Do the English have a soul?

Paul Adams

I felt like a bit of a spoilsport posting this Amazon review of Kate Fox's book, Watching the English. I loved the book, it is so full of spot-on observations, expressions, and anecdotes. And I recognize myself in her observations of the basic social dis-ease she sees as the defining characteristic (if it could be reduced to just one) of the English.

What is sad, though, is not only the loss she ascribes to our tribe of any sense of the transcendent. It is also her own (and presumably the tribe's) complete lack of any sense of loss at this flattening of the English character into two-dimensional soullessness. Here's my review:

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
business as usual, December 27, 2010
4.0 out of 5 stars
By
Paul Adams (Honolulu)
This review is from: Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (Paperback)

As others have said, Fox's book is witty and full of insights about English culture, understood as the way we do business as usual. Like other ex-pats, I found it a wonderful articulation of my English ways. After nearly 40 years in the U.S., I notice how English I am in ways Fox identifies--a self-deprecating habit of turning away compliments, for example, along with all the class-marking prejudices about word usage and having an untidy car.

And yet...as I made my way to the end of this lengthy book I felt a growing unease. I had to keep reminding myself that its subject is culture in that anthropological business-as-usual sense, so perhaps I should not expect any exploration, or even hint, of anything like an English soul, equivalent to the way people talk about the Russian soul. My England, after all, is also the land of rebellions and revolution, great strikes and marches and movements, of martyrs and saints, of Shakespeare's tragedies, Milton, and D.H. Lawrence ("my Englishness is my very vision"), to pick just a few of the less mundane elements of English culture. Fox's England seems soulless.

The author is wonderful at identifying all the cultural and class markers of behaviors, tastes, and attitudes that we tend to think of as our own autonomous choices or original thoughts. At times, though, she expresses her own upper middle-class, secular-liberal, cultural-elite prejudices as if they were scientific observations. This is nowhere clearer than in her superficial and, frankly supercilious discussion of Christianity (and paganism)in relation to the English. The book is best read, not as (even loosely) scientific, but as a very perceptive expression of the author's own class, academic milieu, and generational outlook.

Of course the book was published well before the recent and first-ever papal state visit to England and Scotland. As I've noted in other posts, the visit was preceded by an intense barrage of unrestrained anti-Catholicism, not from the old Protestant fundamentalists this time, but from the mainstream media and secularist intellectuals.

The success of the visit speaks volumes about the extent to which the cheerfully secularist account Fox gives of the English is missing something important beneath the surface. The sense of loss, and even spiritual longing, that comes through in Roger Scruton's better but gloomier vision--see his England: An Elegy and Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life.

And without belaboring the point, I want to point to how well Scruton gets the point here. See in particular the final paragraph:

Missionary to the Multiculturalists
What does it mean for the pope to visit post-Christian Britain?

By Roger Scruton
Thursday, September 23, 2010

Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain brought home the strange spiritual condition in which the British people in general, and the English in particular, now find themselves. The English have an official church — the Church of England — whose dominant position is guaranteed by the unwritten constitution, and whose head is the Head of State. Bishops have seats in the House of Lords, and act as legislators. And each English village has its Anglican church — usually an ancient building of stone, whose Gothic spire is like a badge of ownership, a guarantee from God that the place around will always be England and that England will always be Christian.

Yet these churches are hardly visited: more people attend Friday prayers in the mosque than attend Sunday worship in the Anglican Church. And still more people attend mass at whatever crowded Catholic Church they can find, in a country where Catholic churches have been legal for less than two centuries.

Most English people say that they believe in God, though only a minority claim to be Christian, and of that minority fewer still are observant. The official culture, represented by the BBC, the TV chat shows and the opinion pages of the quality press, is neither Christian nor English, but “multicultural” — and even Pope Benedict ended his visit with praise for the multicultural identity that has emerged in our country. Nobody really knows what multiculturalism is, or how you belong to it or affirm it in your daily life. But it is the official religion of the British Isles. The main sign of this is that less and less people in public life bear witness to the Christian faith or express any opinion in matters of religion other than a vague hope that the many faiths will learn to live together peacefully. You can be outspoken about religion, but only if you are an atheist, and only if your target is Christianity — the once official faith, whose loosened grip exposes it to assault from all who might once have been obliged to endorse its Credo.

