Ten years of ‘Some Definite Service’

The village of Deeping St. Nicholas, Lincolnshire, seen from the Peterborough–Lincoln train, 20th March, 2014.

‘We read to know that we are not alone,’ it turns out C. S. Lewis didn’t say — I have almost been the latest to misattribute to the man himself a line spoken by him only in a fictionalised form, in the 1993 biographical film Shadowlands.  Still, the words ring quite as true as if he really had said them.  It was to know that I was not alone, for instance, that I started following Catholic blogs in early 2010.  I read for some alternative to the media hostility against the forthcoming visit to Britain of Pope Benedict XVI; I read in search of ripostes to  the media mischaracterisation of Catholics and the Christian faith and the personal attacks on Benedict himself; I read, in that heyday of the New Atheists, for witty rejoinders to the mockery of believers that was then still fashionably edgy.  I read, and kept reading, for intelligent and thoughtful writing on what the Church actually believes and why, and on living out our faith in the present age.

And what a relief it was to find those blogs.  Many were pseudonymous, such as the ‘Countercultural Father’ and now-defunct ‘Reluctant Sinner’, but others were written under their authors’ real names: Joanna Bogle’s was a particular favourite, as well as the various contributors to the Catholic Voices blog.  Either way, they seldom overstepped the mark in tone or content, to my mind at least, and whether vigorous or sober in style, in substance they were generally well-informed and intellectual.  They always gave plenty to think about — though I never dared comment!  I also enjoyed other writers beyond the so-called ‘Catholic blogosphere’, such as Peter Hitchens’ lyrical long-form essays and Eleanor Parker’s insights into Anglo-Saxon culture in ‘A Clerk of Oxford’.

Then, some years later, I happened upon the blog of Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh (the ‘Irish Papist’), with its poetry, its unpretentious musings and memoirs, the occasional spice of more polemic pieces, and the quiet courtesy with which he diligently responded to every single blog-comment short of, though occasionally even including, actual spam.  It was probably in corresponding with him that a creative idea already glowing like a small fierce flame within me gathered strength until I could resist it no longer, and published the first post on this blog, ten years ago today.

The title came from a meditation of the great — now Saint — John Henry Newman, from which Pope Benedict quoted in his address in London’s Hyde Park on 18th September 2010, and which seems as sound as ever:

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work.  I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.  Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him.  If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.  He does nothing in vain.  He knows what He is about.  He may take away my friends.  He may throw me among strangers.  He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me.  Still, He knows what He is about.

Bl. John Henry Newman: Meditations on Christian Doctrine, Meditations and Devotions, March 7, 1848.

And here is the excerpt from Pope Benedict’s address in which he reflects on the above passage:

One of the Cardinal’s best-loved meditations includes the words, “God has created me to do him some definite service.  He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another.”  Here we see Newman’s fine Christian realism, the point at which faith and life inevitably intersect.  Faith is meant to bear fruit in the transformation of our world through the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the lives and activity of believers.  No one who looks realistically at our world today could think that Christians can afford to go on with business as usual, ignoring the profound crisis of faith which has overtaken our society, or simply trusting that the patrimony of values handed down by the Christian centuries will continue to inspire and shape the future of our society.  We know that in times of crisis and upheaval God has raised up great saints and prophets for the renewal of the Church and Christian society; we trust in his providence and we pray for his continued guidance.  But each of us, in accordance with his or her state of life, is called to work for the advancement of God’s Kingdom by imbuing temporal life with the values of the Gospel.  Each of us has a mission, each of us is called to change the world, to work for a culture of life, a culture forged by love and respect for the dignity of each human person.  As our Lord tells us in the Gospel we have just heard, our light must shine in the sight of all, so that, seeing our good works, they may give praise to our heavenly Father.

The heyday of the ‘Catholic blogosphere’ now seems some way past.  There are still plenty of good magazines and newsletters with engaging articles, but fewer individual blogs than there used to be, and those less lively.  (That said, there is a good deal of activity to be found via Malcolm Mann’s list of extant Catholic blogs at the British Catholic Blogs directory).  Perhaps it was mostly a ‘Benedict moment’, a phenomenon with a particular context, but like all such things it may have sown the seeds of a quiet harvest.

As for this particular blog, I wrote, and write, however sporadically, much as I have read — to know that I am not alone — and to try to convey similar reassurance to others of like mind.  I know how encouraged I was in my faith, temperament and conviction by these other writers, and I have always felt that in making my own contribution I might help to do for someone else what these others did for me.

For in today’s Britain it can, and often does, feel like a lonely business being a Catholic Christian, never mind an Englishman of homely and nostalgic temperament.  This sense of isolation may seem unlikely, given that I have millions of fellow believers around the world, to say nothing of the companionship we find in the canon of the saints and in the pages of old books.  And indeed, it has been my astonishing blessing over the last ten years to get to know more friends of like mind than I once could ever have hoped for.  Even so, it can feel lonely.  So much is no longer what it used to be: old traditions, cherished institutions, principles, morals and manners… none seem able to withstand the caustic solvent of liquid modernity, and only in certain niches like family homes, rare schools, or particularly vital parishes, does the old culture thrive.  In such moments I have found it helpful to seek the company, even the virtual company, of others who think and feel along the same lines.

Having said this, the blog is not just supposed to be a balm for gloom.  I try to write in both major and minor keys, hoping to produce as much a positive celebration of poetry, music, churches, landscapes and traditions, and other oddments, as a record of what has passed.  Indeed, one regret about the blog is that it doesn’t seem to leave me much room for humour.  Exposed to the windswept steppes of the Internet, which lack the context and shared experience which are so essential to a shared sense of humour and in which misunderstanding seems so easy, and perhaps amid the kind of virtual stage-fright that results, I find it much harder to crack jokes — no doubt to the benefit of all.

Thank you to everyone who has read, or commented on, or been sent to sleep by this blog over the past decade.  I don’t know how much longer Some Definite Service will last, but as long as it seems worthwhile, I will try to offer, as far as I can manage, the kind of refuge that I myself seek in other blogs, and a candle of witness to the many good and gentle things I see in the world.  For, ultimately, those are the things that will endure, or, if not, the eternal verities they betoken.  Hope, that slow-burning thing, may have to wait ten, or a hundred, or two thousand years, but it will outlast all opposition — and even all blogs!  — until its final and wondrous vindication.

John Everett Millais’ portrait of John Henry Newman on display at Arundel Castle (W. Sussex), 13th September 2019.

Farewell to Benedict the Great

And so we must begin the new year without those two great figures, those beacons in our time, Elizabeth II and Benedict XVI.  We were not unprepared for the losses; we cannot complain that long life was not theirs, but we always knew that the world would be a colder and lonelier place without them.  The torches they carried, we realise with a pang, are handed down to us.  I try not to allow myself too many living heroes, but that is what both have been for me.  They stood for truth and faith in a cynical and darkening age.  They used word and gesture to encourage and hearten people of good will.  They made it clear that they understood their offices as vocations, their authority as a form of service, and their main power to be that of the quiet example — which they each set unfailingly, in a strikingly similar style, and with comparable courage. 

The praise of the intelligence, erudition and churchmanship of Joseph Ratzinger I will leave to others better qualified to judge — ‘an essential European thinker’, ‘the greatest mind to reach the papacy in a millennium’, ‘a man with the intelligence of twelve theology professors but the innocence of a child at his First Communion’.  Mine must be a more personal tribute: the thanksgiving of an ordinary rank-and-file pew-filler whose privilege it was to live through, and be formed by, his papacy.  The reign of Benedict XVI corresponded almost exactly with my adolescence: I was confirmed less than a month after his election in 2005, and was most of my way through university when he resigned.  In between, of course, in September 2010, came his visit to Britain, an event which smote my spirit right when the iron was hottest.

