My father, who went to Holy Cross College, once accused a priest of hating him for being Catholic; might I assume that you are doing the same to me? While I must admit that I have set aside much of my belief in the Canon of the Church I, like you and like Joyce was raised a Catholic and this informs much of my outlook on life and to a large extent my concept of morality. Joyce, though antagonistic to the Church, always stylized himself as a Jesuit.

At the moment let’s assume that the matter at hand is the ever unfolding lies surrounding the lies of 9/11 and this installment (am I wrong to assume they are lies) is the criminality (unprosecuted) involving the manufacture of terrorists. We are watching this unfold, in real time, and it is nothing more, no different than, a scripted television show produced by one of the networks; the only difference is that, perhaps for political reasons or union restraints the talented writers have been left out of the mix. So what we are seeing would be laughable were it funny and it’s not. So bankrupt are we morally as a society that I think it is necessary to look at every aspect, every institution, that makes us what we are; even if that means criticizing the NFL. In this instance, what triggered my ire (excitable boy they all said…. Warren Zevon) was the fact that the FBI was trying to pass off as real some of the crap they “secreted from the back of their glands” (V. Nabokov) and “there’s the rub” it’s the FBI and why wouldn’t I get excited? It’s the government, stupid! (That is rhetorical by the way and in no way personal.) You must forgive me for having a visceral backlash of disgust from the absolute and repugnant assault on reason that these lies engender in me and let’s hope any other person with at least half a brain. And I think I can also be forgiven for my virulent disdain for the person of Bill O’Reilly. I don’t know what his motives are. You questioned them, what do you think? I am not certain that Bill O’Reilly isn’t just a persona. That has been done before. In order to go into the punch drunk “I could have been a contender…..” world of boxing a NYU Law Graduate Howard William Cohen created the bristling persona of Howard Cosell.

I must admit that I think my attempt a succinctness, in my post, was moribund. And I also confess that perhaps my vitriol crept, somehow, into my rationality queue; I don’t know. The debate between O’Reilly and Rivera is an old one. It is about whether or not the use of prior restraint by cooking up a crime against an individual, participating in the crime, and then trying to circumvent the law by saying that what you have done constitutes in any way an avenue around probable cause; and it doesn’t. This line of thinking won’t even pass the rather dubious Rivera sniff test, and it shouldn’t. As you may note from my post above it is my contention that the FBI, the architect of the above chicanery, is in fact a criminal organization posing as otherwise. You may think differently but for me the FBI has a long history of criminality, duplicitousness, and thuggery no different than crimes committed in other historically criminal regimes and therefore meets the criterion of criminality, ipso facto.

Now we have Mr. O’Reilly siding with the techniques of the FBI and in effect he becomes complicit in this kind of behavior. O’Reilly is a public figure and it is a well-recognized fact that public figures are legitimate targets for criticism and if religion comes into it so be it because that point has also been succinctly established in the old saw “……and the horse you rode in on!” As a Mick and one who was forced to chant the Ave Maria while I was still wet behind the ears, I reserve the right to criticize myself, my progenitors and my educators in the same way that erstwhile Professor Norman G. Finkelstein reserves the right to criticize Jews; I must say that I in no way intend to insinuate that I have the same intellectual vigor as Dr. Finkelstein although I have glommed onto some things that he has missed, 9/11 treachery being one of them. If you have any doubt about my “Mickness,” to coin a term, Google: Irish Modal Haplotype New York Times, and see whose name pops up, after all we are being scientific here. And if you have any doubt of my “Catholicness” (neologism) just root around some dioceses somewhere; I will leave that part to you as I don’t want to be associated with them.

Yes there a millions of people who think that The Vatican rules the world inasmuch as there are millions of people who think “the Jews” (vile phrase) do, and no, I am neither. In defense of “the Jews” I like to say: “by that do you mean Rabbi Hillel, Jesus, Seymour Hirsh, Albert Einstein, Norman Finkelstein, Maimonides and Mr. Shapiro who used to make me Lox and Bagels with cream cheese?” You would have to agree that defending Catholics gets a little tricky but there is a list: Fathers Philip and Daniel Berrigan (both enemies of the FBI which puts them in good stead), The Maryknoll Sisters in Nicaragua, Arturo Rivera Damas and a few others. Would I be showing a prejudice in stating that my Jewish list of superlatives was limited for the sake of brevity and that my Catholic list was self-limiting? I don’t know but that is what I think.

