Deja vu all over again

| 3:00 pm EDT October 20, 2024
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The Al Smith Dinner is an annual white tie dinner in New York City constituted to raise funds for Catholic charities. Its eponymous spirit was the first Catholic to run for president of the United States. In part because he was Catholic, four-term New York governor Al Smith was spectacularly beaten by Herbert Hoover in 1928. So when people talk about the Al Smith dinner, it’s not unusual for them to invoke the ghost of John F Kennedy.

But this latest iteration of the Al Smith dinner on Thursday night was filled instead with ironies. The irony began with the words, “We couldn’t be more thrilled than to be joined by the 45th president of the United States of America, Donald J Trump.” Trump took the stage like a rotting behemoth and gave a speech that was vintage Trump, full of bitter invective and whining.

Well, they’re at it again. Catholics are once more playing host to a man who relegates whole categories of human beings to the status of “vermin,” darkly warns of “the enemy within,” promises to round up and herd millions of people into concentration camps, refers to himself as the “chosen one” and has shown himself to be a loathsome racist with nothing to offer the “Christians” of the Catholic world but hate. To borrow a phrase from Yogi Berra, it’s deja vu all over again.

To be sure, the embarrassment that the Catholic hierarchy has had to endure for playing Hitler’s enablers in Germany in the 30s and 40s is only one small instance of a catalogue of embarrassments. Before he got back to the business of being infallible, the Pope and the recent “vicars of Christ” have had to apologise for the imprisonment and silencing of Galileo, the crusades, the torture and burning of “heretics” and the rape of children. So it’s a short step to apologise for playing host and supplicant to Adolf Hitler. Even if they will need to do it all over again before too long.

The Catholic entanglement with Hitler is clearly a lesson unlearned, so one would not be unreasonable to wonder what other lessons the Catholic leadership has failed to learn. In any case they are once again embracing a fascist dictator, and they do so with unabashed enthusiasm. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is the ninth commandment. Presumably the effort to ensconce the Ten Commandments in schools and courthouses doesn’t come with a requirement to actually learn them.

Clearly no humiliating hypocrisy is too tawdry for the Catholic Church to endure. Their capacity must be limitless. Embracing Trump at the Al Smith dinner is just the latest example. I suppose this infallibility thing really isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.