated to me that I am unwanted in the
Ivory Tower exactly because I am Polish-American, I am poor and white, and I am
Catholic. Finally, as a job-seeker, it was communicated to me that being
Catholic and all those other nasty identities pretty much doomed my job search,
along with a job market flooded with PhDs who couldn't find tenure-track jobs.
I've seen statistics that show that
Christians and "political conservatives," sometimes a code word for
Christians, are underrepresented both among students on elite college campuses
and among faculty. I have read accounts of professors who were all but hired
and then axed when it was discovered that they were devout Christians. I have
witnessed this kind of anti-Christian bigotry first hand from college
professors toward Christian adjunct faculty and towards students.
I couldn't get a job. I was extremely
poor, living on nothing, unable to go to a doctor. I contemplated suicide. I
made a retreat to a monastery to pray for guidance. And that is the plot of God through Binoculars.
Anti-Catholicism has a vigorous and
deadly history in the US and in its mother country, the UK. The
anti-Catholicism I encounter in the Ivory Tower is the anti-Catholicism of
right-thinking liberals like yourself, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. The
folks who want to liberate humanity in the Enlightenment sense of strangling
the last king with the entrails of the last priest.
Strangulation may not be on your
"To Do List" but you do advance the worldview that makes it difficult
for folks like me to get jobs. See your last two missives. We Catholics are
stupid liars who commit atrocities. When I was diagnosed with cancer and my
adjunct position provided no health insurance and hospitals turned me away,
strangulation would have been redundant. The cancer came close enough to
finishing me off.
How this all relates to Nazism. My
dissertation, and now prize-winning book, Bieganski, talks about how right-thinking
liberals use shopworn, bigoted views – like those you expressed in your last
two letters – of people of faith in general, Catholics in particular, and
Polish Catholic peasants, specifically, to distort Holocaust history.
This affected me directly, as I describe
in God through Binoculars. For example, Fordham University Press,
a prestigious publisher, was considering publishing my book. That would have
been a boost to my career. The editor said to me, "We need a Jew to
endorse the book."
"A Jewish scholar does endorse the
book. Antony Polonsky." Polonsky is one of the most important scholars in
the world in this field.
"He's no good. His last name sounds
Polish. We need a more overtly, visibly Jewish scholar."
On another occasion, I encountered a
big-name scholar in a public forum. He had previously never heard of me. I
tried to give him a brief intro. After I said a few words, he swiftly denounced
me as a typical right-wing, obscurantist, pre-Vatican II Catholic chauvinist.
I'm a feminist, I've published gay-ally material, I think women should be
allowed to be priests, I think abortion should be legal; I am in no sense any
thing that this man accused me of being. But he knew he could defame me because
of one word: "Catholic."
The myth that the Catholic Church was
Nazi, or that Nazism was Catholic, is used to defame any and all Catholics. If
we introduce facts into the conversation, we are reduced to non-person status.
So, yeah, you missed a lot if you missed
the centrality of Catholic identity re: Nazism to the plot of "God through
Binoculars."
Daniel, you say that child sex abuse in corporate
bodies other than the Catholic Church is "irrelevant to our
discussion."
I'm currently watching a superb,
four-part, HBO documentary series entitled "Allen v Farrow." It's
about Woody Allen and his twelve-year professional and personal relationship
with Mia Farrow. Their relationship ended in 1992 after Farrow discovered that Allen
was f---ing her teenage daughter, Soon Yi Previn. Later that year, seven-year-old
Dylan Farrow, Woody and Mia's daughter, alleged that her father sexually
assaulted her. She is now thirty-five and her accusation stands.
Team Woody is insisting, as they have
been doing for the past twenty-nine years, that Woody Allen is an artistic
genius who makes brilliant films that are a gift to humanity and that Mia
Farrow and her daughter Dylan are nutty and slutty and have accomplished
nothing of note.
Diane Keaton leads that DARVO parade. "Deny
Attack Reverse Victim Offender."
I watched Keaton's 2014 speech at the Golden Globes where Allen won
the Cecil B. DeMille award. It's clear in her speech that Keaton's goal is to
call Dylan Farrow a liar. Watching Keaton's speech, I feel intense rage. Rage
at her callous indifference to an abused little girl. Rage that a soulless
careerist like Keaton is canonized as something like America's sweetheart while
Dylan Farrow is dragged through the mud.
Others say that the documentary should
never have been made because the topic of father-daughter incest is
"unseemly" and "tawdry" and "too intimate" and
"unfit." Sweep child abuse and incest and the sexual exploitation of
a minor under the rug. Move along, people. Nothing to see here.
