Liberals dislike of good news is telling

Bill Donohue shows how liberal Catholics dislike good news about their own church.

Peter Steinfels, who wrote the obituary on Father Andrew M. Greeley in today’s New York Times, notes that “there was resistance among liberal Catholics to his [Greeley’s] positive findings about Catholic schools.”

This is striking. Steinfels, himself a liberal, is writing about Greeley, another liberal (on most subjects), about the way liberal Catholics react to good news about Catholic schools. Which raises the question: Why do liberal Catholics treat good news about Catholic schools as bad news? Would they prefer they fail?

Steinfels went on to say that Greeley’s “research debunked the received view at the time that Catholics had low college attendance rates. He found instead that white Catholics earned bachelor’s degrees and pursued advanced degrees at higher rates than other whites, and he attributed their success to the quality of education in parochial schools, a controversial assertion in a time of public-school ascendancy.”

Conservative Catholics cheer such news. Apolitical Catholics cheer such news. So what’s wrong with liberal Catholics that they resist such news? Is their craven need for acceptance by secular elites so debased that it drives them to resist good news about Catholic education?

Of course many of them also dislike good news about the abuse scandal in the church. The proposition that there are a finite number of child abusers in the church or that the problem is at least under control disturbs them for some reason.