Taking pleasure in the suffering of others is not exactly a Christian virtue. But, oh my, one is tempted, for Ted Turner just lost $8 billion!

Turner is a mixed bag. On the one hand he is a very serious man and a visionary genius. On the other hand, he has said some very silly and even ugly things.

The thing about Turner, mixed bag and all, is that his still-unfolding tale is practically biblical, one of Old Testament proportions. And we do not know how it will end.

Turner is a visionary genius for looking at plain things and seeing grand things. He inherited a regional billboard company from his father. With the profits he bought a tiny Atlanta television station.

And here was his vision: The new cable television industry whimpered hungrily for programming, so Turner programmed his tiny local station like a national network and offered it via satellite to the hungry cable operators who promptly ate it with a spoon and asked for more. Turner had created the cable television network.

Turner then cast his gaze to the network monopoly on television news. In those days, it was only NBC and CBS, with ABC in a weak third. In those days, a wink or a tear from Walter Cronkite meant peace or war.

Turner saw a 24-hour all-news cable network that would challenge the monopoly. The experts laughed. The network potentates called it the Chicken News Network. But when the bombs flew into Baghdad back in 1991, the American people's eyes — even Walter Cronkite's — turned to CNN.

After selling his cable television interests to Time Warner in 1996, Turner became the largest single stockholder, and overnight his net worth went from $2 billion to just more than $9 billion. In recent months, however, AOL Time Warner Inc. has become perhaps the largest merger failure in corporate history. Turner's net worth evaporated to his 1996 level of roughly $2 billion.

It is clear Ted Turner hungers for heaven.

He talks about it often enough.

While we take pleasure and reap benefit in Turner's creations, at least for now he disappoints. Oh, how we wish he were one of ours! Alas, he is not. For along with these aforementioned great things, he has done and said the awful and disgraceful.

Turner has given millions to questionable and even evil causes. He pledged $1 billion to the United Nations through his U.N. Foundation.

Among his first gifts was to a U.N. literacy program in Latin America, whose purpose was to teach women to read so they could “better understand their reproductive rights.”

In other words, not so they could read bedtime stories to their children, but so they could abort them.

During these past few years Turner has pledged and given millions to every left-loony cause available, including the now thoroughly discredited theory of population control. He once said he was sorry he had five children, wishing instead he had only two. He never specified which three he didn't want.

And Turner seems to possess a special animus for Christianity. He said Christianity was a religion for losers. He called Catholics wearing Ash Wednesday ashes “Jesus freaks.” He once told a hooting and hollering U.N. crowd that his childhood Christianity was intolerant.

And so some of us take pleasure that Turner has lost $8 billion. Fine. He can no longer give this money to causes that are inimitable to the faith and to bodies and souls. Good. But the Turner drama is far more interesting than his money, for it continues mostly within his own soul.

It is clear Turner hungers for heaven. He talks about it often enough. He recently guaranteed he is going there. Some suggest his intemperate comments about the faith come from the childhood trauma of his sister's death and that he is simply angry with God. I believe that. Moreover, I suspect a man so publicly angry with God is closer to him than the lukewarm and wishywashy sitting next to us at Mass on Sunday.

Some fights with God are puny affairs, where someone does not want to give up some silly sin. Others, like Turner's, are grand, even biblical.

It is rumored his former wife, Jane Fonda, became a born-again Christian after she listened to a tape left by her driver in the back seat of her car. If this is true, we must note the delicacy of God's arrival. A tape left in the back seat of a car?

Delicate, indeed, are the ways of God.

An Ethiopian rode out across the desert hungering for heaven. An angel directed Philip to find the Ethiopian and teach him. In his mega-rich and secular world Turner is probably more isolated than that Ethiopian. So who is riding out to meet him, to assuage his anger and show him the things of heaven?

Turner would be a good one to get.

Frequent contributor Austin Ruse runs C-FAM (the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute).

He can be reached at [email protected].