Bill O’Reilly wears his religion on his sleeve. And I am not the only one to ever criticize him for this. O’Reilly states: “Over the years, I have occasionally written about being a practicing Roman Catholic, a fact that sometimes leads to incredulous statements like 'YOU go to church?' Somehow, I don't believe the question is a compliment.” Gee, why would anyone say such a thing? He goes on to say that the reason he has remained a Catholic, in spite of well-known criminal (back to unprosecuted criminality) activities in the church is that the Church , in his words: “the Catholic Church was about Jesus, not Father Flannery.” But that is not true because one of the tenants of Catholicism is the emulation of Christ so the answer is not to be found, as O’Reilly’s example attempts to show, between Scylla and Charybdis but with the tertium quid not Jesus or the fictitious Father Flannery but the real, the Berrigans.

Now, I made what I consider to be a flippant, offhanded comment about O’Reilly. People think that the Vatican rules the world and my comment says, in effect, that if they did certainly O’Reilly wouldn’t be in line to be one of their lieutenants. And in doing so I have stepped into the morass of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It looks like I am deriding all of Catholic education to you but I am not. I can demonstrate that but in doing so I must point out an ironic friction and that is that the product of a good Catholic Liberal Arts education would be to produce someone like say, James Joyce; he was a Jesuit stem to stern but he reflected on his upbringing and was not at all disposed to be positive about it, to put it kindly. I will also confess to having stepped into the cow patty of Realpolitik because my post was in a sense a loaded phrase. Where are our vaunted institutions to be found in this mix? While I would be the last to suggest that the Vatican runs the world; I would be foolish to suggest that they and their, reportedly, billion members don’t have any influence. One needs only to look at the recent health care controversy over contraception. To my reading, it seems that the Catholics didn’t want to be forced to provide contraception in church run institutions because it is against their religion and yet they reserve the right to use them themselves as polls show between 80 and 98 per cent of Catholics do. Some wag said that there was an elegant symmetry in hypocrisy and they were right. But that is getting bogged down in the same political divisiveness that is driving this country. All the politicians talk about is morality and money. But the kinds of morality they talk about is stilted and picayune and not the greater morality of global rightness and righteousness. “In our little world,” to borrow a phrase from the hapless TV painter Bob Ross, that is yours and mine Mr. Tzamboti, morality counts for something. The nuns told me that I didn’t have to obey an unlawful order and that I wouldn’t necessarily have to be martyred for it because reason would prevail. Where is the voice of the Catholic Church on the encroaching fascism in the United States. Word on the street is that they blew it with the whole Hitler thing and now they have a chance to redeem themselves and where are they? Is something going on there sotto voce or sub rosa that I am missing? But I am not about attacking them alone, I am saying we need to look at all our institutions as a whole. For example: where is the Black Caucus as the government dismantles freedoms which blacks fought tooth and nail for while the sonorous bell of freedom is still yet ringing “I have a dream!” Yes there is a marked failure of our institutions to rise to the moment of our distress J'accuse!

Now we look at O’Reilly and we have to consider the whole person. No one faults scholars for looking at Joyce’s Catholicism and why should O’Reilly be any different. He had a perfect opportunity to take something positive away from his Catholic education and he blew it. And the Catholic Church as an institution had the perfect opportunity to mold him into taking a leadership role and they failed miserably at that, and why shouldn’t that be criticized. What I was exposed to in my Catholic education was this:
Corporal Works of Mercy:
To feed the hungry;
To give drink to the thirsty;
To clothe the naked;
To harbour the harbourless;
To visit the sick;
To ransom the captive;
To bury the dead.
Nowhere on that list do I see anything about bombing little brown babies with depleted uranium (notice that I didn’t say anything about experimental weapons because after all we are talking about provable criminality) or taking the side of what I have stated before is a political goon squad. And if dragging O’Reilly’s upbringing into the mix to prove a point then what of it? This guy is a rogue cannon that is grounded in baselessness. I am merely questioning his legitimacy as an intellectual pundit, the legitimacy of Fox News as a service to the public, his job description as anything other than a provocateur and his understanding of the morality that he professes to be schooled in. And if I knew what kind of pen he uses I would criticize that as well.