The Pope’s beatification of John Henry Newman had a special poignancy, therefore. Newman was an Anglican priest who joined the Oxford movement in protest against the Wesleyan assault on ritual and mystery. The Anglican Church, he believed, had made too many concessions to the drearier forms of Protestantism, and was losing the core of enchantment that draws ordinary people into its fold. Once he had thought through what this criticism really meant, Newman left the Anglican Church and became a Roman Catholic, founding the Oratory at Brompton and taking an active part in the establishment of churches, religious institutions and places of education dedicated to the Roman Catholic faith. As Rector of the new Catholic University in Dublin, he delivered the lectures that were later published as The Idea of a University. These describe the ideal university, like the ideal church, as a place of enchantment. The Church delivers God’s grace; the university delivers grace of another kind — the kind that prepares us for society. Both depend upon a mysterious encounter with authority, revealed in ritual and submission.

The beatification of Cardinal Newman can be read as endorsing the path that Newman took, from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. It can also be read as endorsing the Anglican Church, as a valid purveyor of sacramental gifts — the gifts that Newman sought to protect from disenchantment in the face of Protestant austerity. But for most English people, I suspect, the beatification has been a piece of mumbo-jumbo that does not concern them. Who was this J.H. Newman anyway? That he was author of The Dream of Gerontius would be known to lovers of Elgar; that he wrote the great hymn ‘Lead Kindly Light’ would be known to Anglican church-goers — some of them at least. That he is the author of one of the great autobiographies, as well as the best defense of the university as an institution that we now possess will be known to scholars. Some might even be familiar with The Grammar of Assent, that strange reflection on the truth-discerning aspect of the human mind that has baffled logicians and philosophers for a century and a half.

But what do ordinary multicultural Englishmen know about those things? BBC News will not have informed them, any more than it would have explained to them the doctrinal differences between the Anglican and the Roman churches. So far as the BBC was concerned the main interest of the Pope’s visit lay in the protests that surrounded it — protests from marginal groups pressing for the ordination of women, for gay rights, or for an apology to the victims of sexual abuse by members of the priesthood. The Pope gave the apology, and skirted the other issues. The BBC, as the voice of the official multiculture, could find little of significance in his remarks other than their divergence from current secular morality, and the fact that from time to time the Pope rebuked the atheists who have such standing with the BBC.

The most positive effect of the Pope’s visit, however, was one that even the BBC could not prevent — and that was the public display of Roman Catholic ritual at its most gorgeous and replete. For many television viewers the mass at Westminster Cathedral was their first experience of sacramental religion. The mystical identity between the ordinary worshipper and the crucified Christ is something that can be enacted, but never explained. It is enacted in the Mass, and as Cardinal Newman recognized, it is the felt reality of Christ’s presence that is the true gift of Christianity to its followers. For those who experience it the quibbles of the atheists and the protestors seem as trivial as BBC News. For many Englishmen, I suspect, the Pope’s Westminster mass was the first inkling of what Christianity really means.

Retrieved December 30, 2010 from http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/roger-scruton/missionary-to-the-multiculturalists

“I felt as if I had been given my country back”

In this post from the excellent blog MercatorNet, Joanna Bogle describes exactly how I feel about the pope's visit to the UK and why it was so important to me.

Joanna Bogle | Tuesday, 21 September 2010
“I felt as if I had been given my country back”
We have been given another vision of Britain – brighter and more interesting.





It was all joy. There had been such muddles over the complex ticketing arrangements, and such hostility from sections of the mass media, and such horrible things said by campaigners opposed to the Church’s teachings, and such tragedy over the evil actions of priests who had betrayed their calling.

But now, here was Pope Benedict, arriving at Edinburgh airport and standing next to the Queen for the national anthem.

