Don’t expect to be loved

Stuart Reid Charterhouse
It was already a bumper year for Catholic-bashers, but this week it got better. On Monday night there was an extraordinary debate in London, organised by Intelligence Squared, on the motion: “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.” Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, opposing the motion, wiped the floor with Ann Widdecombe and Archbishop Onaiyekan (of Abuja, Nigeria), who supported it.
The final vote was: for the motion: 268, against: 1,862. Apparently it was the biggest No vote in the history of Intelligence Squared.
Ed West reports on the debate elsewhere. If it’s the facts you are after, a coherent account of the evening, go there now. I want to dwell here on what the debate may tell us about anti-Catholicism in England today.
Fry and Hitchens were well-armed and wellprepared, and they deployed their WMD to great effect. Rockets rained down on the usual Catholic suspects: Hitler, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, the Crusades, Pius XII, Mussolini, the sack of Constantinople, the spread of HIV/Aids, Franco, Salazar, Bishop Richard Williamson – or “Roger” Williamson, as Hitchens called him, in what for me was the only light relief of the evening – and, to quote Hitchens again, the “institutionalisation of the rape and torture and maltreatment of children”.
It was the same old song with the same old beat. The audience loved it. There was gleeful clapping. Hitchens and Fry sure know how to work a hall. On Monday they mixed stand-up comedy with a burning sense of their own moral righteousness. They did not have a doubt between them. There was nothing tentative in their approach, nothing nuanced; but there is no need for subtlety if your purpose is to trash religion. At one point Fry, who was the more passionate of the two, said: “I think of myself as one who is filled with love.” Ann Widdecombe gave a feisty performance, but it was not good enough. The archbishop was out of his league, and towards the end seemed shocked and upset.
The audience was made up for the most part of student types and of relaxed, charming, nicely dressed professional and media folk. They were the sort of people you’d like to invite to lunch if you had a nice enough house and weren’t such a saddo.
These were nice people, in other words, antiCatholic to be sure, but in a rather self-deprecating English way. You felt that they wanted to have their most cherished disbeliefs confirmed, without being too noisy about it, and they reminded one of what has become increasingly obvious in recent years: that many of the well-educated, high-income professionals who run the country think Christianity is absurd, and that unyielding Catholicism is doubly absurd, even if it gave us Tuscany. But the times are changing, and the English may become less easy-going. It is possible that within 50 years, for example, it may be against the law for the Catholic Church to proclaim its teaching on sexual morality or to continue to bar women from the priesthood.
Already it is against the law for adoption agencies to refuse to place children with homosexual couples. The time could be coming, too, when doctors and nurses will lose their jobs if they refuse to perform abortions. If I were an extremist I might be tempted to suggest that one day Catholics will not be allowed to appear on Question Time. In other words, unlike the racist BNP, the “homophobic” Church may eventually come to be regarded as beyond the pale by the BBC.
Happily, I am not an extremist, and I allow myself to hope that England will continue to bumble along in its cheerful, easy-going way, even though antiCatholicism is increasingly the default setting of the society in which we live, as Monday’s debate shows.
There is often much to be said for balance. The great danger today among orthodox Catholics is paranoia. There is a persecution complex in some Catholic quarters, and we are hearing again that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals. There is some truth in that, but if taken too much to heart it can lead to loopy thinking.
Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League in the US, denounced a recent vile attack on the Church by the entertainers Penn and Teller as “Nazi-like assault on Catholicism”. Nazi, as in Holocaust. Elsewhere, anti-Catholic sentiment in the media is being compared with the sort of persecution suffered by the Jews in 1930s Germany.
This should stop now. Think about it. Even if Catholics were one day rounded up with other Christians and sent to extermination camps, there would still be one very big difference between antiCatholicism anti-Semitism: anti-Semitism is about race, anti-Catholicism is about belief.
You can stop being a Catholic – indeed, there is no anti-Catholic like a Catholic anti-Catholic – but you can’t stop being a Jew. Edith Stein is a great Christian saint, a Doctor of the Church, but she went to her death in Auschwitz because she was Jewish. She was convicted by her DNA.
Catholics should not muscle in on Jewish territory. Cries of “me too” are insulting to the Jews and demeaning to Christians. Not everything is about the Nazis. Nazism is not the only measure of evil. There may even be worse things to come, there may be persecution, we may be required to show our mettle, but for the time being the most heroic thing most of us are called on to do is to smile in the checkout queue at the supermarket, and to be civil to Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry if we bump into them in the pub.
Besides, if there were not quite a bit of antiCatholicism about, the Church would be failing in its duty: you cannot oppose the spirit of the world and at the same time win the beauty contest. You cannot preach sacrificial love and expect to be loved.
In just over a week we celebrate All Saints’ Day. The Gospel appointed to be read on the feast ends with these rather cheering words: “Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for My sake: be glad and rejoice for your reward is very great in heaven.”