We All Tend to Concentrate on the Wrong Things

In my mind, I had always given Pope-Emeritus Benedict some credit regarding the issue of clerical abuse of children. I had the impression – from somewhere – that the then Cardinal Ratzinger had tried in vain to persuade St John Paul II that the Church really needed to do something about it but that his efforts had foundered on the rock of the pontiff’s disbelief that anything much was wrong. When Ratzinger became Pope himself, he did at least begin the process of facing up to what had been happening. But his latest intervention is jaw-dropping. It’s a blank rewriting of history so barefaced you wonder what can be going on in his mind.

The letter, or essay, was written, says Benedict, as a result of thinking what, as former Pope, he ‘could contribute to a new beginning’, and with the approval of the Vatican was published in Klerusblatt, a newsletter for mainly Bavarian clergy, a little while ago. Translations then appeared on Catholic websites.

Now, Benedict’s mental background is profoundly affected by the 1960s: as a seminary professor he at first welcomed the signs of change in society and religion and then saw them, as he judged, go sour and malign. His entire subsequent career can be seen as a response to that experience of being wrong. So it is not unnatural that when considering the history of clerical sexual abuse of children he assigns a key role to that epoch: ‘Among the freedoms that the Revolution of 1968 sought to fight for was this all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms. The mental collapse was also linked to a propensity for violence … Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ‘68 was that paedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.’ At the same time, Benedict avers, Catholic teaching suffered its own ‘moral collapse’ that rendered it incapable of responding to these challenges. The Second Vatican Council and the movement around it tried to dispense of natural law as the basis for Catholic morality and instead attempted to rely only on Scripture, an understandable but doomed mission which took decades to be reversed. The attacks on the authority of the Church over moral matters, Benedict goes on, forced it ‘to remain silent precisely where the boundary between truth and lies is at stake’. Finally, he describes how he and Pope John Paul tried to reform a Canon Law whose ambiguities previously allowed liberal bishops in the US to resist attempts to discipline clerical child abusers, recasting the crime as one against the Faith itself as well as about the harm of individuals. He doesn’t allege that those liberal bishops were being unco-operative because they approved of criminal priests, but suggests they were committed to a ‘conciliar’ model of Church authority, and therefore resented intervention by the Vatican.

The story allows the Pope-Emeritus to swipe at his favourite targets, ones shared by many other conservative Catholics. I can’t comment much about the accuracy of his characterisation of the trends of Catholic theology and canon law over fifty years, but a mere glance at the wider history is probably sufficient. And a mere glance is all that’s required to lead to the facile but telling point that clerical and societal abuse of children goes back a long way before 1968. Benedict is not a stupid man, and we must presume not an insincere one, either: therefore that he argues along these lines suggests that, despite what he says, he just hasn’t been paying attention all these years. And while it is true that there were voices raised in support of, for instance, the abolition of the age of sexual consent in the UK, they were only ever marginal voices. The rest of society remained convinced that sexual acts between adults and children were wrong: the general reaction to the UK Paedophile Information Exchange demonstrates that well enough. For Benedict to claim, without any qualification, that paedophilia was generally considered ‘allowed and appropriate’ from the 1960s onwards, is quite breathtaking. He wants us to accept that somehow all the things he complains about affecting the Catholic hierarchy – doctrinal confusion, faulty process, epistemological inexactitude – meant that the Church of Jesus Christ found itself incapable of dealing with a thing that society, wicked, devilish, fallen society, a society Benedict says had turned away from God, still managed to regard as wrong. In the real world, of course, the world outside the ex-Pope's head, the Church knew it was wrong too, it just didn’t do anything about it. Society at large didn’t do anything about it either, probably for the same sorts of reasons - disbelief, not regarding the problem as serious enough, unwillingness to face the consequences of exposure. To these the Church added its own convoluted excuses, none of which had anything to do with the matters Benedict discusses. I suppose a theologian and philosopher is naturally biased towards seeing theology and philosophy as the cause of every issue, rather than political or institutional factors, or even sin.

Half the article is not about the past at all, but a thoughtful attempt to rescue the idea of ‘the Church’ from the damage it has done itself, to restate the possibility of love, truth and holiness notwithstanding what has happened. ‘The devil wants to prove that there are no righteous people, that all righteousness is only displayed on the outside’, says the Pope-Emeritus, and the task of Christian people, and of all human beings, is not to despair because of human sinfulness. ‘I live in a house’, Benedict goes on, ‘in a small community of people who discover such witnesses of the living God again and again in everyday life and who joyfully point this out to me as well. To see and find the living Church is a wonderful task which strengthens us and makes us joyful in our Faith time and again.’ There is a humility in this, recognising that the Church is inextricably connected to institutions and structures, but that they are not its essence: the Church subsists essentially in human experience and interaction. Benedict’s attempt to say, basically, ‘it wasn’t our fault’ shows that he doesn’t understand the past, but we would do better to excise that analysis, and concentrate on his hope for the future.

