Another voice
For those in peril on the sea
Auberon Waugh
For weeks it seemed that the only positive or beneficial thing to emerge from the Falklands adventure would be the cancella- tion of the Pope's visit. Not everybody, it seems, agrees with me on this point. In fact, according to the Sunday Telegraph's Gallup poll, it might seem that I am in a small minority composed for the most part of Protestant bigots, xenophobes and other eccentrics who feel strongly in favour of abortion or sodomy or other forms of birth control in face of the population explosion or for some other reason. Only a very few — among them Sir John Biggs-Davison approached my own position, that the best way to show our devotion to this brave, beautiful and holy man was to implore him to stay away from England at the present time.
This feeling might be misrepresented as a sort of snobbish aestheticism — that the Pope belongs in Rome, just as Michel- angelo's Pieta does: one goes to Marseilles to eat bouillabaisse, not to the King's Road. In fact other Popes have shown these peripatetic inclinations long before the soldiers of Victor Emmanuel persuaded St Pius IX to declare himself a prisoner in the Vatican in 1870. St Leo IX, who died in 1054, used to embark on visitations all over Western Christendom to make sure that his bishops were behaving themselves, and to give them a tremendous dressing down if they weren't.
Within the Christian tradition there is a precedent for almost anything even if there is not actually one for a papal visit to England. One cannot expect our Christian leaders to be like St Anastasius, the sixth- century Patriarch of Antioch, who was lit- tle given to speech in any case but refused to discuss temporal matters at all, and if anyone tried to involve him in such discus- sions turned his face to the wall and remain- ed silent for days on end. Why should we expect Dr Runcie to model himself on this admirable man in particular? Similarly, there is no particular reason why Pope John-Paul should choose to model himself on St Caius, the third-century Pope who spent the last eight years of his pontificate underground in the catacombs of St Callistus without emerging once; although he was acclaimed as a martyr when he even- tually died.
If it had been the Pope's intention, on his visit to England, to inquire into the state of England's Catholic Church and to deliver a stinging public rebuke to the assembled bishops, then nobody would have welcomed him more enthusiastically than I — except, perhaps, Sir John Biggs- Davison. In fact, it has been plain from the
earliest moment that he had no such inten- tion. The effect of his visit would be to bestow a sort of pentecostal aura of papal approval over the frightful English hierar- chy and all its revolting activities. There was even a danger that he might bring with him a Cardinal's hat and pallium for Arch- bishop Worlock of Liverpool, little realis- ing what a death-blow this gesture would represent for those thinking English Catholics who still, pathetically, look to the Holy See as their remaining link with a religion which seems to have more or less disappeared in this country.
To say that the English Catholic Church is in a mess would be to flatter its leader- ship. Even the Apostolic Delegate, Arch- bishop Heim, can have little idea of the col- lectivist trash being peddled around in near- ly every parish as the Christian message. It is undoubtedly aided, to some extent, by the new liturgy with its emphasis on com- munal participation rather than on the in- dividual's direct personal responsibility to God. But it is only in England that the priest has become Big Brown Owl to his congregation's Brownies skipping around a toadstool. The Pope's best approach to England would be to put it under a Papal Interdict and send an army of Inquisitors preferably Argentinian — to dismiss at least half the priests and most of the bishops.
But of course the Pope had no such plan. On the great moral question of whether we are justified in going to war with Argentina over the Falklands he has not, at the time of writing, made any clear pronouncement. If one follows the traditional Christian teaching as expounded by Dr Runcie at his second attempt, it would be easy to decide that we are not, in fact, justified, since the price of pursuing justice is too high. If, on the other hand, we follow Cardinal Hume's exposition of the new United Nations morality, whereby the aggressor is always wrong, then we clearly are justified. Neither seems particularly impressed by the princi- ple of self-determination for the Falklanders, and in this I suspect they are right. Self-determination (that is, majority preference) is a modern notion of limited local application and no absolute value. But the Pope, as I say, has given no ruling, and I can't help feeling he is right.
By coincidence, there are two saints celebrated this week, both on Tuesday the vigil of the Ascension, who might easily serve as models for Dr Runcie and Pope John-Paul since one was an Archbishop of Canterbury, the other a Pope. Any early Christian martyr would provide a good enough model for Archbishop Worlock, so long as his martyrdom involved the use of boiling oil.
St Dunstan was always one to speak his mind. A Somerset man, born near Glastonbury, his first ambition was to be a courtier, but he made himself so unpopular at the court of King Athelstan that they threw him into a cesspit. As a result of this he developed a skin disease which he wrongly supposed to be leprosy and when his uncle, Alphege the Bald, Bishop of Will" chester, advised him to become a parson, he agreed. Thanks to King Edmund, son of Athelstan, his career prospered, as it did under Edred, Edmund's brother, but he was always one to speak his mind and after Edred was succeeded by his nephew EdwY' Dunstan's career suffered a nasty setback when he made some ill-chosen remarks, about Edwy's behaviour with a girl cake' Elgiva. But it was all right, because EdwY soon gave way to Edgar, and Dunstan was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Then Edgar gave way to Ethelred, and Dunstan was in the dog-house again because at the coronation he couldn't help making tactless remarks about Ethelred being Unready. 5° his last 18 years were spent in retirement' but it was all right in the end because 1110 made him a saint. So Runcie need have no worries. The other saint celebrated on 19 MaY is St Celestine V, otherwise known as Peter en Morone. He was Pope for five months, after being elected much against his will as, 3 compromise between irreconcilable !ae tions. At the age of 20 he went to live in da cave so small he could not stand up stayed in various caves, on and off, for the next 64 years until being dragged out,err ing bitterly, on a donkey, to be Pope at the age of 84.
He knew no Latin and no Canon LaW,
refused to live in Rome and asked only for little cell in the King of Naples's palace. Ase Pope he was a complete failure. He °yid anybody anything they asked, and wija.,1 innocently grant the same benefice sevel times over. After five months of gerler,, ,a confusion, he was allowed to abdicate u' Cardinal Caetani who succeeded as P°Pe Boniface VIII and locked the dotard up m aa
castle where he was happy as a O
sandboYP e tiny cell, dying ten months later. Like John-Paul, he did not want to take sidest Dante put him in hell for this `Great Refusal' but the Church, in its wisdorm made him a saint. It is scarcely odd that our unfortunate soldiers, sailors and airmen, being Wss,Fd ,. around like pancakes in the South Atlantic, can receive no very clear guidance from Christianity. Christianity. The Catholic Church 1,011 Argentina supports the Argentinian case, I England (but not in Scotland) it suPP°rts the British case, the Pope sits on the fence and the Archbishop of Canterbury says' In effect, that we have no business to be the They are all, in their different ways, g°1 re' 1 about their saintly businesses. As St Part, said: 'If the trumpet give an uneertal sound, who shall prepare himself for hat, tle?' Sadly enough, nobody seems to PaY the smallest bit of attention to their unce! taro sounds. But they are doing their best'
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