Pope Benedict is small. And quiet. His voice and manner is that of a gentle, kindly professor, with a warm smile and large intelligent eyes. Long years in public view have trained him in the art of maintaining stillness and dignity while speeches are made and greetings are exchanged, but he still doesn’t look quite at home with military bands and official formality; he walked nicely along the guard of honour but was much smaller than all of them. Things got more relaxed when he was sitting chatting with the Queen (she is small, too) and the Duke of Edinburgh, and everything positively erupted into joy when he cheerfully donned a tartan scarf and went out into the city.

He has a rapport with the young – not unexpected in one who spent years teaching them at universities – and a gentle pastoral style with children. People held up babies to be blessed, waved flags and banners of welcome, and called out greetings – and when he celebrated the first Mass of his visit, at Bellahouston Park, before a vast crowd, with everyone roaring out glorious hymns, the style of the visit was established.

Why were we led to believe that this was a nasty, cruel, ranting figure of hate? People who had never met Joseph Ratzinger, who hadn’t read his books, who knew very little about him, repeated one another’s myths and legends – even though the internet makes available masses of material, videos, books, reports, interviews, and more. When he arrived in Britain, the reality became clear: this is a man who long ago placed his entire life at the service of Christ, and has, down all those years, tried faithfully to imitate Him and to live according to His teachings. And it shows.

I was privileged to be invited to Westminster Hall, where, in an extraordinary moment of British history, the Pope was to address Members of Parliament and a great gathering of men and women in public life from across Britain. These walls have echoed to the great events of British history – notably the trial of St Thomas More, who in this place was condemned to death for refusing to follow a king’s rebellion against papal authority, adhering to God and conscience instead. And now, here was a pope arriving – heralded by trumpeters standing in the arches of the great glowing window of stained glass.

The band of the Coldstream Guards played as we waited seated on gilt chairs set in long rows on the ancient stone flags, above us the great hammerbeam roof, and on either side the old grey walls with their Norman arches. A line of former prime ministers awaited his Holiness, along with the Speaker of the House of Commons who would introduce him. He came with the Archbishop of Canterbury from an ecumenical Vespers in Westminster Abbey, another first for a pope.

He arrived looking small and polite, and there were handshakes and pleasantries. And then came his speech. The voice, low and quiet, with its fizzy accent and precise vowels, takes a moment to assimilate: this is no passionate orator. But he had us spellbound. He drew attention to the central issues of our day – the big questions: by what values do we live? How on earth do we decide? Does it matter what is right and wrong? Have we anything by which we can make decisions and judgements? Are we spiritual and cultural orphans, adrift with nothing to guide us?

With clarity, and delicate precision, this priest who represents an authority dating back in an unbroken line across two millennia, spelt out what Western man knows but has forgotten: we cannot live as though religion does not exist, we cannot live without truth. Man has to use his mind, he has to open himself to what is good and true and beautiful. Attempts to marginalise faith – including Christianity – impoverish all and rob human beings of their dignity. Parliamentary democracy – a gift from Britain to the world, and a heritage of which British people should be proud – did not arise in a spiritual vacuum, and will not flourish in one.

I felt as if I had been given my country back again. For too long we have been told that our ancestors, with their assumptions about God and man’s unique destiny, were ignorant and muddled, and that now we must shake off the nonsense passed on to us. Morality as previously known was dangerous; it could now be reinvented by television pundits and if we were smart we would not challenge their views.

Now, sitting in Westminster Hall, I heard all this challenged, and new and much more interesting vistas opened up: of course we must be allowed to think along large lines, to lift our minds to things that are great and noble, to ponder the things of God, and to connect these with our public life, our common life and the search for the common good.

The Pope was not asking for the Church to have a privileged position, not seeking the reinvention of a Church-dominated society; on the contrary, he was inviting us all to a national conversation, a way of living and serving one another in a country where there are people of many faiths and none, and where the place of faith is recognised and enjoyed and honoured for the contribution it can make and the good fruits it brings.

He was applauded all the way down the aisle – where he stopped to view the plaque that commemorates Thomas More – and afterwards the glorious bells of Westminster Abbey pealed out as people milled about in a wonderful traffic-free area, savouring London in a new way.

