RIDICULOUS, FEBRILE, LURID, LUDICROUS

Conrad Black takes exception to

Ferdinand Mount's attack on Catholic triumphalism

IT IS dismaying to read the editor of the

Times Literary Supplement and former head of Mrs Thatcher's policy unit ques-

tioning or even lamenting the Catholic

Emancipation of 1829. Sir Ferdinand Mount almost suggested in The Spectator

(`No pontification in this realm of Eng- land', 29 January) that this country would be better off if Roman Catholics were still prevented from attending university, sit- ting in Parliament or freely purchasing real property.

The irritation of serious Anglicans at the discomfiture of their church is understand- able, and all responsible people in this country will wish the Church of England good health. However, the answer to its problems does not lie in the most hack- neyed and contemptible refuge of Protes- tant ignorance and bigotry: anti-popery.

The provocation for this outburst from an unsuspected source has apparently been triumphalist or disparaging comment from a few unauthorised lay Roman Catholics. This has refreshed Sir Ferdi- nand's resentment of nostalgic references to the old church by historians whom he acknowledged as 'distinguished', such as J.J. Scarisbrick.

He is irked by his perception that 'it is the Pope's big guns who dominate the media'. He also purports to believe that opposition to or scepticism about Maas- tricht on the part of prominent Roman Catholics (including me) reveals our 'para- noiac literalism' about a flawed but inef- fectual treaty. He does not find commendable our resistance to the allure of closer acquaintance with the Catholic countries of Europe.

His professed inability to find 'the differ- ence between Roman Catholicism and Islamic fundamentalism' should, I suppose, win him sympathy for his febrile state of sectarian confusion. Similarly, his minor aggrandisement of regarding the post-con- ciliar evolution of the Roman Catholic Church as its `anglicanising' should be indulged as inoffensive conceit.

Whatever problems the Church of Eng- land may have, the Roman Catholic Church is not the source of them, and seeking to make it a scapegoat is both

unjust and unwise. There is no need to reargue the Reformation or reassess the merits of King Henry VIII as a religious leader to determine that the ranks of British Christians include large numbers of people of sharply differing ecclesiastical tastes. Some desire a church of episcopal authority apparently continuous to the early Christians. Others seek a liberal, national, almost congregational church, albeit with the trappings and flourishes of an established church in a serious country. Most of the difficulty seems to me to arise from the Church of England's long and sometimes brave struggle to be both catholic and protestant. The most rigor- ous, ingenious and persuasive of all expo- nents of the via media was surely John Henry Newman. He gave up the effort 150 years ago when the Anglican episcopate condemned his Tractarian agility, intend- ed altogether though it was to preserve the credibility of the Church of England as a catholic church.

Those Anglicans who are repelled by the internationalism, lack of clerical democracy, and what they consider arcane doctrinal interpretations of transubstantia- tion, or by the counsels of perfection in sex and marital matters of the Roman Catholic Church, are in no danger of adhering to Rome.

Those who find trendy and undignified the Anglican tendency to agonise in public deliberations over every contemporary moral issue, and who detect a tendency to strip the faith down to feel-good, love-thy- neighbour handclapping as our pal God jogs along beside us, may find Rome more appealing.

In seeking to straddle, or at least to bridge, the Roman Catholics and the non- conformists, the Church of England has chosen a difficult but not at all ,a con- temptible path. Some competitive friction is inevitable between these denominations, but they are all serving similar spiritual needs albeit with somewhat different cul- tural traditions.

My sympathy is with the clergy, fallible as they are (including, contrary to widespread Protestant myth, the Pope). It is difficult enough for them to be terrestrial represen- tatives of a celestial order many people do not believe in at all, without having to do so over the belligerent sabre-rattling of lay pundits.

If Sir Ferdinand retreats from his ludi- crous foray into what Newman would have called 'mere controversy', he might glance at the 150 years of real and conjured Catholic plots and conspiracies after the Henrician apostasy, and the disgraceful anti-Catholic repressions that accompanied them, and conclude that nostalgia for the Penal Laws and the persecution of recu- sants is, to put it in the most supercilious Mountese, un-English. Despite the unhap- py precedent of King James II, I commend toleration to him. All the work of genera- tions of eloquent Whig utilitarian myth- makers, led by Macaulay and the Trevelyans, should not have rendered tol- eration completely impracticable in this country.

Finally, I can assure Sir Ferdinand that there is no popish plot in the British media. The writers whom he mentioned are not holding hands in a campaign of denigration against the Church of England.

I and surely most Spectator readers had hoped that in intellectual circles, at least, silence had fallen both on those who por- tray the Anglican clergy as composed exclusively of pathetic whingers who equate religion with Greenpeace and the Cone system, and also on the critics who repre- sent Roman Catholicism as a satanic con- spiracy to turn the England of Shakespeare, Johnson, Wellington and Churchill into a priest-ridden excrescence of ultramontanist Europe.

I wish to reassure Sir Ferdinand and other Cantuarian Zouaves that I am not encouraging Roman Catholic proselytising in our publications. The charge is piquant, since I have been (falsely) accused of pro- moting virulent Judaic nationalism in our

Israeli newspaper (the Jerusalem Post), and of promoting anti-Catholic derision in

Canada by my acidulous published com- ments about some of the Catholic bishops' more fatuous utterances on social and eco- nomic matters in that country.

If there were any basis to Sir Ferdinand's lurid suspicions, at least as they apply to me, his ridiculous article would not have been published by The Spectator.

Conrad Black is chairman of The Telegraph