Pass the sick bag, Alice Cooper

I think I can claim to be one of the world’s leading cynics when it comes to rock stars saving the world.

But I am not hardened enough to ward off waves of nausea at the thought of last month’s benefit gig at Madison Square Garden.

Headline act, according to the New York Times, was “Sir Paul McCartney”.

“Is this the New York Royal Fucking Times?”, asks San Francisco-based New York cultural commentator Danny Cassidy by e-mail: “What is this Sir Paul shit anyway? We are not a fucking lousy monarchy yet. We are a good old capitalist dictatorship with a thin veneer of democracy. Sir Paul sucks anyway, as do the rest of the fucking assholes (except Clapton) they have lined up.”

Cassidy takes the A-list insult personally. His home parish, St. Camillus, lost 32 firefighters in the September 11th atrocities.

The NY Times piece (October 19th) which sparked his outrage told that, “It fell to Harvey Weinstein to give the idea its first big push by approaching Sir Paul McCartney. He cajoled Sir Paul to sit with him in the first-class cabin of a New York-to-London red-eye on Sept. 23. By the time the flight was passing near Greenland, Sir Paul had agreed to headline a five-hour extravaganza… Along with Mr. Weinstein, the other main movers behind the event are John Sykes, president of the VH1 cable network, and James L. Dolan, the president of Cablevision...

”Harvey basically got on a plane with Paul McCartney,” Mr. Dolan said, “and wouldn’t let him off the plane until Paul said yes.”

There’s more, much more, along the same lines, but the nausea wave is building towards tidal proportions.

Weinstein is one of the most strident Zionists west of Sharon. VH1 had the rights to “telecast” the gig. Cablevision owns the Garden.

We are invited to be awed at the imagined scene of Weinstein and McCartney, unhassled by the hoi polloi five miles high in their first-class capsule, achieving an apotheosis of noblesse oblige as they agree a plan for top celebrities to serenade the grief of the stricken non-celebs beneath them.

Among the “fucking assholes” who joined in this enterprise were Jagger, Bowie, Clapton, and The Who; plus overrated newer acts like Jay-Z and Destiny’s Child; Bon Jovi and Billy Joel; and “emcee stars” including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jim Carrey and Mike Myers. Bono and the Edge didn’t play for personal reasons; Richard Gere was booed offstage for using the word “forgiveness”.

The gig began with a choral version of Bowie’s “Heroes” and ended, according to Cassidy, with the entire mob on stage for a mass rendition of “Oh CIA Can You See It”.

Pass the sick-bag, Alice Cooper.

Recent events have caused me to neglect my irreligious duties, but fear not. I’m back, and this time it’s impersonal.

It’s no skin off my nose that the devil – here I quote Archbishop D’Souza – ”made a number of attempts to enter into Mother Teresa at night”.

It’s an oddity in the story of the Albanian nun’s devilment that she and Henry D’Souza “providentially” (Irish Catholic) found themselves in the same Calcutta hospital at the same time and suffering from the same ailment.

The pair were in the Calcutta General in August 1996, having undergone angioplasty to relieve cardiac problems when D’Souza became aware that Teresa was becoming “distressed and very agitated and unable to sleep”, and had taken to ripping out drips and wires and writhing and screeching when nurses tried to re-insert them in her arms and body. (Doesn’t conjure up a pretty picture, does it?).

The doctors, despite extensive tests, could come up with “no natural

explanation” for Teresa’s condition.

As we know, when doctors attest that there’s no natural explanation for a medical phenomenon, the Catholic Church tends to conclude that the explanation is supernatural. Thus, D’Souza decided that there was “an evil spirit” “troubling” and/or “worrying” the wizened nun, and ordered Fr. Rosario Stroscio to “say the prayer of exorcism over her”. Stroscio was the diocesean exorcist for Calcutta. D’Sousa says he told him: “You command the devil to go if he’s there. In the name of the Church, as Archbishop, I command you”.

Sure enough, soon after Stroscio had conducted the exorcism, Teresa fell into a peaceful sleep.

D’Souza’s account, when it first became public in August, caused consternation at the highest levels in the Catholic Church. He has since been scrambling to back-track. The mention of an “evil spirit” was not necessarily a reference to the devil, he now claims. Stroscio’s recitation of the exorcism prayer was not “a real exorcism”.

I’m afraid this won’t do.

Catholic doctrine provides for two types of exorcism, simple and solemn. Simple exorcism can be conducted in private by any Catholic of good standing – essentially, it amounts to a Catholic in a “state of grace” saying a prayer over the supposedly occupied soul. Solemn exorcism, on the other hand, is conducted in a public way by a priest specifically appointed to the task by the bishop of the diocese in question.

The official line of the Church now seems to be either that the exorcism conducted on Teresa was of the simple variety, and therefore of no great significance, or that it wasn’t an exorcism at all. The shiftiness of this position testifies to the continuing anxiety of Church bosses.

A simple exorism may be relatively informal and involve less elaborate ritual than a solemn exorcism. But the condition the procedure is designed to alleviate, possession by the devil, is of equal and terrible significance in both cases.

On the basis of what has been publicly stated, there is no doubt that Mother Teresa underwent an exorcism. And the balance of evidence suggests that it was a solemn exorcism. Fr. Pat Collins, a leading writer on the spiritual aspects of Catholic teaching, in the course of trying to argue that the affair didn’t amount to much (Irish Catholic, October 11th), conceded: “The exorcism conducted by Fr. Stroscio was carried out in the name of the Church in a public way”. Which is as close as makes no difference to a Catholic Dictionary definition of solemn exorcism.

D’Souza’s attempted distinction between the devil and an “evil spirit” indicates a degree of desperation. If the distinction be maintained, it follows that there is a source of evil in the world other than the devil. This – we might call it the “two devils theory” – runs directly counter not only to Catholic teaching but to the eschatological basis of all Judaeo-Christian thought.

Stroscio’s description of the dispersal of the “evil spirit” confirms that the exorcism was for real. The wimpled advocate of misery for the masses, he recalls, “seemed to be labouring under some distress” when he arrived to cast out the evil spirit, and “did not say the prayer with me”, or seem to respond at all to his ministrations. Later, however, he was assured by some of the drone-nuns in permanent attendance on Teresa: “Mother Teresa had slept peacefully for the rest of the night”. The exorcism was a success. This is text-book stuff.

We can well understand the Church’s embarrassment that its relevant official believed in 1996 that Teresa was possessed by the devil. Since her death the following year, she’s been fast-tracked for sainthood by Rome. Any suggestion that Satan had recently been a house-guest in her heart would raise fraught complications. As well as an obvious question: how long had all this been going on?

I mean, if Mother Teresa was possessed by the devil prior to the exorcism of 1996, how about 1995? ’94? ’84? ’64?

Was it herself or the devil who provided cover for blood-thirsty dictators from Duvalier in Haiti to Bokassa in the Central African Republic? Duvalier, interestingly, was a devotee of voodoo and regularly communed with the “dark spirits”. Was it the woman from Skopje or the devil from hell who urged women in sub-Saharan Africa to have “five, ten, even 20” children each, on a promise that “’Our Lady’ will provide”. Which one was it refused to allow couples who used contraception to adopt babies entrusted to her nuns, because “a couple which uses contraception is incapable of love”?

And if she did work the occasional wonder during her lifetime, did it result from the grace of god or the power of darkness?

Beelzebub or Mother Teresa. Difficult to tell, of course, even from good photographs.

“Mother Teresa? She’d ate ya’”, the great Pom Boyd once wisely observed.

But the Pope still intends to declare her blessed. Who’s he’s in league with, then, eh?