Whatever you think about the Pope, there has to be an admission that he wasn’t what most people had expected, and his message was timely.

I expect we’ll ignore it. We have become used to dismissing matters of religion (“Oh, it’s all rubbish”; “Causes more trouble than it’s worth” etc) and we find it easier to sludge along with our culture soaked in TV soap operas and rising crime figures and drunken teenagers hanging around bleak shopping centres shouting at one another on Saturday nights. But we would be stupid to do this. We have been given another vision of Britain – brighter, more interesting , and one that we know is realistic, honest, and attractive. It echoes with our common sense and our desire to get along with one another in a workable way and achieve things. It carries resonance from the best of our past and offers a way forward.

Please, don’t let us marginalise faith in God, or ignore what Christianity offers, or sneer at the possibility that men and women can know about the deepest and greatest things. Perhaps it shouldn’t have had to take a Pope to tell us this. But he has done so, and it is a wake-up call. Often, elderly gentle clergy with quiet wisdom do say wise things.

Joanna Bogle writes from London.

Retrieved September 24, 2010 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/i_felt_as_if_i_had_been_given_my_country_back/

Benedict in Britain

Benedict in Britain: personal triumph for the Pope, humiliation for secular fanatics

By Damian Thompson

There are so many things to say about this remarkably successful papal visit that I can’t fit them into one blog post. But if I had to produce an immediate response it would be delight that Pope Benedict is no longer a stranger to the British people. They know him now; their curiosity has been aroused by his powerful message and their hearts warmed by his perfect manners and grandfatherly little grin. David Cameron has just made this clear in his speech at the airport: we have heard you, he told the Pontiff, adding that “you have challenged the whole country to sit up and think”.

Consider the failure of the “Protest the Pope” stunt yesterday. On a sunny afternoon, in a city of 10 million people, a crowd of fewer than 10,000 protestors followed the anti-Catholic bandwagon. Richard Dawkins, Johann Hari, Stephen Fry et al may regard that as a good result, but if (at most) one Londoner in a thousand takes to the streets to register disapproval at the use of their taxes to host the Pope, then I’d say the secularists have misjudged the public mood, wouldn’t you? And look at what a thin demographic sliver of the population they represented: mostly white, middle-class, metropolitan. (Needless to say, none of them could be bothered to make the trek up to Birmingham: the Pope may be the atheists’ Antichrist, but you mustn’t let your principles get in the way of a lazy Sunday morning cappuccino.)

Compare the protestors to the Catholics in Hyde Park: old Polish ladies, tweedy gents from the shires, African hospital cleaners, self-consciously cool teenagers, Filipino checkout assistants and, as one of my friends put it, “some rather tarty-looking traveller women who’d obviously had a glass or two”. They don’t call it the Catholic Church for nothing: if not a universal cross-section of humanity, it was a damn sight closer to it than the humanist smugfest.

I’ve just watched Pope Benedict leaving Oscott College and being photographed with the police officers who guarded him. None of them made an attempt to arrest him. What incredible prats Dawkins, Hitchens and Roberston made of themselves with that plan, which was based on false reporting and wilful misunderstanding of the Pope’s involvement in child abuse cases. The British people certainly aren’t in a mood to let the Church off the hook on that subject, and nor should they; but they do now understand that Benedict XVI feels deep shame at those dreadful crimes, and from now on they will be less receptive to the lie that he covered them up.

As for the ridiculous Nazi slur, today they heard a German Pope congratulate us for fighting the evil ideology of Hitler. What more does he have to say? Nothing, I suspect: the papal visit has killed the myth of the “Nazi Pope” outside a tiny circle of professional Pope-baiters who from now on may find themselves marginalised even in secular liberal circles.

Remarkably, the success of Benedict’s visit has had an effect even among the ranks of his ideological opponents. Lots of liberals are quietly distancing themselves from the Romophobes (and I wouldn’t be surprised if Stephen Fry slightly regrets wading in). The truth is that after months of increasingly shrill rhetoric from Dawkins, Hitchens and Hari, the anti-Pope movement delivered nothing except a medium-sized bog standard demo.

