Earl Appleby discusses Teresa Heinz-Kerry’s recent profile in the New Yorker and her penchant for speaking her mind and thus sounding like a modern-day Marie Antoinette (or the caricature of her preserved by history). From the story:
Despite her linguistic prowess and her worldliness, Heinz Kerry has, at times, a deaf ear for the nuances of slang, code, condescension, and vulgarity in Englishcribe some of her detractors.
Or saying that those sending relief supplies to Caribbean nations hit hard by hurricanes to “let them run naked” for a while until after the most necessary supplies of food and water are there. It’s not that what she says is necessarily wrong, it’s how she says it. “Let them run naked” evokes images of dark-skinned people as uncivilized savages. That may not be how she meant it, but it’s how she sounded.
The funny thing is that the more I hear her speak, the more she reminds me of Mrs. Howell on “Gilligan’s Island.” Mrs. H was always making suggestions and statements that showed her to be completely out of touch with the reality of the average person. And John Kerry has even admitted that he calls Ter-AY-za by a pet nickname: “Lovey.” They just satirize themselves.
It is almost like John and Teresa are on different campaigns. With John, itnote, we must be discerning when we draw any conclusion that the fruit of any Catholic apostolate is mere “accreted baggage”. Obviously, I agree the Church must respond effectively to the changing nature of the world. As is well known, Protestant revolutionaries went down the slippery slope of embracing Luther’s Sola Scriptura, rejecting Catholic tradition as “popish superstition” filled with unnecessary “accretions”.
In the Protestant attempt to reach back to the “purity and simplicity” of apostolic times, the teaching authority of the Magisterium and Sacred Tradition was roundly rejected. The collective wisdom of centuries of Church teaching was summarily dismissed in their new understanding of the Deposit of Faith. This was tantamount to rejecting that the Holy Spirit was operative in the Church since the earliest days. Consider, if one had a 50 year old’s understanding of reality, would it be wise or even feasible to return to a 5 year old’s understanding of the same?
My two cents.