Sobran's -- The Real News of the Month August 2000 Volume 7, No. 8 Editor: Joe Sobran Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications) Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff Subscription Rates. Print version: $59.95 per year; $100 for 2 years; trial subscription available for $19.95 (5 issues). E-mail subscriptions: $59.95 for 1 year ($25 with a 12- month subscription to the print edition); $100 for 2 years ($45 with a 2-year subscription to the print edition). Payment should be made to The Vere Company. Address: Sobran's, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 Fax: 703-281-6617 Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign countries, add $1.75 per issue. Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-493-3348. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue Features THE MOVING PICTURE (pages 1-2) I take no position on Harry Potter. Haven't even glanced at the books. For now I'll say only that I don't like the sound of him. * * * As Bill Clinton, his days in office numbered, tries to rustle up a "legacy" -- a Middle East peace treaty or something -- two new books focus on what he'll really be remembered for. It seems he has nicknamed his guiding organ "Willard." One book explains the origin of the name (from one of Hillary's uncles); the other makes Willard a speaking character. How vile! How vulgar! How appropriate. * * * A black suspect has been arrested in the murder of an eight-year-old white boy in Alexandria, Virginia in April. The WASHINGTON POST reports that police found a note in the suspect's rented room near the scene of the crime reading "kill them racess whiate kidd's anyway." This would seem to be the purest possible example of a "hate crime" -- singling out a child because of his race and slashing his throat -- yet that phrase has been conspicuously absent from media coverage. The POST described the note as "racial" rather than "racist." * * * A 13-year-old ballplayer in the local Junior League, the step up from Little League, finished his brilliant season as pitcher, catcher, and shortstop by going 4 for 4, with two doubles and a triple, in his final game. His last hit raised his average over .500 for the year (best in the league) -- shades of Ted Williams. His name: Joe Sobran. His grandfather, a career .200 hitter, is inexpressibly proud and of course claims full credit for this prodigy. * * * The U.S. Supreme Court has closed its term with a spate of interesting rulings, all wrong. First it ruled that a Texas public school couldn't allow a student to lead a voluntary prayer before a football game, on grounds that this somehow violates the First Amendment's injunction that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Congress had nothing to do with it. That's all that counts. * * * Then the Court ruled that New Jersey couldn't force the Boy Scouts to accept sodomite scoutmasters. Conservatives applauded, but they shouldn't have. New Jersey, though dead wrong, was acting within the reserved powers of the states, since the federal government has no authority to overrule such laws, however monstrous. If federalism means anything, it means that even tyrannical laws may be constitutional. * * * The Court also ruled that laws banning late-term abortions place an "undue burden" on a woman's right to kill her unborn child and are therefore unconstitutional. Nonsense, and sickening nonsense at that. Even the majority in Roe v. Wade acknowledged that the states may protect the child when it attains "viability." Now even that flimsy criterion has been abandoned. Shame on Sandra Day O'Connor for joining the forces of evil on this one. * * * The Court upheld certain forms of federal aid to religious schools. Clarence Thomas's majority opinion rightly argued that such aid doesn't violate the First Amendment, but he forgot the Tenth Amendment, which denies to the federal government all powers not delegated to it (as opposed to all powers not arrogated by it). Discouraging, since Thomas is the only justice who occasionally remembers that the Tenth Amendment exists. * * * Did Al Gore know that the Buddhist temple fundraiser was a fundraiser? A sharp NEW YORK POST reader poses a simple test: Who paid for the trip? If the government paid for it, it was illegal anyway; if the Democratic National Committee paid for it, Gore knew the truth and is lying. * * * A fond farewell to Walter Matthau, one of the screen's great comedians. He could make a scene funny by his sheer presence; he made you feel what was comical about it just by being in it, and his lines seemed hilarious even before he delivered them. Actually, he seldom got material worthy of his talent; but his Whiplash Willie, the crooked lawyer in THE FORTUNE COOKIE, and Oscar in THE ODD COUPLE (the original, not the vulgar sequel) would be sufficient to justify a career. * * * When a tabloid headlined "HITLER IS ALIVE," one's