I don't read this guy often enough.

The incomparable Rex Murphy on Christopher Hitchens:

Pope Benedict may be many things, but banal is hardly one of them. Even the obsessionally anti-Catholic will have noted — if they’ve paid any serious attention at all — that his mind is subtle, exercised, scholarly and profound. Now, what one-word adjective can claim all those qualities I’m not sure of, but I know that “banal” is not it.



As for this “stench of evil,” why does Hitchens choose to tell us it’s beyond “the power of exorcism to dispel”?


I presume the affected belief in exorcism is a display of tormented irony, but I still hold it curious that Hitchens — who would throw exorcism together with the Sacraments, the Mass, and the power of prayer into the bucket of outdated idiocies — calls “exorcism” into service for his rhetoric. It may be that what he strains so mightily and vociferously against has, still, some forbidden and irresistible allure for him.

h/t Kathy Shaidle