More Irish than the Irish themselves

It's a sign of our exasperation with the mostly uncritical coverage of the Pope in the American media that we'll take this observation from Andrew Sullivan at face value:

This Pope lost even Ireland. Yes, Ireland. How much more damning an indictment can there be?

Indeed. It's inconceivable that a Papal visit to Ireland now (which was not out of the question -- JP2 was thinking about visiting Northern Ireland) would draw the national single-mindedness such as described by the blog GUBU's account of his 1979 visit. Church attendance and vocations have collapsed. You won't hear the reasons why amidst the construction of a new Holy Trinity of JP2, Reagan, and Dubya, but they're not hard to figure out: consider Fintan O'Toole's analysis of the institutional ossification of the Church, and Malachi O'Doherty's account of how the Irish church is drowning in the cynicism that it created.

And yet in contrast to the relatively even-handed assessments of the Pope in the Irish media, we've had nothing but an Amen corner of Irish-American papal punditry since last week. The Daily Howler bluntly calls attention to the prime source of this drivel -- the concentration of very wealthy, very influential Catholic Irish-Americans at the NBC network:

How Catholic is NBC News? Let’s run down the major players, as we’ve done in the past. Anchor of NBC Nightly News? Brian Williams, Irish Catholic. Head of Meet the Press? Tim Russert, Irish Catholic. Official hood ornament for MSNBC? Chris Matthews, Irish Catholic. Ubiquitous commentator on all programs MS? Pat Buchanan, Irish Catholic. And who’s the president of NBC? Bob Wright, Irish Catholic.

It's telling when you're being out-sycophanted (if that's a word) by Fox News, but that where's NBC is right now. Part of what's going on here is something we've mentioned before -- the shift to the reactionary right of the old Irish-American populist tradition. And just to be clear, the issue here is not the concentration of particular profiles in these jobs per se, but the degree to which it's affecting the content of the news that gets delivered. [Apr 27: More Howler on this here].

Finally, as we hinted a few days ago, the oddest thing about this televised piety of the rich and famous is the degree to which it has produced a Lutheran parody of Catholicism, with constellations of political saints obscuring the sight of Jesus. So when the aforementioned Andrew Sullivan proffers that:

[Catholic Church revival] will require amending some of the most anti-modern aspects of Church teaching on sexual ethics or the role of women and a refocus on the simple and powerful message of the Gospels.

we wonder whether it's time to start a countdown on his conversion to Anglicanism. Or, God forbid, ours!

UPDATE 13 April: that clock on Sully's conversion just moved ahead a bit: "Cardinal Law is now an esteemed part of the Roman establishment" -- a usage that is a tad Protestant, don't you think? And, [FURTHER UPDATE 19 APRIL] note for future reference that we made our prediction before Sullivan's apparent (and understandable) crisis of faith with Benedict XVI.