Retrieved September 19, 2010 from http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100054282/benedict-in-britain-personal-triumph-for-the-pope-humiliation-for-secular-fanatics/

Britain's Shame

The extraordinary display of anti-Catholic bigotry that the Pope's visit to England and Scotland occasioned is very different from the anti-Catholicism of the KKK or the Know-Nothing-Party of earlier times in the U.S. It is even different from the rhetoric of hard-core Protestant Rev. Ian Paisley of Northern Ireland, though it uses the same imagery and often sounds just the same and though Paisley did put in his own anti-papist two cents' worth.

The religious intolerance and hate have come instead from the "progressive" cultural elite, from the leading media of press and television and from celebrity academics and film stars. The extraordinary level of ignorance and intolerance expressed by these leftist leaders has to be seen to be believed. Peter Tatchell, leader of a campaign against the Pope's visit, was invited--invited!--by Channel 4 to make a supposedly factual documentary that attacked the Pope in the most dishonest and scurrilous way imaginable--see my earlier post. The Independent newspaper published a column by Tatchell about Pope Benedict, every single assertion of which was false, as any competent fact-checker could easily have discovered.

Such shrill and shameless religious intolerance requires an explanation in its own right, not simply endless rebuttal of the bogus charges that continue regardless of fact, civility, or decency. Some atheists and leftists of integrity, to their lasting credit, have protested against this display of intolerance--notably in the Spiked blog--see Frank Furedi's column at http://www.frankfuredi.com/index.php/site/article/405/ and Kevin Rooney's at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9355/. But the best account I have read so far of this crusade of religious intolerance against the pope and the Catholic Church is by Rory Fitzgerald and posted (or re-posted?) by Huffington Post, and again below.

The picture it paints of British society in moral, cultural, and spiritual decline is not pretty. But the hypocrisy, cowardice, and intolerance of the spokespeople of the dominant secular orthodoxy are well described here, confirmed by the scores of hostile comments to the blog that simply confirm Fitzgerald's analysis...and beautifully rebuked by the popular enthusiasm of the masses of the Catholic faithful, and especially the youth, despite all the efforts of the bigots to undermine and discredit Pope Benedict and his visit, the first ever state visit by a pope to Britain.



Rory Fitzgerald
Irish journalist www.freemansjournal.net
Posted: September 17, 2010 06:25 AM

The Pope's UK Visit: "Aggressive Secularists" Are Making Britain an Intolerant, Bigoted Nation (Again)

Virulent anti-Catholicism is alive and well in modern Britain. It is particularly interesting to watch this spectacle of hatred from the neighbouring island to the west -- one which has felt first-hand the depth of British hatred of Catholicism for many centuries.

There was rabid anti-Catholicism in Cromwell's massacres of thousands of innocent Irish people in the 1600s. There was anti-Catholicism in the British authorities who subjected millions of Irish and Scots to dispossession, death, disease and oppression in their own countries throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

There was anti-Catholicism in the British troops who fired over the head of my grandmother when, as a 6-year-old, she hid from them in the hedgerows on her way to school. It seethed in the British soldiers who burned my home city of Cork to the ground in 1920. More recently, it lurked in the Paratroopers who shot dead 13 innocent Catholic civil rights marchers in Derry in 1972.
For a while it seemed that this old hostility had expired, but the shrieking intensity of anti-Catholic hatred in recent months has shown that it was merely resting: however, nowadays it is the politically incorrect left that stokes the fires of the old anti-Catholic hatred.

Its resurgence has troubled even prominent UK-based atheists like Padraig Reidy, who recently wrote in the Observer that "Catholicism is viewed with suspicion by significant sections of the British left" and traces the present vitriol back to these ancient hatreds.

Brendan O'Neill of Spiked, says "the campaigning against [the pope's] visit has become so shrill that soon only dogs will be able to hear it. And the great irony of this allegedly rationalist protest against the pope is that it is indulging in precisely the kind of demonology that the Catholic Church once excelled at. Campaigners have turned Benedict into a Satan for secularists, an Antichrist for atheists, against whom they desperately hope to define and advertise their own moral integrity."