first reaction was: "Oh, rats!" Luckily the report appeared to be baseless. But THE NEW YORKER reports that some of Hitler's relatives wound up in the United States -- in, of all places, the New York City area. (Of *course* they changed their names, dummy!) Meanwhile, some of the German branch of the family are still fighting legal battles over the royalties from MEIN KAMPF. Hope springs eternal, doesn't it? All of which reminds me: when I lived in New Jersey, I sometimes used to see a plump little woman, vaguely familiar-looking, on the morning bus to New York. At first I paid little attention to her; but eventually I learned that she was Svetlana Stalin. I wish I could have gotten to know her, but I could never quite think of an appropriate way to introduce myself. You try it. * * * My book ALIAS SHAKESPEARE is still being attacked on the Internet; but it's the same old stuff. The case for William of Stratford comes down to testimony, which can never be conclusive, witnesses being notoriously unreliable. The evidence of the works themselves, especially the Sonnets, speaks loudly for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The other side keeps dodging my argument that the speaker of the Sonnets sounds like Oxford, point for point, and can't be matched to anything we know of William. Among other things, the poet is bisexual, as Oxford seems to have been; or, as I like to say, he's here, he's queer, he's Edward de Vere! * * * The Pope has scolded the countless sodomites who held a "Pride" week in Rome to affront the Catholic Church for its traditional attitude toward sodomy. It goes without saying that the Church and other reactionary institutions have no right even to disapprove of such practices. Note the ground rules of tolerance: "gays" can contribute to pluralism just by being what they are; Catholicism and the Boy Scouts can only contribute to it by ceasing to be what they have always been. * * * Exclusive to the electronic version: Think how much of last year's journalism was expended on the questions of a Y2K crisis and whether George W. ever snorted cocaine. The Religion of the World (pages 3-6) I've often marveled that modern man has more faith in the State than medieval man had in the Church. Though the State's utopian promises have been kept by fraud at best, and war and mass murder at worst, its authority has hardly been impaired by experience -- probably because it has taken charge of education and erased its subjects' memory of its own crimes. All political discussion, you'd think, should naturally begin with a haunted awareness of two world wars, the Gulag, forced famine, genocide, the bombing of cities, nuclear weapons, that sort of thing; not to mention the State's enormous and ever-expanding parasitic economy of dependency, debt, and funny money. But evil has a way of inuring us to itself; having supped full with horrors, we cease to be horrified. In time the horrible seems normal, and we live contentedly with things our ancestors would have crossed oceans to escape. By now even ordinary people should talk about the State in the same mordant tones in which Jews talk about Hitler. But modern man not only still obeys the State (he has little choice) but still expects it to better the human condition. He thinks of Hitler as an unfortunate anomaly, with whom his own rulers have taught him they have nothing whatever in common, even as they promote the right to slaughter unborn children. Even if I were an atheist, I'd cherish the Catholic Church as a bulwark against the prevalent fanaticism of the State. As G.K. Chesterton once put it: "Only the Catholic Church can save a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his time." As my patient readers know, I've long been fascinated by Garry Wills, whom I consider one of the exemplary writers of our time -- one of the brighter children of our time. He's undeniably gifted, and I always look forward to wrestling with his books. He writes a lot of them. He's one of the most learned, stylish, and stimulating journalists in America. After dropping out of a Catholic seminary, he took his doctorate in the classics at Yale. He has written dozens of books -- about Chesterton, Richard Nixon, Jack Ruby, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, the Kennedys, Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne, not to mention Roman culture, Catholicism, and Shakespeare. Wills began his journalistic career as one of Bill Buckley's Catholic conservative crew at NATIONAL REVIEW. No doubt his early writing would embarrass him now, but it holds up very well. His first submission to the magazine, in 1957, was so mature and assured that Buckley was floored to learn that the author was a lad of 22. Even now I can hardly think of another writer with such a wide-ranging mind, who can write so much high-quality prose on so many subjects. In 1968 Wills shocked his conservative