Today is a Federal holiday in the United States — the only one in the American calendar designated in honor of a single individual. That individual, of course, is Martin Luther King, Jr., the most famous black leader to come out of the Civil Rights movement, and the closest thing Americans have to a national hero. Cornell is certainly doing its part to honor King’s memory. Earlier today I received this email from our esteemed president, David J. Skorton:

Dear Cornellians:

David J. Skorton
President, Cornell University

It’s such a sad thing, really, to see how badly the secular world is in need of heroes and saints. The hagiography of Martin Luther King was rehashed for us annually in public school; in the lower grades we used to have a special assembly in his honor (either before or after the holiday) in which people would read poems (the closest they could get to prayers in such a context) dedicated to King. I remember being in the school choir and singing songs especially in his honor. And of course we would get a speech from the school principal reminding us how we should try to keep his spirit in our school, and in our lives as a whole. Apparently some things stay consistent all the way through graduate school.

The only problem, of course, is that King is an utterly inappropriate object for this kind of devotion. Cornell being a university, I think it particularly shameful that they would persist in calling him “Dr. King” throughout this little message, despite the overwhelming evidence that King plagiarized significant portions of his doctoral dissertation. If Boston University had any academic integrity, his degree would have been posthumously revoked. (But instead, they established scholarships in honor of their school’s most famous cheat.) Incidentally, many of King’s other works were plagiarized too, apparently including his famous I Have a Dream speech. Is that the spirit we want kept alive in the university?

Beyond his problems with academic integrity, King’s personal life was far from admirable. It’s fairly widely known by now that King had numerous adulterous affairs, and (somewhat ironically for a man famous for preaching nonviolence) he sometimes brutalized the prostitutes he hired. Finally, King had significant connections with known communists, and with organizations known to be sympathetic to communism. A powerful leader he may have been, but he was not a notably good person. It takes a lot of revisionist history to turn this man into someone for whom a school assembly should be held.

Normally these details about King’s past simply pass unmentioned, at least by anybody who is eager to prove that they are politically correct and non-racist. When the sordid stories do come up, you sometimes hear sober reflections on how very great people can still have their flaws, we all have clay feet, etc. This is a ridiculous justification given how thoroughly America has beatified King. It’s true, of course, that all of us (with three historical exceptions) are born tainted by sin, and thus are prone to make mistakes. But virtue, as Aristotle understood, is something that affects all different aspects of a person’s life. A man might have small flaws (say, a tendency to be late, to lose his temper a little too easily, or to forget about things he promised to do) and still be called, with reasonable accuracy, a person of character. Someone who falsifies his academic work and hires and beats prostitutes cannot be called a man of character, and there’s no evidence that King ever repented of these mistakes or mended his ways. Does everyone have clay feet? Then show me the clay feet of St. Agnes (whose feast day this is.) Or perhaps that’s unfair (there being somewhat limited information now about the life of St. Agnes), so how about the clay feet of St. Padre Pio or Bl. Theresa of Calcutta? Everyone may have a few peccadilloes, but a saint should at least show significant signs of having lived a virtuous life. Martin Luther King was not a virtuous man. We might still admire certain specific actions of his, but he should not be venerated.

The problem, of course, is that our country needs saints. We need figures to admire, and paragons to show us how to live our lives. In the secular world, there’s kind of a dearth. Who are leftists and atheists supposed to look up to? Bill Clinton? Noam Chomsky? That great Man of Peace and Reason, Al Gore? No wonder they settle on King, who at least has the advantage of having been murdered by a person who probably was genuinely racist.

I know that there are some foolish liberal parishes that join the public schools in holding events to honor Martin Luther King on his national holiday. (In fact, the American bishops are said to have put his name forward as a non-Catholic figure to be honored at Pope John Paul II’s Jubilee Mass in 2000. I couldn’t find anything on whether the suggestion was accepted, which I hope means that it wasn’t.) I propose that we take a different line. Today is a day to pray for those unfortunate souls who have no better heroes in their lives than Mr. Martin Luther King, Jr. May they one day have the grace to be inspired by true saints, whose examples of faith and purity can lead them back to God.