Much has been said about the clarity of Joseph Ratzinger’s prose, but this was not a quality confined to his writings or even his speech.  Clarity was a characteristic of all his actions and gestures; it surrounded him like an aura.  Simply by his presence, by occupying his square, he shed light by which others around him could see and think more clearly.  This was certainly true for me: his visit to Britain clarified my life and clarified my faith; it set a seal on me, exactly when I needed it, and deeply and lastingly.

I don’t mean that there was a dramatic conversion.  To grow up with and into the faith in mid-suburban south London in the 2000s was to be more than familiar with the ennui and malaise of our times.  It was, then as now, to live against the grain of the surrounding culture.  There was always an awareness of being held to different, I dare say higher standards; always a discernible change in atmosphere between the Church and the mainstream, secular-materialist world whose raucous tide came right up to the front porch.  I knew that this world thought Christian believers mawkish and irrelevant and obsolete.  I knew about Dawkins and Hitchens and the fashionable New Atheists — though the prevailing mood, at school for example, was less outright hostility than a flippant indifference to serious conversation of any kind.   Yet I was certain that all churches were inhabited; that they were Someone’s house, and that this indwelling presence was a benevolent influence on life.  So the awareness that to practise my faith was to risk the bemusement or ridicule of others was not something I minded — in fact, I probably enjoyed it rather too much.  I felt myself lacking in intellectual formation — and since it was on intellectual grounds that the New Atheists were attacking religious faith, I wanted to know how to mount a defence — but socially, I did not mind being a bit of an outsider.

What I did not altogether realise, though, was what became clear almost at the moment Pope Benedict’s visit was announced in February 2010: the sheer proliferation of quarters in which the Church is actually hated.  Hated not just by celebrity atheists with a book to sell, not merely by self-promoting comedians, but by considerable numbers of influential, intelligent people in actual positions of responsibility. Journalists in reputable papers, politicians, personalities, even employees of government offices — all felt quite free, even in self-proclaimed tolerant Britain, to articulate that hatred to their spleen’s content.

Now, I knew I could not expect unbounded enthusiasm from the media, but this went beyond, say, reasonable concern about public expenditure, or just excoriation of corruption in the Church (corruption which Catholics hate as fiercely as anyone else, if not more).  It was plain that what they hated was the Church itself, and the faith itself, and Pope Benedict himself.  It was personal and it was nasty.  In modern Britain it would have been tolerated towards no other religious leader.  It was different, too, from the residual Protestant anti-Catholic prejudice which had led some to protest against Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1982.  This had a different source: secular progressivism, the new faith of Europe, whose chummy mask had slipped to reveal a face twisted with rage.  It was an outbreak of what we now call ‘cancel culture’, and they certainly wanted Benedict cancelled.

I had not known all that much about Joseph Ratzinger, but all this impelled me to find out pretty quickly.  For us Catholics, an attack on the Pope is like hearing an insult directed at your grandfather — the immediate instinct is to rush to his defence — but even a dispassionate observer should have been able to see the extraordinary discrepancy between Benedict’s media image and the man himself.  This discrepancy was its own wordless vindication of Pope Benedict, of course, but, being a fire-blooded adolescent, I wanted to see some hefty ripostes from our own side.  Many of the most spirited defences I initially found online were mounted by bloggers sympathetic to traditionalist worship, and ever since, though always an English Mass-goer myself, I have been disposed to sympathy for those who prefer the traditional Mass (though it has since been dismayingly instructive to see some other traditionalist blogs turn as nasty about Pope Francis as the secularists were about Benedict).  Benedict had other defenders, too, not least Catholic Voices, which was established precisely in order to offer intelligent, robust, charitable defences of Catholic positions  — an approach which, I now realise, was entirely consistent with the style of the Pope himself.

What I discovered in Benedict was a man alert to the times but not subservient to them, quietly but firmly addressing himself to the modern world, diagnosing its ailments acutely, warning with gentle urgency against its errors, pointing some possible ways ahead.  He explained with startling lucidity what I had long hoped and suspected: that intelligence and faith, far from being opposed, illuminate each other; that there is no contradiction between truth and love; that the small flame of the sanctuary lamp remains the vital spark of life, in this age as in any other.  More immediately, I found a gentle and grandfatherly man, perhaps the most misrepresented man of the past half-century.  

The protesting secularists probably bothered me far more than they did Benedict himself.  Still, there was considerable and justifiable concern that the visit was going to be marred or hijacked in some way, and the eight-month media circus offered little reassurance on this score.  But this was where his clarity came in.  His character, simply by its sheer contrast to the mud-slingers, presented me with a clear choice.  One side was sneering at faith, hating beauty, scoffing at marriage, dismissing hope; on the other sat Pope Benedict and the Church, quietly but firmly standing for the ‘splendour of truth’, defending the absolute and irreducible human dignity of every human being, even when it is inconvenient — perhaps especially when it is inconvenient — and holding up defiantly the model of the person of Christ.  The whole experience confirmed my suspicions about the the secular-progressivist modern West, and my sorrow at the ebbing away of Old Britain.  I saw that I might one day have to choose between my own culture and the Church; that when it came to it, the Faith might actually cost me something.  Before he even landed, then, Pope Benedict made it clear to me where my loyalties lay.

But then he did land — and the mood changed utterly.  There he was on the television, chatting with the Queen at Holyrood; suddenly the BBC was wearing the seriousness and respectability of the national broadcaster, and the grown-ups were back in charge.  And it was not that Benedict routed or shamed the protestors. It was that they just seemed to melt away, and their menace evaporated.  A demonstration against the visit did go ahead in London somewhere, but it had simply ceased to matter.  I almost forgot about them — and if I did give them a moment’s thought, they seemed rather sad and silly and lonely.  Meanwhile, the crowds who came out to see Benedict, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, were unequivocally benevolent, if not jubilant.  That change of mood alone taught me several lessons I have since found useful — how far a media narrative can diverge from public opinion, and how quickly simple spiritual sunlight can evaporate hostility.  It also confirmed everything I had ever been taught about withstanding bullies and their largely illusory power.

But even while all this was sinking in, Pope Benedict himself, twinkling away, was healing the hurt of centuries.  Here he was, at the the Queen’s invitation, not merely on a pastoral visit (as Pope John Paul II had been), but also a state visit.  The following day, the seventeenth of September, he was down in London, meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, and, later that evening, during a profoundly moving Evensong in Westminster Abbey which included some of my very favourite hymns, kneeling with him at the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor.  This was, however fleeting, a startlingly coherent and plausible expression of Christian unity, an image of how things could be if the divisions between Canterbury and Rome could finally be healed.  It was an act of worship held together not merely by politeness or decorum, I believe, but by an aesthetic and spiritual harmony.  And so, in sudden contrast to the outsiderhood I had been experiencing as a Catholic Englishman only a few days before, I suddenly found deep congruence between my faith and the very roots of Englishness, and a way opened up and out — as if illuminated by a lightning flash in the middle of the night — towards reconciliation between the Churches.  This had a great deal to do with the organisers on both the Anglican and Catholic sides, of course, but it was also because Pope Benedict himself understood the power of symbolic gesture.

