RELIGION: Stow it Rugby
Rome strikes back
As a Catholic on the Right, who is well known to the editors of ERO (and therefore one of a group of people, so triply blessed, which is larger than readers might imagine), their contributor John Rugby will perhaps not be surprised if I pick up on at least a couple of points he makes in his recent commentary on the meeting of His Holiness and the Pope.
My main concern is with regard to Mr Rugby's interpretation of the Vatican press release following the further meeting between Blair and Secretary of State Sodano, in which, to recap, it was stated:
In the course of the [meeting], there was also an exchange of opinions on the future Constitutional Treaty of Europe [i.e. ]. On the part of the Holy See, the hope was expressed for explicit recognition of the Churches and communities of believers as well as for a commitment of the European Union to maintain a structured dialogue with them.
Mr Rugby is so alarmed by the very mention of the word "Europe" in a Vatican statement that his knee jerks (who said he never genuflects?) thus:
In other words, our Curial friends are reminding us here that they will seek to press even the British Prime Minister into their crusade to gain for the Catholic Church a European status equivalent to that they enjoyed in, say, the Irish Free State under de Valera’s notorious 1937 constitution. Never has there been a time for Britain to stand more firmly alongside French anti-clericals in the face of this South German-led project.
Euroscepticism, Romophobia and paranoia are a heady mix, sadly stirred up all too frequently but which, the first ingredient apart, ill suits ERO. I would have expected the website to rise above the type of deluded nonsense which betrays a belief, or at least a fear, that the EU is all a big Vatican plot to recreate the temporal power of the papacy - just the sort of emotional silliness which the collection of humanists, socialists, technocrats and bureaucrats, which is really running the project, is happy to keep alive while it clinically gets on with its worst.
I am surprised that Mr Rugby appears unaware of the recent campaign, led by the Vatican but not composed exclusively of Catholics, to ensure there is a reference to religious expression in Article 2 of the Constitutional Treaty, concerning "the liberty and the rights of man." The lobbying of Mr Blair was in fact part of this campaign. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported from Brussels in the Sunday Telegraph on February 8, the obliteration of any reference to religion in a clause supposedly about human rights - and in a continent where lack of religious tolerance, intra-Christian, Christian ante alia and extra-Christian, has caused so much disregard for human rights, to put it mildly - has been "much to the dismay of Polish Catholics, Dutch Muslims and France's orthodox Jews, all united in deploring the spiritual emptiness of the new Europe".
Whether he was aware of this cross-faith campaign or not, Mr Rugby seems wilfully to disregard the reference in the Vatican statement, not to "the Church" and not even simply to "the Churches", but to "the Churches and communities of believers". How this is meant to equate to a curial bid for constitutional influence on a par with the Irish Free State, I am not sure. As far as I know, de Valera did not regularly consult Dublin's imams before taking legislation through the Dail. In any case, this is not about securing all-pervasive constitutional influence for any religious leader or leaders; it is about the EU's formal recognition, in one tiny clause, of man's right to worship, alongside his right to take three months off work to change nappies and reach paternal fulfilment and whatever other rights which, partial flippancy aside, Brussels rates over and above the simple, age-old wish to face one's God as one sees fit. It's a plea for a very small crumb from l'Empereur Valery's table, really. Let's not make absurd comparisons to anachronistic clerical states.
Given this context, Mr Rugby's clarion call "for Britain to stand more firmly alongside French anti-clericals" seems even more misplaced. A key architect of the Giscard Convention has been the socialist Josep Borrell Fontelles. He's not quite French (although there are plenty of his fellow Catalans around Perpignan), but he's fanatically anti-clerical. The title of his paper "Let's Leave God Out of This", which weighed heavily upon the Convention's humanist thinking, hardly requires further explanation. Says Fontelles: "When it comes to democracy, human rights and equality, God is a recent convert. He was comfortable for centuries with slavery. Yesterday he still blessed Franco." I am sure that a Surrey Quaker would have something to say about this idea, but notice that Fontelles doesn't discriminate; in his eyes, it's God at fault here, not various Popes, or Ayatollahs, or "Protestant firebrands".
