Cardinal Timothy Dolan has it right on Catholic respect and admiration for Billy Graham

It was probably one of the shorter tributes published last week after the death of 99-year-old Protestant evangelist Billy Graham, but nonetheless Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who heads the Archdiocese of New York, had it exactly right about Graham’s place in Catholic understanding.

Writing on the Archdiocese of New York’s website Feb. 21, Cardinal Dolan, wh0 grew up in the American Midwest in Ballwin and St, Louis, Missouri, said, “As anyone growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s can tell you, it was hard not to notice and be impressed by the Reverend Billy Graham. There was no question that the Dolans were a Catholic family, firm in our faith, but in our household there was always respect and admiration for Billy Graham and the work he was doing to bring people to God.”

Graham, a graduate of Florida Bible Institute, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church in 1938 and ordained to preach by a Southern Baptist congregation in 1939. While his early years of ministry were marked by antipathy towards Roman Catholicism (in 1948 he reportedly said, “The three greatest menaces faced by orthodox Christianity are communism, Roman Catholicism, and Mohammedanism”) Graham within a few years had greatly moderated his position on Catholics and by the early 1950s was friends with Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the finest Catholic communicator of his or any other Catholic generation to date, and Cardinal Richard Cushing, archbishop of Boston from 1944 to 1970. The story of how Sheen and Graham met has been oft told. According to Graham, the two happened to be on the same train from Washington, D.C. to New York City. Graham was apparently already in his pajamas when Sheen knocked on his door, wanting to meet him for a chat and to pray, and the two became fast friends.

Billy Graham’s crusades, one of the most remarkable cultural phenomenons of 20th century Christianity, made him a representative Christian, deeply respected across denominational lines, including by Roman Catholics, many of whom also attended his Crusades. In June 1972, at the peak of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America with members of the movement  often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks” more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative, and Billy Graham, the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it.  Cardinal Karol Wotjyla, just before he was elected pope, later to become Pope Saint John Paul II, invited Graham to Poland to preach a mission in Krakow in 1978.

While Graham’s life was a powerful witness to the repentance and redemption he preached, he paid a price with some of his more hardline fellow Protestant evangelicals for his warming towards Roman Catholics, leading some to publicly label him as a disobedient compromiser at best and an outright apostate at worst. So it goes. There is always a price to pay on the walk.

Said Dolan last week: “Whether it was one of his famous Crusades, radio programs, television specials, or meeting and counseling the presidents, Billy Graham seemed to be everywhere, always with the same message: Jesus is your Savior, and wants you to be happy with Him forever. As an historian, my admiration for him only grew as I studied our nation’s religious past, and came to appreciate even more the tremendous role he played in the American evangelical movement. May the Lord that Billy Graham loved so passionately now grant him eternal rest.”

“From Jerusalem, I mourn the death of Billy Graham,,” tweeted Father Jonathan Morris at 7:09 a.m. Israel Standard Time (IST) last Wednesday. Morris is the pastor of  Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in the Bronx.  “From this earthly city of human brokenness, I can imagine more easily the New Jerusalem, where Our Lord has now welcomed his faithful son, #billygraham,” Morris tweeted.

It took me a few months to get around to finishing, but back in 2015 I watched the last 18 minutes of a slightly more than 26-minute TED conference talk titled “On technology and faith” that a then 79-year-old Billy Graham gave in California in February 1998. If you are interested, you can watch it here at: http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering#t-399663

The talk, like many Graham gave over his long life, was remarkable for any number of reasons, and delivered with his usual homespun, folksy North Carolina wisdom. I once wrote right after that observation, “If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’ve long considered the Southern Baptist preacher with a worldwide appeal transcending Christian denominationalism, and even extending to non-Christian religions, as somewhat analogous to a living saint (Catholics don’t have living saints, much less Protestant ones, but grant me a moment of literary licence.) It was all half, true, half in jest, of course. No one knew better than Billy Graham himself that he was no saint, and indeed, was a sinner, as we all are.

