War of Words Between Jimmy Breslin, Kenneth Woodward

By: E&P Staff A war of words has broken out between two prominent journalists, Jimmy Breslin (currently a columnist at Newsday of Melville, N.Y.) and Kenneth L. Woodward (former religion editor at Newsweek for 38 years).

In a review of Breslin's new book, "The Church That Forgot Christ," yesterday in The Washington Post, Woodward accused the author of "mendacity," and other sins. Breslin has fired back with a letter to the Post, still unpublished, charging that Woodward is "inadequate to speak of anything I do, from a postcard to a book. If he wrote of the postcard, he would get the location wrong."

It could not be immediately ascertained what the Post plans to do with Breslin's lengthy letter.

Breslin told E&P that he sent a four-paragraph note to the Post on Sunday after reading the review, then a full-length letter today, "to do it right," which was posted this afternoon on the Romenesko site at Poynter.org.

The letter, he said, was "pretty good, you know." He added: "I don't complain a lot" and "I work as a single so I don't really care what any of these guys think of me."

The book expresses his sadness and anger about the modern Catholic Church, especially the priest sex scandal. But Woodward in his review charges that Breslin writes of a parochial world, based in Queens, and that he has "produced an incoherent rant that tells us nothing new about the abuse crisis, much that is demonstrably false and more than anyone would want to know about his loss of a very literal and childish faith."

In other choice putdowns he attributes the following to Breslin's work: "paralyzing bathos," "a columnist's rewrite job" and "errors large and small."

Today, in his letter sent to the Post, Breslin complains that Woodward "consigns me to hell." For hundreds of years, he adds, Woodward "has been writing about religion as if he invented the rules of God." Woodward's view seems to be: "How dare Breslin come out of some grubby Queens parish and write about Catholics?" In fact, according to Breslin, Woodward "writes about a Queens that has not existed for a half century."

He concludes his letter: "Shame on the newspaper for printing something as personal and dead wrong as this. Mr. Woodward and a Post desk person should have called me to check."

But at least Woodward spells his name right throughout, "and for that," Breslin observes, "I am grateful."