Catholic Transcript Online

HAMDEN – Anne Hendershott looks as though she’s ready for a game of tennis, has a smile that brightens a room, and goes straight for the jugular when she’s defending her faith in writing.

"Sometimes I wish I could be a little more subtle, but sometimes you just need to be in their face," the conservative sociologist from Milford explained with a laugh.

During a recent chat at a Hamden coffee shop, Dr. Hendershott said she looks at many issues in light of Catholic social teaching. When she is curious about or bothered by what she sees, she writes a book or fires off articles or opinion pieces.

She writes a lot.

Her articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Psychology Today and the CatholicCulture (CatholicCulture.org) Web site. Her book Status Envy: the Politics of Higher Education, published earlier this year, followed The Politics of Abortion (2006) and The Politics of Deviance (2002).

She said that anger spurred her to write The Politics of Deviance. She recalled being at lunch with other faculty members at the University of San Diego back in 2002, when she chaired that Catholic institution’s sociology department. The clergy sexual abuse scandal was very much in the news. Another faculty member jokingly suggested that Dr. Hendershott remove her son from the Hendershotts’ parish’s altar server program for his safety.

"And everybody at the table laughed and thought it was hysterical that all priests were molesters. And I didn’t think it was funny," she said. "I loved our priest. I loved our Church.

"I kind of made myself unpopular because I started writing op-eds for the paper, the San Diego Union, that defended [the Church]," she recalled. "But then I started to get attacked for defending the Church. It was shocking to be in that position because I thought I was on the right side of things. People who defend the Church now are the bad guys in a lot of ways. And so I decided to write The Politics of Deviance."

That book focused on how behaviors become defined as "normal" or "deviant." In her research, she found abortion to be a key issue for which terms were redefined in order to further one side or the other. That research became the seed for The Politics of Abortion.

At the same time, Dr. Hendershott said, the Catholic identity was fading more and more at the University of San Diego, where she said she became "a pariah" and one of the few pro-life faculty members.

"I kept saying, ‘What are we doing with internships at Planned Parenthood?’ You’re not popular when you say things like that because all of the pro-choice feminists on campus will hate you. And they did," she recalled.

After 15 years in San Diego, the timing was right when her husband, Dana, who works in insurance, was transferred back to the East Coast five years ago. They settled in Connecticut, where she’d been born in 1949 at St. Mary’s Hospital in Waterbury, and where her father, 92, still lives.

Dr. Hendershott, 60, now is a professor of urban studies and chairman of the politics, philosophy and economics program at The King’s College in New York City. "I love it. It’s a place where I’m allowed to be Catholic," she said.

Their son, a graduate of West Point (which his mother is quick to describe as "being more Catholic than many Catholic colleges"), returned recently from a tour in Iraq and now is serving in Nashville.Their daughter teaches at Fisher College in Boston.

Dr. Hendershott is curious about several things at the moment, she said, quickly naming names and listing examples, just as she tends to do in her writings. She is looking into Catholic and Catholic-educated legislators and how they vote – such as Connecticut Senators Rosa DeLauro and Christopher Dodd and Senator. Dick Durbin of Illinois – saying, "It’s sort of like my next logical progression from my book, Status Envy."

She also is zeroing in on "pseudo-Catholic organizations like Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good" and Voice of the Faithful, particularly in its role in Connecticut, she said.

She has little patience with certain former and current women religious who are angry with the Church because they are not priests. Nor does she suffer quietly the mention of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which is facing an apostolic visitation by the Vatican in January 2010.

"[T]hey’re unbelievable, and many of them are running Catholic colleges now," she said.

In her book about Catholic higher education, Dr. Hendershott traces the progressive loss of Catholic identity on many Catholic campuses to a tendency to compete for status in the secular world.

Some colleges that call themselves Catholic, she said, "have these beautiful statues and they take their prospective students and their moms and dads and say, ‘This is our statue of Mary,’ and, "This is our grotto.’ They don’t say, ‘This is where we have the transgender fashion show.’ They have this façade of pious people. But what goes on inside … it’s fake. I worked at one for 15 years. I know how fake it is."

A member of St. Mary Parish, Dr. Hendershott said that her book about Catholic higher education was sparked by what she saw happening at San Diego.

Saying that she didn’t go to a Catholic college, she added, "That’s how I stayed Catholic, and I didn’t let my children go to Catholic colleges."

In a conversation that ranged from Connecticut’s bishops – ("We’re lucky," she said.) – to liberation theology, feminism, dissident Catholics and Church transparency, Dr. Hendershott rattled off the names of key players and the philosophies they espouse.

Still, Dr. Hendershott is far from discouraged. She pointed to increasing numbers of vocations, enthusiasm in her students and other young people on campuses and growing Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults programs.

"People are attracted to a church that stands for something. The Catholic Church stands for something," she said.

She said that the Church can play a key role in America in the future.

"This population control movement of the current administration, it’s scary. The Catholic Church is the only one that will stand against that. We’re the only ones who have this moral authority, still," she said.