EDITH STEIN AND OTHER OMISSIONS

On 2 August, "A Woman for All Seasons," I told you a little about this remarkable woman, later Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and asked how Horrywood, our combined, omnipresent, Argus of an entertainment industry could have overlooked such a powerful, true story.

Is it that Horrywood is out of tune with religious themes? Clearly not, for take a look at “Bee Season,” with Gere and Binoche, to witness the celebration of Judaism over Catholicism and a general attack, under the advertised guise of a story about a kid in spelling bees, of the latter faith.

Is it that in Horrywood there lurks some ethnic or religious bias against Christians, in general, or Catholics, in particular? Hmm, before answering, do try and recall the number of movie sluts with crosses dangling over their marvelous breasts as they fornicate or flaunt their sleeping arrangements. Seen any Mogen David's on those luscious chests?

While they were about it, the Nazi’s made Saints and Blesseds (the stage preliminary to sainthood, which is not at all an easy achievement) of quite a number of Polish priests, nuns, and Catholic lay people. Polish priest, now Saint, Maximilian Maria Kolbe (14 August), for example, proffered his life to save that of a fellow concentration camp prisoner. Wouldn’t that, against a background of wholesale murder and war, make a memorable film? Sidney Carton’s sacrifice did, didn’t it?

If you think the only people tortured and slaughtered in death camps were Jews, then you ought to ask who’s been telling the stories you know and those related to your school children by teachers whose only concept of what happened back then was formed in front of television sets or in classrooms of third-rate colleges of education. Why hasn’t Horrywood catapulted those names above into sublunary prominence to accompany the celestial honors they’ve been accorded.

Doesn’t it seem to you that Jews are the ONLY group you’ve ever seen film-memorialized in depictions of Nazi brutality and murder? ( By the way, non-readers of German and those totally ignorant of history, the “Z” in Nazi stands for what we call “Socialist!” Denken daran, Onager Liberals.)

Another important question is how has Communism dodged Horrywood’s potent bullets? Consider, for example, that the Catholic Martyrology – register of saints – enrolls numbers of priests, nuns, and Catholic lay people murdered by the “Popular Front,” their own euphemism for “vicious Communists,” during the Spanish Civil War. You’ve seen the Hemingway side, right, but what about the non-Commies?

Horrywood-wise, Commies have come off with astonishing leniency. What movie or tv miniseries ever alluded to Stalin’s murder of millions of his own people? What screen legends acted out Mao and Jo’s (however transliterated nowadays) annihilation of equal numbers of Chinese? Why has Benevolent Uncle Ho, idol of Jane Fonda and her Horrywood dung dregs and calculated murderer of several million Vietnamese, Catholics of especially high priority, escaped Tinsel Town’s scrutiny?

Perhaps if the Ukranians, Chinese, and Vietnamese had been predominantly Jews, we’d have seen these forgotten events graphic dramatized hundreds of times, as we have Hitler’s liquidation of German and Polish Jews. Perhaps Horrywood’s lust for Communism might have succumbed to its blatant Semitism.

Regardless of all this, remember Edith Stein, Saint Benedicta of the Cross, commemorated on 9 August.