For over seven years, I have had a mailbox just above E.J. Dionne’s in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. E.J. and I have always shared cordial relationships, periodically getting together to discuss our shared and differing opinions on American politics. We have speculated on what might be a blood relationship, as my mother’s maiden name is Dionne and we both have family that hail from Fall River, Massachusetts, by way of French Canada. In graduate school I was impressed and influenced by E.J.’s book Why Americans Hate Politics, a book I hoped some day to emulate in sensibility if not sales. E.J. recently wrote an admiring blurb for a book of essays that I co-edited by my mentor, Wilson Carey McWilliams.
Thus it goes against my personal inclination to criticize E.J., but I have grown increasingly distressed by his tendency to define the Church and its activities in terms of American partisan politics. By doing so he diminishes the Church and threatens to make it merely an extension of modern politics and even the State.
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