friends and readers with a sudden lurch to the left, political and theological. He left NATIONAL REVIEW and quickly established himself in the liberal mainstream with his book NIXON AGONISTES. It was typical of his later work: big, sprawling, and impressive, yet not very satisfying. In Wills the parts are always better than the whole. He has rarely written a bad sentence or a good book. His next book was a smaller effort, a short but unfocused attack on the Catholic Church titled BARE RUINED CHOIRS. He continued, however, to insist that he was a loyal Catholic, even as he adopted the latest liberal causes, including, at last, abortion on demand. I've been puzzled by Wills ever since his conversion. *Why* did he change? One of my own first efforts for NATIONAL REVIEW was a critique of Wills, which he pronounced "solemn, long, [and] laughable." No argument there (I hope nobody ever digs it up and reads it!), though I stand by my central judgment, which, I must say, strikes me as extraordinarily shrewd, coming from such a callow fool: Wills had, and still has, a taste for the subtle and the clever that distracts him from the obvious. If he sounded mature when he was young, he seems oddly unfinished in his advanced years. I've spent decades trying to plumb depths that I'm not sure were ever really there. A few months back I discussed his book A NECESSARY EVIL: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN DISTRUST OF GOVERNMENT. It supplied half the answer to my question: he has an uncritical faith in the State. His new book, PAPAL SIN: STRUCTURES OF DECEIT, supplies the other half: he has no faith in the Church. After a century in which the State has usurped the authority of the Church and murdered countless Christians, Wills is on the side of the State. He has dedicated his considerable talent to bearing witness for the State against the Church. He's what I call an anti-martyr. He has made himself at home in the modern world. That's one reason I call him exemplary. "I am not attacking the papacy or its defenders," Wills announces at the outset in PAPAL SIN. Most people would say that denying the claims of the papacy is "attacking" it, but Wills is actually denying much more than that. His thesis is that since 1870, when the First Vatican Council defined the dogma of papal infallibility, the Catholic Church has been trapped in its own "structures of deceit." Since the Church claims to be error-proof, it can't back down from its errors. "In order to claim that popes cannot err," he writes, "popes must lie." He traces this bad habit back to Pius IX, the villain of the book, whose papacy lasted from 1846 to 1878. His first case study is the Holocaust. Wills concedes that Pius XII may have worked to save Jews from the Nazis, but he insists that Pius kept a culpable silence about the Holocaust -- and later lied by claiming to have spoken out. The Vatican has subsequently lied to maintain Pius's, and its own, reputation, despite its "terrible record" on the Jews. Wills doesn't explain what this "terrible record" consists of, beyond recounting the story of how Pius IX personally adopted a baptized Jewish boy against the wishes of the anguished parents, outraging much of the general public. For the most part he repeats familiar charges against Pius XII, ignoring all contrary evidence, including heartfelt tributes from Jews, notably Israel Zolli, the chief rabbi of Rome, who not only became a Catholic after the war but took Pius's baptismal name, "Eugenio," as his own. The evident purpose of these opening chapters is to make the Church look bad in the eyes of the secular world. This is propaganda, not history. Wills briefly acknowledges that Pius was constrained by many factors, not least of them the peril of Communism (which even before the war had dwarfed the Nazis in the mass murder department), but he treats anti-Communism as a neurotic anxiety. Never mind that Communism killed quite a few Christians and that Christians didn't kill very many Communists (though let us *never* forget that McCarthyism deprived a few Communists of their government jobs). If your working premise is that Communism was nothing worth worrying about, you can make all sorts of responses to it look not only unreasonable, but reprehensible. But Pius was perceptive enough to realize that the war would be won by either Hitler or Stalin, and he could hardly have seen this as anything but a terrible dilemma for the Church, which Hitler had pledged to crush "like a toad." Wills says not a word about the Catholic nations that fell to Stalin, or about the martyrs and other, more ordinary victims of that Famous Victory, whose religious and cultural life was devastated by Communist tyranny. (Let's not cavil about the hellish poverty Communist rule also imposed on them; that would be mere "economics.") Wills's argument appeals strictly to regnant prejudices about liberalism's holy