Take Back the Truth: Combating Papal Power and the Religious Right - Book Review

Humanist, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Edd Doerr

by Joanna Manning (New York, NY: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2002); 176 pp; $16.95 paper

On November 11, 2002, I had the pleasure of attending a book signing in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Catholics for a Free Choice. Author and activist Joanna Manning discussed her new book, Take Back the Truth: Combating Papal Power and the Religious Right. Manning is a devout Canadian Catholic who, though small in stature, is a powerful speaker and even more forceful writer.

In her speeches and her book Manning takes on what she calls the "dissident minority" in the Roman Catholic Church, by which she means Pope John Paul II and his myrmidons, the majority of cardinals and bishops who have turned their backs on the modest reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Manning accuses the church's power structure of authoritarianism, patriarchalism, and indifference toward the rights of women and children. She condemns the coverups of clerical sexual abuse of children in North America and Europe and of sexual abuse of nuns in the developing world. She charges that victims of abuse must all too often go outside the church to seek justice.

Manning is eloquent in describing the convergence of interests of the bishops in North America with those of the fundamentalist religious right. Their "family values" are not those of most Americans and most Catholics, featuring as they do opposition to women's rights and reproductive freedom on the one hand and, on the other, support for male dominance and exploitation of the environment and the world's poor.

The author challenges Opus Dei (Latin for "God's Work"), the semi-secret, ultraconservative Catholic organization whose founder, Spanish priest Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, was rushed to sainthood by his admirer, John Paul II, in October 2002. Manning refers to Opus Dei as "a Catholic version of [Jerry Falwell's] Moral Majority" and shows the ideological links between the bishops and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition.

Manning, a devout Catholic, makes clear something that I have been articulating for some time now, that it is a serious mistake to think of the U.S. population as divided into vertical denominational columns (Catholics, Methodists, Jews, Muslims, humanists and others) when reality dictates that the divisions or polarities should be viewed horizontally, with moderate to progressive Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and others facing forward and religious right Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and others pointing backward.

Manning's observations and conclusions merit the widest possible attention. She speaks for millions who communicate by their silence, their absence in Sunday worship, and their closed checkbooks.

Edd Doerr is the immediate past president of the American Humanist Association and president of Americans for Religious Liberty.