Tammany on the Tiber: Enhancing the Allure of Celebrity through “Sainthood”

Tammany Hall was (in)famously the political machine in New York City in which for decades the political “bosses” ran an efficient and corrupt political machine based on patronage and graft. According to Wikipedia, Tammany “depended for its power on government contracts, jobs, patronage, corruption, and ultimately the ability of its leaders to swing the popular vote.”

Now Maureen Mullarkey now has compared the Vatican to Tammany Hall (HT: Paul Bassett) in its recent rush to name popes as “Saints” (Pope John XXIII and John Paul II recently canonized, and now rumblings that Pope Paul IV, the “contraception” pope is headed down that path as well).

It’s a system that can vote for its own infallibility AND its own celebrity. And the celebrity of a Saint Al Capone. Of course, it’s a system that also hides its own incompetence and its leftist agenda behind flashy headlines as well:

Catholics—popes among them—are no less subject than anyone else to the lure of the star system and its crafted emphasis on personality.

It took no time at all for Francis to degrade into a celebrity. And like any politically astute showman, he takes to the camera for carefully designed photo-ops. (Posing with an anti-fracking T-Shirt in November, he conferred on activist filmmakers the kind of endorsement we expect from Yoko Ono and Matt Damon.) Media-conscious symbolic gestures are mirrored in an airy, imprecise rhetoric that is a receptacle for whatever meaning the public drops into it.

Francis clearly likes the elusive phrase “economy of exclusion.” He has used it before. Imprecise, it is a phrase for rent to fixers and mongers of any stripe. This time he served it to Ban Ki-Moon and visiting attachés of that grand sepulcher on the East River. But what do the words signify? Are they a gloved jab at the crony capitalism disabling his native Argentina? Do they aim at an American president who obligates an unborn generation to insurmountable debts not of its making? Was Francis making veiled reference to the debased status of imperiled Christians in Syria? Or, perhaps, to Islamo-leftism and the price of totalitarian theocracy? Might the phrase have sideways, metaphoric application to Vatican recognition of a Palestinian state that refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist?

None of these. Uttered in concert with an autocratic injunction for “legitimate redistribution” of wealth, our pope was lending his office to apostles of the same tired, ideological hostility toward the market that ends in economic slavery under the guise of social justice. Papal messianism, bolstered by lack of competence in economics, is the road to a familiar hell, however finely paved with lovely intention.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/mullarkey/2014/05/tammany-on-the-tiber