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05e2e68
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"When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of "Devil's Advocate," in order to fast-track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil ."
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religion
beatification
canonisation
deacons
devil-s-advocate
fanatacism
monsignors
mother-teresa
pope
pope-john-paul-ii
priests
pro-bono
satan
testimony
sainthood
vatican
devil
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Christopher Hitchens |
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c099437
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The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.
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mother-teresa
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Christopher Hitchens |
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fe7dc66
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It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.
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sexual-life
mother-teresa
church
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Christopher Hitchens |
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c437587
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"Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn't quite recognize", Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of the
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television
politics
friendship
diana-princess-of-wales
martin-walker-reporter
marty-peretz
nightline
presidency-of-bill-clinton
sidney-blumenthal
the-guardian
the-new-republic
university-of-oxford
pettiness
oxford
argumentation
mother-teresa
bill-clinton
journalism
united-states
england
betrayal
london
new-york
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Christopher Hitchens |