Catholic World News News Feature

Bell-Curve Catholics January 09, 2002

By William Oddie

In last month’s issue, Catholic World Report carried a short news item which indicated that Alice Thomas Ellis has dismissed by the Catholic Herald at the request of Cardinal Basil Hume. That news report was based on a series of widespread reports, which have subsequently been repudiated by the staff of the Catholic Herald. Harry Coen, the acting editor of the paper, insists that in dismissing the columnist, he was acting on his own; he adamantly denies having received any message from Cardinal Hume--or from any other English bishop--in the wake of the column in which Alice Thomas Ellis attacked Archbishop Worlock. - The Editor.

The Catholic Church in England has just emerged from a strange but nevertheless instructive interlude. The interlude began with a Catholic Herald column (her last, as it transpired) by the Catholic novelist, Alice Thomas Ellis, in which she expressed her hope that the delay in appointing a new archbishop for Liverpool might indicate "a repudia-tion" of the work of Archbishop Derek Worlock, who had died earlier this year. "The last thing faithful Liverpudlians need," she wrote, "is another 'progressive' in that position." There was an immediate outcry: the acting editor of the Herald, Harry Coen, was forced into a humiliating public retraction. Alice Thomas Ellis' column (which had in any case only two more weeks to run) came to a premature end. The secular press moved in on the story: Ellis, it was reported, had been sacked: not only that, but her sacking had been under pressure from the authorities, and it was part of a "civil war" going on within the Catholic Church between liberals and conservatives. In fact, there had been no sacking, and according to most Catholic commentators no civil war either. The most prominent voice arguing that there was no "Catholic split" was that of Clifford Longley, acting editor of England's oldest Catholic weekly, the Tablet. As he repeatedly put it, on the radio, in the Tablet and in his column in London's Daily Telegraph,"there is less in this than meets the eye." "Opinion in the Catholic Community in Britain," the Tablet argued, "almost certainly corresponds to what statisticians call a 'bell curve'... The largest number of Catholics hold to the middle ground, while declining numbers occupy either more conservative or more radical positions. The hypothesis of a split would suggest a distribution curve like a double-humped camel." Longley's argument depended to some extent on his insistence that the constituency Alice Thomas Ellis represented was way out on--or even beyond--the right-hand edge of the curve. These were people who believed in the first Vatican Council but not the second, in obedience to the Pope but not necessarily to their own bishop. "What distinguishes a Catholic fundamentalist from an ordinary traditionalist" wrote Longley in his Telegraph column, "is a seething sense of betrayal, most of all by the Catholic bishops." DIFFERENCES, BUT NOT DIVISION In the same issue of the Telegraph, as if to confirm this analysis, Alice Thomas Ellis returned to the fray. Her final paragraph was vintage Alice "‘Well,’ people ask, ‘who would you like Liverpool's next bishop to be?’ And I respond, not I think unreasonably, that a Catholic would be nice." So beyond any doubt, it finally turned out; the episode came to a neat conclusion with the appointment to Liverpool of the irreproachably Catholic Patrick Kelly, Bishop of Salford--a theological conservative tending towards social radicalism--to the satisfaction of liberal and conservative commentators alike. Longley's bell curve seemed to be vindicated. It was a unanimity all the more firmly expressed for being a conscious repudiation of the way outsiders had perceived the whole controversy. Here, we need to note a peculiarly English dimension to the affair. In England, the base line for Christian disunity was long ago established by the Church of England. So in an ecclesiastical context, to the English media the word "split" means "split like the Anglicans are split." Today, Anglican schism has become a way of life: there are now in existence specially appointed traditionalist bishops (in vulgar parlance known as "flying bishops") whose function is to minister to congregations who consider themselves to be out of communion with their own diocesan bishop. Anglican splits, that is to say, reflect the most profound, irreconcilable and permanent theological divergences. Catholic differences of opinion are wholly different--not only in degree but in kind (although Alice Thomas Elllis, for one, would probably not agree). An Anglican liberal repudiates Church tradition as a source of authority, a Catholic liberal--as epitomized, for instance, by the late Peter Hebblethwaite--does not repudiate the tradition, but tends to think that at some historical point it has developed illegitimately. The real difficulty with Longley's bell curve, however, is that although it may work at the level of theological principles, it does not necessarily work on the level at which reality is concretely perceived. It may be that there is an element within the Church who, as he puts it "are hardly participants in mainstream Catholic culture at all, who repudiate Vatican II and believe the bishops have betrayed them." Certainly most English Catholics would reject this analysis of what it is that has gone wrong over the last thirty years. But everyone is agreed that something has gone wrong. It is not a problem, speaking personally, that as a convert I find myself dwelling on unduly: being a Catholic, whatever the passing