That Benedict knew this personally is, I think, proven by my favourite story about him, an incident which occurred during the Lambeth Palace visit.  It was told by the late, great Fr. Mark Langham, himself an ardent ecumenicist, who was present at the time:

At the conclusion of the speeches we prayed together the Lord’s Prayer, and we came to that awkward bit — the bit where the Roman Catholics stop and Anglicans carry on.  The Anglican bishops, sensitive to the Roman Catholic tradition, graciously concluded, “But deliver us from evil,” and there was a pause.  And then one voice continued, “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.”  It was the voice of Pope Benedict.

I think this simple gesture speaks volumes about the man.  He was salving and resolving the past, blessing the present, and giving us hope for the future.  Between the Lambeth Palace visit and the Evensong in the Abbey, he delivered one of the great speeches of his pontificate in the great hammer-beamed Hall of the Palace of Westminster, arguing that faith and reason are not only compatible but essential to each other.  With his impeccable manners he was proposing a vision for Britain — a vision in keeping with our best traditions, and one which would lead us to a happy and harmonious future.  “May all Britons continue to live by the values of honesty, respect and fair-mindedness that have won them the esteem and admiration of many,” was his prayer.  It has occurred to me that the visit meant a great deal to him, as well as to us; I think these words of his were entirely heartfelt.

It remains a special memory for me that I saw him when he was in the midst of all these monumental errands.  Having travelled up with some Sixth Form friends (incidentally none Catholic) to greet him on Lambeth Bridge, we saw him in the Pope-mobile, twenty feet away, as he travelled to Westminster from his meeting with the Anglican bishops.   

Now, so far, everything may seem to have been on the political or national sphere, rather than the personal.  The main spiritual experience took place the following day, Friday 18th, at the great vigil in Hyde Park on the eve of the beatification of John Henry Newman.  It is worth remembering, when watching back film of the crowds on the Mall past which the Pope travelled, that Hyde Park was already full of 80,000 of us waiting for him; the two gatherings have to be taken together!  It was a tremendous joy, to be gathered all together, to see how many of us there were — and, for me, not least, to see so many other Catholics of my own age.  The music — with its full chorus and orchestra — was both dignified and uplifting.  Then came his unforgettable speech.  What other figure, addressing young people, would refuse to talk down to them, would steer clear of slogans or cheap platitudes?  “Dear young friends,” he called us, and one sensed, by the fondness with which he spoke about John Henry Newman that this speech was clearly his own work, and sincerely felt.  There was a sense of his speaking personally to us — indeed, to me.  The three lessons he drew from the life of John Henry Newman were, just as he said, ‘very relevant to our lives as believers and to the life of the Church today’: firstly, that we are capable of knowing — and were created to know — the truth, which, in a word, is Christ; secondly, that this truth requires our commitment, our ‘intellectual honesty’, which may come at a cost; and thirdly, our beliefs and our lives must be consistent with each other: our faith must be no mere intellectual pose or stance, but permeate our hearts and influence our every word and action, so that, by this courageous integrity, health might flow back not only into the human person but into families, into nations, into the whole world:

One of the Cardinal’s best-loved meditations includes the words, “God has created me to do him some definite service.  He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another.”  Here we see Newman’s fine Christian realism, the point at which faith and life inevitably intersect.  Faith is meant to bear fruit in the transformation of our world through the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the lives and activity of believers.  No one who looks realistically at our world today could think that Christians can afford to go on with business as usual, ignoring the profound crisis of faith which has overtaken our society, or simply trusting that the patrimony of values handed down by the Christian centuries will continue to inspire and shape the future of our society.  We know that in times of crisis and upheaval God has raised up great saints and prophets for the renewal of the Church and Christian society; we trust in his providence and we pray for his continued guidance.  But each of us, in accordance with his or her state of life, is called to work for the advancement of God’s Kingdom by imbuing temporal life with the values of the Gospel.  Each of us has a mission, each of us is called to change the world, to work for a culture of life, a culture forged by love and respect for the dignity of each human person.  As our Lord tells us in the Gospel we have just heard, our light must shine in the sight of all, so that, seeing our good works, they may give praise to our heavenly Father.

And then in the cool September night we fell silent for Adoration, all together in prayer in the middle of London with Pope Benedict, on the eve of the beatification of a great Englishman.  It was an unutterable privilege.

There is much else that I owe to Pope Benedict — I have not even mentioned a greater reverence in the liturgy, and the new English translation of the Mass, which I associated closely with him —  but this visit was the centre-piece of his legacy for me.  Barely a fortnight after hearing this speech I began university; it was a natural step to join the student chaplaincy, and there I found the same irresistible combination of vigour and conviviality which I have been able to find in various different places to this day, and which is so characteristic of the Church. 

Did he have weaknesses?  It is true that neither his visit nor his papacy appear in the short term to have arrested Britain’s, and Europe’s, slide into despondency and self-loathing; true that few of the British parliamentarians who heard his speech have since made any sign of having paid the slightest attention to him.  Some of my friends outside the Church have only an impression of a man overwhelmed by scandals and crises, and even some of his admirers have criticised him for his decision to resign his office.  It is arguable, I suppose, that even a good pastor and perceptive intellectual may lack the strength of will to govern effectively.  But I think some of the things he had to deal with would have been a fairly hellish proposition even for a younger man — and in any case, even before he became Pope, he had already spent twenty years meticulously, if unspectacularly, driving out rot as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  Likewise, though I was as shocked as anyone else by his resignation, I don’t find myself worrying too much about it now.  I agree with many others that it was a sign of his humility, and his awareness of his own limits, for, much as I would have loved him to be able to carry on for ever, he seemed clearly weakened and bowed down.  It was also a sign to us not to pin all our hopes on him.  He had, in any case, arguably already established his legacy.  His emphasis as Pope was on Europe, and on issuing the last warning to her not to tear up her roots, and on encouraging the faithful as the shadows fall.  At the same time, he knew as well as anyone that the greatest vitality in the Church today is in Africa and Asia, and I could well believe that, having given all he had for the faith in Europe, he felt the need to stand aside to let this new growth flourish.

Pope Benedict XVI was one of those rare people who were both great and good in both mind and heart — too great and too good, perhaps, to be summed up at this short remove; I agree with those who expect his clarifying influence to be making itself felt centuries hence.  He was, as our own Cardinal Nichols has said (himself, I sense, strongly influenced by the visit), ‘through and through a gentleman, through and through a scholar, through and through a pastor, through and through a man of God’ — and, he added in a BBC interview on the day of the funeral, simply ‘a lovely man’.  I am proud to belong to the Benedict Generation.  May the God whom he served so faithfully and so courageously welcome him into the courts of Paradise.

In the Next Few Years

Half the battle, in these next few years, will be to keep our heads.  These are troubled, unreal, topsy-turvy times, and even leaving aside, if we can, the war in Ukraine, where the horrors of the 1940s have come howling back into our continent; even if we concentrate on our own society and culture, there is a widespread sense that the world has gone mad, and is going steadily madder. 

The first thing is not to follow it: we must not panic and go mad ourselves.  There are at least two false paths to be avoided — to give in and simply go along with the world’s insistent lunacies, or to allow ourselves to be goaded into an opposite, contrarian madness.  Both are easier than we think, even for honest and well-intentioned people.  Not for nothing do we speak of sanity as the state of being ‘well-balanced’, as a kind of equilibrium which has to be maintained, and which by implication it is more than possible to lose.  And such a balanced mind can indeed be hard to maintain, or to be sure of having maintained, especially if all around are losing theirs.