Indeed, I cannot think of an instance in modern European history where any nation was so convulsed by vitriolic hatred of a particular religion since the Nuremburg Rallies, which themselves have recently featured nightly on the BBC: no news item on the pope is complete without a sinister soundtrack and archive footage of goose-stepping Nazis. Yet this media hostility comes not from the old establishment right: It emerges solely from the secular left.

Much of it stems from plain cowardice: The fact is that radical Islam, not Catholicism, is the big religious problem that British society faces, but most commentators are afraid of their lives, quite literally, to speak out against its tenets; and so they treat the Catholic Church as a punch bag for their repressed hostility toward Islam. This was made clear in Polly Toynbee's recent column for the Guardian where she bizarrely conflated Catholicism and Islam. Hence too Richard Dawkins' comment that Catholicism is the world's "second most evil religion."

The pope has praised Britain's record of tolerance, yet as the Irish Times noted recently: "in practice, that has been extended to Catholics only in the last century and a half." However, the Irish Times is being far too generous with history: In Northern Ireland, a part of the UK, such prejudice and institutionalised state-sponsored discrimination continued unabated until at least the 1970s.

A cursory glance at the British leftwing press, which would normally pride itself on its tolerance in matters ethnic, shows extreme intolerance of a Church which dares to contradict its secular creed. However, it is not at all difficult to tolerate a person with merely a different skin tone. The real test of tolerance comes when you meet people with different ideas. In this, the British leftwing media has utterly failed the test of its tolerance of others' views.

The Catholic Church's hierarchy has given plenty of good reasons to criticise it, but in Britain, many of its critics' motivations now go far beyond a fair-minded exploration of its faults, and far beyond the anger most Catholics share at the abuse cover up. They also completely fail distinguish between the hierarchy and the 1 billion plus people who really comprise the Church.

The real issue at stake goes to the great existential and philosophical split of our times: between those who believe in the spiritual and those who don't; and those who believe in an objective morality and those who think right and wrong are relative, negotiable and arbitrary. Let's call this latter view the "secular orthodoxy," (the eminently sensible Henry Porter of the Observer, an atheist, refers to it critically using this term.)

This morally relativistic secular orthodoxy is by far the dominant ideology in Britain and in much of its media. The pope's stated aim is to take on this moral relativism and its exponents appear to have decided that ad hominem attacks on "God's Rottweiler" are the best way forward.

There are real moral debates to be had, especially around issues of homosexuality and married priests, but at some level of their being, the people who lead the cheers for the secular orthodoxy fear that their dream of a secular utopia is doomed - perhaps because in Britain it is now clear that it has already failed.

Some of the criticism of the Church is fair-minded and based in fact. However, others have more sinister agendas. Some exponents of the secular orthodoxy often frame their criticism of the Church along these lines: "I just love children, justice and human rights so much that I feel I simply must speak out against this nasty Church".

However, a deeper look at those who shout loudest often shows a dark hypocrisy: Peter Tatchell's recent hour-long attack on the Pope and the Church on British television was, he claimed, founded upon his concern for children. Yet he campaigns for it to be made legal for 14-year-olds to have sex with adults. Worse, in 1997, Mr. Tatchell wrote a letter to the Guardian defending an academic book about "Boy-Love" saying that the book's arguments were "courageous." He said "several of my friends - gay and straight, male and female - had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13."

Did he report this to the police? No, instead he contends that "it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy."

Nine years old.

Or witness the comments by prominent agony-aunt and former nurse Claire Rayner that, "I have no language with which to adequately describe Joseph Alois Ratzinger. In all my years as a campaigner I have never felt such animus against any individual as I do against this creature....The only thing to do is to get rid of him."

This prompted speculation as to whether by "get rid of him" she meant "kill him". Ms. Rayner has in the past recommended that Down's syndrome children be killed before birth. Perhaps it is the pope's opposition to such eugenicist policies that irks her: In fact, in 1941 one of the pope's cousins, who had Down's syndrome, was murdered in the Nazis' "euthanasia" campaign.

