Susan Sarandon, Smear Artist

Susan Sarandon’s left-wing “activism” is too well known to be recounted here in much detail. The actress has embraced causes as various and predictable as the 2008 presidential campaign of John Edwards and the bona fides of author-murderer Jack Henry Abbott (1944-2002), for whom she named her son. Last week, however, Sarandon hit a nerve.

In a question-and-answer session with actor Bob Balaban at the Bay Street Theatre on Long Island, she recounted her role as the anti-death penalty nun Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking (1995). Indeed, so impressed was Sarandon by Sister Helen that she sent a copy of Prejean’s memoir, on which the movie was based, to the pope: “The last one [John Paul II],” she specified, “not this Nazi one we have now.” When Balaban gently rebuked her for this slur of Benedict XVI, Sarandon pointedly repeated it.

The Scrapbook does not expect, or require, that Susan Sarandon count herself among the pope’s admirers: People are entitled to their own opinions. However, as the late Senator Moynihan once ruled, they are not entitled to their own facts. Benedict XVI, born Joseph Ratzinger, is German, as everybody knows; but he was not a Nazi, as Sarandon should know. At the age of 14 (1941), he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, as required by law, but is reported to have skipped most meetings. Later, while a seminarian (1943), he was drafted into the German Army’s antitank corps but deserted to his family’s home (1945) when his unit ceased to exist, and was briefly incarcerated in an Allied POW camp. By November 1945, age 18, he was back in the seminary.