How, then, do we keep ourselves steady?  There is some considerable strength to be drawn simply from calm observation of the situation at hand.  With the right bearings we can, in all humility, taking into account our own flaws and follies, still have the confidence to point out the world’s madnesses, and to be sure that they are indeed the world’s, and not ours.  We can say that women and men, though radically equal in dignity, are also different from each other in certain essential ways, and that the blurring of such distinctions carries great risks, including to that same equal dignity.  We can say that an undue preoccupation with racial and ethnic characteristics, even with the ostensible goal of eradicating unjust prejudice, will actually do more harm than good to race relations.  We can say that the freedom of adults must not take precedence over the flourishing of children.  We can say that political causes do not make good religions.  And so on.  It helps simply to be able to say these things, to reassure ourselves that we at least have kept our heads.

 

All the same, the situation we find ourselves describing may still be a grave one.  We churchgoers, for instance, are trying not to find particularly daunting the displacement, by means of a potent blend of secularist, materialist and progressivist ideologies, of the Christian imagination of Europe: a process which has been going on for several centuries but which seems in our times to be ascending to a new climax.  Now because we are churchgoers we know too, of course, that this is nothing new.  The forces of chaos — and human beings in general — have been in rebellion against God and good sense since time immemorial.  We saw it yesterday, on Good Friday, which I find more shocking with every passing year.  The silent treachery of Judas, the queasy pragmatism of Pilate before the hissing Sanhedrin, the spittle-flecked blood-thirst of the mindless mob, Peter’s three (three!) denials, the exquisite ingenuity of the malevolence of the soldiers, the agony beyond agony of the road to Golgotha and the anguish of the Mother who stood beside it, the skull-stark desolation of the Cross itself, and then the final, unthinkable horror actually coming to pass: ‘He bowed his head and gave up his spirit.’  We were not there, and yet in truth we are there all the time.  For we know what this is all about: we have all heard of such things, or witnessed them, or indeed committed them; it is the history of the world.  Yes, we know all this.  And yet, since the forces of rebellion take different forms in different times and places, it is possible to make observations about the particular circumstances of different ages; and in our own day, it seems to me, the various threats to the Church add up to something that is without precedent in history.  

In part this is because these threats are not usually overtly violent: they are often invisible or intangible as well as appearing sophisticated and civilised, and therefore more insidious, disorienting and difficult to oppose.  So, for instance, here in Britain we have, in only a century or so, and with scarcely any controversy, transformed ourselves from an at least outwardly Christian civilisation into a largely secular-progressive one.  Perhaps because the trend itself has remained constant for most of our lifetimes we might not realise how great a shock this is, but we should not underestimate its effect: even taking into account the atheism and scepticism already widespread in the British establishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it amounts to a swift and drastic revolution, and one by which we have made serious alterations to the moral and ethical foundations and fabric of our society.  Partly it came about by the sheer cost of the the two world wars, whose shattering violence left intangible things as well as tangible beyond straightforward repair: social solidarity, love of country, standards of decency, trust in institutions.  Then since the war we have had the Revolution of the Self, a phenomenon that Ed West has gone so far as to call a second Reformation, and whose general coarsening and cheapening influence successfully ushered in a radical transformation of our understanding of family, morality, culture and of truth itself.  The attack was deep, determined and aimed more or less directly at Christian morality.  Wise and brave people sounded warnings to no avail.

In recent years, though, something else has begun to happen.  Partly it is something we might have been expecting: some kind of counter-reaction to that Revolution of the Self, as the sheer magnitude of the cost of its false promises became clear.  Something along these lines has now indeed begun to materialise, but it not the sort of thing we might have hoped for.  Angry beyond coherence, it rails indiscriminately against more or less anything that is inherited from the past, so that, instead of vindication for the Church, we now, to our horror, find ourselves actually lumped in with the Sixties revolutionaries, as if we straightforwardly share the blame for the problems they caused.  Never mind that it is the Church that has, say, warned most strongly and consistently against the myth of ‘free love’: no, the traditional Christian understanding of marriage is still considered as grave a threat to the fulfilment of women as the post-Sixties status quo.  Likewise, in the renewed focus on the wounds left by the slave trade, there is scant acknowledgement of the Christian motivations of the abolitionists, still less a willingness to make the distinction between the teaching of a religion and the decision by some nations and individuals at times to disregard this teaching.  We might also have hoped for any counter-revolution to have a cleansing, refreshing effect on our culture and language, and to restore some of the old care and courtesy in self-expression, but what has happened instead is that new and arbitrary speech-codes have been drawn up, so that we are terribly nervous about words like ‘Christmas’ and ‘Easter’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘unborn baby’, while the public conversation in general remains as casually crass and foul-mouthed as ever — and they accuse us of using hurtful language.  It is all deeply unfair and demoralising.

A hostile culture is by no means an unprecedented proposition for the Church.  But what seems different in our own time — what makes our mission a New Evangelisation — is precisely this complexity, this many-layeredness of the hostility of the twenty-first-century West towards the Church to which it owes so much.  We are not dealing with straightforward persecution, but a sulky, cynical, irreverent, suspicious, yet also strangely gullible society.  Meanwhile it often feels as if the Church has no traction, no way on it; that we lack the language and credibility to address the world (though this is partly our own fault as well).  The words of the Gospel, however rich and life-giving they may sound within our sanctuaries, can seem to ring hollow or trite in the stale atmosphere outside.

In the face of all this, our feelings, too, are complex.  We might be fearful of being wrong-footed by our culture’s many self-contradictions, never mind embarrassed by its vulgarity and narcissism.  We know we need a new kind of courage, and a great deal of it.  All this understandably makes us hesitant about what to do next.  

There is often, too, a sense of not only being attacked but tormented and goaded.  To use the famous phrase of Benedict XVI (to whom Happy Birthday, for he turns ninety-five today!), the steadily consolidating ‘dictatorship of relativism’ — which, as he put it so presciently, ‘does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires’ — has brought about some maddening, bewildering situations.  For instance, we are witnessing simultaneously this aforementioned obsession with fundamentally unimportant distinctions regarding ethnicity, yet also the vehement rejection of essential and crucial distinctions between the sexes.  To take another example, the long revolution against marriage has not demolished it straightforwardly, as one might have feared in the Sixties, but instead captured and refashioned it in a new image by means of sleight of hand and word games.  For the meaning of such a fundamental word to change underneath our feet, for it to be stripped of its transcendent, cosmic significance and shrunk to something beholden to human whim, is almost more dismaying than plain iconoclasm would have been.  It was not enough for marriage to be destroyed; it had to be disfigured and then destroyed.  It is not enough for abortion to be permitted as a necessary evil or last resort; it must now be championed as a positive good and a civil right.  It is not enough that the Church should be defeated — the Church must be humiliated and then defeated.  Truth must be twisted and then toppled.  Christ must not only be crucified; He must be mocked and crucified.

This being Holy Saturday, these words are necessarily sombre.  I know that, amid all these woes, opportunities for good are emerging all the time — such as the fact that most ordinary people, whether believers or not, remain reassuringly normal and sane; or the youth and vitality of the pro-life movement — and also that, every minute of every day, we have the unwavering assurance of Providence that all manner of thing shall, in the end, be well.  But even if all evil is ultimately in retreat — even if any advancing menace or host can only hope for a Pyrrhic victory, and a temporary one at that — this Triduum gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the dreadful strength that evil can and does wield.  Evil is frightening; it roars and ambushes and twists the knife and goads us even as it wounds us.