Let us, for the sake of argument, leave God out of this. As did Lenin and Stalin, their successors and satellites. As did Hitler (and don't forget that he didn't only leave Yahweh out of it - there were plenty of Catholic priests and Protestant pastors in the concentration camps too). And yes, as did the French anti-clericals when they "reigned in terror" at various points after 1789. In all these instances, democracy and human rights were in short supply, while slavery, persecution and murder were not. Let's leave God out of it indeed. As Mr Rugby correctly if serendipitously implies, Fontelles and his kind are the direct intellectual heirs of Robespierre and it is the same venom which drives them to deny recognition of the human right to worship of our harmless Quaker friend in Surrey. Senor Fontelles is no friend of Rome. Make no mistake, Mr Rugby, he is no friend of Canterbury either.
More is the pity, then, that while John Paul is left to champion Mr Rugby's right to be an Anglican in the new Europe, there has been not a squeak of protest reported from Lambeth Palace, as far as I have read (and if I am writing this in similar ignorance, then I wholeheartedly apologise in advance). Indeed, it seems in this respect as if its new incumbent is acting less like the Primate of All England and more, to coin a description which Mr Rugby applies to the Archbishop of Westminster, like a local branch manager.
Mr Rugby is correct to say that Archbishop Williams and Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor are not counterparts, but not necessarily for the reasons he puts forward. The latter's position within his Church, beyond his archdiocese and, by the way, beyond his position as Catholic Primate of England and Wales, is made more complex by his red hat, making him not just his "sect's local branch manager", but rather, as the more traditional amongst his "sect" would see it, a prince of the Church, or, to put it in terms which Rugby would perhaps prefer, one of the "sect"'s Board of Directors.
While Mr Rugby might protest that he was intending merely to be dispassionately technical, that phrase "his sect's local branch manager" is, unwittingly or not (and I suspect not), disrespectful and, to many, will no doubt be offensive.
I do not imagine that Mr Rugby would choose to describe, say, the Bishop of Bath and Wells in such terms, though, in the same dispassionately technical way, he could do so. The more appalling part of such a description would be the use of the term "sect" to describe the Church of England. Again, one could dispassionately argue that this was technicallly correct, but if ERO were to do so, I should retort, in my best Paxmanian, "come off it", for I doubt that anyone is aware of the subtleties of vocabulary more than the editors of this website. In effect, one would be reducing the Established Church to the status of a club for eccentrics. In so doing, one would be aiding and abetting those anti-clericalists with whom Mr Rugby has so thoughtlessly expressed solidarity; those anti-religionists and, particularly, those who conform to such sentiment only when it manifests itself as anti-Christian, whose aim is to bring an end to fifteen centuries of Christianity in these islands by ridiculing it into irrelevance. One performs this gross disservice to Britain, so untypical of ERO, whether the Church which one demeans is the established one or not.
I say all this as a "cradle" Roman Catholic whose late father was a good Anglican and whose Christian example left a profound and lifelong mark upon me.
Now, ERO, get back to bashing more relevant targets!
PS I am not sure whether Mr Rugby has entirely covered the full breadth of the Prime Minister's churchgoing. Although he was referring specifically to Mr Blair's worshipping habits (or lack thereof) whilst at Chequers, he effectively implied that the Vicar's appearances "at a church near you" were on offer to London congregations only. This overlooked Mr Blair's celebrated relationship with the RC Parish of St John Fisher in his Sedgefield constituency, particularly his reportedly frequent spots of tennis with the elderly Parish Priest, Fr John Caden. Although I am very far from certain (that is to say I don't know at all), I also wonder if Fr Caden - his surname may or may not be the giveaway - is an alumnus of the Irish College, thus providing a wholly more innocent explanation for the Blairs' brief (but no less inappropriate) stay there.
Adrian Muldrew was political secretary to Iain Duncan Smith during what has subsequently become known as the Tory Leader's 'Golden Period'.
Adrian Muldrew, March 6, 2003 09:11 PM