In Vanity Fair, the Pope morphs from criminal into villain

In an interview, author Christopher Hitchens seems to have called Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope, an elderly criminal. The actual publication of the interview in Vanity Fair magazine has changed the word "criminal" to "villain."

Journalist Damian Thompson, writing for the Telegraph, got to see an early version of an interview in which Christopher Hitchens called the Pope "an elderly criminal." To his surprise, he later discovered the final publication of the interview used the word "villain" instead of "criminal." Thompson noted the change in words on his blog in the same paper. Checking the interview itself, what's most obvious is the fact neither the Pope nor Henry Kissinger are of any real importance in the context. Both men are called elderly villains. The whole interview is about Hitchens' throat cancer and how he expects to die from it. The statement about the Pope is actually minor, made in the following context:

I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.

Indeed, if one reads the whole interview, now available online, Hitchens mainly talks about his fight with cancer. However, the original Telegraph article calls it "a very unpleasant piece" and singles out the comment about the Pope as being "a nasty piece of character assassination." As for Vanity Fair and the editors' intervention with word changes, one can only guess whether or not this was meant to avoid alienating Catholic readers or if it was done on the advice of in-house lawyers, as the Pope has not yet been convicted of any crime.