By Roy Peter Clark
The motto of this culture is simple: If you are lucky enough to be Irish, you're lucky enough. Such self-congratulation is tolerable in a pub on St. Patrick's Day, even to the non-Irish. And who could not be proud of a culture that, according to historian Thomas Cahill, saved Western civilization from the forces of darkness? The light of Irish culture gave us poets and scholars, playwrights and musicians, church men and women of astonishing accomplishment, and some of the world's greatest journalists and political figures. But it took St. Patrick, an outsider, to drive the snakes out of Ireland, and he didn't get them all, not by a long shot. For all the charm, lyricism and camaraderie of Irish culture, the serpents survived in the form of clannish intolerance, political corruption, sexual repression and, most famously, the demon rum. When my mother, the daughter of Italian and Jewish immigrants, hears me attach myself to Irish Catholicism, I'm sure it hurts her feelings. While Irish immigrants of the 19th century suffered terrible forms of discrimination in America -- our crude imitation of the British crimes against the Irish -- there came a time when the Irish themselves became the oppressors. Long after the "paddy wagon" became a relic, it was the Irish in cities like New York and Boston who turned political patronage into an art form and filled the police and fire departments with names like O'Sullivan, O'Reilly, O'Malley and Quinn. In such an environment, the new Americans from Italy and Eastern Europe came to see the Irish as petty tyrants. Irish schoolmarms would shave their heads looking for lice, and the Irish police would crack their skulls. Such corruption would lead to the election of reformers like Fiorello LaGuardia as the mayor of New York City. But the once oppressed could never fully abandon their grudges. Years after my brother Ted married a lovely Irish girl from Notre Dame, my Italian relatives would still make fun of the Irish on St. Paddy's Day: "Let's all go up to City Hall," my mother still says in a mock Irish dialect, "and get our asses painted green." And yet my teachers were Irish, my next door neighbors were both Irish cops, my girlfriends were Irish, many of my closest friends and teammates were Irish. In later years, I would meet Irish-American journalists -- Francis X. Clines, Anna Quindlen, Jim Dwyer, and Dan Barry, just to mention veterans from The New York Times -- and recognize in their eyes many of the same cultural influences that had shaped me. I was born in 1948, two years before Tim Russert. I've learned from the hagiography that has grown since his passing that Father Tim also attended Catholic schools for 16 years. After law school, he joined the staff of New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, arguably the most brilliant Irish-American politician of his generation. In his days at NBC, Russert's pals included the likes of Chris Matthews, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Mike Barnicle and Maria Shriver, prominent Irish-Americans whose careers, like Russert's, bridged the worlds of journalism and politics. To feel the influence of various expressions of Irish Catholicism on journalism, I only need turn to my friends and colleagues at The Poynter Institute. Jim Naughton, who once covered the White House for The New York Times, served as Poynter's president. Bill Mitchell, once a veteran editor with Knight Ridder newspapers, created Poynter Online. Butch Ward came to teach leadership at Poynter after serving as managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Naughton, Mitchell, and Ward are all devout Irish Catholics from the Russert generation. All root for the Fighting Irish of their alma mater, Notre Dame. The late James Carey, perhaps journalism's most famous scholar, served for years on Poynter's national advisory board and greatly influenced Poynter's attitudes toward journalism, community and democracy. Carey was so sickly as a child that his Irish Catholic parents didn't bother to send him to school. For the rest of his life, he would attribute much of his success to the Catholic priests who took him to Red Sox games and enlightened his conversation and view of the world. Kelly McBride, who teaches ethics at Poynter, wears the map of Ireland on her face. Raised in Toledo, Ohio, she, too, is the product of parochial education with a graduate degree from Gonzaga, a Jesuit school in Washington State. She became one of the nation's most able reporters on issues of religion and ethics. Chip Scanlan attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through college. Now a steadfastly secular Irish-American, Scanlan was raised by a mother who remains a devout Catholic in a house with an alcoholic father who died at the age of 46, a burden that has shaped his life and writing. That last pattern is of particular significance because it echoes the classic Irish narrative of the saintly mother and the drunken father, a pattern described in the best-selling book "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt and experienced by generations of Irish American families. Tim Russert's canonization of his father in "Big Russ and Me" and his conspicuous modeling of fatherhood with his own son and younger employees can be seen, among many other things, as an effort to redeem the brutal and beer-soaked reputation of Irish fatherhood. I could make the case that Russert's enormous influence and popularity derived, at least in part, from a special ability to elevate personal responsibility without dousing the flames of the more jovial and creative aspects of Irish culture. Father Tim expressed endless admiration for the beer-and-a-shot blue collar workers of his native Buffalo, New York. Time and again, he praised their work ethic, patriotism, and discipline, values and virtues that Russert himself came to embody. You'd see him at ballparks and football stadiums, or at bars or restaurants, always joking, his big Irish hand clapped on someone's shoulder, his big head smiling like a Jack O'Lantern. I've never heard it said that his excesses included alcohol, but he often seemed to me inebriated by the stress, influence, celebrity and importance of his work, an ethic and lifestyle that could only have contributed to his untimely death. The Irish are fabulously sentimental, with a remarkable ability to romanticize even the worst kinds of personal experiences, so it did not surprise me when Russert bragged to Bill O'Reilly about the high school priest who grabbed him by the collar and slammed him up against a locker for some act of disobedience. There is not a hint in his recollection that maybe priests shouldn't be throwing students against lockers, only a gleam in his Irish eyes that accountability counts. Accountability. There is a Calvinist streak in some forms of European Catholicism that was transplanted to America from places like France and Ireland. That streak is sometimes called "Jansenism," named after the churchman most associated with the heresy, and was the hallmark of the Irish Catholic education that I received in the 1950s. At St. Aidan School, a cruel nun -- I'm tempted to name her -- made the girls in her class write letters to orphanages asking to be taken in because their misbehavior proved they were unworthy of their parents' love. My brother Vincent witnessed this. Much of that emotional abuse has been transformed to humor, hence all the blarney about masturbation, blindness and girls who wear patent leather shoes. But such attempts to neutralize the poison of sexual repression, confusion, and alienation could never heal the agony of the kind of sexual abuse by the clergy, enabled by the likes of Cardinal Law, in places like Boston. Sadly, the reputation of American Catholicism is more likely to derive from a Jansenistic focus on sexual sin than on the ministry of nuns such as my friend Sister Mary Jane Herlik, who cares for women with AIDS. It strikes me that Father Tim's best trick was to hold the powerful accountable for their words and actions. In essence, he pressed politicians up against their lockers and interrogated them in search of hypocrisy and inconsistency. His training in the law became a perfect companion to his postlapsarian vision of a flawed human nature. To listen to his Sunday morning cross-examinations week after week was to assume that he himself never spun a message when he worked for New York pols, or that contradicting a statement you made a year ago was a mortal sin. Against this ethic of discipline and accountability is the more generous expression of Irish Catholicity, embodied most powerfully by a woman named Dorothy Day, a co-founder of something called The Catholic Worker movement, and a hero of Poynter's McBride. Influential throughout most of the last century, Day created an international corps of Catholics devoted to the social gospel. Service to the poor and needy was at the heart of their ministry, efforts which at times put them at odds with the institutional church. Such a movement, no doubt, inspired the fierce work ethic and sense of social justice that may have burned out Russert's body, even as it inflamed his spirit. The Catholic Workers movement influenced peace activists like the Berrigan brothers and publications such as the National Catholic Reporter. But for every Russert or Jimmy Breslin or Pete Hamill playing for the Irish team, there is a counterpart on the right, a Pat Buchanan, a Peggy Noonan, a Bill O'Reilly, a Sean Hannity or that cranky blob of Irish Catholic paranoia, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League. Whatever their political preferences, the Irish American journalists I know seem to share a love for language, an abiding sense of family, a deep disdain for injustice, a fervent embrace of the social gospel, a theological affinity to good works as a means to salvation, an attachment to ritual and an openness to the mysteries of the universe. On some days they see themselves as saints and sinners, or others as sinners and saints. |
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