difficulties of the age, is quite simply much better by a very long way than being anything else. THE PROBLEM IS REAL But the "fundamentalists" nevertheless have correctly perceived that there is something amiss. Alice Thomas Ellis was not the late Archbishop Worlock's only critic, for all the outraged cries of "bad taste" at her criticisms. "The City of Liverpool," wrote Clifford Longley, "...has risen as one man in defense of its late and beloved archbishop." But that was not quite the whole truth. In an article Longley himself published in the Tablet, indeed, just after Worlock's funeral, one senior priest was reported as saying that "moral among the Liverpool clergy is at a low ebb, and the diocese is now approaching a state of crisis." The article continued: Other senior priests I spoke to privately endorsed this remark, and added comments of their own, notably that Derek Worlock "was at heart a pre-conciliar bishop," that "his concern with himself revealed classic signs of insecurity," and that he offended his clergy by "focusing too strongly on national issues." Local priests aged under 50 were now in a small minority, they continued." This was not Alice Thomas Ellis' analysis; but what they were talking about is palpably the same reality. That drying up of vocations among the clergy was paralleled, as she wrote, by lapsations among the faithful which were higher than anywhere else in England. From being a city in which "you could breathe Catholicism in the very air," in Mass attendanc-es Liverpool "once the most Catholic City in England, came bottom." Between 1980 and 1995 there was a net loss of 50,000 practicing Catholics. But was Archbishop Worlock really personally and solely responsible for this gloomy story? In one way, it would be more encouraging to think that he was, so that the decline could be quite simply reversed by appointing the right man to succeed him. He must, of course--as the senior Liverpool clergy already quoted perceive--take his share of the blame for the present parlous condition of the diocese; he was after all, the man in charge. But there were other factors at work here, not least a massive deterioration in the city's economic and social fabric and a huge secularization of society in general, which has brought in its wake a decline in Mass attendances all over Europe. Nevertheless, there remain questions that need to be addressed. It was one of Worlock's real achievements, for instance that he successfully overcame Liverpool's bitter "Green-versus-Orange" religious sectarianism by giving first priority to his high-profile ecumenical partnership with the city's Anglican bishop and other Protestant leaders. But did he at the same time help to undermine a sense among Liverpool Catholics of the distinctiveness of their own faith? One correspondent in the letters columns of the Daily Telegraph wrote from Liverpool (in defence of Alice Thomas Ellis) that "if the Anglican bishop could not accept a particular Catholic doctrine, the Catholic archbishop did not teach it." Was this unfair? The question is probably best left to the verdict of history, but it needs to be said that it had become all too easy to think it. Liverpool is famous for its dry wit; one minor fragment of folk humor shows at least that a certain perception of archiepiscopal indifferentism had grown up alongside the genuine respect for Worlock; the Anglican bishop's favorite song, the story went, was My Way;" Archbishop Worlock's was "Anything Goes." FIGHT FOR THE SCHOOLS This brings us inevitably to another topic which emerged strongly during the furor over Alice Thomas Ellis' column: the continuing battle over Catholic education. It had been for some years a source of reproach among genuine mainstream traditionalists--well towards the center of Clifford Longley's bell curve--that Archbishop Worlock had encouraged the production and use within his diocese of a religious education syllabus called Weaving the Web. The syllabus was supposedly designed for use in Catholic schools: but it has become a best seller in secular schools committed to an approach which sees not only all versions of Christianity but all faiths as being equally valid. The content of Weaving the Web (which was designed to replace the existing Catholic religious-education syllabus in the Liverpool diocese) has been analyzed as follows: 12 percent purely Catholic; 26 percent other Christian faiths; 62 percent non-Christian religions. Those English Catholics who questioned this approach tended to be accused of obscuran-tism and of being opposed to the Second Vatican Council's emphasis on inter-faith dialogue. But the Council's decree on ecumenism makes it clear that--uncomfortable and even unpleasant though it often is--Catholics are still committed to the view that although other Christians "have by no means been deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation," nevertheless "it is through Christ's Catholic Church alone... that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained." (Unitatis Redintegratio, 1) It is interesting to note, as a possible indicator of future developments in the Liverpool diocese, that in Archbishop Kelly's former diocese of Salford, Weaving the Web is banned for use in Catholic schools (as it is also in the Archdiocese of Birming-ham). If those campaigning for orthodox teaching in Catholic schools are to be written off as fundamentalists, the label will have to be attached not only to the Archbishop of Birmingham but to Liverpool's new archbishop too. But it was not over Weaving the Web, but over another religious-education text that controversy was raging at about the same time as that over