From the Inbox 7 April 2005

I just realized I used the wrong date for yesterday’s “From the Inbox.” Confusing things, calendars. Here are a few things for today:

Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition writes A rabbinic eulogy for the pope. In yesterday’s “From the Inbox” I mentioned the sometimes not completely gracious responses to the pope’s death. Rabbi Lapin’s eulogy offers a good example of how to praise from the outside without pretending complete approval or agreement, especially this paragraph:

Did I personally agree with every single one of his papal positions? Of course not; he was the pope and I am a rabbi. Theologically and practically he did not speak for me. However that is not the issue. The issue is that he made the world a better place for all who love life and for all who revere the words in Deuteronomy, “therefore choose life.”

Beliefnet.com offers The future of the church, a report from its national correspondent Deborah Caldwell. She quotes three liberal Catholics (only one identified as such), one conservative non-Catholic, the historian Philip Jenkins, and one professor I don’t recognize but whose comments are sensible.

In After Wojtyla: a “papal revolution” for the third millenium, the Italian journalist Sandro Magister offers an interesting description of what may be the thinking of some of the leading “neoconservatives” (a theological term in this case, not a political one), including the great Cardinal Ratzinger.

In God and mammon from the English weekly The Spectator, the Oxford historian Norman Davies, author of a history of Poland, writes about Poland after the death of the Pope. After pointing out that when in Poland the Karol Wohtyla was a “liberal”—a useful reminder of something the pope’s critics forget—he writes that:

Now the Polish Pope has gone, his bewildered Polish flock could run off in all directions. Optimists believe that his benign, moderating influence will continue to operate long after his death, and that major conflicts will be avoided.

The pessimists believe the opposite. They talk of the possibility of a schism within the Polish Church between the radical ultras and the liberal intelligentsia, and the likelihood of youngsters turning away in droves. In that case, Poland will come to resemble the largely godless societies of Western Europe, and in so doing will lose much both of its inimitable flavour and of the moral strength that has served it so well in adversity. . . .

The safest guess is to expect a variety of reactions. When the lid comes off, the pot is likely to give off a puff of steam, but it will not necessarily explode. Arguments will simmer. Everyone will claim to be acting as the late Pope would have wished.

And he gives more evidence for something I’ve written about before: the untrustworthiness of the major media:

Watching Western TV coverage of ‘Krakow-LIVE’, one gets a clear reflection of Western confusion about Poland. CNN sends in a gent who tells the viewers that the Franciscan Church is Krakow’s cathedral. The BBC sends in a lady who stands in front of St Mary’s Church on the City Square, and she, too, thinks she is in front of the cathedral. They are like Polish reporters in London who can’t tell the difference between Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s. And it’s the same with Poland’s complicated Catholic traditions.

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan also writes on the pope’s effect on his homeland. In “We want God” she describes, and quotes extensively from, his first sermon upon his return to Poland after being made pope.

In John Paul II, the Puritan writer (his term) Douglas Wilson offers a generous and theologically astute tribute to the Pope. It closes (it’s apparently a message to the church he pastors):

We are gathered here in order to worship the living and triune God, through the great name of Jesus Christ. This God, the only God, governs all things, all denominations, all communions, and He does so for the good of those who love Him and are the called according to His purpose. He does not just govern those who believe the right things about His governance.

The Church of Rome has a precious possession in the letter of Paul to the Romans. In that book, St. Paul promises that even the Jews will be grafted back into the olive tree. And he warns the Roman church against the folly of thinking they could never be cut out of it. But consider the drift of his promise. If the Jews will be brought back to Christ, does it take a great imagination to believe that one day the breach between Rome, Geneva and Wittenberg will be restored?

It is in that postmillennial hope, and in that ecumenical spirit, that these condolences are offered. And this worship service is part of that restoration, no doubt still centuries off. But as one historian noted, the Christian church lives in the light of eternity, and can afford to be patient.

To change subjects: Also for the WSJ, the literary critic Jeffrey Meyers writes of the late Saul Bellow in He thrived on chaos. The Christian reader can’t help but feel that a more chaste and faithful life would have been much better for Mr. Bellow, whatever effect it had on his books. There are other subjects of worth besides (in the writer’s words) “Mr. Bellow’s dominant theme of sexual betrayal and energizing jealousy,” and ways of writing even about that subject without using oneself as a source. 

From New Scientist, the not surprising news that TV may turn four-year-olds into bullies:

The study showed that four-year-olds who watched the average amount of television—3.5 hours per day—were 25% more likely to become bullies than those who watched none. And children who watched eight hours of television a day were 200% more likely to become bullies.

Said Frederick Zimmerman of the University of Washington, who led the study, the children were probably watching

mainly animated videos and cartoons. He says such shows may follow a trend seen in movies and cites a recent study showing the average G-rated kids’ movie contains (U-rated in the UK) about 9.5 minutes of violence—up from 6 minutes in 1940.

“What I suspect is these violent animated shows are causing kids to become desensitised to violence,” he told New Scientist. “Parents should understand that, just because a TV show or movie is made for kids, it doesn’t mean it’s good for kids—especially four-year-olds.”

In The Daily Telegraph, one of the major English newspapers, a book reviewer offers an analysis of The psychosis in the French soul. He says something I did not know:

Something went awry in the French world view almost as soon as America was discovered. It seems amazing, but in the eyes of French naturalists of the 17th century the new continent was noteworthy chiefly for the piffling size of its flora and fauna, and for its moronic, feeble-spirited inhabitants. Perceived as small, wet and poisonous, America was a “lesser world” of which no good could ever come. Claims like these persisted into the 18th century, which was why Thomas Jefferson brought a seven-foot carcass of a moose to Paris.

Things did not improve. After quoting a French anti-semite during the period of French collaboration with the Nazis, he writes:

similar obscenities continue to our day. Some are casual, such as a recent film review in Le Monde that, commenting on the ambition of the American film industry to dominate the planet with its images, concluded: “Goebbels said the same thing about German images in his day.” And some are sick, like the huge sales of the French book alleging that the Americans had blown up the Twin Towers themselves.

Sicker still was the admission by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard after 9/11 of “the prodigious jubilation in seeing this global superpower destroyed. . . Ultimately they [Muslims] were the ones who did it, but we were the ones who wanted it.”

But even this writer—being English, I suppose—blames America for its effect on countries perfectly capable of resisting, if they wanted to:

Clearly, French culture has suffered provocation. . . . [including] most recently the horrifying prospect of big American buyers forcing French vineyards to make their subtly variegated products taste more like that turgid, over-rich Californian grape-juice which passes for red wine.

This is bad, I’ll agree, but a provocation? The vineyards are perfectly capable of saying no. But they want American sales and American money, and America can hardly be held guilty for giving them what they want. Slapping grandma is a provocation, offering her money to put more sugar in her apple pie is just business, and if grandma thinks the pie fine as it is, she can turn down the offer.

This seems to me to be true of most of the alleged American sins the French whine about. They didn’t have to let MacDonald’s into the country. America is not making all those French citizens scarf down Big Macs.