The deaths of Mother Teresa and Princess Diana; Ted Turner’s billion dollar baksheesh at the United Nations; vociferous South East Asian lack of appreciation for George Soros’s way of raising money for his good works: all this serves to focus attention on contemporary requirements for sanctity.
And it takes a tad more than a widow’s mite to make the grade nowadays. Especially if you are rich, since then you have to unburden yourself of sufficient wealth to be able to squeeze past the camel stuck in the needle’s eye.
Before the current pope took up fast-track canonization, the Vatican put prospective members of the celestial choir through an audition as tough as a Senate ambassadorial confirmation hearing. Almost as fearsomely negative as Senator Jesse Helms, the devil’s advocate would argue the case against the would-be saint.
Allow me to put myself into this role. It’s a tough job but someone has to do it. We need to thin out those throngs at the pearly gates, which are currently as crowded as Calcutta where people – not traffic jams – lock up the back streets.
It was in Calcutta, of course, that Mother Teresa preached celibacy, which is an unlikely solution for 30 mn people living in a swamp at the end of the Ganges with few entertainments available apart from sex.
Her opposition to birth control was even less practical, although it did ensure a steady supply of moribund indigents for her to be saintly toward.
One of the conditions for saintliness, of course, is poverty. Yet Mrs – sorry, Lady – Thatcher, for one, thought poverty was a sin, whereas for Mother T it was a virtue. On the other hand, the hearts of Mother T and Lady T beat as one on this: neither believed it was any business of theirs to do anything about poverty.
Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier of Haiti and former President Sali Berisha of Albania made a virtue out of impoverishing most of their compatriots, so perhaps it’s just as well that Mother T declared that she had no intention of inquiring into the causes of poverty. In this, Mrs and Mother T were both wrong: poverty is a disability, not a virtue. It’s only a sin if society does nothing about it or its consequences.
Now that we are over the lachrymose spectacle of a whole nation loosening its stiff upper lip in an orgy of wet Kleenex, Diana’s qualifications for sainthood may also bear examination. Her privileged aristocratic background, for instance, makes her a little under qualified to take Evita’s place as champion of the descamisados.
However, to stretch a point, in one sense Diana wasn’t really rich since her lifestyle was based on income from royal alimony and the British taxpayer rather than on capital. Admittedly, neither Diana nor Santa Evita quite measure up to Mother Teresa on the celibacy stakes. On the other hand, Diana was beautiful, which helps no end with the press, and she was big on good works of late, although Kitty Kelley’s jury is still out on whether this was altruism or a vengeful upstaging of her former husband.
Neither will Ted Turner nor George Soros be likely candidates for sanctity futures, although they have both in their own ways done something about poverty.
George Soros is not a name to conjure with in the central banks of Malaysia and Thailand at the moment, but you can hardly blame him for taking advantage, if he did. These countries have prospered by ignoring advice from the IMF and the World Bank, except in liberalizing their currency regimes. People should learn from their mistakes L it’s the American way, after all.
If Soros was involved, we can be sure that in his quixotic way he will devote a substantial part of the proceeds to philanthropic works, such as decriminalizing cannabis in the US and combating ethnic chauvinism in eastern Europe. But neither of these pursuits is likely to get him into any kind of heaven where Southern Baptists or orthodox nationalists have any role as gate-keepers.
Ted Turner is another problem altogether. Cussing out Rupert Murdoch in public is unlikely to be effective if Rupe, as a born-again Christian, does indeed have a personal hotline to heaven, although one could be forgiven for suspecting that Ted occasionally believes he is the Almighty.
Nonetheless, a billion dollars worth of Time Warner stock to help the UN’s work is indeed very generous, even if Ted disarmingly explains that in the end he will still remain very, very rich. Surely honesty counts for something.
Additionally, relics that could work miracles were always a very convincing factor for the Vatican, and the UN beneficiaries must certainly be praying for the miracle of a ten-year bull market to keep these relics from the former Turner Broadcasting System levitating steadily in the years ahead.
So how to be saintly? One Talmud scholar suggested that an anonymous mitzvah was worth a hundred or so that came with a named gift tag. However, while this is a nice thought, like the needle’s eye thing, it is certainly counter to modern examples.
After all, unless you or your organization have the resources to hire a press agent you are unlikely to make sainthood in the modern world. Being lionized by the media is certainly a less painful way to sainthood than being lionized in the Coliseum. And much more certain as well.
The Speculator