war: anyone who wasn't denouncing Hitler at top volume must have been Hitler's friend. Yet as Sidney Zion has recently observed, Pius did far more to save the Jews than those prize hypocrites, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. For all that has been said, written, and shrieked about Pius's conduct, it has seldom been examined from a Catholic standpoint. I confess I'm partial to Pius, one of the greatest men of the century. He was tactfully silent about many horrors; why not condemn him for failing to denounce the Allied bombing of cities, including Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, and of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I presume he thought it was simply useless to do so in the colossal welter of violence that was World War II. There were so many things to denounce, for those inclined to do so. But since liberals specialize in retroactive denunciations, we may fairly ask why they choose to blame Pius for some silences and not others. Wills himself rightly denounces nuclear weapons -- the modern State's most typical achievement, I'd say -- yet he doesn't even think to blame Pius for failing to thunder against them. A recent book has stigmatized him as "Hitler's Pope." With equal justice (or injustice) he could be called "Roosevelt's Pope," or perhaps "Truman's Pope." Wills also accuses Paul VI of dishonesty for overruling his own committee of experts in order to uphold the Church's condemnation of contraception. He treats it as self-evident that Paul was wrong, giving no weight to any reservations about birth control and the sexual revolution. He blames priestly celibacy for the scandal of pedophile priests, as if allowing a man to marry would redirect his appetite for boys. It doesn't, as witness similar scandals among ministers, rabbis, scoutmasters, teachers, athletic coaches, and guidance counselors. Wills also scores the Church for its treatment of "gays," including priests; yet it doesn't occur to him to suggest that marriage may be the cure for *that.* As "we" now "know," homosexuality is fixed in one's makeup by birth and can't be "cured." If Wills is not very consistent with himself, at least he's consistent with fashionable opinion; and that seems to be what counts. Wills argues that the several Scriptural condemnations of sodomy don't apply to all homosexual acts as such, though St. Paul seems to be pretty unambiguous, and even Moses doesn't seem to leave much wiggle room for "gay people" (my term, not Moses'). The notion that modern liberal attitudes may be lurking in ancient Hebrew and Christian texts, against all appearances and every traditional understanding, strikes me as a triumph of trendiness over honest scholarship. The idea that St. Paul was condemning only the *abuse* of homosexuality sounds like a weird joke. He strikes me as pretty "homophobic" (Wills's term, not Paul's). According to Wills, priestly celibacy was not a genuinely Christian idea, but a cultural infection, resulting from the contamination of Christian thought by pagan and Jewish misogyny. As a specimen of this misogyny he cites the third- century Dionysus, Patriarch of Alexandria, who wrote that during menstruation, "pious, devout women would never even think of touching the sacred table or the Body and Blood of the Lord." But Wills fails to see where this citation leads. As the book proceeds, Wills proves that he is indeed attacking much more than the modern papacy. He denies the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, deriding the notion that the priest has a "magic" power to consecrate mere bread and wine. Once again he ignores the obvious: the words of Christ, not only at the Last Supper, but on the occasion where, according to John's Gospel, many of his disciples fell away when he told them that nobody can go to heaven unless he "eats my flesh and drinks my blood." They were shocked: "This is a hard saying; who can accept it?" Obviously they were taking this teaching literally, and Christ didn't correct them. Paul likewise warned the Corinthians that to eat "the body of the Lord" unworthily was to incur damnation, just as every little Catholic, until recently, used to be taught. This strange idea gave rise to the Roman slander that Christians practiced cannibalism. Wills denies that the early Church had a priesthood apart from the whole body of believers. He notes with satisfaction that his hero, St. Augustine, in his hundreds of sermons, "never mentions (any more than the New Testament did, or [St.] Ignatius did) the power of the priest to consecrate." But as his quotation from Dionysus shows, the doctrine later called "transubstantiation" had become established a century before Augustine. If Augustine had rejected a belief so widespread, he would have had to deny it explicitly. If his silence proves anything, it proves that he accepted it. Wills needs better evidence than this to