Bill Donohue vs Christopher Hitchens

Well, well, kiss me, I’m English. [laughter] Thank you, Father, at least for your generosity and fraternity, and also for giving me, in what you just said, that any foe of this revolting president is a friend of yours or Mr. Donahue’s, another proposition to rebut. I thought I only had one. I’m certainly here to dispute not to be heard. [inaudible] Turn it on.

Listen, can we settle this once and for all? Am I audible now? Did you hear the kiss me, I’m English bit? [laughter]

Okay. I wanted to thank, I felt I was obliged to thank at any rate, Father for his generosity and absence of vulgarity.

And to say that in doing that, he nonetheless burdened me with rebutting and yet another proposition, namely that any foe of this revolting pagan president is also a friend of his. I fear, Father, there you’re too generous or too optimistic too.

I’m in a fortunate position, though, in rebutting this motion, in believing both that it is not true that the American intellectual and cultural elite is biased against religion, let alone against Holy Mother Church, but in wishing and hoping that it were true.

So I should either have half the time or perhaps double the time for my task. I am also an admirer, especially of the poetry of both Hiller, Bellock and G.K. Chesterton. Of Catholic writers, my favorite is Evelyn Waugh. Of atheist writers, my favorite is P.G. Wodehouse, of whom Evelyn Waugh was a great fan.

Mr. Wodehouse once, in trying to summon the image of a very loud and deafening noise, said of the person in his short story that to his disordered ears there came a sound as if the figure of Mr. G.K. Chesterton had just fallen onto a sheet of tin.

Now it’s, I think, very important for me anyway to be able to say that I don’t have to begin, as I would have if I was speaking for the church, with any apologies. We don’t have a lot to apologize for.

It wasn’t we who framed Galileo, it wasn’t we who said that God wanted the Crusades, it wasn’t we who mounted the Inquisition, it wasn’t we who sponsored Pavlich, Salazar, Mussolini, Dolphus, Hitler, Vichy, Franco and the rest of it, and it wasn’t we who preached the Easter sermons saying who was responsible for the death of a mythical figure and creating ludicrous pain to real people in the real world.

We don’t have to begin by proving that our institutions and our beliefs are human, as all human institutions are, that we are only mammals, as His Holiness the Pope is only a mammal. We don’t make a mystery when none exists.

We say that we face the heavens and we find them empty, and that some of us at any rate are not alarmed to find this emptiness, and would be more alarmed to find the heavens full of permanent supervision and invigilation, and that an ethical life may be led by someone with no supernatural means of support, without the fear, if it is a fear, or the hope, if it is a hope, of celestial invigilation.

America is actually the country to which people came in the most of a hurry to try and find if that life could really be lived as a society.

Some of them came to practice their religion freely, many came to escape from persecution by other religions, some came to be free from religion altogether, and that’s why the Constitution is godless and doesn’t mention the word, that it was not written by atheists, was written by democratic theists and secularists, and that’s why the meeting at Philadelphia, which decided these matters and decides them still for us, was a godless one, if not an atheist one.

And that’s why I think modern America should be a lot more anti-religious than it is, should pay less respect, make much less reverence to religion than its mass media, to which I’m coming presently, do.

Read one page of Stephen Hawking about the event horizon, about the possibility that we will soon know, not where the universe originated, but where it has tended, and the event horizon to which we may all be headed.

There is more to inspire awe in one page of Stephen Hawking than in any of the fantasies of Tertullian, imagining that he could go to the window of heaven when he was promoted there and look down for his consolation on the torments of the damned.

There’s much more to be awe inspired by in a page of Hawking than any number of burning bushes or other such myths. Now it could be, and this part of the motion I think I might have to admit for debate purposes, that when religion is attacked in this country that the Catholic Church comes in for little more than its fair share.

I may say I probably contributed somewhat to that and I’m not ashamed of my part in it. But doesn’t the Catholic Church make rather large claims for itself? The Catholic Church claims to hold the keys of Peter.

The Holy Father claims to have that power and to be the vicar of Christ upon earth. It is said that only through this means and this approach can redemption be achieved. These are large claims for a human and fallible and political and bureaucratic institution to be making for itself in the age of Hawking.

I think it’s also the case that America is preeminently a country of, if not sexual license as you might imagine from hearing the Mr. Donohue. I mean I’m surprised that you can cross the streets without copulating individuals and with dogs throwing buckets of water over them to keep the temperature down. But at any rate a country of sexual tolerance, a country of sexual, I’ll settle for pluralism, would settle for pluralism for now.

Well, Holy Mother Church doesn’t settle for that. Holy Mother Church makes rather strict demands. Holy Mother Church prohibits by various edicts, UKs, statutes and pronouncements all forms of sex that are not specifically devoted to the outcome of pro-creating further Catholics.

And it enforces this with a celibate hierarchy. Now that’s fine and it is your choice and as you say Father, as you don’t say Father, excuse me, but presumably would, but as Mr. Donohue did say, no one has to join that church, but that church where it can does try and impose those standards on non-believers and non-members.

And there will always seem to some people, I think, something absurd in the enforcement of such statutes, especially since we know most Catholics don’t observe them, by a celibate oligarchy and hierarchy. And isn’t it said, and should it not be believed or at least affirmed or at any rate not repudiated, that you should expect to suffer for this? That you should expect to be reviled?

That you should be proud to be abused? That you will be told that what you believe is absurd? That you should be glad to hear it for his sake? That those who despitefully use you are to be expected?

And isn’t that a rather dignified position? A rather honorable position for the church to take? Something that even an atheist and humanist and Marxist like myself can understand and respect? But instead what do we get? An endless whine of self-pity. Why are they picking on us? They wouldn’t say that about the Jews. An endless play on the ethnic politics and identity politics card.

An endless appeal to self-pity where you should be proud that you’re in a fight for your politics and your church. And you seem instead to be resentful about it. And perhaps, who knows, a little insecure.

However, for the main part of it, you only have to open a paper to see the exaggerated deference paid to every utterance of his holiness the pope wherever he goes and the extraordinary deference shown to him whenever he visits these shores and decides to grace us with his presence. As for the woman styling herself, Mother Teresa, I can attest that until I wrote my little pamphlet she had been the recipient, the beneficiary, of a 25-year Niagara of 100% favorable publicity in every secular, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic or non-religious outlet of any kind at all in the media.

Only by the grace of my intervention could it not be said when she died that no one had ever said a single word against her. And that no one had ever pointed out that she had formed on the Duvalier family in Haiti and said that they were the Lord’s anointed and beloved of the poor. Oh well, I’ll get to her depredations in rebuttal because I say I have only a minute to go and I don’t want to overrun my time or end foaming in mid-sentence, waving vomit bags and tampacs in the name of good taste and good bearing and good manners and good standards.

I think I can hope to be rescued from that fate without any divine intercession. The truth of the matter is, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, brothers and sisters, religion has it very much its own way in this country of ours.

It’s in the pledge of allegiance, thanks to a stupid intervention by President Eisenhower, it’s on the money. It’s in the opening of Congress every day. It’s at the National Prayer Breakfast.

It’s when the delinquent president summons his advisors and his spiritual team in order to fend off what should have been inevitable. It’s when Al Gore can’t bring himself to criticize the decision of the Oklahoma school board and it’s high time that that situation was reversed and we developed a proper immunity to it and made sure that religion could only be self-inflicted. Thank you.