While most of what was written about the passing of Billy Graham last week was pretty fair and accurate, an unfortunate minority of pieces that have appeared have not only been mean-spirited but unfair to his historical record on the major social issues of his life and times. Drives me crazy! I shouldn’t let what finds its way onto social media get under my skin, but I still do at times.

Yes, Billy Graham, was a man of his times, as we all are. He got things wrong. But Billy Graham never shirked from later admitting he had been wrong, expressing sorrow, repenting and apologizing. He may have got some important things wrong at times, but he was not on the wrong side of history.

Martin Luther King, a fellow pastor, called Graham a good friend. While Graham’s crusades had been desegregated in 1953, before either custom or the law required it, he had no hesitation at admitting he should have been on the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches in March 1965, but he wasn’t. In 1993, Graham agreed with the suggestion HIV/AIDS might be a judgment of God. He later admitted he was wrong and apologized.

Billy Graham fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith.

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Right/Left: Pat Buchanan and Thomas Frank ponder the Dog Days of August’s fizzling Populism this American Summer

I had kind of forgotten about 77-year-old Pat Buchanan, who in some ways was America’s resident right-wing politico kook before 70-year-old Donald Trump, running unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in the 1992 and 1996 primaries. He also ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election. And then I came across this opinion piece by him last week headlined, “Yes, the system is rigged: Pat Buchanan to establishment overlords: ‘When do we have our American Spring?’ (http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/yes-the-system-is-rigged/) in WND (formerly WorldNetDaily), a far-right website founded by publisher Joseph Farah in 1997, as a project of his Western Center for Journalism.

Then I remembered some of the things that Buchanan was saying about immigration 20 and 24 years ago, during the two-term Reign of Clinton I, eerily presaged what Trump is saying today. But truth be told, Pat Buchanan, a Roman Catholic co-religionist who graduated from Georgetown University, is a very bright guy. That’s what makes him different than Donald Trump, and arguably, if he had arrived for his presidential quests in a different, later political season – like right now for instance – even more dangerous than Trump. Buchanan is and was an ideological hard-liner who wouldn’t have to go the dictionary to look up the meaning of the word ideological.

Buchanan was an original host on CNN’s Crossfire. In his early 20s, he was assistant editorial page editor of the old St. Louis Globe-Democrat and was a White House advisor and speechwriter in Richard Nixon’s White House from 1969 through 1974.

In fact, Pat Buchanan, in this article, which if you can overlook the fact for just a minute he’s pumping and stumping for Trump, makes some valid points about the political establishment and “system.” Writes Buchanan: “If 2016 taught us anything, it is that if the establishment’s hegemony is imperiled, it will come together in ferocious solidarity – for the preservation of their perks, privileges and power.” Yes, Buchanan even uses the H-word “hegemony,” which I don’t recall hearing coming from the mouth – or pen – of a right-wing Republican before. That’s a word I’d associate more with neo-Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci.

But I’d suggest the core of Buchanan’s argument is not so very different than the one Thomas Frank, the political analyst and founder of The Baffler, who defies easy political labelling, made Aug. 13 in The Guardian in an opinion piece headlined, “With Trump certain to lose, you can forget about a progressive Clinton” (https://www.theguardian.com/…/trump-clinton-election-chance…). Frank writes, “Today it looks as though his [New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s] elites are taking matters well in hand. ‘Jobs’ don’t really matter now in this election, nor does the debacle of ‘globalization,’ nor does anything else, really. Thanks to this imbecile Trump, all such issues have been momentarily swept off the table while Americans come together around Clinton, the wife of the man who envisaged the Davos dream in the first place … the political process bears a striking resemblance to dynastic succession.”

Meanwhile, back at WND, Pat Buchanan’s near-ending the piece with the John F. Kennedy quote, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” was a particularly deft touch.

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