Poison Penn?

A reader asks: "Have you seen the attack on Mother Theresa on Showtime?"

No, I haven't, since I don't get the premium channels on my cable television. Apparently the reader is referring to a segment of a show by the magicians' duo Penn and Teller. According to Catholic League president Donahue, quoted in a recent story by NewsMax, an episode of Showtime's Penn and Teller show "Holier Than Thou" was a...

"Nazi-like assault on Catholicism, and on the person the show calls 'Mother F***ing Teresa.' In the 12 years that I have been president of the Catholic League, I have never witnessed a more vicious attack on Catholicism than what appeared this week on the Showtime program 'Penn and Teller.' The episode, 'Holier Than Thou,' was a frontal assault on Mother Teresa and her order of nuns, Missionaries of Charity (as well as Gandhi and the Dali Lama)..."

Well, nice to know that Mother Teresa gets the same respect as the Dalai Lama.

I wish I paid more attention to these things, really. But as much as I like watching cable television (I'll have it turned to either Classic Arts Showcase, Great American Country, or reruns of Law and Order or The West Wing), it's not enough to keep me from leaving the house when I have a notion.

Many of us like to think of saints as placid, starry-eyed perfectly calm individials who win popularity contests in their lifetimes. The majority do not fit this description. Many suffer at the hands of local Church authority, the membership of orders they have founded, or the very people they are trying to help. Some even get thrown out of real classy places like the Temple in Jerusalem (or five-star hotels in Washington). In Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton wrote of the difficulty of understanding the ways of the saints, of how so many of them "cannot fit inside the box."

Merton cited as an example one Benedict Joseph Labre, an eighteenth-century itinerent monk. Rejected by the Trappists, the Carthusians, and the Cistercians, Benedict was consigned to wandering the countryside in southern France and into neighboring Italy, visiting one holy place after another. He dressed in rags, and smelled bad. But in Rome, he was frequently the source of advice and counsel to his fellow homeless. He died penniless in a Roman hospice, and numerous miracles were attributed to him within a few months of his death. He is the patron of beggars, hobos, the homeless, the insane, the mentally ill, people rejected by religious orders, pilgrims, tramps -- and probably because he didn't bathe much, unmarried men.

I'm gonna bet he was also easy to pick on. So's Mother Teresa.

(Did I mention I also like watching reruns of ER?)