The energetic renascence of anti-Catholicism in Western precincts has been making itself felt for a while now, with some instances more visible than others. There was the low-water mark of 2004, for example, when the Italian intellectual Rocco Buttiglione was nominated as a justice minister of the European Commission— only to be forced to withdraw on grounds that, as an orthodox Catholic, he could not be trusted to uphold ever-changing secular imperatives concerning sex. There are the more farcical reverberations in our own time and place—like Senator Dianne Feinstein’s recent declaration to an impeccably qualified Catholic candidate for judicial appointment that “the dogma lives loudly within you.” And then there’s what might be called the hidden hand of this hardy prejudice, the kind that shapes outcomes without showing its face.
The majority of prestigious magazines and journals, for example, will only rarely review books by writers outed as unapologetic Catholics, and almost wholly ignore volumes published by religious presses (unless to mock them). Omertà regarding Catholic thinkers also seems the watchword for gatekeepers of top-flight secular literary prizes and related awards. Reflecting all of the above, the bias of the times is also manifest in the fact that George Weigel is not the household name he would have been, had he been living in an age more elevated in mien and less determinedly ignorant of all things Church.
The bias of the times is manifest in the fact that George Weigel is not a household name.
