After resisting temptation for a while, I decided to look at Christopher Hitchens’ de mortuo nil nisi malum on John Paul II. Everyone knew that Mr. Hitchens would write something vicious. If he had unexpectedly found favorable, or even neutral, words for the late Pontiff, his public would have been deeply disappointed.
The denunciation was rather feeble, I thought, beginning with reasonable, though vastly overstated, criticism of John Paul’s failure to crack down vigorously enough on pederastic priests, then drifting into absurd irrelevancies, such as the claim that a “Catholic cabal” “imposed” President Ngo Dihn Diem on South Vietnam. All quite nonsensical and deserving of Tom Smith’s sneer that it –
reads like the rantings of an Oxford old boy well into his third bottle at the local wine bar. Reading his piece, one wonders, justly, what exactly does the no doubt unexemplary Catholicism of the long dead Vietnamese politician Diem have to do with anything? You can almost see Hitchens bent over his glass, muttering“Catholics . . . Pope . . . damn . . . . them” like some old Nazi muttering “the Jews.”
What most struck me, though, was Mr. Hitchens’ opening trope:
The papacy is not, in theory, a man-made office at all. Its holder is chosen for life, by God himself, to hold the keys of Peter and to be the vicar of Christ on earth. This is yet another of the self-imposed tortures that faith inflicts upon itself. It means that you have to believe that the pope before last, who held on to the job for a matter of weeks before dying (or, according to some, before being murdered) was either unchosen by God in some fit of celestial pique, or left unprotected by heaven against his assassins.
Maybe there is a Papist somewhere who believes that the Pope is “chosen by God” in some nontrivial sense, but I’ve never met any who weren’t aware that he is elected by the College of Cardinals, human beings quite capable of picking a mere mortal or even a less than satisfactory Christian. No one thinks that Pope Alexander VI was the Holy Ghost’s favorite son. Mr. Hitchens appears to be under the impression that Popes are god-kings rather than simply men endowed with high office and great responsibilities, which some carry out more adequately than others.
The flood of commentary on the late Pope’s tenure, much of it exhibiting amazing misunderstanding of Christian history and doctrine, highlights a more general problem. Our society’s secular elite knows less about Christianity than about astrophysics and is nonetheless ready and willing to pass judgement on what it doesn’t know.
This ignorance would be bad enough if it were limited to journalists. More disturbing is to find elementary lapses in scholarly works. To take one instance, The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch has received lavish, and in many respects deserved, praise. The author is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, so, despite the fact that he is by his own account not a Christian, one expects him to be thoroughly acquainted with Christianity.
Yet Professor MacCulloch confuses the Virgin Birth of Christ with Mary’s perpetual virginity (p. 97, where he asserts that Isaiah 7:14, the classic proof text for the former, was used to support the latter) and writes that Arius taught that “Jesus was not God at all, but a human prophet of God” (p. 182), a highly misleading description of the Arian doctrine that the Second Person of the Trinity was created before Time began. Later (pp. 589ff.) he asserts that Christian teachings about men, women and sexuality “borrowed heavily from the pronouncements of pre-Christian Greek and Latin science”, as if all of the opinions that he dislikes (and he dislikes pretty much all that the historical Church has to say on those subjects) were not found, clearly and forcefully stated, in the text of the Bible.
All of these are areas in which an Oxford Professor of the History of the Church ought to be as unlikely to err as a law professor is to confuse habeas corpus with corpus dilecti. It takes little imagination to extrapolate how much nonsense the public is fed about the Faith by what appear to be authoritative sources.
The upshot is that public discourse has no filter for distinguishing wildly speculative theories, such as those of the Jesus Seminar, from solid though unconventional scholarship, such as John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew. In such an intellectual atmosphere, a preposterous novel like The DaVinci Code isn’t laughed into oblivion.
Does it matter to Christians how much or little secularists know about us? I think that it does. On the simplest level, misinformation is a barrier to evangelization. If non-Christians hold a farcical picture of Christian doctrine, they won’t give it serious consideration. Those who become dissatisfied with the secular world view will instead drift to other religions, of which New Age pseudo-mysticism and radical Islam are the most active proselytizers at present.
There is also a danger to Christianity itself. Hearing ourselves constantly misrepresented and abused, we are tempted to retreat into isolation and obscurantism. Until recently, that was the dominant survival strategy of Protestant fundamentalists. Of course, refusal to engage the world only convinces the world that it is right to regard Christians as mentally impaired fanatics, leading to a downward cycle of reprehension.
Having identified the problem, I confess that I have no useful ideas for remedying it. Anticipating that a large proportion of his readers will lack familiarity with Christians’ “basic doctrinal toolkit”, Professor MacCulloch finds it necessary to furnish an appendix consisting of the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Hail Mary. If those can rightly be considered unfamiliar texts, the task of acquainting this age with the Faith of our Fathers is a daunting one indeed. To make a start, I suppose, most of us need to devote more time and effort to making sure that we are thoroughly acquainted with it ourselves.
Addendum: The recently resurrected Man Without Qualities shreds the Hitchens screed into more tiny pieces than Sandy Burglar tearing into a top secret memorandum. I have formed a working hypothesis that Mr. Hitchens did not really want to say anything negative about Pope John Paul but, knowing that he owed his public a tirade, sat down with a couple of fifths of single malt scotch and let whatever came into his head slop onto his keyboard.
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