j\u2019accuse.<\/em> I\u2019d as lief be spitted on an actual Roman gladius as suffer a copy to fall on my foot.<\/p>\nKeller must be paying too much attention to the Church\u2019s cheering section \u2014 people like George Weigel (at the top) and Bill Donahue (at the bottom), who spill gallons of sweat and ink in defense of her good name. Well, it\u2019s a living, I guess, but it\u2019s never made any nevermind to me, nor, I suspect, to most Catholics. There\u2019s real pride to be taken in knowing that even our screw-ups are epic and spectacular. <\/p>\n
What\u2019s the worst thing a fundie pastor\u2019s ever done? Kiss another guy? Smoke some glass? Rip off the faithful? Junior varsity. Nickel and dime. Amateur hour. When one of our popes feels like living in infamy, he sells an entire hemisphere into slavery. That goes for their kids, too. You say Franklin Graham was a real hell-raiser? Cesare Borgia could have stolen his Harley and his girl, gotten his blue-tick hound in the family way, and carved \u201cAUT CAESAR AUT NULLUS\u201d in his forehead with a stiletto before Lucrezia finished pouring arsenic in his grits <\/p>\n
Max Weber links the rise of the middle class to the emergence of the Calvinist work ethic. Historians and sociologists may dispute the point; what is indisputable is that scandals involving Protestant clergy are dreary and cheesy in a unmistakably middle-class way. Take the PTL thing. Jim Bakker makes a few million ripping off hayseeds and pays a quarter-million in hush money to a secretary who later becomes a Howard Stern regular. And what does he have to show for it? Heritage U.S.A. Not even PJ. O\u2019Rourke had the heart to make fun of the guests there. As he put it, \u201cit would be like hunting dairy cattle with a high-powered rifle.\u201d <\/p>\n
When we put our hand to shady direct-marketing campaigns, we get St. Peter\u2019s, the Pieta and the Sistine Chapel. Game, set and match to us.<\/p>\n
Jerry Falwell called Bakker \u201cthe greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.\u201d No, he wasn\u2019t talking about the d\u00e9cor at Heritage. Yes, he was serious; his imagination is that<\/em> impoverished. If chicanery in the name of God were a sport, these clowns would be in the AFL. <\/p>\nYou want to talk violent extremism? Actually, the Protestants begin to look like legitimate players here. The Scots who formed the Solemn League and Covenant were a pretty scary bunch \u2014 see Sir Walter Scott\u2019s Old Mortality<\/em> \u2014 but they still lost to the Jacobites at Killiecrankie. Some credit should go to the Dutch Reform pastors who urged on the Boers to whomp the Zulus at Blood River with a score of 3,000-love. They gave the British a pretty tight argument in both Boer Wars, too. <\/p>\nBut after Tommy Atkins marched into Pretoria, something happened: Protestants worldwide lost the last of their mojo. Mr. Scopes, the monkey man, was tried and convicted without an ounce of hot tar or a feather being spent on him. Tragic. And look at the Germans. Lutheranism had enough in the tank to sustain them through a few years of low-grade Schrecklichkeit,<\/em> including the invasion of neutral Belgium and unrestricted submarine warfare. They needed to develop Nazism, a brand-new ideology, before they could climb back in the ring and go really nuts. <\/p>\nEven recently have Catholics been going bad in style. Having decided that Charles de Gaulle was a traitor and a tyrant, French military officers \u2014 all being well-bred graduates of St.-Cyr and l\u2019\u00c9cole Polytechnique<\/em> \u2014 didn\u2019t lower themselves by floating any rumors about his birth certificate. (Since de Gaulle was born in Lille, an excellent case could have been made that his nose was a Belgian citizen.) No, asking themselves, \u201cWhat would Thomas Aquinas do?\u201d, they came up with the answer: take him out. An air force colonel named Bastien-Thiry engaged five gunmen to ambush the presidential car on the Rue des Petits-Clamarts. De Gaulle survived; most of the conspirators escaped to Argentina, where they found jobs teaching naval midshipmen to deliver electric shocks to dissidents\u2019 testicles in a properly Thomistic fashion.<\/p>\nBastien-Thiry himself was arrested, tried by court-martial, and sentenced to death. He went to the firing squad clutching his rosary. <\/p>\n
He had been a Boy Scout. His specialty was designing air-to-surface missiles. His given name was \u201cJean-Marie.\u201d <\/p>\n
Even our sissypants wonk patsies are hardcore.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What a prince Bill Keller is. In reviewing John Julius Norwich\u2019s Absolute Monarchs, he warns that this \u201crollicking narrative\u201d featuring \u201c265 popes (plus various usurpers and anti\u00adpopes), feral hordes of Vandals, Huns and Visigoths, expansionist emperors, Byzantine intriguers, Borgias and Medicis, heretic zealots, conspiring clerics, bestial inquisitors and more\u201d might not appeal to \u201cdevout Catholics.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[49,141],"class_list":["post-627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholicism","tag-literature"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n