Hagiophobia
Hatred of Sanctity Runs Deep
A Jewish historian doing research at the Vatican recently discovered directives recommending the excommunication of any Catholic who joined the Nazi party or even flew the swastika. They date from 1930–1933, during the pontificate of Pius XI, when Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, was Secretary of State and therefore largely responsible for Vatican dealings with Germany. The documents, according to the historian, are evidence of an ongoing ideological war between Rome and the Nazi regime, even before Hitler became chancellor.
If this news seeped into the iron skull of the mass media, I did not hear of it. For the word on Pius XII is that, worse than doing too little to assist the Jews during the Nazi oppression, he was actually sympathetic to Nazism. This, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, and despite contemporary evaluations of his ceaseless efforts to use whatever means the church had at her disposal to hide and protect Jews in Italy and help them escape from the Nazis. Pius was a saintly scholar, but after he died, he became the object of slander when a Communist playwright, one Rolf Hochhuth, wishing to undermine the credibility of the Catholic Church, tagged him as Hitler’s man. The rest, we may say, is a gleeful rush to “history,” not of what happened, but of what many people wish had happened.
Or take Mother Teresa. Here is a simple woman who never affirmed anything else about herself than that she was stupid and unworthy of the greatness of the task to which God had called her. She took people dying on the streets, lying in their own filth, abandoned by their fellow men, unwanted and unloved, and helped them, when they were past cure, to die with human dignity, in the company of someone who gave them food and water and, more important than that, a human touch and a smile. She set up dispensaries for lepers, and helped them build a village where they could live with their families and grow some food and earn a little money. She took abandoned children and fed them and housed them in orphanages. She and her sisters now have some 650 houses of charity established all over the world.
She did all these things while living among the poor, eating simply, possessing nothing more than the clothes on her back, her blue and white sari, a rosary, and a bag for first aid. No one in the past century has been anywhere near so tireless as she was in loving the poor; she brought them the love of Jesus, no matter what their religion happened to be. She brought them joy, when she herself, as we now know, suffered through a long dark night of the soul, such as the greatest of Christian mystics have experienced. Yet she of all people has been called “Hell’s Angel” by the remarkably venomous Christopher Hitchens, who searched through the thousands of deeds of love that she and her sisters performed, to find fault, somewhere, anywhere.
Or take the current pope, Benedict XVI. He is a redoubtable scholar whose many writings return again and again to the centrality of Jesus Christ to all human history, and to the human questions that the individual man, believer or not, must ask. He affirms that the very being of God is a communion of love, and thus that our being created in the image and likeness of God means that we can only become ourselves when we freely give of ourselves in love.
Yet precisely because he holds so high a view of man’s destiny and, more to the point, because he will not divorce man’s sexuality from love and from truth, his words are readily misunderstood, his actions misinterpreted, and his whole ministry tarred as a tyrannical desire to impose his views upon millions of people. The reaction against him is so absurd that the aforementioned Hitchens and his fellow infidel Richard Dawkins have expressed a desire to arrest him for crimes against humanity.
As the preceding editorial reiterates, we are of one mind on the severity of the sex abuse crisis. It is clear, however, that the problem with predatory priests is not with Benedict, but rather with a loss of fidelity he and others have sought to correct over the last fifty years, a mission denounced by his critics. It is little more than political opportunism that Benedict’s haters now wish to move so quickly from denouncing him as “God’s Rottweiler” in defending the purity of the church to denouncing him for not being “Rottweiler” enough.
Fear of the Holy
My purpose here is not to uphold the sanctity of various prominent Catholics, but to ask what it is about the holy that strikes fear into the hearts of so many. We think that the saints are beautiful, and they are. Then how do people miss it?
Then again, why should we be surprised that they miss it, when in Jesus himself, as far as many a Pharisee would concede, no beauty was to be found? When Jesus wrought his signs and wonders, and when he taught with authority about the kingdom of God, what did those Pharisees ask him, but why his disciples did not wash their hands before eating, and suchlike? They had before them the Lord, the long-awaited anointed of God, who had made the blind to see and the deaf to hear, and somehow the truth could not penetrate the shells of their self-regard.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
20.8—October 2007
The Deep & Abiding Biblical Roots of Western Liberal Education by David Lyle Jeffrey
27.3—May/June 2014
Facts versus Stereotypes About Love & Marriage in the Land of the Free by Allan C. Carlson
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