Docility in Boston

Boston's multitudinous, intensely parochial Roman Catholics wear their faith on their sleeves, reach for brickbats and shillelaghs at the slightest hint of criticism. But last week, after a telling blast against Boston Catholicism, they scarcely knew what head to crack: the blast had been loosed in the Commonweal, a Catholic weekly. It was signed "Katherine Loughlin," a pseudonym protecting a middleaged, devout, Irish Catholic spinster, her family and a relative who is a priest.

The reason Critic "Loughlin" had her Irish up was James Michael Curley, the city's mayor. Boston recently gave a brass-band welcome to Mayor Curley after he had been found guilty by a Federal Court (in Washington, D.C.) of using the mails to defraud. Catholic Curley, who is a congressman ($10,000 a year) as well as mayor of Boston ($20,000), began his political career in 1903 with a jail sentence (for taking a civil service examination for a friend), yet has served four times as mayor, one term as governor, despite being forced to pay back $42,629 which he had grafted from the city. Charged Critic "Loughlin": Curley's "long career has been possible only through the support of large numbers of Godfearing, good-living Catholics."

Her explanation: "The Boston Catholic laity are in leading strings to the clergy, and are impotent. In an excess of goodness, docility, almost infantilism, they respond to every dictum of the clergy. . . . They have no leaders, no official voice, no public opinion as a group, no forum for frank discussion."

"Katherine Loughlin" insists that she is not ant-clerical, that she has merely repeated what popes and bishops have said on laymen's passivity. "When the Pope cries, 'Give me leaders!' he means lay as well as clerical. But lay leaders are not to be looked for in a regimented society where every Catholic association is ruled over by a priest. . . . Without these monitors, we might learn to use our own mental and moral muscles."

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