Book Review: "The Church That Christ Forgot" by Jimmy Breslin

Breslin's Church, Too, Couldn't Shoot Straight

NEW YORK
The New York Times

By R. SCOTT APPLEBY

Published: August 4, 2004

'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.

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