Just months after a minister accused him of fabricating quotes,
Jimmy Breslin is in hot
Catholic priest Mr. Breslin quoted-unnamed-in his most recent book says the Newsday columnist put words in his
mouth.
The Reverend Patrick Fitzgerald of Mary Immaculate Church in
Bellport, Long Island, told The Observer that he never discussed
abortion at a baptism earlier this year, nor did he say that Presidential
candidate John Kerry “talks crap,” as Mr. Breslin reported on page 2 of his
book about the Catholic Church’s sexual scandals, The Church That Forgot Christ . “That is a pack of lies,” Father
Fitzgerald said. He said he moved to Long Island in 2003 after living in Zambia
for 21 years and has never heard of Mr. Breslin. “I’m an Englishman, as you may
detect from my accent,” he told The
Observer . “I haven’t come across Jimmy Breslin.”
In April, The Observer
noted that the Reverend Lou Sheldon, the founder of the Traditional Values
Coalition, had accused Mr. Breslin of fabricating quotes. Mr. Breslin had
quoted him saying that “homosexuals are dangerous.” In response, Newsday published an editor’s note in
which it said that Mr. Sheldon’s words were “not precise quotations” but were
nevertheless “an accurate reflection of the essence” of his conversation with
Mr. Breslin.
The new flap began on Aug. 1, when the Washington Post Book World published a scathing review of Mr.
Breslin’s book by Kenneth Woodward, a contributing editor of Newsweek and the magazine’s religion
editor for 38 years. In his review, Mr. Woodward called the book “a columnist’s
rewrite job” and accused Mr. Breslin of sloppy reporting and possessing a
limited knowledge of church history. Mr. Woodward honed in on an incident in
the book’s opening pages. The scene is a baptism “on a Sunday afternoon on Long
Island, at the beginning of the Hamptons.” Mr. Breslin said he “stood way out
in left field” during the ceremony, which he attended with a friend of the
family.
In Mr. Breslin’s account, an unnamed priest-“your usual
white-haired Irish”-addressed the baby, saying that he must “stand up against
abortions.” Afterward, Mr. Breslin writes, the priest told his friend that
priests “have been ordered that at every liturgical ceremony, we must make a
statement against abortion.”
Mr. Woodward was, to say the least, skeptical. He wrote: “I’ve
covered the Catholic church for as long as Breslin has been writing, and I
don’t believe this ever happened.”
This sparked Mr. Breslin’s ire. On Aug. 2, a letter identified as
Mr. Breslin’s reply to The Washington Post appeared on the
Poynter.org media news Web site. Jim Romenesko, who runs the Web site’s
media-news page, said Mr. Breslin had sent him the letter to post on Aug. 2.
The following day, however, the editor of The
Washington Post Book World , Marie Arana,
said the paper had received a slightly different, shorter version of the
letter, which she provided to The Observer . “Of course, we’ll consider
publishing it in Book World ,” she
said.
In both letters, Mr. Breslin filled in details that were missing
in the book. He wrote: “On February 8, 2004, in Mary Immaculate Church in
Bellport, Long Island, Father Patrick Fitzgerald baptized Peter Joseph Verity.
Upon finishing the blessing, Father Fitzgerald announced that the infant had to
fight against abortion. Was he going to hand the kid a sword and tell him to
crawl out and slay people? … He also announced, ‘Kerry talks crap. All
politicians talk crap.'”
Father Fitzgerald said he has “never referred to abortion” at a
baptism.
“My concern is the 30,000 children who are dying needlessly
inAfrica because the world doesn’t care enough,” he said.
Both in the book and in his letters, Mr. Breslin said that he had
attended the baptism, and that afterward his friend, Ed Ward, had questioned
Father Fitzgerald about whether it was appropriate for the priest to discuss
abortion and politics on such an occasion. Mr. Ward, who is the spokesman for
the Republican minority leader of the Nassau County legislature, told The Observer that Father Fitzgerald’s
denial was “an outright lie.”
Mr. Ward said he had spoken privately to the priest in the
sacristy after the baptism and that Mr. Breslin wasn’t in the room for the
conversation. Yet in the book, Mr. Breslin wrote, “At the finish, I heard Ward
say to the priest, ‘Don’t you think it was a little out of context to be
criticizing a politician like Kerry and then yelling about abortion?” If Mr.
Breslin wasn’t there for the conversation, how could he have heard it? “I don’t
know,” Mr. Ward said. “You’d have to ask him that.”
Mr. Breslin didn’t seem eager to discuss the issue. “If you want
to check on me, you can spend your life [doing it] and make an enemy very
fast,” Mr. Breslin told The Observer .
“What the hell do I care? You’re sneaking around. Do me a favor, leave me the
fuck alone.”
An Advertisement?
Mr. Woodward seemed rather ruffled by Mr. Breslin’s letter on
Poynter.org. “He has every right to write The
Washington Post a letter, but I can’t
imagine why he’d post it on a Web site, unless, as I suspect, like his pal
Norman Mailer, this is an advertisement for himself,” Mr. Woodward told The Observer . “What are you supposed to
do with a letter in which he ignores the eight or so errors I found in his
book? He will not acknowledge it,” Mr. Woodward continued. “I would say his
letter is angry, maudlin, self-absorbed, defensive and dishonest, just like the
book.”
But beyond the he-said/he-said, beyond Mr. Breslin’s righteous
anger at the Catholic Church, there’s another level to the controversy, which
has more to do with who best understands outer-borough, middle-class Catholics
and captures them most clearly. “If you’ve never visited Jimmy Breslinland,
you’ll need directions,” came the opening salvo of Mr. Woodward’s review. “It
is centered in the borough of Queens, N.Y., where Breslin grew up, and extends
to the Hamptons on eastern Long Island and west to Manhattan, where Breslin now
lives and writes a column for Newsday .
Everyone in Breslinland talks a lot, and they all sound like Jimmy Breslin.”
In his letter posted on Poynter.org, Mr. Breslin turned the
debate into one of Queens versus Westchester, blue collar versus white collar.
“That he writes about a Queens that has not existed for a half century, shows
that he has detested it from first scorn and never looked again,” Mr. Breslin
wrote. “Woodward says he can’t conceive of such a church scene. Of course he
can’t. If he didn’t instantly feel that the ceremony is one of these sad,
laughable tales from every church, then he stands on his lovely rich suburban
lawn and lives in blind dislike of a place called Queens that doesn’t even
exist anymore.”
But just what is irking Mr. Breslin? That Mr. Woodward has
savaged his book, that a reporter is questioning his reporting, or that the
Queens of his youth doesn’t exist anymore? Or perhaps everything combined.
After all, as fellow Queens native Mario Cuomo writes in a back-cover blurb,
Mr. Breslin’s book is a “real cri de
coeur by a forever Christian, badly wounded by the church’s betrayal of the
religion he clings to.”
Even as he fanned the flames on Aug. 3, Mr. Breslin acknowledged
that the controversy couldn’t have come at a worse time. His daughter,
Rosemary, recently died after a long battle with a rare blood disease. “I lost
a daughter. I don’t use it as an excuse,” Mr. Breslin said. “Now you make the
priest look bad, you make him lie in public.”
He called back later in the afternoon, clearly upset. “I never
thought the priest would wind up in a freaking international scandal,” he said.
“He’s an old man, a retired priest! When the guy’s telling a lie, I’m trying to
protect him. He’ll kill himself! Give the man a break. Goodbye.” And with that,
Mr. Breslin hung up the phone.
