c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) God has been good to Jimmy Breslin.

After a legendary tenure in journalism, this Pulitzer Prize-winning scribe was facing the latter stages of his career with hardly a target worthy of his inimitable ire. Sure, as Newsday’s longtime columnist he could count on any number of New York pols to shoot themselves in the foot on any given day. Presto, an opinion is born. And there was always the president _ doesn’t matter which one _ to provide a steady stream of material for Breslin’s tabloid tempests.

But having taken down politicos _ as well as CEOs and other assorted rogues _ for more than four decades, you had to start asking: What was left?

The answer, as we all know by now, was the Catholic Church. Or, more precisely, its feckless leadership.

The eruption of the clergy sexual abuse scandal was a gift from on high for the likes of Breslin. Apart from the awful crimes that molesting priests inflicted on thousands of children over the past 50 years, the actions of far too many bishops in ignoring or even facilitating the abuse was the kind of cover-up that rightfully enrages Americans. It also demands the skills of a seasoned journalist to articulate that anger and set things aright. This was a story made for Jimmy Breslin.

Unfortunately, in his new book, “The Church That Forgot Christ” (Free Press), Breslin is more predictable in his judgments than perceptive, and he settles for rehashing resentments and covering well-trod ground rather than moving the story ahead. He largely neglects the shoe-leather skills and storytelling talents that made him such a great journalist, and instead relies on devices such as imaginary conversations with the pope and stray reminiscences to prop up a book-length harangue.

Not that a harangue is such a bad thing, especially given the nature of the scandal. But “high dudgeon” is Breslin’s default setting, and that means he quickly risks becoming a stuck car alarm _ you either tune it out or you start praying that someone really steals the darn thing just to shut it up. Either way, it’s all about the alarm, not the car.

Breslin starts out humbly enough, imagining himself as a bishop _ which some would say is a come-down _ in a church that he would run. His retelling of the stories of sexual abuse victims can be powerful, especially when Breslin views them through his favorite lens _ that of working-class types getting shafted by the power elites. These vignettes are necessary reminders not only of what the victims suffered, but of how the church’s leadership betrayed its essential mission to champion, not exploit, the powerless and marginalized.

But all these episodes seem sadly stranded. They do not go anywhere, and they do not hang together in any kind of coherent whole. Rather, they have the feel of columns repackaged into a book.

In fact, the principle narrative thread _ and the most articulated drama of Breslin’s tale _ is not the abuse crisis but his own wrestling match with a Catholic religion that retains a hold on his imagination, if not his faith. Until he began writing the book, Breslin was a weekly Mass-goer and he remains fiercely Catholic, although in a way he is still apparently working out, not unlike millions of other disillusioned Catholics.

This agonizing provides several potent moments. In particular, his accounts of his first wife’s death and his daughter’s ongoing illness are moving set-pieces that have the potential to explore all manner of spiritual and religious themes, such as when Breslin stands on a Manhattan street corner and struggles over whether to enter a church after visiting his daughter at the hospital:

“I cross to the church,” he writes. “Inside the church, there was silence and dimness and low candlelight, all familiar, all comforting to my private prayer. Simultaneously, the scandals I have been writing of so much seemed to cover the floor and leave the church as dead as the statues. I was in need of my spirit being stirred and I got nothing. Of course I prayed. For a daughter. And I tried losing myself in a too-short prayer of love. Oh, Lord, give us your jobless, your homeless, your sick and imprisoned. But the words in church are uttered into a confused air. Do I keep on in a church that I mistrust or remain outside and follow a religion I love?”

It is a good question, of pressing importance for Catholics, and for any adherent of a traditional faith these days. Yet Breslin offers no comprehensible answer, and in the end you wonder what _ or even who _ he finds in Catholicism that makes it worth fighting for.

In Breslin’s story, almost everyone is fatally comprised. The very title of the book seems to indict the entire church, ignoring the millions of saints and wannabe-saints _ lay and clergy _ out there who see themselves as the “church” every bit as much as the bishops do.

More worrying is his description of the victims of clergy abuse as “mainly young men.” No, actually they were all children, which is the whole horrific point of the scandal. The sin of this imprecision is compounded later on when Breslin takes New York’s Cardinal Edward Egan to task for testimony he gave while a bishop in Connecticut, in which Egan was careful to clarify that the victims were within a year or two of 18, the age of majority.

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Equally unsettling is Breslin’s apparent preoccupation with race and ethnicity. I suppose he can get away with his repeated blasts at his own Irish tribe, who he says “think less and boast more than any race ever to hit the ground.” (He does chalk their faults up to Catholicism.)

But his comments about blacks are disturbing. In one breath he demeans Bishop Wilton Gregory, an African-American who is president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, as a token trotted out to appease the crowds. In reality, Gregory’s race was irrelevant to his unenviable job, which he conducted to wide acclaim. In the next breath Breslin accuses the Vatican of “trying to load the church with Africans to make up for dwindling whites.”

Still later he says the Vatican is trying to fill parishes with “Africans so black and so aggressive that the worshippers will tramp into the churches like infantry.” Then a few paragraphs on he describes a Nigerian cardinal, Francis Arinze, as “good and black.”

What does he mean by all this? It is unclear, but what is certain is that Breslin is treading on dangerous territory, especially for someone who was himself disciplined a few years ago for using racial slurs against an Asian-American reporter in his own newsroom.

Too bad that’s the only dangerous part of this book, and it’s not even relevant to the topic at hand. In the abuse scandal, Breslin has a big target, but in launching one roundhouse punch after another he inevitably overreaches and thus lets his quarry emerge relatively unscathed. Moreover, his second advertised goal _ to envision a new kind of Catholic Church _ never takes shape.

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This far removed from the eruption of the scandal, what was needed was a fresh eye or a keen analysis or a well-told tale. Other writers have already examined the scandal and produced original work. David France’s “Our Fathers” is an exhaustive and dramatic investigation of the scandal’s roots, and in “Vows of Silence,” Jason Berry and Gerald Renner go in new directions with investigations that take the scandal to the threshold of the Vatican.

In “The Church That Forgot Christ,” Breslin channels the justifiable rage of American Catholics. But he is so loud and so repetitious in his denunciations that only his most devoted converts will hear his message. Even though he bills himself as the ultimate outsider, Bishop Breslin only winds up preaching to the choir. And that’s a real shame.

(David Gibson, a former religion reporter, is the author of “The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism.”)

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