Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: secular Catholic hero? - Arts & Culture - suggestion that President Bush may be imitating Jack Ryan, a fictional character

Catholic New Times, Oct 20, 2002 by Chuck Bishop

Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan adventure novels prove that life imitates art and create a new kind of secular Catholic in the person of the hero. Unfortunately, they also seem to provide many of the ideas used by President George W. Bush to delineate recent United States foreign policy.

As a fictional character, Jack Ryan has an eventful life. He helps to steal a new Russian-guided missile submarine in The Hunt for Red October and becomes the U.S. president when a disaffected Japan Airlines captain crashes his 747 into the Capitol building at the end of Debt of Honor (published years before 9/11).

It is widely accepted that the themes of Clancy's novels reflect whatever issues were exercising the American military and intelligence establishments at the time--from the collapse of the Soviet Union to various kinds of international terrorism and the creation of "weapons of mass destruction" by politically unreliable governments.

Inevitably, Clancy's recipe for defeating the disparate collection of bad guys in his books is the application of various kinds of deadly force by Ryan and his colleagues. Assisted by CIA spooks John Clark and Domingo Chavez, Ryan uses everything from silenced pistols to laser-guided bombs to terminate the opponents of truth, justice and the American way.

Throughout the Ryan series, Clancy makes it clear that his upwardly mobile hero, and many of his associates are Catholic. Ryan, himself, is a product of parochial schools: Boston College and the Jesuit Georgetown University, and he sends his kids to Catholic schools. Both Clark and Chavez (professional CIA Special Operations assassins) admit to being Catholic on a number of occasions, as do his CIA friends, Ed and Mary Pat Foley. Despite all of this scene-setting, none of the plots place Ryan or Clancy's other Catholic characters anywhere near the sacraments or a church. While the characters may pray occasionally, details of these prayers (or to whom they are directed) are never revealed.

This writer confesses to enjoying Clancy's novels and to rereading them from time to time, but the way that his themes have been picked up by Bush's speechwriters and policy analysts is worrying.

A careful review of both Executive Orders and The Bear and the Dragon, in which the Catholic Jack Ryan has reached the U.S. presidency, make it clear that the fictional Ryan's hard-nosed approach to America's enemies is providing a useful model for the evangelical George W. Bush.

There is a very close fit between the fictional "Ryan Doctrine," as stated in Executive Orders (just before Chavez and Clark land laser-guided bombs on the villain) and Bush's recent pre-emption doctrine.

According to both Clancy and Bush, only America's interests count. Revenge is a necessary evil. Because Clancy has carefully excised the religious components from the Catholicism of Ryan and his associates, neither the Sermon on the Mount nor Christ's other commandments of love and peace need interfere unduly with realpolitik.

The immense popularity of Clancy's novels may well have suggested to Bush's advisors that life could indeed imitate art. Just where Clancy's secular Catholicism, as interpreted by Bush, leaves the rest of us Catholics--under the New World Order--remains to be seen.

Chuck Bishop writes from Kamloops, B.C.