Yet "anti-pedophiles" who want to legalize child sex and members of the "caring profession" who want to eradicate people with Down's syndrome are typical enough of the thinkers that inform a great deal of the criticism of Catholicism in modern Britain.

We all know that Church has been deeply flawed and it has done wrong. We all know about the recent scandals; however the anti-Catholic hysteria that has enveloped Britain is not motivated by that. The recent abuse scandals serve merely as an excuse for militant secularists to open the floodgates for an ancient national hatred, and to air the shrieking grievances of multiple activists and fringe groups with radical and often-dark agendas.

Brendan O'Neill, a compelling humanist-atheist writer, says: "These pope-protesters threaten to drain the last drop of decency from old-fashioned humanism, turning a once-principled outlook into little more than a requirement to hate religion... Today it is a powerful sense of lack within modern-day so-called humanist circles - a feeling of directionless and soullessness - that leads them to invent religious demons against which they might posture and pontificate. That is why they talk in such religious tones (ironically) about the Catholic Church's 'clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel' -- because this is about cynically cobbling together some sense of their own goodness and mission. And in the irony to end all ironies, they make use of the very religious tools that secularists once hoped to supersede with reason -- intolerance, fear-stoking, demonology -- as part of their self-serving campaign."

As well as this sense of "lack" there is also perhaps a sneaking sense of shame behind much of the anti-Catholic sniping:

For one of the sad truths about modern British society is that it is falling to pieces: It has amongst the highest European rates of divorce, single parenthood, teenage pregnancies, abortion, alcohol and drug abuse, sexually transmitted diseases and violent crime.

All this stems from Britain's abandonment of its shared heritage, values and community - the ineffable loss summed up in Prime Minister Cameron's phrase, "the broken society".

Only 50 years ago Britain was widely admired as one of the most gentle, civilised, safe and harmonious societies in the world. This civilisation was underpinned and sustained by the very Christian-derived values that the anti-Catholic commentators now so viciously attack and mock. The secularist experiment in Britain has failed: It has become a chaotic, fragmented, decadent nation that increasingly resembles Rome after the fall.

In their bones, many British people I have spoken to feel that a shadow has passed over their country in recent years. They mourn deeply for what it once was. There is something indefinable in the British air these days: a sense of tension, fear, unease and foreboding.

Much of my family is British and I am deeply fond of the country. It is saddening to see it in mired in such social and spiritual turmoil. Its society has broken in to bickering ethnic, religious and ideological factions. Some quarter million of its citizens flee every year (mainly those who can afford to). They, by choice, are emigrating to America, Australia, Canada, Italy, France, Ireland and Spain - places where some basic sense of shared values, (which Catholicism in many ways represents) remains a part of the social fabric.

Perhaps the pope, for all his faults, uncomfortably reminds Britain's aggressive secularists of the values that once held their nation together. In doing so, they are reminded of what they have lost, and that their society is now falling apart before their very eyes.
Maybe that's why they hate him so much.

Or maybe it's just because he's a German. Either way, the anti-Catholic hatred of recent weeks shows that the idea of Britain as a truly tolerant nation is dead and buried: Britain's "aggressive secularists" have killed it.

Retrieved September 18, 2010 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-fitzgerald/the-popes-uk-visit-aggres_b_720595.html

The Bigotry of the UK's Channel 4

There is nothing surprising about the fact that Peter Tatchell, a gay rights activist and sometime advocate of man-boy sex* hates the Church and the leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics. What is or ought to be extraordinary, as Thompson says, is his complete lack of integrity and Channel 4’s complete failure to use its research capacity to correct any of Tatchell’s lies and distortions—ones that anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the Church and its doctrines would know to be false.

What is also striking is the blatant bias in Channel 4's religion coverage, pandering sycophancy toward Islam and Islamists, while promoting the worst kind of anti-Christian, and specifically anti-Catholic bigotry and hate.

*Prof Gilbert Herdt points to the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea, where all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood. Far from being harmed, Prof Herdt says the boys grow up to be happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers.

The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.

