By Thom Nickels
When you meet Christine Flowers the first thing you notice about her is her hair. She has a lot of hair. Her hair sometimes covers her eyes; it cascades across her shoulders. When she walks across a room to meet you, something that I experienced recently, you see that her hair moves like a coordinated dance movement. And as for that pronounced bounce in her step — and her more than occasional laughter — that speaks to her high energy. It becomes clear early on that this woman is no slouch.
She likes to call herself a Delco girl, the quintessential Catholic schoolgirl all grown up. She went to Villa Maria Academy and Bryn Mawr College (of Marianne Moore fame), today a hotbed of left progressive PC culture and activism. She’s the eldest of five children. Her father, Ted Flowers, an Irishman, was a notable attorney who died of lung cancer in 1982 at age 43.
“You know,” Christine told me by phone, “people of his generation who are still practicing law — that’s 36 years later — still have such vivid memories of him. They know my last name and they will ask me, ‘Are you his daughter?’”
Ted Flowers was a civil litigator and a Temple University grad (he was in Lynne Abraham’s class) who in 1967 went to Mississippi to register black voters. At one point he had a run in with the KKK. “His story is amazing and one day I’m going to write it,” Christine adds. “When he was dying he started to write his memoirs. I have boxes of yellow paper that he typed his remembrances on and one day I’ll put it all together.”
With impeccable liberal credentials like these, how did Ted Flowers’ eldest daughter become one of the city’s most notable conservative firebrands? It began, mainly, with her work as an immigration attorney.
“Well, I didn’t think I could ever become an attorney because I thought I would never be near the quality of my father, but when I graduated from college I began looking at my options and decided to stay in school so I went to law school.”
She also wanted to be a writer at this point. At seven she not only published a poem in a local Havertown newspaper but she brazenly rewrote The Night Before Christmas. Later as an attorney she wrote occasional pieces for The Legal Intelligencer, a paper for lawyers that (she says) lawyers never read.
Over time she became an avid letters to the editor writer and when the Elian Gonzalez story burst on the scene in 2000, she wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Daily News that caught the eye of an editor, who then asked her if she would like to contribute occasional Op Ed pieces.
“Things changed for me when I started talking about how I felt about certain issues. People realized that, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s anti-abortion, how is that possible?” Flowers says her views weren’t political, just the natural result of her orientation as a social conservative and a practicing Catholic.
“I never thought of myself as being controversial. I lived in a bubble a good portion of my life. But it was only when I started talking about conservative social issues that I started getting some blowback. The blowback wasn’t as fierce before the Internet and the rise of social media but now the mentality is such that it is impossible to have a conversation with different viewpoints. Everything is made very personal. People can’t separate opinion from the person and it is sad.”
People with differing viewpoints have called her shallow, a traitor to women, a racist and even evil. “The ‘evil’ comment, “she says, “is actually on the mild side. It is one of the nicer four letter words that I have been called.”
Nobody is harder on her than feminists and ex-Catholics it seems, especially women who find her pro-life views appalling. She’s been labeled a Benedicta Arnold for her criticism of the lack of due process in the #MeToo movement, and a racist for simply daring to question certain facts and attitudes in the Sean Schellenger case.
“Because I’m a conservative and doing immigration work, I am not making anyone happy,” she says. “My conservative friends are not happy with my position on immigration, which is not about open borders, but definitely not Jeff Sessions’ position. Liberals are just outraged that I am doing this kind of work.”
She says that when she read the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report on clergy sex abuse in the state, she cried for an hour.
“I’m very emotional. I’m Italian and Irish and this wasn’t something I expected to be impacted by but some of the details of the report were devastating. The lawyer part of me said to me when I was crying, we can’t turn this into an emotional crusade against the Church itself, we have to step back and realize that most of this occurred during a 70 year period. It kind of stopped in 1986 and no one has really come forward since then. It is obvious that the Church didn’t do enough but it knows now that it cannot hide anything any longer.”
She takes some solace in the fact that the report documents numerous incidences of priests who attempted to hold their predator priests accountable. These priests (she calls them ‘angels’) wrote letters to their superiors but they were ignored.
She confesses that she gets angry at some of her Catholic friends who say things like, “Of course it’s a non-Catholic person (Josh Shapiro) going after the Church!” She reminds these people that a good many people going after the Church are either Catholic or former Catholic.
She finds it problematic when those who (understandably) criticize the Church on this issue then go on to piggyback issues unrelated to the scandal, such as when people say, “This is why we need a married clergy, or why we need women priests.”
“You know, back in 2002, when the scandal first broke in Boston, there was a lot of anger. That’s when a lot of people were saying “I’m going to leave the Church. But statically speaking, there are more younger families who are in the pews now than for many years.”
She admits that The Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report will be on the front pages for a long time to come.
“Of course there’s a legitimate reason for it to be there because it is criminal. But there’s also an illegitimate reason,” she adds, “and that is that the media is going to feed into their inbred, innate enmity and hostility toward a church like the Catholic Church, which is pretty institutional and hierarchical … and then of course there’s the media trope involving the patriarchy…”
If anyone would know about media trope, it would be Christine.