Vanity Fair have sent me a preview of Christopher Hitchens’s very unpleasant piece about his cancer – unpleasant not just because Hitchens describes in detail the invasion of his body by a monstrous tumour, but also because it contains a despicable slur against the Pope.(And Henry Kissinger, but I don’t care about that.)
He writes: “Will I really not live long enough … to read – if not indeed write – the obituaries of elderly criminals like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”
This should scarcely need saying, but Pope Benedict XVI is not a criminal: neither Hitchens nor anyone else has produced evidence that he covered up the crimes of paedophile priests. On the contrary, he sought to tighten up canonical procedures against sex abusers.
There were plenty of cover-ups; it’s just that the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith didn’t organise them and, indeed, fought battles with some of those prelates who did.
So this is a nasty piece of character assassination, sadly typical of a brilliant journalist who, once he’s made up his mind about somebody, shuts out information that might force him to tone down the savagery of his rhetoric.
And it’s not rendered any less nasty by the fact that “Hitch” is – by his own account – probably dying. But it does make the whole thing desperately sad.
SIC: TGUK