BOOKS OF THE TIMES  August 4, 2004

by Jimmy Breslin, 239 pages, The Free Press, $26

'Do I keep on in a church that I mistrust or remain outside and follow a religion I love?" This piercing refrain haunts Jimmy Breslin's angry meditation on the scandal of priestly sexual abuse of children and teenagers that has shaken the foundations of Roman Catholicism in the United States (and elsewhere). Echoing the anguished cry of countless bred-in-the-bone American Catholics, "The Church That Forgot Christ" devotes four pages to excoriating "the church that I mistrust" for every one that celebrates "the religion I love." The formula produces mixed results.

On the upside Mr. Breslin brings a distinguished history of giving voice to the voiceless. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who made his reputation as New York City's relentless exposer of municipal corruption, organized crime, and government policies and actions that discriminate against the poor and racial minorities, he speaks with the authority of a bracingly honest, time-tested public servant.

Mr. Breslin champions the regular guy struggling at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy: the single mother working two minimum-wage jobs to put her kids through school; the Mexican immigrant denied legal status, health care and a living wage for his back-breaking construction work; the underpaid, overtasked Catholic-school teacher who, from dedication to her indigent students, cheerfully accepts a life of virtual poverty.

In focusing his social crusader's eye on the Catholic scandal, Mr. Breslin reports little of substance that is new. Now well known are the patterns of abuse perpetrated by predator priests, and the stunning complicity of some bishops who covered up these serial crimes and reassigned the priests to parishes filled with unsuspecting children. But few critics have provided such a clear-eyed, unsentimental and unflinching depiction of how lives already made difficult were crushed irreparably by an institution that had seduced them into believing it could do no wrong.

Among the tortured souls on display is the author's. An Irish Catholic, Mr. Breslin cannot escape the cruel paradox that the very institution he now detests - "this club of old men, this Catholic church that refuses to open its arms for so much good, makes it preposterous, and in my book pure evil" - helped form in him a love for the poor and a passion for social justice. "And it is here, today, in the church and school of my origins, where the lives of nuns in the convent are now dedicated to getting women out of prison and helping them afterwards, here suddenly on this empty sidewalk I was never prouder of anything in my life," he confesses. "This is where I come from."

In such passages Mr. Breslin's fidgety, staccato mode of expression, a street-colloquial style that conveys equal parts disgust and world-weariness, gives way to the eloquent pathos of the betrayed believer forced to preside at the funeral of "the deep habits and beliefs of a lifetime."

Elsewhere the unfocused rage and reckless hyperbole of the muckraker weakens the indictment. Appropriately Mr. Breslin reserves his compassion for the victims and their families, showing no mercy to the perpetrators or their accomplices. But the priesthood itself, including thousands of trustworthy priests, is tarred with the same brush. How can a Catholic go to confession now, he asks, "with everybody on the other side of the screen a suspected sex molester?" "Look at almost any Irish bishop or cardinal," he comments, in a typical rant, "and you have most offensive behavior."

Taking issue with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' finding that over 4,000 priests had been accused of molesting 10,000 youths from 1950 until 2002, Mr. Breslin provides his "considered estimate" - concocted, presumably, on the basis of extrapolations from his own limited investigations - of 25,000 priests (nearly half of the priests active in the middle years of this period) and 100,000 victims. Would Mr. Breslin himself, one wonders, wish casually to be lumped with the dregs of his own profession?

As he widens the target of his critique from Cardinal Edward M. Egan to Mother Teresa, from pedophile priests to Pope John Paul II, from tyrannical Irish bishops to the "anti-Jew, anti-black" Irish people, who, in their subservience to authority, "gave us total religious insanity," it becomes clear that the true subject of "The Church That Forgot Christ" is not the sexual abuse scandal per se but the window it provides upon what Mr. Breslin calls the systemic corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.

Thus the bishops' vehement and consistent opposition to abortion is not a principled position but a red herring, designed to cast attention away from priestly misconduct. Thus "Mansion Murphy," as Mr. Breslin memorably labeled the bishop of Rockville Centre, on Long Island, represents all Catholic officials, who live in extravagant quarters and wallow in the arrogance of power. Thus "a church that is supposed to teach you to worry about the poor sets the standard for having, for owning, for rejoicing in great big things."

Martin Luther has nothing on Jimmy Breslin: "A gold ring on a bishop's finger," the present-day reformer intones, "is the commercial of a pimp." Like Luther, Mr. Breslin feels it necessary, he says half-seriously, to establish his own church. In doing so, however, his challenge will be to attract and retain the kind of people of courage, faith and compassion that somehow, for a time, found a nurturing spiritual home within the walls of what Luther called "the whore of Babylon" and what traditionalist Catholics still call "the one true church." People, that is, like Mr. Breslin himself.

By R. Scott Appleby, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame