I wanted to post something about Joy Behar's comments as soon as I heard the story Thursday morning, but I was already getting ready for work. And then on Friday, I wrestled with Brews You Can Use. So this morning, I'll address it.
Here's what she said:
Okay, it's ridiculous. Fr. Jonathan Morris points out: "Nobody is beatified or canonized because they hear voices. People are declared saints because they have first of all exemplified a heroic living of Christian virtue." It's because they are "moral miracles," to borrow a phrase from Thomas Dubay's new book, Saints: A Closer Look. No one is declared a saint because they hear voices. If anything, that hurts their chances at sainthood, especially if they're adults. (Dubay's book, incidentally, discusses dozens of traits of sainthood, and he doesn't once mention "visions" or "voices.")
A spokesman for "The View" said it was just "a theory." Quite frankly, I find that more insulting than Behar's joke. A theory, based on what? It doesn't come anywhere near to rising to the level of a "theory." There's not even enough substance to make it a good joke (you might as well frame a joke around the premise that Italians are terribly laid back).
But there's a screen of reality behind Behar's comments. The screen is this: people aren't ready to accept saints, just as they're not ready to accept holiness. They will look for ways to rid themselves of it.
It's nothing new. I pulled down the excellent book by E.I. Watkins, Neglected Saints, and went back through the biography of Blessed Osanna of Mantua, who as a young child in the fifteenth century had seizures of ecstasy. Her father and others didn't like it:
[H]e tormented his daughter, no doubt by blows, to rid her by this rough treatment of her supposedly morbid condition. Now indeed or later, burns and other wounds were inflicted, and once in church a woman drove a sharp needle into Osanna's flesh. She felt nothing till she returned to normal consciousness and with it to the pain of those wounds.
Osanna's father would beat God out of his daughter. Behar would medicate God out of people. It's nothing new, just the tools have changed.
It's particularly troubling because often people who have visions or hear voices are mentally sick and do need medication. Groeschel wrote about it in A Still, Small Voice. Sample:
Severe mental illness, especially a certain kind of paranoid schizophrenia, may create in a subject's mind not only a grandiose need to make some monumental contribution to history but also hallucinatory experiences of a pseudo-mystical type.
So how do you tell the genuine visionaries from the sick? That's a delicate subject, and one that we don't want to trust to the brass know-it-all attitude of modern science that drove Behar's joke. At bottom, Behar's comment was a mere regurgitation of the empirical attitude that underlies public discourse today: If science can't explain it, medicate it. Modern science can't explain saints, and therefore they merit medication. Case closed. Fortunately for us, most saints don't have visions or hear voices. Most saints, Dubay likes to point out in his book, are quite practical and have more common sense than most people.
Behar's comment was ridiculous, yes, but behind the ridiculousness is a world view starkly at odds with Christianity and especially Catholicism. That's what ought to concern people more than Behar. She's just a comedian that uses the material lying around her, the type of material we all have access to but that a comedian can make funny. Here, the material is a secularism that is so thorough it doesn't realize it's secular. Behar isn't the problem. The cancerous secularism that her comment reveals is the problem.
