RELIGION: When Goldilocks met Red Socks
Is it even constitutional?
Each time I’ve ‘met’, which is to say, both times I’ve been within forty foot of the Prime Minister, it’s been in a church. In, to be specific, an Anglican church the first time, and a Presbyterian one the second. Which is as it should be — longtime readers will know of ERO’s frenetic attachment to establishment, North and South of the border. Mr Blair, however, gets about, and now he’s been to see the Pope in Rome. Big media assures us that this was for the sake of his wife, ‘a devout [Roman] Catholic’, being ‘from Liverpool’, and her mother, ditto, and a full three out of the five children, they being, of course, Catholics all. The Prime Minister, famously, is not a subscriber to Rome, being instead the issue of Glasgow Presbyterianism out of its Donegal cousin: Mr Blair’s late mother is the consistently under-explored element in his religious make-up. And I am afraid, possessing no special knowledge myself of the Corscadens, she must remain so for the purposes of this article. My interest lies in what theatre is offered spectators by the meeting between Protestantism’s Prime Minister and the Roman pontiff. More particularly, on what basis has significance been attached to this compact.
A few years ago, the dreadful Helen Liddell, Secretary of State for Scotland, and fully paid-up member of the Irish catholic mafia that runs the Labour party in North Briton, took herself off to see John Paul II. There Madame Ecosse — wearing, unlike Cherie, the full back fig, mantilla and all — was introduced, as some of our newspapers have taken to calling him with ostentatiously oily pleasure, to the Holy Father, as a ‘British Minister’. At which the Pope cocked his head, looked puzzled, and asked his secretary in Italian, ‘but can Catholics become government ministers in England?’ As we all know, the pass was sold on that score some time ago, but the ready expectation of some self-belief on our part is, obviously, an entirely undeserved papal indulgence. This sort of visit is entirely unexceptional — for as long as there have been Catholic political leaders in English speaking realms, they’ve been paying clannish visits to Rome. That, equally, is what separates Mr Blair’s late in the day decision to tack on a trip to the Vatican to his long planned meeting with the Italian Prime Minister. It was something he sought out, not something he felt obliged to do in order to keep in with the tribe back home.
What he hoped to get out of the Pope is obscure. John Paul II, as popes tend to do amongst their insecure Anglophone followers, has had built up for him quite a reputation by a certain stripe of chiefly American ‘conservative’ pundit. Sadly, for the Michael Novaks of this world, his holiness has been a sorry disappointment over the forthcoming war against Iraq. For whereas wars involving Poland such as the Second World War have been just enough, this one isn’t passing muster, is how at least one of his own loyal critics has phrased it. Some contend that the Prime Minister sought out an audience with the Pope so as to be able all the better to engage him in theological banter, and obtain some measure of papal sympathy. This, though, surely attributes a colossal vanity to Mr Blair he otherwise shows no signs of possessing? So back we incline, as a first alternate explanation to the pressures not so much of tradition or faith, but to that of family — the Prime Minister’s own to be exact.
The show that was put on was something quite extraordinary. To get to Vatican City, when already in Rome, is hardly a challenge. The Prime Minister required a ten car motorcade. That’s two more than the Pope generally employs for instance when departing the Vatican. When the Blair family met with the Pope they exchanged the sort of kitsch gifts (a picture of the door at Number Ten, and so forth) that gives Catholicism a bad name. We are told (presumably by some source as malicious as the Downing Street press office) that an audience had ‘long being sought by Mrs Blair’, and we can safely assume that it was Mrs Blair, rather than her sometime alter ego, Ms. Booth, QC. Furthermore, the seeker in question is, as previously adverted to, ‘extremely devout’, in that ecumenical and undemanding fashion devotees of the new age have a habit of being. After the port and cigars bit between the Prime Minister and first the Pope, then Sodano, the Secretary of State, Labour’s first family enjoyed a treat less favoured juntas from properly Catholic countries would envy: they partook of a private mass conducted by John Paul himself. All in all, a lovely day out, and it concluded with a mysterious, but suitably flaky assurance that Cherie ‘had been asked to take on duties as an “ambassador” for Catholics in Britain’, which must be nice for them.
Perhaps I should have added that the Blairs, curiously, spent the preceding night not in an official residence of the Italian government (their hosts for the day), or of the Vatican itself (their hosts for the following day), nor in our commodious embassy in Rome, nor even in an hotel. For some decidedly peculiar reason they chose to spend the night in the Irish College. Now, in a strictly proper and historical sense, it would be inaccurate to state that neither the English College nor the Scottish College have been literally anti-British. They for long periods in their mutual histories were reservoirs of opposition to the Hanoverian Union; what it would be equally fair to say of both now, is that neither is any longer anti-British. The same really can’t be said, unfortunately, of the Irish College, which is honest enough to admit its longtime predilection for violent, Anglophobic nationalism. Why then did the Prime Minister and his family make this odd diversion? I don't know.
