The Unhealed Wound

Bishop Thomas Curry has some good criticisms of Eugene Kennedy's mindless diatribe, The Unhealed Wound: The Church, the Priesthood, and the Question of Sexuality. Kennedy gave this as a talk at the University here in Santa Barbara to plug his book. Bishop Curry writes:

In his book, Eugene Kennedy writes of "a once totally passive Catholic community conditioned to receive and accept as God's will whatever the official Church bade its members do" (p. 101).

Nineteenth century anti-Catholics would have concurred with him. As Philip Hamburger documents so thoroughly in his recent "Separation of Church and State" (Harvard U.P, 2002), that was precisely the stereotype they used to advocate the exclusion of Catholics from the franchise and political life.The very people Kennedy so denigrates faced constant and malignant prejudice, and by their courage, faith and resistance, they contributed enormously to the transformation of America into a pluralistic, open and diverse nation. In the church that they built for themselves, they found a refuge from their sufferings, and they created one of the most vibrant expressions of Catholicism ever.

... The depth of his confusion and lack of understanding of contemporary Catholicism appears in his astonishing and unsupported statement: "Distracted from or forgetting it, the church misses entirely the meaning of its central teaching that God took on our flesh in Jesus, sparing Himself none of our experiences, save sin, in order to heal our wounds and make us whole" (10).

... his view of history and life is based on crass conspiracy theory and reductionism. The Catholic people are seen as mindless sheep, manipulated by conspiring "hierarchs," or just long-suffering martyrs to the same. He reduces the whole tradition of celibacy in Catholicism to the desire of the 11th century pope Gregory VII to protect church lands (IX).
...
Reality always comes off second best when measured against an idealized future. Like a modern-day Gatsby, Kennedy believes in the "orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us." However, in his determination to present such a skewed and partisan version of Catholicism, he joins himself to an old tradition of American anti-Catholicism and is himself "borne back ceaselessly into the past."