But however many bearings we feel we are losing, we always have the faith and the saints and the True North of the Mass.  For alongside the long history of human power and human misery is the other, parallel, unsung history, forgotten by the chronicles but every bit as true: the history of all the Masses said every day, all the prayers uttered, as well as all the words and deeds of kindness and courage done by people of good will.  It is by this compass, always present, never erring, that we keep ourselves sane and rooted.  Let it be recorded, not on this ephemeral blog but in hearts and minds now and in years to come, that even in these unreal years there were those who still believed in the eternal verities, who still cared about the inheritance of their forefathers; who cherished such things and passed them to their descendants in the confident hope that evil shall in the end be outlasted, outweighed and outdone by good.  If we do this, then we shall have kept our heads; if we keep our heads, then that will be half the battle won; and a half-won battle is one we can hope to win outright.  Let us keep heart too, then, as well as our heads, so that generations to come will enjoy heart’s ease and happiness in a gentler culture, a fairer society, and a world closer than our own to the will of its Creator.

DrewCR2 · There is a green hill

The too-seldom-heard setting by Herbert Sumsion (1899–1995) of Cecil Frances Alexander’s hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, sung here by the choristers of Grimsby Parish Church, directed by Andrew Cantrill, and with the organ played by David Leigh.  I have a soft spot for ingenuous Victorian Evangelical hymns like these, and the fine balance they strike between sentimentality and starkness.

He died that we might be forgiven,

He died to make us good,

That we might go at last to Heaven,

Saved by His precious blood.

Eleven years ago today…

Eleven years ago, Pope Benedict delivered these words to a multitude of 80,000 in Hyde Park in London…

This is an evening of joy, of immense spiritual joy, for all of us. We are gathered here in prayerful vigil to prepare for tomorrow’s Mass, during which a great son of this nation, Cardinal John Henry Newman, will be declared Blessed.  How many people, in England and throughout the world, have longed for this moment!  It is also a great joy for me, personally, to share this experience with you.  As you know, Newman has long been an important influence in my own life and thought, as he has been for so many people beyond these isles.  The drama of Newman’s life invites us to examine our lives, to see them against the vast horizon of God’s plan, and to grow in communion with the Church of every time and place: the Church of the apostles, the Church of the martyrs, the Church of the saints, the Church which Newman loved and to whose mission he devoted his entire life. 

I thank Archbishop Peter Smith for his kind words of welcome in your name, and I am especially pleased to see the many young people who are present for this vigil.  This evening, in the context of our common prayer, I would like to reflect with you about a few aspects of Newman’s life which I consider very relevant to our lives as believers and to the life of the Church today.  Let me begin by recalling that Newman, by his own account, traced the course of his whole life back to a powerful experience of conversion which he had as a young man.  It was an immediate experience of the truth of God’s word, of the objective reality of Christian revelation as handed down in the Church.  This experience, at once religious and intellectual, would inspire his vocation to be a minister of the Gospel, his discernment of the source of authoritative teaching in the Church of God, and his zeal for the renewal of ecclesial life in fidelity to the apostolic tradition.  At the end of his life, Newman would describe his life’s work as a struggle against the growing tendency to view religion as a purely private and subjective matter, a question of personal opinion.  Here is the first lesson we can learn from his life: in our day, when an intellectual and moral relativism threatens to sap the very foundations of our society, Newman reminds us that, as men and women made in the image and likeness of God, we were created to know the truth, to find in that truth our ultimate freedom and the fulfilment of our deepest human aspirations.  In a word, we are meant to know Christ, who is himself “the way, and the truth, and the life”.

Newman’s life also teaches us that passion for the truth, intellectual honesty and genuine conversion are costly.  The truth that sets us free cannot be kept to ourselves; it calls for testimony, it begs to be heard, and in the end its convincing power comes from itself and not from the human eloquence or arguments in which it may be couched.  Not far from here, at Tyburn, great numbers of our brothers and sisters died for the faith; the witness of their fidelity to the end was ever more powerful than the inspired words that so many of them spoke before surrendering everything to the Lord.  In our own time, the price to be paid for fidelity to the Gospel is no longer being hanged, drawn and quartered, but it often involves being dismissed out of hand, ridiculed or parodied.  And yet, the Church cannot withdraw from the task of proclaiming Christ and his Gospel as saving truth, the source of our ultimate happiness as individuals and as the foundation of a just and humane society.

Finally, Newman teaches us that if we have accepted the truth of Christ and committed our lives to him, there can be no separation between what we believe and the way we live our lives.  Our every thought, word and action must be directed to the glory of God and the spread of his Kingdom.  Newman understood this, and was the great champion of the prophetic office of the Christian laity.  He saw clearly that we do not so much accept the truth in a purely intellectual act as embrace it in a spiritual dynamic that penetrates to the core of our being.  Truth is passed on not merely by formal teaching, important as that is, but also by the witness of lives lived in integrity, fidelity and holiness; those who live in and by the truth instinctively recognize what is false and, precisely as false, inimical to the beauty and goodness which accompany the splendour of truth, veritatis splendor.

Tonight’s first reading is the magnificent prayer in which Saint Paul asks that we be granted to know “the love of Christ which surpasses all understanding”. The Apostle prays that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, and that we may come to “grasp, with all the saints, the breadth and the length, the height and the depth” of that love.  Through faith we come to see God’s word as a lamp for our steps and light for our path.  Newman, like the countless saints who preceded him along the path of Christian discipleship, taught that the “kindly light” of faith leads us to realize the truth about ourselves, our dignity as God’s children, and the sublime destiny which awaits us in heaven.  By letting the light of faith shine in our hearts, and by abiding in that light through our daily union with the Lord in prayer and participation in the life-giving sacraments of the Church, we ourselves become light to those around us; we exercise our “prophetic office”; often, without even knowing it, we draw people one step closer to the Lord and his truth. Without the life of prayer, without the interior transformation which takes place through the grace of the sacraments, we cannot, in Newman’s words, “radiate Christ”; we become just another “clashing cymbal” (1 Cor 13:1) in a world filled with growing noise and confusion, filled with false paths leading only to heartbreak and illusion.

One of the Cardinal’s best-loved meditations includes the words, “God has created me to do him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another”.  Here we see Newman’s fine Christian realism, the point at which faith and life inevitably intersect.  Faith is meant to bear fruit in the transformation of our world through the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the lives and activity of believers. No one who looks realistically at our world today could think that Christians can afford to go on with business as usual, ignoring the profound crisis of faith which has overtaken our society, or simply trusting that the patrimony of values handed down by the Christian centuries will continue to inspire and shape the future of our society.  We know that in times of crisis and upheaval God has raised up great saints and prophets for the renewal of the Church and Christian society; we trust in his providence and we pray for his continued guidance.  But each of us, in accordance with his or her state of life, is called to work for the advancement of God’s Kingdom by imbuing temporal life with the values of the Gospel.  Each of us has a mission, each of us is called to change the world, to work for a culture of life, a culture forged by love and respect for the dignity of each human person.  As our Lord tells us in the Gospel we have just heard, our light must shine in the sight of all, so that, seeing our good works, they may give praise to our heavenly Father.

From the homily of Pope Benedict XVI at the Prayer Vigil in Hyde Park, Saturday, 18th September 2010, retrieved 18 September 2021 from https://thepapalvisit.org.uk/home/replay-the-visit/day-three/the-holy-fathers-hyde-park-vigil-address/

Happy 94th birthday to Pope Emeritus Benedict

Pope Benedict leaves Lambeth Palace for Westminster Abbey, 17th September, 2010

Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, celebrates his ninety-fourth birthday today.  Wishing him Herzliche Glückwünsche und Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, or, as I understand they say in Bavaria, Ois Guade!

-----

How much contemporary society needs this witness!  How much we need, in the Church and in society, witnesses of the beauty of holiness, witnesses of the splendour of truth, witnesses of the joy and freedom born of a living relationship with Christ! 