Solidarity

Sometimes the church office computer allows me to send emails; sometimes it refuses. Yesterday morning it was being recalcitrant, so in the spare half hour before the communion service at the sheltered housing block nearby I phoned a couple of people to sort out Easter home communions. My second call, to Thora, revealed that she was sat anxiously at home unable to do anything. The man from the chemist's had called by with her medicines, and, as she couldn't remember the number of her keysafe, made her laborious way to the door and passed him the key through the letterbox. Once all the excitement had passed, Thora found that she'd dropped her litter-picker, which she uses to pick things up, on the floor and couldn't reach it (if she could, she wouldn't need it in the first place). One response might have been, "Well, you wait for the carer to arrive in a couple of hours, that'll teach you", but that wouldn't have been very pastoral. I know the number to Thora's keysafe, and reckoned I could get round to her house and back in just enough time to make it to Burring House for the service. I did, picked up her litter-picker, and arranged a time to bring her communion.

It didn't seem like the core of a clergyperson's work, and it isn't. But thinking about my time with Bill in the hospital the other day I reflected on the way back from Thora's that not just death but old age, certainly, is also very often a battle, and whatever we can do to assist people in that situation is effectively standing alongside them in the heat of the battle. It may not feel very much, but, cosmically, perhaps it's more than we imagine.

Church Crawling Round Guildford Centre

Within a walk of less than a couple of miles around the centre of Guildford, you can visit as wide a variety of churches as you can find anywhere. My stroll a few weeks ago began at St Nicolas, an old church which began acquiring a Catholic tradition in the mid-19th century. That combative High Churchman JM Neale once applied for the living, but the Bishop of Winchester decided Mr Neale was too dangerous a man to have in his diocese; John Monsell, an Anglican Catholic hymn-writer on a more modest scale than Neale, did end up incumbent of St Nic's, and oversaw its rebuilding, dying while actually inspecting the works (accounts differ as to how). Now St Nic's presents a fairly consistent image of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism, though with some additions and alterations over the years. Unusually, though, it's the west end which is the more sumptuous, mosaic and painting providing a backdrop to a towering Gothic font-cover. 

I'm not sure yet of the date when the nave altar was installed. The point of interest is that it has triangular legs, a Trinitarian theme which is picked up in the motifs of the floor. 

Not far away, St Mary's is now shared with the Methodists, and its churchmanship is a bit indeterminate. It trades more on its antiquity, and there are some vistas which - despite the sense of clutter around the building - provide a sense of monolithic drama.

The grandest church in the town centre is Holy Trinity, an old church rebuilt in the 18th century as a typical Georgian preaching-box and then remodelled in the 1890s. It's gathered a variety of artworks over the course of the last few decades, but its great surprise is the openwork iron screen which spans the whole east end and which was installed in 1909 - a reja, they'd call it in Spain. 

The wonderful Byzantine east end dates to the 1890s, and while the church now has a moderate Catholic tradition (there are icons about and the Sacrament is reserved), the east end hints at more. The predella behind the high altar, installed in 1948, has a space for a tabernacle - and remember, this is not some off-the-wall back-street Anglo-Catholic church but nothing less than (at that time) the pro-cathedral of the Bishop of Guildford. It shows what was acceptable in the Church of England by that stage.

To the north of the town centre we find a different style: the churches here were daughter establishments of St John's Stoke Park, whose tradition was more evangelical. I was lucky to get into Christ Church (they were setting up for a concert) although I have to say there wasn't a lot to see. 

Meanwhile, St Saviour's not far away is one of the great hothouses of the Guildford Diocese. The church does have a monumental sort of grandeur and though I was surprised it hasn't been reorientated to face one of the long walls, in fact that would work very awkwardly here. It has the carved wooden reredos we have come to expect to find in High Victorian evangelical churches, although curiously there's a marble block inserted between the reredos and the mensa.

But at St Saviour's the old church is an adjunct to the rest of the plant. What you see when you come in is the reception desk - the corporate HQ model of church! You do get Love, though, as you can see through the office glass.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: Footprints on the Moon/Le Orme (1975)

It took me a while to discover how I had found out about Footprints on the Moon, a reasonably obscure little Italian thriller sometimes known by its other title, Le Orme. By a process of elimination I worked out it was in Jonathan Rigby's history of Continental horror film, Euro Gothic - not that there is much horrific about the movie, and it's far more psychologically unsettling and inconclusive than most of the other films that tome features. Its Brazilian star, Florinda Bolkan, was apparently so affected by the filming that the weight fell off her, and there are places where she indeed looks worryingly skinny, appropriately for a character undergoing such emotional derangement. It's slow, episodic, and beautifully filmed, the old bits of Istanbul (apparently) and its environs standing in for the fictional island of Garma which Alice, a Portuguese translator working in Italy, is convinced she has never visited and yet where everyone recognises her. The version I saw (via Cinema Paradiso) is distributed by Shameless Films who seem to specialise in mid-1970s horror (I think I will avoid most of the rest of their output including the notorious Flavia the Heretic in which Bolkan also stars). Perhaps that's why the lipsynching seems to be ever-so-slightly awry: at first I switched to watching in Italian with English subtitles until I realised the actors were, in fact, speaking English. There are a couple of short scenes which apparently only exist in a dubbed Italian tape, and which, having been copied back in, appear grainier than the rest of the film. If anything that only adds to the weirdness.

