Rev. Dr. Christopher M. Hitchens

---

Born in Liverpool in 1965 to an Anglo-Irish father and a mother of fierce Dutch Reformed stock, the Reverend Dr Christopher Hitchens grew up in a household where piety and sarcasm were the twin pillars of dinner conversation.  Educated at Ampleforth, then the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, he earned his doctorate (subject: Koine Greek Humour and the Rhetoric of the Pauline Epistles) before returning to Ireland, where he quickly became known as a cleric of considerable intellect and even greater indiscretion.

Giles and the good Doctor first crossed paths in the early 2000s when Hitchens was serving as Catholic curate of Ballymagaleen — a village that tests the theological resilience of any man of faith.  Their friendship began, as Giles tells it, “in Koine and ended in cognac.”

A pun on metanoia led to an exchange of hip flasks and phone numbers. By the second week, they were swapping books on patristics and borrowing each other’s hangovers.  Their friendship, now over two decades old, has aged like a fine single malt — complex, warm, and faintly disreputable.

Dr Hitchens once held the lofty post of Spiritual Director at the Pontifical Hibernian College in Rome, where his sermons were considered “too inspired, too entertaining, and far too gay-friendly.”
Following the Vatican’s mass reassignment of faculty, he returned to Ireland and rebranded himself as a strict party-line priest, carefully walking the narrow ridge between obedience and irony.

Now sixty, he serves as Chaplain at the Diocesan Seminary of Saint Bede the Confused, and Secretary to the Bishop, a position which, he claims, “involves more typing than temptation.”

His private ambition remains either a mitre or a Chair at Maynooth, though he suspects both posts are occupied by dullards.  In the meantime, he directs the diocesan amateur dramatics society, The Saintly Players, and continues to scandalise the faculty by staging Wilde and Brecht in the same Lent.

The Reverend Doctor is a man of extremes and refinements:

• Appearance: Gaunt, bald, and perpetually windblown, like a desert hermit who’s misplaced his camel.
   
• Speech: Possessed of a deep, sonorous baritone — the only thing he shares with his atheist namesake.
   
• Personality: Believes firmly in God, but less firmly in the Church’s administrative competence.
   
• Diet: Lives chiefly on coffee, cassocks, and his famous chile con carne, which he insists “contains the full theology of spice.”
   
• Vices: Vodka, self-quotation, and the conviction that he could have been a fine mountaineer had he been born on a slope.
   
• Drug Policy: Disapproves of cannabis, yet cannot resist saying “Pass the dutchie” whenever it appears, laughing as though it were a theological pun.

Their friendship has become one of those enduring oddities of the Irish: the philosopher and the priest, the satirist and the supplicant, united by an unholy respect for fine liquor and poor taste.

They hold long, circular debates about theology, literature, and life over tumblers of Polish vodka, finishing each conversation at the point where it began — somewhere between blasphemy and brotherhood.

As Giles puts it:

“He believes in God, and I believe in good whiskey — between us, that’s faith enough for a small village.”
 

Known throughout the diocese as the Bishop’s Lightning Rod, he absorbs theological controversy and discharges it theatrically.  Parishioners find him exhausting but oddly inspiring.
Even his critics concede that his sermons “contain more truth than accuracy.”