One of the greatest challenges facing us today is how to speak convincingly of the wisdom and liberating power of God’s word to a world which all too often sees the Gospel as a constriction of human freedom, instead of the truth which liberates our minds and enlightens our efforts to live wisely and well, both as individuals and as members of society.  Let us pray, then, that the Catholics of this land will become ever more conscious of their dignity as a priestly people, called to consecrate the world to God through lives of faith and holiness. […]  

Dear friends […] I invite you once more to look to Christ, who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection. […] I pray that, in doing so, you may join the ranks of faithful believers throughout the long Christian history of this land in building a society truly worthy of man, worthy of your nation’s highest traditions.  

Pope Benedict XVI, Homily during Mass at Westminster Cathedral, 18th September, 2010.

Ten Years Since Benedict’s Visit

Pope Benedict leaves Lambeth Palace for Westminster, 17th September, 2010

Already it has been ten years since Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.   Ten years, then, of tea twice daily from my souvenir ‘Papal Mug’ (I make that over seven thousand cups), and ten years, too, that my life has been on the course on which those four days confirmed me: a course with a particular direction, with a particular confidence, in the service of a particular Person.  I cannot be the only one for whom the whole experience helped to affirmed and clarified all that matters most in life, and indeed what life really is.  So, not least because it also happened at a formative time for me, on the threshold of university, I remember the Papal Visit with great happiness, and continue to draw strength from its memory.  It will remain a high moment for the rest of my days.

The long-serving Papal Mug

This had not always seemed likely, however.  One way and another, the months before the visit constituted a rather unpleasant prelude, in which whole swathes of the press and media engaged in an eight-month campaign of hostile publicity not simply against the idea of the visit, but often explicitly and unashamedly against the person of the Pope and the Catholic Church as a whole.  The opposition, overwhelmingly secularist-atheist in character, often went well beyond legitimate criticism of the Church’s institutional failings, or reasonable scrutiny of public expenditure, and curdled swiftly into ill-veiled hatred of the Christian faith itself.  Commentators who ought to have known better indulged in highly personal attacks on Pope Benedict’s character, or fulminated against caricatures of Catholic teaching, or simply ranted against religious belief in general.  Crazed calumnies about Joseph Ratzinger’s supposed corruption or Nazi sympathies or authoritarianism, all nonsense and all child’s play to refute, were sent gleefully off to the printers instead of the compost-heap where they belonged.  Deep down, of course, what these commentators really disliked was Benedict’s resistance to moral relativism; his quiet insistence on the absolute truth of the whole of Catholic Christianity, including those aspects that our age finds difficult.

The most enthusiastic opponents organised themselves into an outfit calling itself ‘Protest the Pope’ (American style — they didn’t even have the decency to protest against the Pope in the British and prepositionally proper manner!).  It was extraordinary to see how much they loathed the Church, or at least what they mistook for the Church; it was both sobering and instructive for us to hear things said and left to stand which, if uttered against almost any other visitor to this country, let alone any other religious leader, would have been seen by all for the smears they were.  The ‘Protest the Pope’ gang was from the outset both very silly and very small, but it received such disproportionately generous airtime from the media that things at one stage began to look serious.  Would Richard Dawkins and his accomplices actually attempt a stunt like a ‘citizen’s arrest’ of Pope Benedict, ridiculous as it sounded? Were they seriously going to ruin the whole thing?  It is by inducing such anxiety that many bullies work, intimidating others as much by their threats as by their actual deeds.  Even in March there was a sense that the whole visit might be in jeopardy:

Some would oppose this proclaimer of peace;
Some disbelieve what he wants to increase;
Some would believe that the world has no hope;
Others know why we must welcome the Pope.

Some have more interest in money than God;
Some are content to give anger the nod;
Others, who know what is built on this rock,
Welcome his peace.  Let him come to his flock.

Well, in the end, this prayer was answered, thank God.  For at last the day came, and the moment Pope Benedict landed in Scotland, the mood changed utterly.  No sooner had all and sundry seen what he was really like, and the public’s true attitude became clear, than the press changed its tune.  The hatred and opprobrium vanished; it was shown to have been over-amplified, even illusory; it was gone with barely a whimper.  ‘Protest the Pope’ simply ceased to be relevant.  There was no longer anything to fear, and we bore our disparagers no ill will.  The BBC, transformed, began excellent and thorough coverage of the visit.  (It is so often the way with the Corporation that it does come up with the goods in the end, when it knows the world is watching!).  Above all, Pope Benedict received the warm and triumphant welcome he deserved, and there followed in succession four days of remarkable gestures, images and experiences.

What strikes me, in retrospect, is to see the different ways in which these moments worked and touched us: though always the same man, he was visiting us in various different guises.  Here was a head of state, a pastor to guide his flock, a thinker with ideas to contribute to our cultural and social conversation, a missionary to a land forgetful of God, and a priest entrusted by Christ with His authority and consolation.  He was both ‘world leader’ and ‘humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord’, and a figure of interest even to non-Catholics, even to non-Christians, including some of my own friends.  This many-layeredness was evident from Pope Benedict’s very first engagement, his meeting with the Queen in Edinburgh.  This being a state visit, the first of any Pope to the British Isles — St. John Paul II’s 1982 journey having been technically a ‘pastoral visit’ — Benedict was, formally speaking, Her Majesty’s guest and counterpart.  But, in the very same moment, the head of the Church of Rome was greeting the head of the Church of England, and the healing of old religious as well as political wounds was continued.  Most simply, and perhaps most importantly, we saw two people who understand and believe the Christian faith and share its hope, who know both the burden and the importance of duty, offering by their steadfast example quiet encouragement to millions of people.  So it was that, even within the first hour, Benedict had touched the people of Britain in the national, the ecclesiastical and the personal spheres.

The day in Scotland concluded with a Mass in Bellahouston Park (with a specially-composed Mass setting by James MacMillan), and the next day, the seventeenth, the Pope came down to London.  That afternoon a group of friends and I went to see if we could catch a glimpse of him leaving Lambeth Palace on his way to Westminster.  Now at last I could see for myself just how mistaken the media had been in the months beforehand.  The mood among the waiting multitude on Lambeth Bridge was one of unalloyed excitement; open delight was alive in this city that is often so jaded and cold-shouldered.  The anticipation steadily grew and grew, until a ripple of cheers rose to our right… all at once the Pope-mobile was in view, sweeping rapidly towards us — and there he was!  A wave of jubilation accompanied Benedict across the bridge in the twixt-season afternoon sunlight.

Only an hour later, the Pope was giving his remarkable speech in Westminster Hall, a speech which remains no less urgently relevant a decade later:

The role of religion in political debate is […] to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves.  And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion.  It is a two-way process.  Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person.  Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.  This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.

Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation.  In this light, I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalization of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. […] I would invite all of you, therefore, within your respective spheres of influence, to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.

Pope Benedict XVI, Meeting with the Representatives of British Society, 17th September 2010. <http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2010/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100917_societa-civile.html>

Then came the first visit by any Pope to Westminster Abbey, and sung Evensong.  For those who love England and long for Christian Unity, it was greatly moving to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope embracing and kneeling side by side in prayer before the shrine of St Edward the Confessor — and then what a sheer treat to hear the music of Herbert Howells thundering from the organ, and the beloved hymn beginning — 

All my hope on God is founded:
He doth still my trust renew.
Me through change and chance He guideth,
Only good and only true.
God unknown,
He alone
Calls my heart to be His own.