Other than in Twitter responses to Dylan
Farrow's heartfelt tweet about her decision to make public the
video of her telling her mother that her father touched her private parts, in
the avalanche of verbiage I've been obsessively poring over, every day, for
hours a day, ever since the first episode aired, I have seen no one, no one in
the New York Times or the Post or Vanity Fair or Slate or any other source,
focus on ABUSED CHILDREN. ABUSED GIRLS.
A girl sexually assaulted by her own
father, and her recovery and attempt to live a full life in spite of that: No
one is focused on that. No. We're focused on titillation, the question of
whether or not we should watch "Annie Hall," whether Allen's movies
have gone downhill in recent years.
People don't care about abused kids. That's
why abuse happens. Nobody cares.
I've known Polish-American poet, John
Guzlowski, through the internet, for decades. In his kind reviews of my work,
and in my reviews of his work, we've been allies in attempts to get the Polish
story in front of the eyes of American readers, and I valued our ally-ship
highly. The other day he unfriended me on Facebook. We'll probably never speak
again.
I had linked to a review of "The
Ratline," a new book about the Nazi Otto Wachter, who tried to escape
Europe through the ratlines, that is an informal network of escape routes. John
posted on my Facebook page that "The Vatican ran the ratlines because the
Catholic Church is anti-Semitic."
I said that the historical truth is more
complicated. An Austrian bishop, Alois Hudal, helped Nazis through the
ratlines. Other Catholics exposed and demoted Hudal. Historians are currently
attempting to discover how much the pope knew about the ratlines. See here for example.
Those who did help Nazis escape had
reasons other than anti-Semitism. The United States formally helped many Nazis
through a program called Operation Paperclip. The US used some of these Nazis in
its space program. Think about that the next time you get goose pimples by the
images and sounds coming from Mars. Others helped the Nazis because they
believed that Nazis could contribute to the Cold War against Communism.
John frequently mentioned the church sex
abuse crisis on his Facebook page. I understood his posts to be expressions of
anti-Catholicism, rather than concern for abused kids. John had known me since
the early 1990s. He knew I am a survivor of child sex abuse. He never said a
single compassionate thing to me about that abuse.
Daniel, you cordon off discussion of sex
abuse anywhere except in the Catholic Church. There is no logic behind such
cordoning. There is no Catholic teaching that children are fair game for
priests. Those priests who committed crimes violated Catholic teaching.
Catholics are more outraged about this abuse than you are and Catholics have
been working hard on this issue.
The work of Catholics to stop child
abuse is not mirrored by any other group. Atheists have certainly not done
comparable work to stop misogyny in their midst. A prominent Atheist accused of
rape currently holds a prestigious university position, where he works with
young people. Hollywood stars are eager to work with Woody Allen. And, again,
India, Thailand, and Cambodia welcome sex tourists, many of whom prey on
children, by the planeload and no one says anything.
What I hear from you is – and no, you
don't say this directly but this is what I hear – "I don't care about
sexually abused kids. I just want to exploit children's pain to bash an
institution I acknowledge hating."
I feel rage and disgust. I don't feel
you as an ally any more than, in the almost thirty years that we knew each
other, I felt John to be an ally when it comes to my own victimization. To you,
my pain is merely worthy of note insofar as it can advance an anti-Catholic
agenda. Rhetoric like yours and John's and many others doesn't make me feel
less attached to the Church. It makes me feel more attached to the Church. I
refuse to be your tool to be used in a campaign of hate directed not just at
the pope but at me, as well.
Please don't tell me that I require
Geoffrey Robertson or anybody else to lecture me as to what
"despicable" is when it comes to child abuse.
Daniel, you wrote "Christianity …
spent the better part of the last two millennia torturing, raping, and
murdering those who refused it."
This is insane, and typical
Christophobic propaganda.
Torture?
Have you ever met, in person, an Atheist
who was subjected to torture by Christians?
I have met a Catholic who was subjected
to torture by Atheists. Atheists all but destroyed this martyred Catholic
priest, body and mind. I met him behind the Iron Curtain.
You're confused about who is torturing
and mass murdering for beliefs. Atheists have left the biggest pile of corpses
in history. I went through the unpleasant prospect of being looked down on in
the Ivory Tower. At least I was not stood up against a wall and shot in Poland or
Germany or Russia or China or North Korea. At least I am not a Uighur in China.
Daniel, you wrote "The reason most
Christians reject the horrors contained in the Bible is because they get their
morality elsewhere- from secular, humanistic culture. They apply it to the
Bible and so accept the fluffy bits while ignoring the primitive bits."
You believe all the standard Atheist BS
about persons of faith. You have contempt for us, and nothing anyone says to
you will sway you. Enjoy! I have no interest in trying to change your mind, or
in engaging further with someone who has so much contempt for me.
You can read the entire exchange here
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