Archbishop Worlock's legacy. The controversy began in the same place as the Worlock controversy: the Catholic Herald. This is a controversy which I had some hand in inaugurating. It concerned a book entitled Roman Catholic Christianity, by a Catholic teacher and former religious sister called Clare Richards, who is also the author of an autobiographical volume entitled Nun to Mum. Her textbook was, I wrote, "Clearly and deliberately subversive not only of specifically Catholic doctrine, but of the central articles of mainstream Christianity." To me as a former Anglican, the overall message of the book was depressingly familiar. Here, unmistakably, was the version of Christianity propagated by David Jenkins, the former Anglican Bishop of Durham, who scandalized ordinary Anglicans by denying the physical resurrection of Christ and the historical truth of the virgin birth. According to Clare Richards, the gospel’s birth narratives themselves--together with any story about God's miraculous intervention in human affairs, such as the feeding of the five thousand--are simply poetry. We are to ask, "not what really happened" (because very little of it did) but "what do the stories mean." This is pure David Jenkins. Three doctrinal areas may be singled out, not because they were (in this book at any rate) expressly and in so many words denied, but because they were powerfully undermined: the physical Resurrection of Christ; the Divinity of Christ; and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The ambiguity of Richards' language has protected her from episcopal interference. In the wake of the Catholic Herald's coverage (my article was backed by a front-page news story on the outrage caused by Richards' book and by a powerful leading article by then-editor Christina Odone) the bishops seem to have decided to defend the book, not on the grounds that these doctrines are not important, but on the ground that the book actually teaches them in an orthodox way. How they can come to such a conclusion is very difficult to understand. Perhaps it is because to the pure all things are pure. But the bishops who have defended Richards' book, it seems to me, have opened themselves to another accusation: that of excessive trustfulness. They have taken Richards at her own valuation; they have not done their homework on the text itself. KEY DOCTRINES UNDERMINED The question is this: is it the purpose of the book to teach mainstream Catholic belief or to undermine it? Here, we have the clear evidence of another book by Clare Richards, in which she spells out her views on two major doctrines so fundamental that it is hard to see how Catholicism can exist without them: the doctrines of the Real Presence and the Divinity of Christ. "I don't say any more," she says in her book, Who Would a Teacher Be, "...that Jesus is God... Jesus is not the object of our searching or journeying: he points us to the Father (he is my signpost)." To say that "Jesus is God," insists Richards, is to speak in "trinitarian language a legacy of fifth-century and medieval philosophical speculation." [sic] Similarly, she denies the Real Presence because she finds it difficult: she teaches her pupils that the Mass is the same kind of liturgical event as the Jewish Passover meal. This is because her non-Catholic pupils have identified the Real Presence as an area of difficulty. Richards refers to the doctrine (and others) as "the party line" and declines to teach it. "I have to wrestle with my own problem here," she explains, "because I sympa-thize with my pupils and share their criticisms"--including the one, it is made clear, that to see Christ as being truly present in the Eucharistic elements is "unreal and distasteful." The Richards' affair has almost certainly not gone away. The bishops would naturally like it to; bishops are constitutionally inclined to keep a damper on controversy. But this is no mere fundamentalist heresy hunt. Those who have stirred up the backlash over modernist Catholic catechetics in recent years--both here and elsewhere in the English speaking world--have undoubtedly seemed negative and obscurantist. But it is difficult to know how else they could have proceeded, short of producing orthodox catechetics as well presented and persuasive as Weaving the Web. Perhaps, now that two of England's archdioceses are ruled by prelates who have forbidden the use of that program, they will authorize (and provide the funding for) well-produced catechetical material based on mainstream Catholic teaching and intended for bell-curve Catholic children taught by bell-curve Catholic teachers. Certainly, such a development seems more of a possibility now than it has been for a generation. In a recent interview, Cardinal Basil Hume expressed the view that "the person who comes after me will have to be very different from me, do it differently from me." Cardinal Hume's perception seems to be that there is a sea change taking place in English Catholicism, that the English Church needs to move into a new phase in its history; after years of exercising a "hands-off" policy towards England, this seems also to be the Vatican's perception. Bishop Kelly's appointment--and the overwhelming welcome given to it on all sides--reflects a new understanding that the top priority now is for English Catholics to come through their present crisis of identity re-affirming the faith of their fathers, but without abandoning the indispensable insights of the post-conciliar Church. That could be a recipe not only for unity but for a real renaissance within English Catholicism. [AUTHOR ID] William Oddie is a regular columnist for the Daily Telegraph of London.