discredit so fundamental a doctrine; he needs, at the very least, a positive denial, from someone of Augustine's stature, that the Eucharist is actually the Body of Christ. And Paul's warning to the Corinthians surely means that someone other than Christ had the power to consecrate bread and wine. If not a priest or someone specially ordained, then who? At this point it's clear that we are far from the "sins" and "dishonesty" of the modern papacy. Wills is really attacking some of the most ancient Christian beliefs, beliefs that Catholicism shares with Eastern Orthodoxy, which has rejected the papacy. These include not only the Real Presence and the priesthood, but apostolic succession, the authority of bishops, the Sacrament of Confession, and the special status of the Virgin Mary. Wills denies the Immaculate Conception, which he sees as a trick of Pius IX (who defined it as a dogma in 1853) to exalt the papacy by elevating the Virgin to "this idol-goddess." He cites another saint, St. Thomas Aquinas, who argued against the doctrine in the thirteenth century. But again his evidence backfires: it shows that the doctrine was widely believed long before 1853. So, by the way, was papal infallibility, which Luther attacked long before 1870. These teachings weren't innovations of the autocratic Pius IX. Wills offers an innovation of his own when he suggests that we "welcome a female analogy for God, but assign it to the third person of the Trinity.... The pronoun for the Spirit should be She, which will make it clear that many of the functions [traditionally] assigned to Mary (as a symbol of the church, or its protector) truly belong to the Trinity in its female analogue." Here he appeals not to Scripture, but to the Zeitgeist. It's not only fair but irresistible to ask why Wills still counts himself a Catholic. (Even a friendly reviewer of the book, the philosopher Richard Rorty, has raised this question.) His vision of Catholic history suggests a despairing view of a Church far beyond repair through a good dose of "honesty." If Wills is right, Christ's promise to stick with the Church "until the end of time" was broken early on, and Catholics have been guilty of what the Reformation accused them of, "the idolatry of the Mass" -- groveling daily before mere bits of bread. Not only have popes lied; priests have been performing empty rituals, women and "gays" have been insulted routinely, and prayers have been sent to the wrong address *every single day, in every single parish* for at least fifteen centuries. As for the Spirit, where has *She* been while all this was going on? Once you adopt Wills's reductive methods, there is no obvious stopping point. If he rejects so much not only of Catholic doctrine but of daily Catholic worship, what, the reader wonders, does Wills still believe in? He affirms very little, beyond the need for "honesty," which seems to mean that other Catholics should admit that they don't really believe in all this stuff either. Even so, the reader suspects that Wills hasn't yet come clean, that he doubts even more than he has told us. Does he really believe in the Virgin Birth? In the Redemption and Resurrection? In the divinity of Christ? In the immortality of the soul? In the existence of hell? Why should he? Another of Wills's heroes is John Henry Newman, largely because Newman bitterly opposed Pius IX on the question of infallibility (though he later reconciled himself to it). But Newman embraced Catholicism because he saw what Wills calls corruptions as authentic "developments" whose seeds were in the Gospels. He argued that the doctrines that scandalized the early Protestants were implicit in Christianity from the beginning, however surprising they may seem to a naive reader of the Scriptures. Over time, Newman said, the Church found it necessary to define these doctrines and to give them full expression in response to new circumstances; but they were no less genuine for that. Newman would be horrified by Wills's conclusions; but so would Augustine and Paul. Apart from the manifest dishonesty of some of his own arguments, Wills arouses the suspicion that he is seeking to bring the Church into alignment not just with the modern world, but with the modern State. The most he can bring himself to say against abortion is that it "should be avoided." He counsels a "respectful agnosticism" about the humanity of the human fetus, but not respectful enough to warrant giving it the benefit of a doubt against the abortionist. Of course he says nothing about whether the fetus may have an immortal soul, a question Augustine and Aquinas might have deemed relevant. Coming after his endorsements of contraception, homosexuality, and other current causes du jour, this is too many for me. If we weren't inured to it by now, the very mention of abortion would induce nausea. Is there *any* question on which Wills would take the side of his Church