Seeing Differently

It was when I noticed the headmaster's bald pate shining as though he had a sort of halo round his head that I realised something was up with my eyes. That was when I was 16, and since then my 'spec spec' has altered a bit as my eyesight has changed. Over the last couple of years I've found the small print of the Missal we read from at the midweek mass easier to use if I take my glasses off to do so, and depending on conditions that's also the case with the Sunday hymnbook. This is no more than one can expect with advancing age, of course. Very recently, though, my right eye in particular seems to have altered so that its focal range now covers only a couple of inches, and annoyingly a couple of inches which don't coincide with the ones the left one can cover. I can manage for the time being, but doubtless the optician will pick it up the next time I go and perhaps advise a new prescription.

The odd effect of this change, apart from the mild inconvenience, is a psychological one - that, with or without my glasses, the world hardly ever appears completely clear. It's as though I no longer have access to things as they truly are: a strange distance has opened up between me and reality and I can no longer be completely sure what things in themselves are. It's as though I am suddenly more separate than I was before from the landscape through which I move; it becomes a place in which I am a little less at home. Perhaps that, too, is a facet of aging.

Hosanna to the King

As ever the children provide a counterbalance to the general discombobulation of things. Whereas last year the weather was sunny and bright, this time we were standing round the churchyard in the cold while Mr & Mrs Norelake unloaded their friendly donkeys and led them in for the procession initiating the Infants School Palm Service. But their journey up the A3 had been uneventful and securing them a place to park along the street was unwontedly unproblematic.

In the background you can see the great rhododendron bush which adorns the churchyard, and which is so glorious this year it almost baffles the sight.

Fantasy Pasts and Possible Futures

Here in liberal-ish West Surrey there is little Brexit nastiness beyond the sense of disorientation and helplessness endemic in the air. Mind you, many of my friends think they're safe from it in London, and this is not the case. Just after the Referendum S.D. heard two elderly souls at a Pimlico bus stop talking about how great it would be when there was £350M a week more to spend on the NHS, 'and then' (said the man conspiratorially), 'then we can send all the darkies back'. ('Because that's where all the darkies come from, Romania' commented Ms Formerly Aldgate at the time). Another friend was in an East End café on the day Britain was originally supposed to have left the EU, and after she returned from the counter with her coffee, which she had no option but to ask for in Italian-accented English, she was treated to a loud conversation between the man who served her and another customer about how there would be a civil war unless 'all the foreigners' were made to leave. But don't imagine it's just the non-white, non-native residents of these islands who aren't wanted in some areas of it. The BBC the other day spoke to locals in Chatham (where I used to live) who suggested that Scotland should be independent and anyone who voted Remain should be deported there. 'England for the English!' - as though no English person could take a different view. So, in some people's eyes, I have no place in the country I and my ancestors, stretching at least five long centuries back, have called our home.

Picking over the ruins of this horrible landscape would probably bore you as much as me, though I will say it's rich indeed that a Prime Minister who chose to divide her people into 'citizens of somewhere' and 'nowhere' now, at this late and dire hour, wants to bleat about togetherness and union. There are so many other ways this could have been done.

Remainers have their fantasies, of course. The Ode to Joy stirs the imagination with thoughts of liberty and international solidarity: 'Alles menschen verden bruder', indeed. Yet in practice the European Union is a flawed organisation of flawed beings, corrupt and remote and - if you're Greek - politically brutal, in ways that its ideals just throw into ironic relief. But at least this is a noble fantasy, and it's noble fantasies that drive human societies forward, provided you're aware of the distance between what you desire and what currently exists.

Backward-looking fantasies are different. 'The EU always cave in at the last minute', 'these will be the easiest negotiations in history', 'all our existing trade deals will roll over', 'other countries are lining up to do business with us' - all these falsehoods, whether deliberate or simply delusional, have at their heart a misconception of Britain's place in the world, and behind that, I increasingly find listening and observing, is World War Two. It's the constant reference point to which people locked in this dream return. 'We'll be all right,' said the man in the club in Chatham to the BBC, 'we managed in the War'. We are going to find that the world is a harder and colder place than we imagined, and that most of the rest of it doesn't care what happened seventy years ago, and increasingly treats with impatience and contempt Britain's insistence that Winston Churchill bought us a kind of eternal free pass to everything, when it thinks about it at all.

If there is anything positive to look forward to from this dreadful time, it's the death of fantasy. But I am not sure how we get from here to there, or what scars may need to be torn open before we do.