AND ANOTHER THING
Walking among the mountains of God and listening to their voices
PAUL JOHNSON
You can't beat mountains for turning your thoughts to God. It is a fact that those lucky enough to dwell among them are invariably religious folk. I have just spent a week walking high among the Swiss Alps, notching up over a hundred miles and goodness knows how many weary metres of altitude. Watching sun and cloud continual- ly shifting the contours of the summits, cre- ating majestic dramas of shadow and bril- liance, then shrouding all in angry swirls of mist, drum rolls of thunder adding Wagner- ian notes of menace — I am reminded by all these sights and sounds of the being who orchestrates them. As I walk, I thank God for beauty, and I count my blessings: good health in my seventieth year, a large, loved and loving family, many friends, a job which gives me endless pleasure, above all the gift of faith. To be confident in the existence of a deity who embodies benevolent power, who sees all and ensures that justice will be done to each one of us in the end: this is a priceless possession. The only thing I really fear is losing it.
Reflecting thus, I am amazed at the levity of so many of my fellow-Christians who take such risks with their beliefs. Witness the meeting of Anglican bishops at Lam- beth, debating in full canonicals the precise Spiritual value of monogamous sodomy. It is true, as the Pope has just rightly remind- ed us, that their orders are historically invalid, and that therefore their assembly has no more apostolic authority than an international coven of witch doctors or an eisteddfod of druids. All the same, these Right Reverends presumably believe in the Powers they think are conferred on them. Why, then, do they engage in their Brueghelesque sarabands of cynicism, their fandangos of fashion and fraudulent fad- dishness, which are bound to induce con- tempt for simple faith, and ultimately out- right disbelief and despair? Have they no sense?
Some Catholics are no better. I am dis- gusted, though not surprised, at the petu- lance expressed by high-placed papists here at the publication by the Vatican of the Pope's apostolic letter, 'For the Defence of the Faith'. It is a timely reminder of what they are obliged to believe if they wish to continue to be full members of the Church. There is nothing new in it. It is the Church Speaking as she has always spoken, and I trust always will speak, with clarity, certi- tude and authority. Ceteris paribus it could have been written by St Peter himself. In a sense it was. As the embodiment of Christ's presence on earth, the Church is by necessi- ty authoritarian and hierarchical, culminat- ing in an apex of spiritual power and divinely inspired truth. That is what Catholicism is about. It is not a debating society, an elected parliament of morals or a credal congress. It is not there to argue about right and wrong or truth and false- hood but to proclaim what it already knows with absolute certitude. A little explaining at the margins does not come amiss, but if the Church does anything less than insist on the substance of faith, she is failing in her duty. Properly educated Catholics are taught this from infancy. So what is all the fuss about?
My friend Carla Powell, who ought to know better — indeed, who does know bet- ter — has written a much discussed letter to the Daily Telegraph, accusing the Pope of being totalitarian. In fact he is merely orthodox. The Tablet, a paper which under its great editor Douglas Woodruff was a reliable repository of apostolic wisdom and dogmatic exactitude but is now much read and relished by Anglicans, Methodists and other sects on the fringes of Christianity, has accused the Pope of introducing 'a chill in the atmosphere'. Perhaps he has, and a good thing too. It is one of the Pope's duties not merely to chill the bones of the weak in faith and cool the arrogance of the heresiarchs, but to fill both with wholesome terror. As the Bible says. 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' The next best thing to the fear of the Lord is the fear of the Pope, his vicar on earth.
Unfortunately, the Tablet is not so much troubled by the fear of God as, like the Lambeth bishops, worried by liberal opin- 'If you think this is bullying, you should see what goes on in the staffroom.' ion and by what atheist newspapers like the Guardian and the Observer may say. (Nor is this surprising, since one of its directors is also chairman of the Scott Trust, which owns these two Teufelblatter.) The Tablet writes of the Pope's letter: 'This is surely not the way for the Catholic Church to commend itself to the modern world . . . . ' Quite a giveaway that sentence, is it not? For what, exactly, is the 'modern world', that phantasmagoria of horror and depravi- ty, which came to birth in the 20th century and is now, I hope, dying with it? The mod- ern world is Freud and Hitler and Stalin, it is Auschwitz and the Gulag, it is Aids and anorexia, crack and speed, Hiroshima and the killing fields, San Francisco bath-houses and Bangkok child-brothels. At its miser- able best it is down-market tabloids, Dis- neyland and Channel 4 soft porn. At its worst it is human degradation so complete and cruelty so heartless as to leave Satan and his pandaemonium gasping with pride at their creation. For it is they who brought the modern world into existence.
The last thing the Catholic Church ought to do is to commend itself to such a world and those who accept its culture. It is the task of Catholicism to fight the modern world, to defy it, excoriate it, expose its shams and lies, its follies and meanness and frauds. Catholicism must set its face, flint- like and adamantine, against the modern world and all it represents, and warn the gullible multitude about the abysses of grief to which the modern world inexorably leads. For Catholicism is unworldly and timeless, unfashionable, unsmart, uncon- ventional, never with it, but against it, com- mitted simply to what is true for all ages and all men and women whomsoever: the worship of God and obedience to His law.
That is the plain message the Pope's let- ter conveyed. We are not forced to believe all he says or obey when he tells us what to do or what not to do. Most of us to some extent are heterodox, and all of us are sin- ners. But it is comforting to know that in a cowardly and conformist world one man has the courage to proclaim God's truth in all its unmodish splendour. The Pope, too, has been walking in the mountains during the last few days, in his worn, dusty boots and leaning on two sticks. He, too, bless his valorous old heart, has been hearing the voices of the peaks, praising the Absolute to whom they point their bony fingers.
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