against liberalism and the liberal State? One almost feels that Wills thinks the Spirit has been guiding the State instead of the Church. He thinks the development of the State -- in particular, the centralization of power in the federal government -- has been benign. Christianity sprang out of a cultural soil remote from and alien to the modern State. How is it possible, just as a matter of mere anthropology, that the early Church -- basically a bunch of Jews who thought their Messiah had arrived in an unexpected form -- should be in such perfect harmony with today's State and, particularly, with the sexual revolution the State has been promoting? It's just too convenient, especially since that Messiah was even stricter on sexual morality than Moses had been. (No divorce, no dirty thoughts.) Newman had something to say on this head too: "In every age of Christianity since it was first preached, there has been what may be called a "religion of the world," which so far imitates the one true religion as to deceive the unstable and unwary. The world does not oppose religion *as such.* I may say, it has never opposed it. In particular, it has, in all ages, acknowledged in one sense or other the Gospel of Christ, fastened on one or other of its characteristics, and professed to embody this in its practice; while by neglecting the other parts of the holy doctrine, it has, in fact, distorted and corrupted even that portion of it which it has exclusively put forward, and so has contrived to explain away the whole.... "What is the world's religion now? It has taken the brighter side of the Gospel -- its tidings of comfort, its precepts of love -- all darker, deeper views of man's condition and prospects being comparatively forgotten. This is the religion *natural* to a civilized age, and well has Satan dressed and completed it into an idol of the truth." Such imitation versions of Christianity are always more or less plausible; but when a man tells us in effect that the Catholic Church can return to its Gospel roots by adopting the latest Democratic Party platform, the question is not what's wrong with the Church, but what's wrong with *him.* In Wills's case, I still don't know. I probably never will. I recognize that it may be a mystery of the soul, a drama of grace, to which only Wills himself is privy and which I can't presume to assess. But I do know that, at the purely natural level, he keeps making arguments on politics and religion that are beneath his own intelligence, and even below my own. And I know that the version of Christianity he espouses is the religion of the world. He is trapped in what you might call structures of self-deceit. Nuggets RANDOM THOUGHT: I'm convinced that if it weren't for white racism, our national anthem would be "I Heard It through the Grapevine." (page 6) UTOPIAN THOUGHT: Al Gore's charge that we have a "do- nothing" Congress inspires wishful thinking. If only it were so! If only candidates would pledge: "Since our citizens are already burdened by staggering taxes and oppressive laws, most of them unconstitutional as well as unjust, I favor a surcease from new legislation. In fact, our business now should be the repeal of most of the laws currently on the books." (page 8) CAMPAIGN KARMA: Hillary's New York campaign is in trouble for an alleged ethnic slur 26 years ago. A new book says that after Bill's first political defeat in 1974, she blamed an ally whom she called an illegitimate fornicator of Hebraic extraction (though she managed to condense the thought into a mere five syllables). She insists she never said it, but three witnesses laugh at her denials, and she's notorious for her foul, abusive mouth. Unfortunately, the only witness who vouches for her is a well-known perjurer. (page 10) ELDER STATESMAN: Jerry Ford thinks George Bush should pick a pro-abortion running mate. As for pro-lifers in the Republican Party, "Where are they gonna go?" At 87, Ford still shows the political sagacity that made him such a winner. Alas, the Republicans aren't quite ready to commit suicide. (page 12) Reprinted Columns (pages 7-12) * The Day of the Yoot (June 15, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/0000615.shtml * Dr. Johnson, Radical (June 22, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000622.shtml * Structures of Deceit (June 27, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000627.shtml * Prejudice and Precent (June 29, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000629.shtml * Let's Debate "Basics" (July 4, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000704.shtml * Crossing Bloodlines (July 6, 2000) http//www.sobran.com/columns/000706.shtml All articles are written by Joe Sobran Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved. SOBRAN'S is distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate (fran@griffnews.com). 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