Final Review: Parish Priest

Well folks, my tenure with Pop and Politics has come to an end. Last May I was informed that my old boss would no longer be working with the website as its home base was moving from the University of San Francisco to the University of Southern California. While I was on my honeymoon I was contacted by the new editor who was willing to raise my rate of pay for each book review provided that I pitched each one to him and he pre-approved of it. This was a minor inconvienance as I usually picked my own books and the previous editor never had an issue with what I submitted. But I'm not a hard guy to get along with so I agreed to his terms.

The first review I submitted was for the new ECW book. When he posted it, I noticed that it had been considerably rewritten. However, since it was just a wrestling book and the basic tenor was consistent I didn't really care. When I submitted my second effort, "Parish Priest," by Douglas Brinkley and Julie M. Fenster, the issue of his over editing not only got worse, he completely changed the voice of the piece from fairly even handed, as most of my reviews are, to an editorial bashing the Catholic Church.

Not maybe I don't know a lot about the journalism world, as he seems to think, but I would think that an editors job is to correct grammar and such, make editorial suggestions, and essentially help you punch up your work, not completely rewrite it as his own editorial opinion piece. Again, I could be wrong but I doubt it.

So here's the entire exchange, including my review vs. the review he rewrote, use your own judgement as to whether I have a legitimate gripe or not. Either way, I will no longer be review books for Pop and Politics.com:

Dear [Editor]
As I'm sure you know, I have been reviewing books for your site for over a year now. I agreed to continue my tenure under the new editor, John Tomasic, with the caveat that he would choose the books I would review. I've since submitted two reviews and both were rewritten such to the point that the voice of the narration was no longer mine. The last one, Parish Priest, was not only renamed but so badly rewritten that it didn't even come close to what I submitted in the first place. More over, John rewrote the review with such a bias that it not only insulted my wife and I (we are Roman Catholic) I'm now afraid to send anymore lest he add unwanted editorial opinions to them.

You are obviously obliged to accept or reject at will any of my submissions but to rewrite something I've written, not send it back for my approval and then attach my name to it is unprofessional in the extreme. If you would like me to continue sending book reviews I would demand that from now on, editorial changes be limited to grammar, punctuation and removal of paragraphs as was the case under Jean Chen. If not then I cannot in good conscience allow my work to be changed and then falsely present views that are not in truth mine.

I have included below the original review I submitted. Please read it and compare my voice to the one posted under the title Peoples Priest. Lastly, please let me know if we should continue this working relationship that I believe has beneffitted both of us for a year and half.

Thank you for your time,

Mark Radulich, MSW

The new editor responded to this e-mail instead of the person whom I had intended the e-mail for:

Mark--

Thanks for voicing your concerns and thank you for your contributions over the past year to the website. I'm sorry you found the edits to your recent pieces objectionable. I did indeed retitle the piece and alter your voice and that was by intention. We
obviously hold different opinions, both as to what constitutes good editing as well as to what constitutes good writing. We also clearly have had different experience in publishing. I am happy to remove your name from the piece(s) if you desire.

Please also extend an apology to your wife.

Thanks again. I wish you the best in the future, one
Catholic to another.

Sincerely,

[Editor]

And now for my review:

Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism by Douglas Brinkley and Julie M. Fenster

Religion has always been regarded as a rather taboo subject. It is not something one should be talking about in polite company, so they say. In today’s multiculturalist water-cooler society, one man’s DaVinci Code or Gospel of Judas is another mans heresy. The topic of religion is by its nature divisive. The Muslims believe there’s is the one and only true god, as do the Jews, as do the many denominations of Christians, let alone the Hindu’s, Buddhists and other assorted spiritual societies. Many by the millions have murdered their brothers to underscore this fact. Needless to say, the subject of religion and what it means to people is not to be taken lightly.

Christianity, as it is practiced by Catholics world wide, has had more than an eventful existence. The Catholic Church has been both worshipped as the glue that has kept a society together when all else had fallen to pieces, and it has been vilified as a morally corrupt institution bent on imperialism, slavery and child abuse (depending on the era in question). Some, like comedian Bill Maher, have said Catholicism numbs the mind and makes sheep out of men, while other laud the Catholic church for giving them purpose and sense of belonging.

