Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Religious Tests?

(Reprinted from the issue of August 11, 2005)

They won’t drop the subject. Judge John Roberts’s judicial competency is suspect because he’s a devout Catholic. The latest to sound this theme is E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post — himself a Catholic whom I expected to be more intelligent and fair-minded. He says Roberts should be questioned about his religion.

Dionne says conservatives are guilty of hypocrisy because they applaud people who bring religion into public life, but then complain when others take note of this in a more critical spirit. Well, maybe conservatives are somewhat inconsistent on this score, but inconsistency is a lapse in logic; it isn’t necessarily hypocritical if the inconsistency is unconscious. Hypocrisy means pretending to be something you know very well you aren’t.

Anyway, this is all beside the point. Roberts may have to rule on the question whether the U.S. Constitution forbids states to restrict or forbid the practice of abortion. Whether his religion condemns abortion has nothing to do with that simple factual question. An atheist or agnostic who was morally untroubled by feticide would not face grilling about his unbelief. Liberal Catholics would never stand for that!

Until 1973, even the most liberal Supreme Court justices had never answered the same question in the affirmative. But suddenly the Court “discovered” what nobody had ever found in the Constitution before, a two-tiered “right,” formed by penumbras and emanations and stuff. First, there was a constitutional “right to privacy” (dating all the way back to 1965); and a further “right” to abortion (under certain conditions, later forgotten — does anyone remember the word “trimester”?) derived from this primary right.

In 1992, a majority of the Court’s pro-abortion majority held, with Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Catholic whose religion appears not to alarm liberals, that the ultimate right at stake is the right to define the meaning of existence, the universe, the mystery of life, and items of that sort. Apparently those penumbras now included the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. Existence precedes essence, don’t you know.

Maybe existentialism was a defunct fad on the West Bank, but it got a new lease on life along the Potomac. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concurred with Kennedy’s opinion, providing a swing vote for the Court’s Being and Nothingness bloc.

Justice Antonin Scalia and other wise-guy conservatives like to poke fun at Kennedy’s famous foray into metaphysics, but Kennedy is so proud of it that he actually quoted his own batty words in a more recent ruling on sodomy.

And no wonder. Abortion, sodomy, the meaning of existence — you see how they all fit together? The principle may also apply to parking tickets, but I can see where even Kennedy might call that a stretch. Let’s not get in over our heads here.

As Dionne acknowledges, the Constitution forbids religious tests for public office. But it doesn’t say anything about IQ tests, a matter perhaps more germane to Justice Kennedy.

All of which reminds me: Only a few months ago, liberal Catholics like Dionne were worrying that the new Pope might allow his personal religious views to influence the performance of his job.
 
The Sins of Alec Guinness

Alec Guinness: The Authorized Biography, by Piers Paul Read, has received rough treatment at the hands of book reviewers, at least two of whom have found it “dull.” I don’t agree at all. Maybe the reviewers are bored by Read’s extensive treatment of Guinness’s Catholicism, which was central to the latter half of the great actor’s life. (He converted in the middle of his career.) But if you’re not interested in a man’s religion, you’re not really interested in the man. This book is intimate in the best sense: It deals not only with Guinness’s sins, but with his own unflinching view of them.

We learn — what I never suspected — that Guinness was what is now called a “closeted” homosexual. So were many of the bright lights of the British theater in his time, including Michael Redgrave, John Gielgud, Ernest Milton, and Guinness’s close friend, the director Peter Glenville, a charming man with whom I once spent an evening discussing Guinness. (There have also been reports — disputed, to be sure — that Laurence Olivier was bisexual.)

Read cites plenty of evidence, but he isn’t out to “get” his subject. His treatment is sympathetic — not so much to Guinness’s foibles as to his religion. Tolerant of the vice in others without encouraging it, Guinness struggled against it in himself. For him sins of the flesh were, after all, sins. He seems to have been discreet in his wayward moments, eager always to shield his wife and son. Above all, he never tried to justify himself in sinning, never regarded his vice as defining his “identity,” but defended Catholic morality as a necessity for his own well-being. As he wrote to his sister-in-law:

“The Church, when she points her finger, says in fact ‘you are wrong in doing that. Our civilization, our belief in the godhead in man, is founded on such and such principles. If you oppose them or break them you shake the whole fabric of our civilization.’ What else would you have her say or do? Tell you you are doing fine when you are doing rotten? It is almost impossible for us not to deceive ourselves, [so] we must do our level best to minimize the deceit, to reduce it and whittle it away until we know ourselves for what we are.”

Very discerning, and it’s also discerning of Read to single it out, from the mountains of private records he had access to, as an important self-revelation. One reason Guinness was a matchless character actor is that he knew himself for what he was.
 
Epilogue

In 1983, Guinness visited Laurence Olivier in a London hospital. The two men had never been close, but this time Olivier, looking frail, was surprisingly affectionate: “Thank God you have come. I’ve been thinking of you so much. Help me! Help me! I want to become a Catholic.” Olivier was the son of a High Church Anglican curate, but now he repeated, “I believe in transubstantiation, you know!”

Guinness recommended a priest he knew, but Olivier, alas, apparently had second thoughts later; when he died a few years afterward, his funeral was held in an Anglican church.


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Joseph Sobran