Conversations often ramble, so feel free to move around and skip bits that don’t appeal to you. But a key point that I want to make is that the many problems we face in the Catholic Church have to be understood not just in the context of the faith, but as part of the faith. The problems are what it is to be Catholic today, part of a human community that needs the redemption of God, and that tries to celebrate it in our lives as best we can. So the first few chapters are about faith and the Catholic faith, and I hope they illuminate the later ones.
Just a word of thanks to some of the people who have encouraged me with this book: my father Andrew, Fr. Bede Leach, Madeleine Judd, Andrew and Nicola Higgins, Fr. Dominic Milroy, Mark Detre, Fr. Patrick Barry, Ed Walton, Anna Reid and Fr. Roger Barralet, to name just a few. None of us stands alone before God, and I am blessed in the people I have with me, and most of all in my mother, Violet, who has gone before to encourage.
The mistakes are all mine, of course. We all make mistakes, and that is what the Church is for: a place where we can go wrong in safety and in good company, sure of forgiveness.
They have found pardon in the wilderness.
Jeremiah 21:2
A bad day
Everything seemed to be going well. The train was on time, and I had a table to myself to spread out sandwiches and books. In fact, the carriage was almost empty, and mobile phones went off less than twice a minute. So why, I wondered, did he sit next to me?
‘Which parish are you from, Father?’
‘I’m a monk, actually.’
Of course he turns out to be a Catholic, so what else can we talk about?
He wants to know about his children, two sons. One is something in the City, the other is on a long-haired traverse of the Antipodes. He is not sure which is more of a disappointment. They don’t go to Mass, you see. He did everything God could have asked of him, and even paid for an independent Catholic education. Finally, he told them that they were in danger of losing their souls unless they submitted to the tedium of weekly Sunday Mass. He was surprised to find this did not move them. ‘Now, Father,’ he asked, ‘are they not doomed to hell?’
I found that rather an odd question from a parent, and not at all easy to answer. He interpreted, rightly, that my silence was temporizing. I was obviously about to say that things are not that simple: typical, liberal wool-gathering. What would you have said that might have satisfied him? I’ll tell you later what I said (see chapter 14), and you can decide if you would do any better. But for now, I would just like to log two issues for the future. First, people can say the oddest things from the best of motives. After all, the man was worried about his children. Second, nothing that matters in life and religion is ever simple.
Maybe both those ideas are totally obvious. But you try living by them. In practice, we ask questions in fear or doubt, and answer with anxiety or aggression. There is a thought too that religious matters should be fairly easy to understand. ‘Why can’t those bigoted people just read what Jesus has to say about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees?’ Or, ‘Why can’t those people for whom anything goes just keep the rules that God has given in the Church?’ The answer to both questions is that we are all people, and people are like that. If you are a person too, then read on, because we shall see that this is exactly the problem that God has faced in and through Jesus: how to redeem us without destroying what he has made us to be.
But first, the doomed journey continued. At Edinburgh station I escaped, and stood watching the departure board in a recuperative daydream. I had forgotten the bruising encounter, forgotten that I was in a clerical shirt, forgotten everything except that I was halfway home for a week’s holiday.
Not for long – the voice was loud and insistent, ‘Father, Father!’ The man was standing in front of me with his face close to mine, and it dawned on me that it was me he was talking to. His name was Ian, and his general appearance such that I was not going to be anything but polite. He wanted to know about Lazarus.
‘Who?’ Lazarus, he explained as though to an idiot, was the man Jesus raised from the dead. Had he gone to heaven on dying or not? Because if he had, and Jesus then brought him back to earth by resurrection, he must have been a bit ****ed off with Our Lord. I replied with honesty that I had not thought about the problem before. This he found hard to take. I was a priest, I had done all that study, and I could not answer an obvious question. ‘And another thing, Father …’ Several more questions followed, until Ian had to go and catch his train to get to Glasgow in time for his criminal trial for robbery with violence. He expected about ten years minimum. He wrung my hand and begged me to pray for him every day, especially to Our Lady, who always looked after him.
In our short time together I did learn that he thought the Church was a great thing, would be lost without it, and hadn’t been near a church since his marriage to a pregnant seventeen-year-old, which ended after he was sent to jail for beating her up a few months later. But he was proud to be Catholic, read his Bible and thought hard about all kinds of issues. He was also very sad about the death of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who, he said, was his model for Christian living.
After that, I gave up, really, and was not at all surprised when a youngish man in clerical collar and neat white jacket sat next to me on the Inverness train, and struck up a conversation. We had a very pleasant talk; he was not fully informed on Lazarus either, but we agreed on many things. One exception was his vitriolic opposition to the ordination of women (I am not vitriolic). But we were one on sacraments and most of the Catholic tradition. He was a great admirer of Pope John Paul II and his strong stance on moral and doctrinal issues.
I asked him, in that case, why he did not become a Catholic. He was, you see, a member of the Anglican Communion. He replied, rather tartly, that he already was a Catholic, but that he did not feel able to become a Roman Catholic, and became rather tetchy. Further enquiry revealed that he felt he had a duty to look after his parishioners, who were largely of the same mind, and to ‘pope’ would be to abandon them. He had decided that to stay within the Anglican Church would be an effective witness to its catholic and apostolic roots.
Perhaps I should explain the problem. The Reformation in this country, starting in the sixteenth century and continuing until the late seventeenth, was not a straightforward affair, and there were always some who followed the break with Rome and papal authority, but wished to retain the Catholic doctrinal heritage: sacraments, a strong view of priesthood etc. Others wanted to adopt a fully Protestant view of the church and its life. Historically, this resulted in the compromise of a broad Anglican church, with a liturgy and structure that allowed both tendencies, ‘high’ and ‘low’, to live side by side. The more ‘catholic’ Anglicans tend to attach much weight to being catholic and apostolic, but still reject a strong papacy and, usually, more ‘modern’ doctrines, such as papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception. At the same time, English Roman Catholics (I’ve run out of adjectives that satisfy everyone, but you know what I mean) tend, with justification, to be jealous of their identity as Catholic, kept through times of persecution, and say that you are either in communion with Rome or you are not Catholic.
Beats me
So, what does it mean to be catholic? What does it mean to be Catholic? Is there a difference? And why should it matter anyway? We have just met three people with different answers to all those questions. For the anguished clergyman, to be Catholic is to have beliefs that can be traced back to the apostolic church of the first century and to the words of Jesus. For the angry father, it is to belong to an organization established by Christ, and to keep the commandments it has given in his name. For the delinquent, it is to know that the Church is there, and that this means that God is with him somehow. The father would say that the vicar is catholic, perhaps,