Don Sterling, the 80 year-old
owner of an NBA basketball team, only had to make a private racial remark to
his young girlfriend and the punishment was swift and severe. The National
Basketball Association (NBA) banned him for life and the league will try to
force him to sell the team worth almost a billion dollars.
Immediately after the attack on the American embassy in
Benghazi, the Obama administration, including then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, blamed it on an inflammatory anti-Moslem video posted by some man in
California. Even though the Administration knew the video was not the cause of
the terror attack, it still threw the poor guy in jail.
However, anti-Catholicism is the
oldest and still most pervasive prejudice in America. In the 1920s the three Ks
in KuKluxKlan stood for Jews, Blacks, and Catholics (Kikes, Koons, Katholics).
Today, the first two are treated as if they were endangered species but it is
still open season on Catholics. The popularity of a film like “Philomena”
confirms the theory that anti-Catholicism is practically the only prejudice
that political correctness allows and even encourages.
The film is based very loosely on
the story of a young woman who has a child out of wedlock in Ireland in the
1950s. In the film her baby is taken from her and then “sold” to the highest
bidder, an American couple, for adoption. The film then goes on to recount the
attempt of Philomena to find her lost child by traveling to America years
later. Despite the very flattering reviews, it would appear that the film is a
pack of lies. Philomena, along with two sisters, was placed in the orphanage by
her father on the death of their mother. Later, when she became pregnant, her
baby was not taken from her but put up for adoption. The baby was not sold to
the highest bidder as the film claims. The American couple made a donation to
the orphanage but the nuns never charged for adoptions. Moreover, Philomena
never went to America to find her son. She only traveled to America last year
to promote the film either for fame or fortune.
Catholic nuns and priests have
been fair game in the entertainment industry for years. G. K. Chesterton was
perhaps the greatest Christian apologist of the early twentieth century. Even
before he converted to Catholicism after the First World War, books like
“Orthodoxy” and “The Everlasting Man” had established him as the determined
proponent of the common sense of Christianity, and the equally determined
opponent of all the crazy notions of his own time. It was he who coined the
phrase, “when men cease to believe in God, they will believe in anything.”
In addition to his religious,
literary, and political writings Chesterton also turned his great talents to
poetry and detective fiction. His Fr. Brown became one of the first in a long
line of well-know fictional detectives. Fr. Brown was an unlikely sleuth. He
was a quiet, well-educated Catholic priest who would never be taken for a crime
solver. Chesterton’s point, however, was that though Fr. Brown looked innocent
and un-worldly, his knowledge of human nature, gained largely in the confession
box, enabled him to see what the professionals could not.
This year my wife and I have been
watching a BBC series based loosely on Chesterton’s priest detective. It is a
good watch although this Fr. Brown is a far cry from Chesterton’s original
creation.* However, the other day
we watched an episode that Chesterton would never have imagined, and that sadly
represented a particular modern bias.
This episode involved two murders
in a convent of nuns. Briefly, a young attractive novice drops dead of cyanide
poisoning at the ceremony where she is to take her vows. Then, an unlikeable
old nun is also found poisoned. The old nun was portrayed, in what has become
stereotypical fashion, as an incredibly, intolerant martinet. Not only does she
force novices to lie prostrate on the ground before her, but she also is
disobedient and insubordinate to her own mother superior whom she regards with
thinly disguised contempt.
It is this stereotype that films like
Philomena thrive on. Of course, the attack on the nuns at the Irish orphanage
is part of an attack on Catholicism in Ireland as well as an attack on the
Catholic Church itself. The penalty for such prejudice was an Academy Award nomination for Philomena and its star, Judi Dench.
Over 60 years ago I graduated from
a Catholic elementary school staffed by nuns of the Dominican order. Although
they seemed terribly old to me at the time, I later discovered that most of
them were young and still taking college courses. I guess that there were some rotten apples in the barrel but
I never met one. Only years later did I discover that despite their youth and
inexperience they managed classrooms of more than 50 students with grace,
dignity and order. My classmates and I came from immigrant families that did
not value education very highly. The nuns were our first glimpse of a larger
world. I also came to realize that these nuns had given their lives for us. I
believe that the same must have been true of most of the Irish nuns who took
orphans under their care and found good homes for them.
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* An earlier British Fr. Brown series starring Kenneth More gives a depiction of the priest much truer to Chesterton's original.
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