If we leave to one side the Catholicism of Mrs Blair and her mother, and pass over as swiftly as bourgeois decency permits the matter of Mr Blair not even being able to bring up his children in his own religion, we are brought back to the Christianity of the father. Leo Blair, the Prime Minister’s biographers assure us, had the scepticism for religion many widowers give understandable vent to. It was at Fettes where his son decided for himself to take communion, and Anglican communion to boot — though to put that in context, roughly a third of all communicants in the school at the time were episcopalians. Today it is fair to say that the Prime Minister does not darken the doors of the parish church near Chequers as often as you might suppose someone with his reputation might. As far as I know, he isn’t sloping off to the local concrete shack for the Roman mass, he simply doesn’t bother much with church when week-ending. In London, where his wife is frequently to be found, the story has been infamously otherwise.
The legend of the grimly penitent figure sitting on his own on one of the wooden chairs towards the back of Westminster Cathedral was assiduously spread by that unreliable figure Fr. Michael Seed. In truth it didn’t happen all that often, but it happened often enough to annoy the late Basil Hume. The reason the sorely missed cardinal, hammer of the traditionalists that he was, minded, was that he had some basic regard for fundamental Catholic teaching. This, as we’ll all remember, is dauntingly precise about what an interloper like Mr Blair was doing to the corporate sanctity of their communion by falsely participating. Thus, save for family trips to mass, this habit fell away too, and now Mr Blair rarely approaches the rail, save for when he’s actually in a church of his own religion. He reads theological tracts — we’re told this often enough by people with a crazed notion of how best to express their admiration for a man they, nominally, otherwise oppose on all counts — but meeting houses rarely see him now.
Were I called upon to categorise the Prime Minister’s religious belief, you know, I shouldn’t think I’d find it that difficult, for he hardly requires a grammar all of his own to describe these highly recognisable inclinations. Mr Blair is a believer, brought by barely intellectualised new world Anglican social awareness to Christ through the South-East English medium of predominantly Anglo-Catholic parish churches, whilst being married to a clannish Roman Catholic in an age of Catholic retreat into near meaningless ecumenicism. In other words, he just wants all his clergy to get along, and dismally enough, too many of his clerics are willing, doctrine notwithstanding, to sate this urge. This is the world as Mr Blair wishes it to be, it could have gone without saying that it is hardly the world as it is, still less, ought to be.
Were we a Catholic country, pictures of the Prime Minister in Rome, sitting awkwardly on a gilded chair across from the Pope would be a bland familiarity. As it is, this image, carefully controlled as it was by the Downing Street press operation, still retains a powerful, instinctual sense of shock for all parties within, and all viewers thereof. No one could claim that we benefit from a self-confident establishment presently — all our new Archbishop’s cleverness will be needed to restore that to a church that commissions James Macmillan to write an anthem for his very enthronement this week. But it remains the case that no matter how much it is asserted otherwise (Matthew d’Ancona, in the course of today’s ludicrous Sunday Telegraph, which found this meeting suitably earth-shattering to receive, alone in Fleet Street, front page treatment, was one guilty party), Cormac Murphy O’Connor is not ‘the counterpart’ of Rowan Williams. One is the Primate of All England, and leader in faith for the Communion beyond, and the other his sect’s local branch manager. It does no justice to truth to pretend otherwise.
Part of the reason behind this misrepresentation is ignorance, some more is explained by admirable sectarianism by the likes of Christopher Howse (his part work on Christianity for the Telegraph a few years ago was a notably fevrid piece of Catholic propagandising), and still more as consequence of episcopalianism’s parodic modesty. Yet something important is lost when we lose sight of our fundamentally Protestant national dialogue, in favour of the shallow understanding preferred by the mass media. One obvious example is that although Mr Blair visited one Christian leader in the last week, he was himself visited at home by a dozen or so. These gentlemen were chiefly assorted American Protestant leaders (Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists) who came to Downing St under the aegis of the Sojourners to argue the Prime Minister out of war against Iraq. This lacked the dirty glamour of a trip to Rome, but all things considered, it arguably mattered more in every sense conceivable: there was debate here (the meeting lasted four times as long as it as scheduled to), but then, and I mean this kindly, it is more probable that a Protestant layman and a Protestant cleric will engage, in a way that an infallible pope won’t, indeed, can’t and shouldn’t too, with the selfsame layman.
Worse though than this omission on behalf of the press — it was after all something they didn’t even look at, it happening on their very doorstep — was what they left out of what actually went on in Rome. For the matter of Iraq was only one item on the agenda between the Prime Minister and John Paul II. Trust the Vatican to tell us what the real substance of this discussion was:
In the course of the [meeting], there was also an exchange of opinions on the future Constitutional Treaty of Europe [i.e. the Giscard Convention]. 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.
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. Thank goodness Mr Blair is Prime Minister, for I do believe that he’s seen more than enough voluntary Catholicism in his life, and really doesn’t want any more ‘through the back door’. That’s the thing they all miss about him: 'popeing' would be a matter of no political consequence in modern Britain, and presumably of some domestic comfort to the Prime Minister, yet he hasn’t. The only theological reason our Prime Minister went to Rome, was to try and do his bit to make the Pope himself that bit more of a Protestant than his post-concilliar form already is. In this we can only but admire the nobility of Mr Blair’s soul; good Catholics, contrariwise, should avoid this man and his sloppy nostrums like the plague.
John Rugby’s favourite article is the thirty seventh
John Rugby, February 23, 2003 11:02 PM