5 FEBRUARY 1994, Page 22

AND ANOTHER THING

We papists don't want to fight, but by jingo if we do . . .

PAUL JOHNSON

This week I had intended to write about the male homosexual lobby and its plans to alter the law so that its more promiscuous, members can get their hands on our chil- dren and grandchildren. But the buggers will have to wait. There are one or two important religious matters which need clearing up first. As I anticipated, the reali- sation that the Catholics now form by far the largest Christian communion in Eng- land, and that many pious members of the disintegrating Anglican Church are return- ing to their ancient allegiance, was bound to provoke a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry. There was a similar outbreak in the 1850s, when the restoration of the Catholic hierar- chy gave little Lord John Russell the excuse to bring back the No Popery mob. Who would be the rabble-rouser this time? I wondered. The Revd Ian Paisley? The Bishop of Durham? I confess I was a little shocked to find Ferdinand Mount applying for the job.

Now of course Mr Mount is far too gen- teel to threaten us with Maria Monk or any of the usual bogeys. He is very grand indeed and thinks nothing of turning down a mere baronetcy; he knows that in order to throw mud he would have to get his own fingers dirty. All the same, I think he might have spared us his condescending reassur- ance that he has never doubted our patrio- tism, and that we're as entitled to call our- selves English as he is — well, almost. And on one point he is mistaken. It may be, as he says, that English Catholics like myself are prickly, inward-looking, narrow, snob- bish, anti-Semitic, paranoid, media-domi- nating and so on. But if he hopes we are going to continue to be 'self-effacing', he is wrong. The days when English Catholics allowed themselves to be trampled on, dis- criminated against and insulted are over.

All my life I have been aware of the quiet, sly but determined efforts of the Anglican establishment to keep Catholics firmly in their inferior place. Casting doubts on our allegiance was always one of the ploys. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was an excuse for racking and disembow- elling us. More recently the object has been social, political or cultural downgrading. I wish I could convey to Mr Mount and oth- ers who are resurrecting the charge of dis- loyalty how much it is resented by Catholics. For nearly half a millennium we have not been slow to give our lives for Protestant monarchs whose very titles are an insult to our beliefs. At Stonyhurst we boys ate all our meals surrounded by the full-length portraits of warriors from the school who had won the Victoria Cross. We were always given a whole holiday when another name was added to the list. Of course the highest commands were barred to us, but we provided more than our fair share of the Other Ranks and junior offi- cers who constituted the cannon-fodder. And it is only fair to add that Irish Catholics, too, in both world wars, volun- teered in enormous numbers to serve kings whose official rubrics dismissed their church as the Scarlet Woman and the Whore of Babylon.

It is still lawful to discriminate against Catholics. No Catholic, for instance, may hold the office of Lord Chancellor, and if you think this rule is in abeyance you are misinformed: that is one reason why my fel- low-Catholic, Lord Rawlinson, missed his chance. More frequently, Catholics fail to get jobs because of a nudge or a wink, a whispered aside, a confidential letter. Thir- ty years ago, the election of Jack Kennedy to the presidency of the United States dealt a blow to anti-Catholic prejudice. As a result, I was able to beat off a determined attempt to prevent me becoming editor of the New Statesman in 1964. It was led by Leonard Woolf, Virginia's relict, who assured me there was 'nothing personal' in

his opposition. He objected solely on the grounds of my religion and the 'alien alle- giances' it implied. The hidden bias contin- ues to this day. There are plenty of jobs at the top of British public life to which no Catholic can realistically aspire.

Moreover, Catholics, more than mem- bers of any other faith, are daily exposed to casual and sometimes deliberate assaults in the media and showbiz, against which a Protestant state offers us no protection. I have lost count of the times when the body of Christ and the crucifix have been blas- phemously and obscenely presented by depraved film directors and the like. Nuns are constantly held up to scatological ridicule, and a shameless harlot regularly paces across our stages in her role as `Madonna'.

Only this month an obscene anti- Catholic musical has been put on in an Islington Congregationalist chapel. This features full-frontal nudity, nymphets in lingerie, a woman being raped on a Catholic altar and the Pope telling his car- dinals to 'f— off. The woman minister of the chapel, the Revd Janet Wootten, read the script in advance, so she knew what was afoot. Of course Congregationalists, or Independents as they are sometimes called, were always notorious baiters of Catholics. Oliver Cromwell himself was a member of this sect and swore in so many words that, wherever he had power, Catholicism would not be practised. He put Catholics to the sword, hanged them or burned them alive. Today the tactic is to pour filth on our beliefs.

We are not going to put up with this kind of thing any longer. The Catholic hierarchy, led by the monk-cardinal Basil Hume, is anxious to avoid a scrap and never utters a squeak of protest if left to itself. But it is high time Fr Hume went back to his monastery and concentrated on saving his soul, thus clearing the stage for a more doughty champion. For the truth is the entire Christian character of our country is now threatened by its innumerable ene- mies, external and internal. The Anglican Church, with all its privileges and resources, has surrendered to secularism without a fight and is leaving the battlefield in fear and disarray. It is the Catholics who are taking over the struggle against the hor- rific paganism of the 1990s, and I can assure Mr Mount and anyone else who is listening that we know how to fight.