Hitch And Sully: “Who Is This Herr Ratzinger?”

<> on June 2, 2012 in Milan, Italy.

The conversation continues:


Andrew: You can say that they are inspired—

H: If someone says to me, “I’m a Catholic,” I say, fine: Does this mean that you believe in the following: in the transubstantiation of bread and wine, etc. … On the whole they’ll say, “well, you don’t have to believe all of them…” Now excuse me, that may be possible now, but there would be no such thing as the Catholic Church if people had not been forced to believe this, compelled to believe, or—though I doubt it myself, really do doubt it—may actually have believed it at the time. Without it, what’ve you got but some menu of spirituality options that you might as well have as a Hindu?

A: Well you can have it as a Hindu, in some respects. Although, the kind of way of life as being portrayed in the Gospels as a way to live is a little different than Hinduism for example, or Buddhism. I think there are overlaps.

H: But Andrew, I wouldn’t bother with this, I would let these beliefs exist in a parallel universe except for argumentative purposes and dialectal purposes. It’s nice, I enjoy discussing with Jesuits—nothing could be more agreeable—as I would with a Hegelian or a Randian or any of the above. But much more than Hegelians and Randians, these people want to influence my life. They say I want your children to be taught things that aren’t true.

A: No, no, my point is that the kind of religion I’m talking about—because it is much more aware of the provisionality of its own knowledge—is a much humbler approach to the divine. And certainly, someone like me would say, “This is what I believe but even I, at some level, cannot give you reasons for this; I cannot explain it entirely; I think this is how I’m trying to figure it out for myself”. The last thing on Earth such a religion would do is tell you how to live your life. Now I understand most religions are not that way, but I am trying to say that at some level, some way of being at peace with one’s own mortality and have some understanding of why we’re here, does not necessitate—even though it’s often accompanied by—the desire to control anybody else’s life. I don’t see Jesus trying to control anyone else’s life.





H: When I was a Marxist I used to think, or sometimes was tempted into thinking, “look, people may not realize they need this, but they really do and the consequences of not adopting—“


H: Well, it was not a religion in the sense that I accept but I’ll take it as a dogma. The feeling one had was, “many don’t seem to want what we’re telling them, but the consequences of not adopting an international socialist program would be so bad that one might have to give people the occasional nudge. It’s for their own good. Marxism has its glories, but its principal failing must have to be accepted as that, the idea of false consciousness.

A: Ratzinger has this concept, too. He gave this astonishing talk in Dallas in 1991—I put it in my book—where he describes what he understands to be conscience. And the Second Council, though it took two millennia, did actually make a significant shift to say that we do recognize that the individual conscience alone is the ultimate arbiter of one’s own faith. Ratzinger, I think having pioneered that idea with Kung, subsequently pulled back from its implications.

H: Which are obviously heretical and incompatible with true belief.

A: Well his argument, in Dallas of all places…(laughs) “Ratzinger in Dallas.”

H: God is everywhere.

A: It’s like “Dusty in Memphis.”

H: All is decided by Heaven, all praise belongs to Allah.




H: It could be that astrology was true. It could be, for example—I can’t prove it isn’t—that the movement of the planets determine my future, and that that’s what they’re there for; they know that I’m Aries. Though why and how they manage to cover the shift between the Julian and Gregorian calendar would still be a mystery to me—it wouldn’t be the main mystery—but okay, let’s agree. The planets know my future and they determine it. I could agree to that, and I could agree that there could be a computer in a building that I had never seen that was running this permanent experiment: there’s my life, being lived by me, and there’s a computer predicting it, day by day, before I could see it.


So there couldn’t be astrological priesthood. So, ever since I had learned to think in the least, and among other things, see through astrology I saw through everything else in much the same way. It could be the case – I’m not, and no one else is, clever enough to tell me it isn’t – but no one is clever or moral enough to tell me that it is. So I return to my point, we begin by excluding those who claim to know. And I think that is Occam’s Razor in practice.

A: Well it does make religion much more private, meditative. I mean Gandhi, for example, was not going around seeking that much power, at least in his religious mode.

H: I wish that was true.



A: (Laughs.)


A: At all.


A: But, these arrogant claims nevertheless were not, by him at least, turned into a doctrine or a church as he lived.



H: And they were wrong, weren’t they?

A: Yeah.




A: I think you could shear, if you will, Christianity of the Second Coming.



A: No.


A: Well in my mind the big—and you know, I’m committing heresy throughout this entire conversation—

H: And you’re better for it.


H: Not for me. Actually, I take that back, it’s hard for me to think of him living.

A: Right. Well, it’s hard for me to think of him dying. (Laughs.)

H: Alright, that’s one difference I’d split.

To be continued.

(Photo: Pope Benedict XVI attends the 2012 World Meeting of Families at Meazza Stadium on June 2, 2012 in Milan, Italy. By Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.)