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Article in the Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2010/09/pope_visits_britain
Sep 16th 2010, 17:35 by Bagehot
FROM my office window high up in St James's, I can see the processional route
down which Pope Benedict XVI will soon pass, on his state visit to Britain.
Even in austerity Britain state visits are taken seriously. Bicycling home late
at night over the past fortnight I have watched in amazement as squadrons of
huge, beeping and clanking machines stripped the special red tarmac from the
surface of the Mall and the street in front of Buckingham Palace, then replaced
it with a fresh layer. Yellow and white papal flags alternate with the union
flag all the way down the Mall. Crash barriers await the expected crowds.
If you judged these things solely by press headlines, you would assume that the
pope was about to face a lynch mob of jeering Protestants and vengeful
atheists. Most Britons, we are told, are disgusted at the thought of spending a
single pound on the visit, while various bigwigs from the arts and sciences
have written a scornful open letter to "Pope Ratzinger", attacking Vatican
teachings on condom use, gay rights, the role of women and the handling of the
clerical sex abuse scandal. Much has been made, at the 11th hour, of remarks by
Cardinal Walter Kasper, a close adviser to the pope, who said Britain was in
the grip of a new and aggressive atheism, and that travelling through Heathrow
airport was at times like landing "in a Third World country". (Rather
brilliantly, the cardinal is citing an attack of gout as his reason for
cancelling his plan to accompany the pope to Britain.)
In return, various conservative commentators have detected old bigotries
surging back to life, as newspaper columnists and polemicists denounce the pope
and Catholicism in vitriolic terms. Such abuse would never be allowed if it
were directed at Muslims, it has been argued: Britain remains in the grip of
atavistic anti-Catholicism.
Hmm. On the one hand, I admit it is impossible to look at some of the pope's
critics and not detect a whiff of ancient prejudices. Richard Dawkins, the
evolutionary biologist and militant atheist, does not just criticise the
Vatican's (shameful) handling of clerical child abuse over the years. He writes
that the pope is a "leering old villain in a frock", whose conservativism is,
however, perfectly suited to destroying his "evil" church from within. Thus,
says Mr Dawkins, the pope:
"should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice - the whole profiteering,
woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution - while it
tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts
and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears."
I agree it is also remarkable that nobody seemed to blink when Julie Burchill,
a noisy columnist, wrote that:
"if one is a Catholic, then surely double-speak and duplicity are second
nature. A Church which rails against abortion and then spends decades covering
up the most appalling degree of child abuse obviously has no problem with
holding two opposing ideas at once – and at least the opposition to termination
now makes perfect sense, with hindsight. All those unborn children that could
have been molested – what a waste!"
But I think it is not right to say that such noisy commentators are only tough
on the Catholic church, and spare other religions their ire. I think that
conservative Muslims are regularly criticised in the British newspapers for
their treatment of women, and for any statements they make questioning gay
rights. I think that socially conservative American politicians get it in the
neck, and so do conservative Jews when they use religious arguments to defend
settlement-building, say.
I also remember secular or left-wing commentators with equally fierce things to
say about the Catholic church in Belgium, France or Spain: and all those are
majority Catholic countries.
What I really think marks Britain out is it is unusually secular (more than 60%
of Britons never attend religious services), and it has an unusually rude and
raucous press. What is more, mainstream Anglicanism is about as far removed
from a fundamentalist faith as you can find.
My own scripture lessons at school stopped when I was 12 years old, and were
taken by the cricket master. I do not recall any funny stuff about passion or
the mysteries of faith: the rules of cricket (as laid out in Wisden) somehow
blended seamlessly with the laws of the New Testament. Without even knowing it,
I think, my teacher would bowl and bat at imaginary balls as he talked of
events in the New Testament: "And then the Devil took Jesus to the mountain top
and tempted him, [overarm leg spin]. A-a-nd then Jesus smote him [cover drive]".
In short, I think Catholicism gets it in the neck in Britain because it is a
socially conservative, stern form of religious faith, which believes in sacred
mysteries.
In this week's print column, I look at a related question, which is how exactly
Britain stopped being rather a sectarian place, in the space of more or less
one generation.
For the piece, I spoke to several successful Catholics, including professors of
religious history and a former British ambassador to the European Union. They
all volunteered stories of family rifts and arguments triggered by mixed
Anglican-Catholic marriages. The ambassador quoted a letter written to his
father by a great aunt, informing him that in her local churchyard lay three
hundred years of family members from good yeoman stock, and he was not to
betray them all by raising his children as Catholics. A professor told me that
his Catholic bishop had forbidden him to study theology in the 1960s, because
his local theology department at university was run by Protestants. He was told
he could study philosophy, though that department was run by Marxist atheists.
They could do a Catholic boy much less harm, the bishop said. And this was
1960s England.
Today, I am pretty sure, most English people under 40 simply cannot remember
why their grandparents were fussed about Catholicism.
The reasons why are various. My interviewees suggested that a lot of sectarian
prejudice was actually snobbery against Irish working class immigrants, who had
made up the bulk of England's Roman Catholic population in the 20th century.
Once Britain's Irish immigrants started going to mainstream schools, became
more middle class and even stopped sounding foreign, I was told, English
tolerance of Catholics grew. (Scotland and Northern Ireland are slightly
different cases).
It mattered that from 1914 onwards, Catholic France was firmly replaced by
Prussian-dominated Germany as the major threat to British security, another
professor suggested. The Roman Catholic church in England also became less
hardline in its own opposition to mixed marriages: until the 1960s, these were
condemned as a threat to the faith and outsiders who married Catholics had to
sign a pledge to raise their children in the Church of Rome.
Above all, historical ignorance—that great anaesthetic of all debate in
England—began to work its magic from the 1960s and 1970s onwards.
This has political consequences, for both good and ill, I suggest in my column:
Jonathan Powell, a former chief of staff to Tony Blair and prime ministerial
envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process, has written that Mr Blair’s
“relative ignorance” of Irish history was a peacemaking advantage: his boss had
no “historical baggage”. You can take the thought further: a settlement in
Northern Ireland was arguably possible only once most English voters ceased to
comprehend sectarian hatreds in that province.
Yet very little of this has ever been debated consciously by the English: that
is the cost of their national genius for forgetting rather than forgiving. This
is a shame, because the death of overt anti-Catholicism is a rather hopeful
story—involving reciprocal tolerance and socioeconomic progress. One big change
came when the Catholic church in England became less hardline towards its own
flock, says Eamon Duffy of Cambridge University. Before the mid-1960s, bishops
would still tell devout youngsters where they could safely study, and denounced
marriage to non-Catholics as a threat to the faith. For Diarmaid MacCulloch of
Oxford University, English tolerance of Catholicism moved in lockstep with the
emergence of a mainstream middle class among Irish immigrant communities.
An optimist might see a chance there for Islam, another conservative religion
currently causing alarm. A bit of affluence here, a bit less defensiveness
there, and before you know it, the English cannot remember why a minority
worried them so much. It is a muddled, imperfect solution (just ask Catholics
offended by this week’s pope-bashing). But with the English, muddle is often as
good as it gets.
