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ROASTING THE POPE

STEPHEN HUGH-JONES | ON LANGUAGE AND LIFE | November 23rd 2007

Never discount the strength of other people's gut feelings, especially in matters of religion, says Stephen Hugh-Jones--who admits to a touch of old-fashioned English anti-papism himself ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

So the 950-year-old rift between the Roman Catholic church and the Orthodox may be patched up: the Pope and his cardinals are meeting on November 23rd to discuss a document to that end. If I were Satan, I'd be laughing all the way to the stokehole: artificial unity is a splendid way of creating its opposite. But what gets my adrenalin flowing is the words Roman Catholic.

My childhood home was in a Scottish village. My "uncle" was an elder of the kirk. His English wife, my godmother, was an Anglican. So most Sundays the household went to the Presbyterian village church, but occasionally to an Episcopal one in the town nearby. The differences caused not a tremor in its harmony.

Just what divided the two sects I never grasped. Bishops, of course, different forms of service, and a few peculiarities of behaviour thereat. Anglicans crossed themselves, Presbyterians didn't. Anglicans knelt to say their prayers, Presbyterians merely leant forward in their seats. Hence the Presbyterian gibe;

The Pisky prays upon his knees,
His back he winna bend,
Because he darena meditate
Upon his latter end.

But all was good-humoured.

Not so the local view of Roman Catholicism. For us English, hostility sprang from ancient politics. The little history I learned at school taught me of Mary Tudor, the bigot whose five-year reign saw some 300 Protestants put to death; of papal efforts to unthrone the queen of England, her successor Elizabeth I; of Catholic Spain and its Armada; of Catholic Guy Fawkes plotting to blow up Parliament; of James II trying to reinstate his Catholicism in a country that had rejected it. Why all this should matter 300 or 400 years later I did not ask.

Scottish Presbyterians, truer heirs of Martin Luther and the Reformation, had deeper reasons. To some, the Pope was next door to Antichrist. That didn't much bother them, so long as he stayed there. Yet at one point on the road to Glasgow, a wall bore in white-painted letters five feet high the message HELL ROST THE POP. Its spelling apart, not a few Scots would have agreed.

A few years later the minister of the kirk was, in effect, forced out. Not because he used a few phrases from the Anglican prayer-book, and thus originally, in Latin, the Roman one: I doubt his congregation knew that. His offence was more obscure.

The church's worn-out organ stood at its east end, behind the communion table. A replacement was found, but too large to go there. Put it at the side, in one of the transepts, he suggested. Why, growled some who maybe had other bones to pick with him? Does Mr Potts want to shift the Lorrrd's Table backward into the east end, where the Romans have it?--(a move which, today, Rome is busily reversing). He found it expedient to seek a call elsewhere.

All this in an area not remote, not backward, not notably religious, in the mid 20th century. I doubt that educated Roman Catholics there much cared: if you know you are right, why be worried by those who think not? Nor did my uncle. Yet lower in Scottish society such sentiments, though mostly buried, even now are not dead. You'll see the ethnic divide--I won't call it religious--whenever Glasgow's top football clubs play each other: Celtic, the Catholic (and Irish) one, in their green shirts, against Rangers, the Protestants. Football today spans the globe. Yet as late as 1989 some fans, on both sides, were enraged when Rangers signed a noted Catholic, ex-Celtic player.

And here's a confession. Having no perceptible faith myself, I'm unworried by other people's. I've worked happily with colleagues of every major Christian kind--Jews, Parsis, Hindus and Muslims, for that matter. I'm glad to know an Anglican church that has a Catholic chapel inside it. I think it entirely right that Ireland's Catholic majority at last won a state of their own, wrong as I think their efforts to force it on Northern Ireland's Protestants. Yet my childhood prejudices aren't dead either. When the late Pope John Paul created saints by the busload, my only logical comment would have been, "That's his business". It was in fact, "How absurd."

Still more so when history, however long past, is involved. When I read that the current Pope may canonise yet more of the English Catholics--40 have haloes already--claimedly martyred under Protestant monarchs, why should I care? Yet my reaction is, "What about Bloody Mary's victims?" When a wave of Anglican priests switched to Rome in the early 1990s, Britain's leading Catholic, Cardinal Basil Hume, a usually wise man, permitted himself the comment that this might be the start of "the conversion of England for which we have all prayed." My hair bristled. Have you, I thought? So the leopard hasn't changed its spots.

And when the Vatican and sundry Catholic parties wanted God written into the might-be constitution of the European Union, my true objection was not to God but to his sponsors. I wholly prefer Jesus Christ's view of "the woman taken in adultery" to the Islamic one. Yet, if ever I had to choose between the Pope and the ayatollahs, though I'd opt for the Pope I'd do it with gritted teeth.

I don't think this visceral hostility is sensible, let alone in an unbeliever. No one is trying to ram Catholicism down my throat. Yet, however little it may affect my actions, my prejudice is a fact--after 60-odd years, in a man reasonably educated, still tolerably intelligent, in a largely secular society, in the 21st century.

There are warnings in this for people like me who see human reason and conscience as better guides to modern life than are ancient scriptures, however admirable. First, that we too may be leopards. Second, that if our gut feelings are that durable, we are unwise if we discount the strength of other people's.