I’m listening withy difficulty
I came away from last night’s debate at the Conway Hall on the upcoming Papal visit with an uneasy feeling I found myself quickly trying to dispel, drowning a pint with a sympathetic friend at a local pub.
I write as a journalist, author and Catholic who found myself poorly represented by Austen Ivereigh and Fr Christopher Jamison OSB, coordinator and patron respectively of Catholic Voices before a packed audience, in which a majority appeared less than enamoured with our current Pope.
Catholic Voices is a group that somewhat presumptuously describes itself as “authoritative but unofficial”, having set the upper age limit of its foot soldiers at 40 , while claiming the ‘blessing’ of the Bishops of England and Wales for its defence of Pope Benedict XV1.
Ivereigh is a former deputy editor of the widely respected Catholic Weekly The Tablet and a one-time spokesman for the Archbishop of Westminster who has worked hard in more recent times on behalf of the low-paid. Fr Jamison is a former Abbot at the public school Worth. He featured in a popular and inspirational TV series The Monastery. While not among the speakers, very much in evidence last night was Jack Valero, the clever director of Opus Dei in the UK. He led the applause of the Pro-Pope team with fanatical passion and afterwards fraternised with his enthusiastic young charges, claiming the evening to have been a success.
I’m not so sure, Jack. Let me tell you how I, a mere spectator saw it from up in the Gods. Your speakers came out with the air of lambs prepared for the slaughter, but soon seemed to relish the lion’s den which was not really that anyway. This was no 16th century Tyburn (Jesuits professing their faith after being brutally tortured and before being hung drawn and quartered) ; not was it the Catholic Evidence Guild of the last century with its young volunteers (my late father Tom was a particular active young member as a schoolboy)taking on the professionals from the Rationalist Association and the Protestant Alliance in Hyde Park Corner and Hampstead Heath when Communism and Fascism was advancing and to be a Catholic in England still meant being discriminated against in public office and treated like an eccentric.
No, this was the Conway Hall, a centre of free speech and progressive thought, in a multi-faith multi-cultural Britain, 2010, in an event organised by humanists to which Catholics had been cordially invited, days away from a historic state visit by the Pope- judged a waste of money by some secularists, and some Catholics but which noone, lets be real, will ban, still less repress.
The debate came alive briefly thanks to the somewhat self-conscious combative air Evereigh adopted. He fought back -as if this was the Oxford Union- against the alleged secularist onslaught led by Peter Tatchell dismissing most of what the human rights activist had to say about the Vatican and issues like gay and women’s rights, as “absurd”. In fact Tatchell by contrast was uncharacteristically quite restrained and reasonable in his arguments. Tatchell’s statement that the UK was about to receive a Pope who pursued a “hard line intolerant version of Catholicism which even many Catholics reject themselves” was at least worth debating.
It was left to a monk Fr Jamison with almost Jesuitical verve, to ignore AJ Grayling’s humorous snipes – e.g.”The Pope can go to Bognor Regis if he wants but I dont see why I should pay for it”, and point out instead his historical innacuracies about the nature of the Holy See and role of Popes, past and present, before trying to respond as sensitively as he could to the most moving contribution of the whole evening- the painful recollection of a middle-aged Catholic woman who had been abused by a priest as a young girl.
Fr Jamison made much of the ‘struggles’ all schools had faced in coping with the implication of the Children’s Act 1989. He put emphasis on the great strides made by the Bishops of England and Wales (he didn’t mention Ireland) in recent years in tightening up their own system of checks and balances. But his monastic humility was made present belatedly in a debate that showed its other lowest points in displays of arrogance (Ivereigh), irreverence (Grayling) and the isolated incidents of verbal abuse from the floor’s atheists-thankfully reprimanded by Polly Toynbee (an excellent chairperson, as well as humanist.).
Fr Jamison fell short in fully reflecting how the sex abuse crisis of recent months has had a different character to previous scandals. As Fr Michael Holman, the Provincial Superior of the British Jesuits wrote earlier this summer in The Tablet: “The (crisis) has spotlighted the inadequate way in which the (Catholic )Church has sometimes handled these cases and the damage that can be done when a culture of ‘don’t rock the boat’ prevails.”
As Holman went on to point out , what is at issue is the Catholic Church’s capacity to respond with effective protocols of conduct and control but also the need for action to address the underlying culture, including the way it exercises power and authority and goes about making decisions.
In their unremitting campaign to defend the Pope from his detractors, Catholic Voices are certainly not rocking the boat of Church dogma and authority. Liberal Catholics like me filled with doubt have clearly been judged not just over aged but also a liability in PR terms.
But this latest Crusade in our midst is in danger of bypassing the necessary debate that continues among Catholic themselves, many of whose voices are ignored if not suppressed by the Vatican. It also risks substituting a fruitful dialogue and interaction with the secular world with a battle zone where love, hope and the common good gives way to fundamentalism and fanaticism. There were Catholic Voices I heard last night that verged on the sanctimonious –that is what led me to the pub, without joining my fellow co-religionists It could have been worse. I could have lost my Faith. I still have it this morning, just.
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