An e-mail:

As a student of Political Science and Catholic Theology, I enjoyed your most recent column … regarding the MSM and religion, although I thought that I could add a few points about Mother Theresa that went unmentioned. Something that the media (and a large number of secularists, particularly of the internet variety) doesn’t understand is that Mother T’s questions of faith reinforce her candidacy for Canonization, and that even a cursory study of hagiography — the long extinguished literary form otherwise known as the Saints’ Lives — reveals that it is more common for Saints to have their faith challenged than to hold their faith confidently. Not surprisingly, this fits in with the Catholic Theological study of “Angelology” and “Demonology” (sciences that are not usually taken seriously by anybody other than their students), where those people who exhume the most faith and who are most touched by God are those who are usually most challenged by the threat of absence. I’ve found myself repeating the adage that it is no coincidence and it is no accident that all of Christ’s Apostles rejected him at one time, and that of all of the people in the Gospels, the only person whom Jesus promises a seat next to him in Heaven is a convicted sinner (history suggesting perhaps a Jewish rebel like Jesus) dying on the cross. Mother Theresa’s confessions (if such a word could be used lightly given the context) similarly affirm Theology, that the greatest fear, or perhaps the greatest threat posed to believers, isn’t death, or evil, or something else, but the absence of God. The Saints Lives, even the Gospels themselves, are rife with temptation by the Devil (and I feel childish even remarking it, because mentioning “Satan” or “the Devil” just don’t seem like mature things to talk about, though they should be)… and the primary tool of temptation is void, or lack of belief.
Anyhow, enjoyed the article, but I think that the MSM has missed the point with this, and it’s just an example of something that they simply don’t get. There is an anecdote that, I think, I pulled from an NRO article sometime ago (I don’t have it, but I’ve read it to myself so many times I’ve almost memorized it) about a fresco painting in Bressone where somebody was told to paint a picture of an elephant, but the artist had never seen an elephant, so he could merely go by description alone. He painted a large, heavy horse, with floppy ears, with an unusually elongate nose…. but it was still a horse’s long nose. The anecdote follows that in a similar vain, when the MSM concerns itself with religion, they largely have absolutely no concept of God, Theology, and of the thing that they are talking about, so they do their best to transcode a political or social message from a situation that is deeply religious or Theological. The result, of course, is that they are merely painting a poor caricature of the thing — a heavy horse with a long nose.
I apologize for the length and understand you do not have time to read such lengthy e-mails, but, regardless, I liked your article.