In Memoriam: John P. Foley and Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens

Cardinal Foley

Two individuals on the opposite ends of the religious spectrum died in the past week.  Cardinal John Patrick Foley and Christopher Hitchens are no longer with us as we enter the winter season.  

Cardinal Foley, best known for his role as the Vatican’s communications director for almost a quarter century, died from leukemia in Darby, Pennsylvania.  His voice was heard by millions throughout the world as he narrated in English the pope’s midnight Christmas Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica.  Foley was always quick to defend the Catholic Church.  He once referred to AIDS as a “natural sanction against certain types of activities” and opposed allowing women to become Roman Catholic priests.  However, Cardinal Foley consistently spoke out against the sexual abuse scandals by rogue individuals within the Church.

Born in Darby in 1935, he started writing radio plays about the lives of saints in seventh grade.  At the age of 14, he was the broadcaster for a Sunday morning radio show.  While at St. Joseph’s Preparatory School in Philadelphia, he said he heard “God’s little whisper” to enter the priesthood.  In 1957, he graduated summa cum laude from St. Joseph’s College and entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary.  In 1962, he was ordained and assigned to a suburban parish.   

Under the advice of Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia, Foley enrolled at Columbia Journalism School where he was the oldest student in his class.  In 1966, he earned a Master’s degree and was promptly sent to Rome for advanced studies.  While in Rome, he earned a doctorate from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.  In 1979, he was appointed as the media liaison for Pope John Paul II’s first trip to the United States.  In 1984, he was named an archbishop and given the responsibilities of Vatican spokesman.  After retiring this year, Cardinal Foley returned to the Philadelphia area.

Foley loved to tell a story that illustrated his priestly and journalistic identities.  On a trip to Egypt in 1975, Cardinal Krol asked him whether he should take a camel ride.  Father Foley, ever the cautious man, said no, but Cardinal Krol ignored the advice and hopped on a camel.  As Cardinal Krol struggled to stay on the camel, Father Foley snapped a picture.  When asked why he had taken the picture after advising against the ride, Foley responded, “As your priest, I gave you my best advice.  As a journalist, I took your picture.”  

In addition to being an outspoken critic of religion, Chistopher Hitchens was a self-proclaimed socialist with Trotskyite roots.  Early in his writing career, he targeted Henry Kissinger and was staunch in his support for the Palestinian cause.  His interviews and writings often took the form of strong verbal or written attacks rather than objective analysis.  He even went so far as to call Mother Teresa a “thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf.”

As a young man, Hitchens traveled widely to Poland, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, and Argentina at crucial moments in their anti-totalitarian struggles.  After the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001, Hitchens announced he was no longer on the political left, and “swore an oath to remain coldly furious” until “fascism with an Islamic face” was “brought to a most strict and merciless account.”  He surprised many when he visited George W. Bush at the White House and befriended Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.  Shortly after, he resigned from his journalist position at the Nation, one of America’s leading leftwing publications.  

Hitchen’s personal life was wrought with dualism and course behavior.  He was nearly expelled from boarding school for homosexuality and later boasted that at Oxford he slept with two future male members of the Margaret Thatcher cabinet.  Eventually, he became a dedicated heterosexual because he said his looks deteriorated to the point where no man was interested in him.  His love of alcohol and tobacco never wavered--he smoked heavily and drank enough “to kill or stun the average mule.”  Even when diagnosed with terminal cancer, he drank heavy amounts of whisky.  Years after his mother passed away, he learned through his brother that she came from a family of east European Jews.  Although he was only 1/32rd Jewish, Hitchens declared himself a Jew according to the custom of matrilineal descent.       

His most successful book is titled “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”, and it is a mockery of religion that put him alongside Richard Dawkins as an enemy of believers.  Hitchens let everyone around him know there would be no deathbed conversion to religion.  When believers prayed for him, he declared himself as flattered, but was obstinate in his atheism.