Ultimately, your view of the Catholic Church will be shaped by the people in your life that are catholic themselves. Obviously if you have angry or neglectful parents whom are also catholic or the local parish priest is any degree of unsavory, your view of the religion will be skewed negatively. By the same token, if you’ve had a supportive upbringing in the Catholic Church and those involved were positive influences than your opinion of said religion will usually follow suit. Like all human institutions, it is that people involved that make all of the difference.

Sometimes all it takes is one special person to make a difference. Douglas Brinkley, author of the Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry biography, “Tour of Duty,” with Julie M. Fenster, author of “Mavericks, Miracles, and Medicine,” has written a book that is one part biography of the life Father Michael McGivney and one part history of the Catholic church in America. “Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism,” is a wonderful and true story that encapsulate both the best parts of organized and the American dream. It is a story about how one truly blessed man lived the word of his god and set about helping an entire community and in doing so, changing the landscape of American society where Catholics were concerned.

McGivney was a tireless local, parish priest who worked out of New Haven, Connecticut in the late 1800’s. He’d been the son of Irish immigrants and had heard the call of his lord early on. He pursued the priesthood with tireless vigor in a landscape where there was much lingering resentment toward both the Irish as well as the wave of Catholics that were immigrating to America. When he finally came into his own and was assigned a parish, recognized immediately the power his religious institution had to help men mend their ways and leave the more guttural parts of society behind i.e. consuming alcohol to the exclusion of taking care of oneself and his family. One way in which he accomplished this was to direct and produce plays featuring members of his congregation so they would have a fun and enthralling distraction away from the local watering hole. This act made Father McGivney beloved among his parishioners.

His greatest achievement however came later on and it is due to this great deed that there is a movement to canonize the good father. In the 1800’s, a widely held belief and practice that came to America in the bosom of Adam Smith’s capitalism was a term widely referred to as “rugged individualism.” Rugged individualism is the belief that all individuals, or nearly all individuals, can succeed on their own and that government help for people should be minimal. The phrase is often associated these with policies of the Republican party as espoused by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, and was widely used by the Republican president Herbert Hoover in the 1900’s. However, well before the stock market crash, merchants and manufacturers in America used this belief in rugged individualism to frame their business in a laissez faire model that usually meant the workers would inevitably receive short shrift.

If a good man fell on hard times and couldn’t feed his family there was no social worker (in many cases) to come to the rescue. In the time of Michael McGivney there was no Social Security, no housing projects, no welfare, no WIC, and no child survivor benefits. If the man of house died, then either mom went out to work or the children would be placed in orphanages. Many Catholic families faced a torrent of diseases and unsafe working conditions on top of wars and discriminatory violence that perpetually threatened to rip catholic society a sunder. McGivney saw this and made the connection that the church did not exist to solely dispense spiritual comfort but also to help destitute families in need of concrete services.

Father Michael McGivney’s legacy lies in his creation of an organization you may be aware of but more than likely your grandfather, as did mine, was intimately aware of. That organization is called the Knights of Columbus. More than just a lodge or a place where old men go to get the heck away from their nagging wives, it was an institution designed to help those bothers and sisters whom had fallen on hard times and were in need of help. The Knights used insurance to keep a steady stream of cash flowing into the hands of catholic families that were either stricken by tragedy or unemployment. McGivney’s Knights would come to redefine what it meant to be a Catholic in America by indelibly tying the fabrics of helping ones neighbor through hard times with the practice of ones spiritual life. In other words, just going to church services didn’t make you a good catholic, helping sister Mary down the block with her 6 children after her husband Sal died of typhoid did.

