Catholic Sensibility

Maybe you've heard the news from my city about the Vietnam veteran who spit tobacco juice at Jane Fonda. Three days later, the Kansas City Star is still printing stories about it. I guess a wave of letters to the editor will eventually give the story a slow and lingering death. Being out of the loop with the mainstream media as I am, I didn't hear about the story until yesterday, when I read the linked piece above. But a few things struck me as my own opinions started coalescing. I can certainly understand the sense of betrayal both Fonda and Smith felt and feel. Fonda has expressed public regret for her tour of Hanoi. But she was an actor, and it's not like actors have their political acts together any more than the rest of us ordinary voters. I can think of hundreds of better ways to protest the Vietnam War, most of them of a pacifist nature. Smith's act was not one of protest, but of emotion. I'm not without sympathy for vets who were first lied to by their country, then by their commanding officers in some instances, then rejected by some of their peers back home, then told to get lost by their government when they came home physically or emotionally damaged by the war. My number one motto for the Iraq troops has been from the beginning: support the troops; bring them home. But Mr Smith ran after his revenge. He ran away. I would feel some sympathy for a person who waited ninety minutes in line, gave the author a good piece of my mind, then waited to be escorted away by security folks. Violence is never pardonable, even relatively harmless violence such as spitting. As far as protesting is concerned, most all of the people I know who have been arrested for protesting nuclear arms or one of the Iraq Wars knew they were breaking the law. They were prepared for the legal consequences. They accepted them. Mr Smith ran away, hoping to strike a blow for vets and not get caught. Fonda trumped him again by not pressing charges. For me, this incident is a haunting shadow of the juices spitting back and forth in Catholicism this week over the election of our new pope. It points out to me a sizable fraction of the Body of Christ just cannot deal in a healthy way with its emotions regarding the "other." I'm not sure Catholics are any closer to repairing the loss of unity the past forty years have brought. But I hope Pope Benedict is aware that a good portion of his Church is inclined to spit-and-run in the name of orthodoxy, progressivism, or whatever the ideology.