What Catholics Are (Ideally, And Sometimes Really) About
by tristero
[UPDATE: As they say, good deeds do not long remain unpunished. You try to say something nice and conciliatory and you end up with egg on your face.
I was led astray. My original source misidentified Reverend Louis Braxton as Catholic and I had no reason to disbelieve him. But Braxton is Episcopalian. Rather than try to come up with something to salvage my main point here, which would rightly be seen as stupid and dishonest, I’ll just say I made a mistake; I should have used a different example to illustrate my respect for Catholics (which continues despite Donohue’s concerted effort to besmirch them).
In any event, Reverend Braxton’s behavior is exemplary and laudatory in the ways I describe below. About that I am not mistaken.
David Ehrenstein and others in comments may be right, that religion has nothing to do with Braxton’s fine character. Fair enough, you don’t have to believe in God to behave decently. Nor, of course, does being religious mean you will behave like William Donohue.
Apologies to all readers for the mistake.]
Via pastordan, comes this moving story of Catholic behavior at its best. Here’s a link to the original article. Some excerpts:
Four punks spewing hateful language at a transgender woman outside a shelter for gay and transgender young people in Queens beat up a priest who attempted to thwart their tirade, police said…
..the boys came back armed with metal poles, empty paint cans, belts and a miter saw. “Father was trying to make peace with them, but then one of them hit him in the back of the head with a paint can,” Carver said. “He fell to the ground, and they kept hitting him.”
The other residents fended off the attackers, and when the teens finally fled, they ran past Metropolitan Transportation Authority police officers, who nabbed them and charged all four with assault as a hate crime, gang assault, weapon possession and harassment…
[Reverend Louis Braxton, the beaten priest], who shrugged off the attack after being treated for cuts and bruises at Mount Sinai Hospital of Queens, said men are often threatened by transgender women. “I think that young men see these striking girls, and they’re attracted,” he said. “And when they find out they are male, they don’t know how to handle it and act out in rage.”
Transgendered men and women are among the most despised groups out there. Even among gays and lesbians, with whom transgender activists often politically align, they inspire as much unease as they do tolerance. Father Braxton’s defense was heroic in and of itself. His comments are, in a sense, equally heroic, and deeply moving.
He refused to make himself the center of the story. Just as important, he refused to turn this story into a cynical “teaching moment” on the abject state of young transwomen. Instead, he focused on the kids who attacked the woman and him. Astonishingly, he reacted not with anger, but with empathy and compassion, trying to make sense of their rage and hatred.
You don’t have to be a serious Catholic, of course, to react this way. But this kind of response – constructive empathy towards those who hate and unreasoningly attack – seems deeply characteristic of the finest of Catholicism’s ethical stances. Father Braxton’s behavior reminds me, in a small way, of the time Pope John Paul met with his thwarted assassin, who broke down and wept as they prayed together, an extraordinarily beautiful story.
As I was finishing this post, I noticed something else about Father Braxton’s statement. He said, “I think that young men see these striking girls, and they’re attracted” before focusing on the confusion and anger the attackers felt. Literally as an aside, he pays the young victim of the attack, Alessandra-Michelle Carver, a charming compliment: she’s no helpless victim but a strikingly attractive girl. And he pays this compliment without shortchanging her reality: he goes on to acknowledge the complexity of Alessandra-Michelle’s gender identity – the beautiful girl is “male” – rather than finesse or hide it.
When I think of what I admire about the Catholic ethos, this is what I have in mind. This deeply-felt loving care for others, demonstrated both in attitudes and deeds, may not be unique to Catholics, but it is a striking feature of so much Catholic charity. Sure, anyone can think of numerous counter-examples of clergy and laity behaving very badly – their attitude towards reproductive rights and women as clergy, the dreadful scandals – but along with those, it is only right to bring up the image of a priest who’s been hit over the head with a paint can, beaten up, gone to the hospital for treatment, and who still has the strength of character to show his attackers compassion, and comfort and compliment a frightened young woman.