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(Published as Celebrity-grovelling and elitist bias of the
Catholic Church in The Irish Times' 'Rite and Reason' column, 25th
July 2005) [Author's note: I regretted
the Irish Times' attribution of snobbery to the church as a whole, which is, of
course, nonsensical. The vice is attributable only to those
who approve of, and benefit from, its monarchical and aristocratic
leadership structure.] "If Jesus was born in a stable and died on the cross, why does
the pope live in a palace?" This question came at me quite frequently from the children to whom
I taught history in a Catholic Grammar school in NI. The safest
answer was the triumph of the faith of the early Christian martyrs -
in the adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire
in the fourth century.
It was never a satisfying answer, however, because the child's
question arose from an obvious clash between Jesus' life of
mendicant service, and the role of the pope as an international
dignitary, ensconced in one of the world's prime pieces of real
estate, surrounded by priceless artistic treasures.
It arose also from the child's identification with the ideal of
social equality - and I was all too aware of the Catholic
hierarchy's disastrous historic resistance to that ideal until
fairly recently. Catholics of my generation will be familiar with
Maynooth-trained clergy insisting that people cannot be equal for
the extraordinary reason that we are 'all different'.
How could one explain to that child that Maynooth itself was founded
in 1795 in a fascinating collaboration between anti-democratic
Catholic hierarchs and British grandees who engineered the Act of
Union a few years later? That is, that our 'national seminary' arose
for reasons that Jesus of Nazareth would have found very strange -
an identification of the One True Church with a social order that
was passing away because it obstructed the historical advance of a
key Gospel value: the equality in dignity of all human beings?
That mis-identification of Catholicism with a supposedly sacred
medieval social order is best called 'Haute Cuisine Catholicism'. It
survives still in the cult of the papacy - the automatic
transformation of a human being into a sacred icon on his election -
epitomised by a recent letter to the Irish Times that
ecstatically described the world's 1.1 billion Catholics as the 'Benedict
XVI sect'.
It survives also in absurd snobberies like 'papal knighthoods' - one
of which went in 1998 to Rupert Murdoch, probably the world's
greatest pornographer.
Another relic of haute cuisine Catholicism is Opus Dei, whose
recently canonised founder made much of his spurious Spanish
nobility. This privileged Catholic organisation sets out to recreate
Christendom by recruiting today's young intelligentsia as a new
Catholic elite.
The celebrity-grovelling that goes on among so many Catholic
newspapers is another such remnant: we are supposed to 'take pride'
in the fact that 'famous people' like Graham Greene, Alec Guinness
and (God help us) Ann Widdecombe have 'joined the fold'. From the
Catholic Herald one gets the impression that English Catholicism
will finally lose its inferiority complex only when it has
recaptured the monarchy from Anglicanism.
The effort put by the Catholic clergy in Ireland into educating the
children of the middle classes had a similar elitist bias. The
conversion of the European military elite in the middle ages had
been followed by the surface conversion of their dependents, and by
the hierarchical church's conviction that it need only retain the
allegiance of social elites to discharge its obligation to its
founder. Thus blessed by the successors of the apostles, these
social elites felt all the more secure.
The liberal capitalism that enabled Rupert Murdoch to buy a papal
knighthood through charitable donations has also torpedoed this cosy
alliance, however. It was the secular Enlightenment that created
modern Europe, so post-modern scepticism has replaced Christianity
as the chosen faith of Europe's technocracy - and, taught conformity
at Catholic school, Ireland's best-educated teenagers now typically
conform to this secularist faith almost as soon as they leave.
This is the predicament our Irish bishops now find themselves in.
Educated to socialise with an Irish Catholic social elite that is
now increasingly no longer Catholic, they also find themselves
pilloried by media for whom church scandals are meat and drink.
Their laments at the rise of 'á la carte Catholicism' invite an
obvious retort from our inner cities: why did you abandon the
accepted practice of bishops in the first four centuries of the
church's history - of eating regularly with the poor?
The answer is, again, sixteen centuries of haute cuisine
Catholicism. This liberated Christendom's hierarchy from the Gospel
obligation of social humility - which was then delegated to the lay
poor. With the recent papal enthronement of the cleric who aligned
his church with Latin America's appalling elites, I don't now expect
to live to see its final demise.
As Cardinal Ratzinger once told an interviewer in Bavaria: "It would be a mistake to believe that the Holy Spirit picks the
pope, because there are too many examples of popes the Holy Spirit
would obviously not have chosen." Quite.
(© Irish Times, July 2005)
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