With all of the cynicism and outright animosity directed at the Catholic Church from snarky comedians to elitist secular liberals to truly betrayed parishioners, this book comes at a most crucial time. It is a stark reminder that organized religion; especially the Catholic Church is not all bad, not by long stretch. When there’s nobody else who will help you, in most cases there will always be the church that will ask no more of you than mutual respect and faith. This is the lesson Brinkley and Fenster teaches us in their new book about the life of Father Michael McGivney, “Parish Priest.”

And finally, his rewrite of my review:

People's Priest

Catholicism seems to feed off its bad reputation. Proven time and again to be a less-than-perfect institution, the church has been rightly vilified as morally corrupt and worldly. It has suffered legitimate charges of imperialism, hypocrisy, avarice, madness, child abuse, torture, of aiding and abetting in the vastly exploitative triangle trade in African slaves and in the near-genocide of the Jews. As if that's not bad enough, politically incorrect Bill Maher in a rare moment of political correctness recently told television audiences that catholicism numbs the mind and makes sheep of men!
And yet the Church goes on, the mother of all Christianity and the foundation of most western thought, one way or another, either by direct lineage or by way of protest. Critics say that the fact that the Church has survived so long is testament to its failure-- that it could never have survived in such Roman splendor without rejecting the gospels and embracing the devil. Defenders say the fact that the Church has survived the horror of human administration is evidence of divine favor.

Douglas Brinkley and Julie Fenster seem to believe that views of the Church are mostly shaped by the actions of catholic people. Their book, Parish Priest, is part biography of Father Michael McGivney and part history of catholicism in America, a narrative of how the teachings of the Church have mixed with the culture of the United States.

McGivney was priest in New Haven, Connecticut, in the late-1800s. The son of Irish immigrants, he pursued the priesthood against a backdrop of resentment toward the era's massive numbers of catholic immigrants to the US, which until then was a nation of protestant leaders, African slaves and disappearing native Americans. When he was eventually named pastor of his own parish, he focused his energies on supporting families, cajoling husbands and fathers to play a larger roll at home, producing and directing plays featuring members of the congregation to move local entertainment away from the pubs. But supporting families was only a first step in extending his faith into the world.

McGivney flew in the face of ascendant nineteenth-century social philosophy, which was based on the idea of rugged individualism or the belief that people must succeed or fail on their own, that government should play a minimal role. The idea of course remains powerful today and forms the heart of the approach to policymaking espoused by popular rightists such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilley. President Hoover stood by the idea even after the dawn of the Great Depression and American merchants and manufacturers for the first hundred years or so of the industrial age based their businesses on the idea, maintaining that their only real responsibility toward employees was to provide work and wages, and as much of the former and as little of the latter as possible.

There was no worker compensation, no benefits, no social workers even. There was no Social Security, no housing projects, no welfare, no child survivor benefits. When fathers died, mothers went to work and the children often went to orphanages. It was catholics by in large who formed the industrial workforce of the time. They didn't come t the US to be farmers. They lived packed together in the underbuilt cities of the Dickens era. In addition to disease and unsafe working conditions, they faced discriminatory violence and turned in large numbers to substance abuse. McGivney, like the "neo-catholics" working in France's urban centers at the time and the worker priests of the post-WWII era, saw society as a large family and came to believe the clergy couldn't stop at providing spiritual comfort.

McGivney’s legacy lies in his creation of the Knights of Columbus. A mystery mostly to people under sixty today, the organization set up insurance accounts to pay medical expenses and carry people through stretches of unemployment. Looked down upon by business leaders as a rival source of influence, labeled "socialist" and ridiculed as a foreign organization with sinister ties to the Pope, McGivney’s Knights redefined what it meant to be catholic in America by tying notions of social justice to spiritual faith. Suddenly, just going to church didn’t make you a good catholic; you were compelled also to help where you could-- to look after the widow McGuiness and her six children after her husband Sal died of typhoid fever, to put your drinking money into the neighborhood insurance fund and, ultimately, to demand more of your employer and your country.

This book comes as part of a wave of recent titles that, in the face of deeply wounded parishioners and crumbling catholic social networks, seek to remind readers of the profound positive influence the Church has played in our lives, whether we're believers or not.