Tatchell, before the clergy abuse scandal, in a 1997 letter to the Guardian. He still favors lowering the age of consent in Britain from 16 to 14.
###



Peter Tatchell's Channel 4 hatchet job on the Pope is so crude that it misses its target

By Damian Thompson Last updated: September 8th, 2010

Peter Tatchell’s Channel 4 documentary about Pope Benedict XVI, The Trouble with The Pope, scheduled to be broadcast next Monday, begins with an incredibly dirty trick.

Within seconds of introducing Benedict as the leader of the Catholic Church, the film switches into the testimony of a woman describing a sexual assault by a British priest decades ago, before Ratzinger was even a bishop. “He was slobbering all over me … I felt something inside me.” It’s a vile juxtaposition whose subliminal message verges on incitement to religious hatred.

Another cheap trick: right at the start, the voice of a young German man is heard asking, “Do I want to be part of a Church in which people deny the Holocaust?” As it happens, I think revoking the excommunication of Richard Williamson was an act of shockingly stupid naivety. But to imply subtly that this suspended bishop’s views on the Holocaust are acceptable to Pope Benedict is a smear tactic, plain and simple. (There is a major world religion in which Holocaust denial is extremely popular, but don’t expect a TV documentary on that any time soon.)

I know that Tatchell profoundly disagrees with Catholic teaching. Fair enough. But I also thought he had enough integrity not to misrepresent key concepts such as papal infallibility, which he implies means that no decision of the Pope can be questioned – a schoolboy error. Tatchell also claims that the Pope’s previous role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith gave him control over Church doctrines. That last statement is so ignorant that I could hardly believe I was hearing it. Did Channel 4 not employ any researchers for this project?

Throughout the film, Tatchell twists the truth again and again. “To this day, Richard Williamson remains a member of the Catholic Church approved by the Pope,” he says. I’m sorry, but a bishop who is barred from exercising his episcopal orders is not approved by the Pope. If a crazed Marxist bishop were similarly suspended, he would be presented by Channel 4 as a persecuted martyr, not “approved”.

“The Pope has done enormous damage to his moral authority,” says Tatchell. I think the Williamson blunder did do damage, yes – but Tatchell’s own slender claims to moral authority (and he has campaigned bravely for his causes) are also damaged by a film that doggedly misleads its audience.

The teachings of the Catholic Church on sexual morality are NOT innovations of Joseph Ratzinger. He inherited them, he is faithful to them, and even if he wished to permit artificial birth control, abortion or extra-marital sexual acts he could not do so. Tatchell finds Catholic doctrines in these areas to be “incomprehensible”. But there is no evidence that he has made any attempt to understand them – or, for that matter, the subtle and complex theology of Ratzinger. (Tatchell sniffily describes the Pope’s thinking as “black and white,” which suggests to me that he hasn’t read a single book by the man he is supposed to be profiling.)

Instead, Tatchell mostly interviews people who share his views, or represent those of a liberal lobby within the Catholic Church. One of the few exceptions is a woman called Fiona O’Reilly from the mainstream group Catholic Voices, who – alone among Tatchell’s interviewees – is not allowed to finish her sentences without being interrupted.

And clerical sex abuse? The charge that Benedict XVI covered up the crimes of paedophile priests falls apart under close examination. Journalists have tried very hard to implicate this Pope in conspiracies to silence victims; they have failed to do so, though we do now know that Pope John Paul II was not nearly attentive enough to the scandal. But that doesn’t fit Tatchell’s script, so after a perfunctory attempt to suggest that Benedict “has form” in this area we move swiftly on.

It is inconceivable that Channel 4 would have sanctioned such a poorly researched hatchet job on, for example, a Muslim leader. Still, I can’t say that The Trouble with The Pope left me feeling any more anxious about the Pope’s visit than I already am. A more nuanced, imaginative and accurate programme could have done real damage. You missed a trick there, Peter.

Retrieved September 9, 2010 from http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100052875/peter-tatchells-channel-4-hatchet-job-on-the-pope-is-so-crude-that-it-misses-its-target/#disqus_thread