Some readers might wonder: why all this excitement for one man?  Well, of course, the Pope is a mortal like all of us.  But the office he holds goes all the way back to Christ; the first of his predecessors was St Peter himself, to whom Christ turned and said ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’.  So he is Christ’s earthly representative — though the authority entrusted to him is not simply raw power to do with what he likes; rather, his is the responsibility of the hand on the tiller and the eye on the horizon.  He keeps the Church together on the straight and narrow through time and space, so that the one eternal Gospel can be proclaimed anew in every age.  This responsibility remains whether or not the Pope himself is a good or a bad man — though it obviously helps if he is a good one.  That Benedict himself is a kind and gentle man, blazingly intelligent and perceptive to the crises and opportunities of our time, only gave us more reasons to love him when he was Pope.

Procession of parish banners in London’s Hyde Park, 18th September

The summit of his 2010 visit was to be the beatification of the much-loved Cardinal — now Saint — John Henry Newman, at Cofton Park on the outskirts of Birmingham.  But it was the vigil the evening before in London’s Hyde Park that was the high point in my book.  As on Lambeth Bridge, it was the atmosphere that made this gathering extraordinary.  The first hint was at at Victoria station, where a proliferation of the distinctive yellow bags with which we had all been issued drew my eye to a large group of fellow pilgrims.  There was a feeling of recognition, of fellowship, of deep togetherness, not in the least bit oppressive, but refreshing and liberating, which only swelled as we converged on Hyde Park.  As we realised how many we were, the great cultural headwind subsided, and another, sweeter spirit took its place.  Eighty thousand of us all together — I had never been in a gathering that size — and with no need of an enemy for our unity.  Yet for all that volume of people, it felt rather like a family gathering, which of course is exactly what it was.  It was such a simple thing, for us all to meet like that together, but even then I knew the memory would be so happy that it would last for years.  Great assemblies of people can be joyful or they can be ugly… but here we had all fallen in with a very good crowd.

Pope Benedict arrives at London’s Hyde Park, 18th September

And we young people present could see for ourselves, by our own sheer numbers, that we were not as alone in our beliefs and hopes as we might feel in ordinary life.  We all went wild when Pope Benedict arrived, of course, but the hush that descended at Adoration was more memorable, and more unique.  What else would bring about such a moment?  Who else could deliver such a lucid, sincere, quietly but deeply stirring address, with that way of calling us ‘Dear young friends…’ as no mere celebrity or political ideologue would do?  Here was a man who knew how seriously young people want to take life, who knew the depth of our hunger for truth and wisdom, who would not patronise us, offering us a serious speech which was also a message of great joy.  He called us not to mere comfort or apathy or fruitless self-indulgence, but to truth and to greatness and to love — the real thing, measured not by the world’s standard but in a higher currency.  Quoting the same John Henry Newman he was to declare a near-saint on the morrow, he urged us to see dwell deeply on our vocations.  He gave us not the off-hand secular doctrine that drawls at us to do as we please, but the call first to discern and then to follow the true path that God has in mind for us, and thereby to discover the only way to real happiness and real greatness:

Here I wish to say a special word to the many young people present.  Dear young friends: only Jesus knows what “definite service” he has in mind for you.  Be open to his voice resounding in the depths of your heart: even now his heart is speaking to your heart.  Christ has need of families to remind the world of the dignity of human love and the beauty of family life.  He needs men and women who devote their lives to the noble task of education, tending the young and forming them in the ways of the Gospel.  He needs those who will consecrate their lives to the pursuit of perfect charity, following him in chastity, poverty and obedience, and serving him in the least of our brothers and sisters.  He needs the powerful love of contemplative religious, who sustain the Church’s witness and activity through their constant prayer.  And he needs priests, good and holy priests, men who are willing to lay down their lives for their sheep.  Ask our Lord what he has in mind for you! Ask him for the generosity to say “yes!”   

Pope Benedict XVI, Address at Hyde Park, 18th September 2010. <https://thepapalvisit.org.uk/home/replay-the-visit/day-three/the-holy-fathers-hyde-park-vigil-address/>

Perhaps it was then that I knew I belonged to the Benedict Generation.  Most thoughtful young people do indeed hunger for some great mission; they do want to be called to marriage or to make some great vow of love; they are drawn to authenticity and integrity; they yearn for worthy and meaningful lives and to pursue truth and goodness; they want to know how to help others, and how to understand the world and the mystery of life.  

There could hardly have been better words ringing in my ears as I began the adventure of university.  I was to encounter the spirit of the Benedict Generation again at Fisher House, the student chaplaincy, where I learned that the Faith is intelligent as well as beautiful.  I was to find it in new friends I have made in the years since.  I was to see it in churches and at lectures.  I know I was not alone in this — it is alive in the articulateness of Catholic Voices, and in the lives of many Catholics now in their twenties and thirties.  It is also worth mentioning Paschal Uche, who delivered an address to Pope Benedict on behalf of all young people in Westminster Cathedral’s Piazza the morning before the Hyde Park vigil.  Since his ordination last month he has been Father Pascal: the call he discerned was a vocation to the priesthood.  In short, we in the Benedict Generation know what we learned from our German Shepherd, and will draw strength from that treasure-store for ever.

The Hyde Park vigil begins

So it was that those four days made certain things very clear to me at an important moment.  Whereas I had already been well aware that that the Christian faith was hardly the in-thing in the twenty-first century, the visit’s prelude showed me that a significant cohort of fashionable secularist Britain, not content with mere mockery, hated it outright.  But they did not have the last word, nor did they even speak for most ordinary British people, who remained their usual tolerant (or at least rather apathetic!) selves.  For the visit itself revealed the groundlessness and weakness of the hatred — of all hatred — before the strange strength by which inner goodness and holiness drive out evil; the way in which (to quote Douglas Gresham, C. S. Lewis’s step-son) ‘Christianity simply works.’   

How could people hate a man so gentle as Benedict?  The situation presented a clear choice to me.  Whose side was I on?  Was I to go along with fashion, or to be loyal to my Church and my faith, even if this meant dissenting from the spirit of the age?  Yes, I would be I was on Benedict’s side, the side of the Church, and the side of Him whom the Church worships.  I knew where my loyalties lay, and I have never since had cause to regret that choice.  Even when Catholic life requires courage and hard work and unwanted conspicuousness, and however clumsy my efforts, it does not call on any strength that it cannot also supply.  It is the only way.  As they sang in Westminster Abbey, 

Christ doth call one and all:
Ye who follow shall not fall.

Thank you, dear Pope Emeritus Benedict!  May God bless you!  And, as you asked on arriving in our land, “may all Britons continue to live by the values of honesty, respect and fair-mindedness that have won them the esteem and admiration of many.”

Notre-Dame: The Price of Love is Grief

Thank God that the fundamental structure of Notre-Dame Cathedral has been saved from yesterday’s fire.  I imagine that it is in no small part due to the bravery of the Parisian fire brigade that it has been possible to type that sentence.  So thank God for them as well.

The problem with signing up to this business of the Christian faith is that it is accompanied by risks, such as the risk of cultivating a heart sensitive to all that is beautiful.  And the risk of loving: as well as loving people, loving the beautiful things in which they have expressed the deepest truths and which generations have preserved.  If you believe in such a thing as absolute beauty, then you cannot just shrug off the loss when beauty is destroyed.  It means unavoidable pain.

Pain and rage, because, in this age of destruction, this is yet another loss we cannot afford to sustain.  Why our Church, again?  That is not to wish destruction on anybody else, but we are on the ropes as it is, we on the ground trying to defend the faith we love.  Now we are confronted with a horribly symbolic sight, the incarnation of our fears: the material, as well as the spiritual, fabric of our Christian heritage going up in catastrophic flames, beyond our power to save.

