THE WANDERER, August 11, 2005
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Religious Tests?
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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