Another voice
Thoughts on a bad Pope
Auberon Waugh
Perhaps I will be accused of perversity for waiting until the week after Pope Paul's eightieth birthday to celebrate this melan choly event, but birthdays are not like deaths in that their topicality is largely arti ficial and it has always seemed to me that there is something undignified in the spectacle of so many journalists falling over each other to write about the same subject for no very good reason — just as Mr Callaghan announced a Grand Debate on Education instead of doing anything about the disastrous policy which is producing a generation of cowed, apathetic and unemployable drones.
Not that there is much to be done about the Pope at this late stag, of course. The only solid event of last week was that so many people chose to write about him but few had anything to say. Mr Patrick O'Donovan in the Observer begged us to take pity on the Pope in the frightfully difficult position he finds himself, denying by implication that the position is largely of his own making. The Sunday Times, so far as I could see (I did not, of course, read the article), confined itself to vulgar and surprisingly uninformed speculation about his likely successor. Even Mr Peter Nichols of The Times, who could have written a beautiful piece if he had wanted to, preferred a few weighty platitudes. Perhaps they are saving it up for his obituary notices next year, but clergymen are notoriously unreliable about dying and he may see us all into our graves.
Mr O'Donovan regretted the fact that the Papacy could no longer rely upon the automatic loyalty of Catholics and attributed this to the unsatisfactory nature of the times, to the drift from institutionalised religion and suspicion of authority, to the forces released by John XXIII's brief but terrible aggiornamento, to the ghastly revelation of the Second Vatican Council that most of the world's bishops are now men of moderate abilities and worldly preoccupations — to everything, in fact, except the ineptitude of the Pope.
At this late stage it might seem vindictive and futile to point out what a disastrous Pope he has been. The abject condition of the Church is reminder enough — if I did not believe that at the root of his failure, which is intellectual as much as moral, there lay a simple error of judgment. While it is scarcely possible that the present Pope could do anything to correct this error, I suppose it is just possible that by spreading an awareness of it now one might contribute towards avoiding its repetition in the future.
Basically, the error is to suppose that the best way for the Church to face a secular age is by secularising itself. Of all the ancient wisdom acquired by an evolving Church in two thousand years one of the most important was an ingrained awareness that the great majority of the faithful have always been part-time believers: that religion seldom transfigured their lives or gave it a sense of purpose, serving at best to exert a steadying influence on day-to-day existence, but more importantly to satisfy intermittent pangs of spiritual hunger and provide a consolation in times of distress. In other words, most Christians have always seen the Church as a refuge from the secular world rather than as an extension of it.
Not all, of course. There has always been a small but indispensable band of enthusiasts — those who arranged flowers for the altar and asked their parish priest to lunch — for whom the Church was a major part of their lives, and for whom there was never anything incongruous in the idea of the Church coming to the people just as the people come to Church. They, if you like, were the good Christians, but the traditional wisdom of the Church has never allowed them to monopolise it or drive out the less good. The Church's mission is not and never has been to a handful of enthusiasts or 'perfect!' — it was partly for such unsavoury practices that the Cathars came to a sticky end at Montsegur in 1244. Yet under the appearance of increasing participation in worship and making everyone holier, this is exactly what the lay movement in the Catholic church is achieving. The three major disaster areas of the present Papacy — in social and moral teaching and liturgical reform — are all the products of this false idea. Wherever the laity is allowed a say, one can be sure that its recommendations will be towards making the Church more Albigensian in form because, by their nature, it is only the goody-goodies or near-perfecti among the laity who bother to make their opinions heard. It has always been the function of the clergy, and above all the Pope, to keep these lay enthusiasts in their place. Yet Pope Paul has done exactly the opposite.
His encyclical Humanae Vitae which repeated and developed earlier Papal suggestions on the contraceptive question is entirely Albigensian in its effect. The Cathars, it is true, forbade all sexual intercourse among the perfect!, but the Pope's insistence on the immorality of the Pill and other artificial means comes to much the same thing, creating two classes of Catholics in exactly the same manner. In the same way, the 'goody-goody' Catholics are delighted to see the Church brought down to the level of their ordinary lives in social and liturgical matters, while the halfbelieving majority feels that it has deserted them, no longer offering a refuge.
I hope I make myself clear. Good Catholics see nothing wrong in liturgy being reduced to the idiom of the teashop because for really good people, to eat a bun in a teashop is an act of worship. Less good Catholics, like myself and most others, are appalled. Perhaps we are wrong and they are right, but that is not the point. It is not the business of the Church to drive away the majority of its members in favour of a few enthusiasts.
To explain how the new emphasis in social teaching (from a doctrine of reciprocal obligations between individuals to one of communal welfarism) is also a sop to elitist lay activism may be more complicated. When one accepts that communal welfarism is the dominant secular ethic of the time, one can see that the principle is the same. But to understand how this development is likely to repel the part-time or ordinary Christian, one needs to look at a particular case.
Last week the Roman Catholic Archibishop of Glasgow with the Trotlopian name of the Most Reverend T. J. Winning, cancelled plans for an extension to his Catholic Cathedral. No doubt there was much to be said for this decision. The existing church was designed as little more than a chapel by James Gillespie Graham in 1814, but is pleasant enough to look at. Graham was a friend of Pugin who may have lacked Pugin's genius but is not too bad by the standards of Scottish Gothic. The idea was to turn the existing nave into a sanctuary and build a huge modern nave for £1.6 million, rather as they did at Brentwood Cathedral. I have not seen the designs — by the Glasgow firm of Wagner — but am prepared to bet they would have looked pretty disgusting when completed. This is not a good time for ecclesiastical architecture, and on balance I would have been prepared to pat Archibishop Winning on the back.
Except for the Archbishop's reasons. At a hastily summoned press conference in Glasgow, he said: 'I cannot go ahead with a full-scale renovation of St Andrew's Cathedral when so many of our fellow citizens are suffering so much,' He went on to list the handicapped, the elderly and the sick as especial objects of his concern, announcing a charity ball for the handicapped on 22 December. All of which would be fine if we could see a cathedral as fulfilling the same role as prestige offices for a social welfare authority. But those who built cathedrals to the glory of God thought of them as having a slightly different function. Does Archbishop Winning suppose that the handicapped, the elderly and the sick were better provided for in Wells, Durham, Salisbury and Canterbury than they are now in Glasgow? If he believed his Church has anything to offer, he would go ahead and build his cathedral. But one suspects he doesn't, and there's the rub.
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