ARTICLES

Rodriguez on Catholicism and Culture

THE VATICAN, LIFE'S DEFENDER -- SEPT. 24, 1994

Thank God for the Vatican! How proud I was, as a Catholic, to see the dry old men of the Church stall the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, expose the racism and the cultural imperialism latent in its jargon....

The only question I had, watching the Cairo conference, was where were our other church leaders. Why did we hear nothing from mainline Protestant theologians? And where were the rabbis?

Jane Fonda flew into Cairo to give a secular sermon. The issue Fonda and her TV-mogul husband, Ted Turner, will never address is this: why was it, whenever television news commentators used the term "overpopulation," the images that filled the screen were of brown and black people? On CNN, Turner's own network, why did we never see a restaurant full of Norwegians when the discussion turned to overpopulation?

Jane Fonda and her husband own several houses, acres of land; no doubt Ms. Fonda flits around the world on her private jet. But of course CNN would never do a story on the waste of the world's resources by Mr. and Mrs. Turner.

A friend of mine, a dear friend who is secular and full of political chatter, got ticked off when he heard a report on Cairo broadcast over National Public Radio. My friend fumed that Rome was obstructionist. Rome was only interested in Africa's having more babies to ensure bloated enrollment rolls.

My friend was born crippled. He walks with a stumbling gait. He is, to put matters bluntly, a loser in the genetic scheme of things. How could I tell my friend: The Vatican was the only institution at Cairo that insisted on your value. In a few years the pregnant mothers of the world are going to be able to abort a fetus like you presumably were -- for being damaged, crippled, not being perfect....

Since the death of Pope John XXIII, I have noticed a growing hostility against Catholicism. And it hasn't been coming from red-neck Protestants. The new anti-Catholicism has come from the chic and the well-groomed, from the nice people who run TV networks, who work at newspapers and New York foundations, who graduate from Yale Law-people who flatter themselves with the label "progressive."

They say: the Catholic Church is repressive. The Church is unmodern. And, over and over, the Church is anti-sexual. Of all the criticisms I hear, that last is the most common and ludicrous. For it was only the Vatican that insisted at Cairo that sexuality is moist, that sexuality is good, that sexuality is life-giving.

As the Cairo technocrats want us to believe, there are millions who starve in the world today. The Vatican knows this. But the Vatican would have us see the problem for what it is: the result of cruel government, flawed agricultural techniques, the selfish consumption by the relative few."


BRITISH LORDS OF NY MEDIA SNEER AT MOTHER TERESA," FEB. 19,1995

I've just been reading the February issue of Vanity Fair wherein Christopher Hitchens, a British subject, describes Mother Teresa as "the ghoul of Calcutta." Mr. Hitchens' essay -- "Mother Teresa and Me" -- is a justification of a television episode that Hitchens wrote and presented last year on Britain's Channel Four.

Hitchens belongs among that generation of British journalists and editors -- amoral aliens -- who have invaded New York and Washington. These expats are like characters from a minor Evelyn Waugh novel, they are craven and coarse and contemptuous of the colonials.

In New York, the knaves edit He and She fashion magazines. Disport themselves in political journals. But the great Brit obsession is with fame. Tina Brown is perhaps the most famous of the pilgrims. Ms. Brown left London some years ago, after editing a society mag called "The Tattler." Ms. Brown was paid to bring her shallow sensibility to bear on Vanity Fair in the 1980s. Vanity Fair has made a speciality of in-depth interviews with personalities of no depth. Vanity Fair became a huge success -- reckoned in pages of advertisements.

British tabloids are notorious for an obsession with provincial celebrity-the dypso-duke, the tycoon caught whoopsy with his high heel spread. Americans always thought the genre had something to do with working class resentment of the upper class.

Tina Brown, who is not of the British working class, brought to the pages of Vanity Fair an obsession with celebrity that revealed a resentment of those in the world more famous than she. (Was the resentment more British than working-class?) Her method was puff and deflate. For every pre-lapsarian interview with Demi Moore, there must be a "dies irae"-the sordid demise of an international whore.

Mr. Christopher Hitchens has certainly earned his reputation as a khaki boohla-walah -- he has traveled much among the wogs of the world. And he has written books and magazine articles from the superiority of having been born in England. But, alas, he is not famous. Not as famous as Tina Brown, who left Vanity Fair awhile back to work her magic on The New Yorker.

The truth is, Christopher Hitchens is never going to be famous. A larger truth is that Tina Brown is not famous either, except among the booths of Vanity Fair.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta is famous. There cannot be many alive on this earth who, by the age of 13, have not heard of her- perhaps a mark of how badly the world wants her legend.

Mr. Hitchens' assertion, in the spirit of Vanity Fair, is that Mother Teresa is an evil woman who accepts the money of criminal businessmen and consorts with dictators: that Mother Teresa is a 'tireless and self-serving campaigner for Vatican fundamentalism,' because she speaks against abortion. Mr. Christopher Hitchens, late of England, rehearses a conundrum worthy of Nanki-poo; "What if [Mother Teresa's] actions were being judged by her reputation, rather than the other way around?" Wow....

The audience for Brit twit is much diminished. America becomes the last outpost of empire. Clever Brits have figured out that Americans are verbally repressed and easily cowed. You can shock an American audience to laughter by saying the impolite, by being blue or crass.

Christopher Hitchens brands Mother Teresa "Mama Cow." She is a "tough egg"; has "a face like a cake left out in the rain"; is "the world's most famous Albanian," now that John Belushi is dead. None of these interesting observations can be conveyed with anything less than a British accent.

Caring too much is bad form in London, too tiresome. Christopher Hitchens dares his reader to get angry. The pose is not to have a stake in any matter. Though, of course, the clever drones do have their saints and their pieties -- Fur lib, Aids, St. John Lennon. Clever Brits are leftish, secular. They are anti-Christian (an apoplectic Archbishop of Canterbury has been a stock comic character for a hundred years). They are vaguely for the Dalai Lama and all of that -- bells, mist. They most certainly abhor what they call "fundamentalism," especially any Muslim or Christian variant, which is synonymous with taking life seriously, which is not any longer possible...

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