Why France, whose sorrow never ends?  And why must this beautiful building be ruined, while every week a smug, ugly addition is topped out in our cities?  Have we not had enough destruction?  Why do sinners’ ways prosper? as Gerard Manley Hopkins paraphrased the prophet Jeremiah.  What does one do in an age in which churches are not built but destroyed?

Millions have stood or knelt in this mighty cathedral.  When I spent some time in Paris as a student, I was one of them, quite often taking advantage of the privilege of being able to come to Mass here, and otherwise I spent a lot of time under its roof.  Around the 850th anniversary of the laying of the cathedral’s foundation stone, I had the unforgettable experience of running my fingers over the new bells cast in celebration, when they were displayed along the nave before being hung.  Later I heard the tremendous sound they made on (I think) the first Sunday they were rung.

Worse grief is suffered all the time by people around us: the bereaved, the dying, the abandoned, the downtrodden.  And I know that the French, whether believers or secular, will show their mettle now as much as ever, and they will not be defeated.  But the gratuitousness of a blow from an unexpected quarter… It is for moments like these that we have the Psalms; their rage, their grief, their remonstration with God who gave us all things and to whom all things return.  And this is why we have Holy Week, to remind ourselves that we are not alone.

And this on the eve of Benedict XVI’s ninety-second birthday, for which I had meant to write a celebratory tribute.  A strange mixture of blessing and sorrow life is indeed.

‘La France pleure sa cathédrale’ on Padreblog: https://www.padreblog.fr/la-france-pleure-sa-cathedrale

Why a ‘dictatorship’ of relativism?

It was a remarkable thing to say, and a remarkable moment at which to say it.  It was at the opening Mass of the 2005 Papal Conclave, addressing those gathered to elect the next Pope, that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as he then still was, warned of a growing ‘dictatorship of relativism’ in our present era.  He was reflecting in his homily on words of St Paul to the Ephesians —

We are all to come to unity in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God, until we become the perfect Man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.  Then we shall not be children any longer, or tossed one way and another and carried along by every wind of doctrine, at the mercy of all the tricks men play and their cleverness in practising deceit.  If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ … [Ephesians 4:13-15]

— and his thoughts, which, when of course the next Pope turned out to be Joseph Ratzinger himself, came to serve in a way as the first homily of Benedict XVI, were these:

How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves — flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error comes true.

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labelled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires. 

(http://www.vatican.va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html, accessed 13 May 2018)

That phrase, the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, has become one of Benedict’s best-known and oftest-quoted.  Even without it, this would be a startling homily; indeed, it attracted a good deal of attention at the time from the secular media, whose spotlight, he knew, that Monday the eighteenth of April, was trained on the Vatican as a new shepherd was being chosen for the Church.  Yet it ought perhaps to have been no surprise to hear a Cardinal opposing moral relativism.  For the Church has always asserted the unchanging nature and the objectivity of the fundamental moral principles that it has been her business, over the centuries, to discern.   Just as the foundations of our human nature have not been designed by us, lie outside our control and are determined by laws above us, the Church tells us that the moral life by which that nature should flourish comes ultimately from standards not our own.  The Church looks with a clear eye and the Holy Spirit’s help at the way we are made, and at the perfect example of Jesus Christ, the man who was God, and concludes not merely that we should not but that we cannot adjust, relativise or negotiate these standards — even if it feels or seems to us like a good idea — without doing ourselves harm.  There are no circumstances, then, in which we may put aside the commandments, disregard the dignity of any human being, or accept the use of evil means in any cause, even a good one.   Moreover, what is fundamentally good and just is the same in every time and place, even if its precise manifestation can sometimes vary from age to age, so neither social change nor technological advances can change these rules.  Now, the Church at its best has also always understood nuance, and knows that different kinds of actions vary in moral gravity, that there is a distinction to be made between the wrongness of a deed and the guilt of the person who commits it, and above all, that God is as merciful as He is just.   But that very paradox of justice and mercy, one of the most tremendous of Christianity’s strengths, would only be weakened if the Church allowed the moral principles themselves to be slackened, offering mere excuses for sins, rather than the limpid water of forgiveness.  If God’s justice were not absolute, the gift of God’s mercy would be diminished.  Relativism weakens justice and falsifies mercy: this is why the Church cannot accept it.

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Obedience to moral principles does not spare us moral dilemmas, though.  Indeed, moral principles sometimes appear to impose suffering on us, seeming to ride roughshod over mankind’s weakness and woe.  Of course the Church is opposed to an unrelenting fundamentalism.  But even as we move mountains to hold out mercy to people, we have to insist, again not without nuance, that the slightest concession to a moral principle itself, even a chink or fracture in the underlying foundation, opens up a temptation to widen it a little further, and then a little further again, and then further still, until, slowly or swiftly, we are tempted into believing that the moral law is below us, rather than above us.  Only when it is too late does it become clear how surprisingly malleable a moral principle may become under surprisingly little pressure, just as easily, we know, as we yield to temptation ourselves.  Hence principle after hitherto-unassailable principle — the dignity of the poor, the sanctity of life, the indissolubility of marriage, the common good — come to be undermined through any number of apparently just, and undoubtedly sincere motivations.  In our own age we have seen this happen.  The Church is not just being jittery when it keeps its look-out for the thin ends of wedges, and Cardinal Ratzinger knew what he was talking about when he warned against it.

Just as this position might be expected of the Church, it is nothing new that it should meet with the disagreement of main-stream secular thought.  Many Western commentators and campaigners would argue that to insist more than a little on more than a minimum of moral standards is to take upon ourselves an authority that is not ours, and in fact to display a certain short-sightedness — a failure to allow for the difference of others’ situations from our own.  From this point of view, relativism is not only harmless, but becomes a virtue, a positive proof of a lack of prejudice, a sign of  a citizen’s readiness to make adaptations in an age of rapid change — and, as we shall see, more important even than that.  The main-stream would probably accept the definition given in an article published in BBC News’ online magazine just after Benedict’s election.  According to this, relativism is the idea that moral principles lack any objective foundation, and vary across cultures and between individuals: not only beauty but ‘goodness, virtue and duty also lie in the eye of the beholder’.  Therefore, in direct contradiction to the Church’s view, it is logically necessary to say not merely that particular discrete acts or deeds or incidents are morally relative to each other (as a judge might hand down different sentences to those found guilty of the same crime) but that the underlying principles that make them right or wrong are also relative, and therefore fallible or negotiable (as if circumstances could put into question the very criminal quality of a given crime; as if the proven act of burglary were not necessarily always forbidden by law).  This idea leaves it up to us to form our own moral standards; we are left to navigate the world by our own light, according to our own perception of our freedom. The secular point of view is far less troubled by the thin ends of wedges than the Church, because it sees no important difference between the wedge and the moral fabric into which it is driven.  Each is as valid, or as fallible, as the other.

The fundamental disagreement is this: the Church says that morality, having an objective source, namely God, is unchanging, written within us and must be discerned; whereas modern Western secularism acknowledges no overall moral authority, understanding morality simply as an agreement reached within a community for the sake of peaceful living.

So, the mind of the Church and the prevailing culture of secularism disagree with each other: business as usual, then!  But what about this word dictatorship’?  This might initially strike even faithful Catholics as quite strong.  We might have expected Cardinal Ratzinger to foretell of a collapse or a disintegration of moral standards, an ‘anarchy of relativism’,  but here he is describing an overt, concerted effort of construction; he seems to be warning of an organised threat.  “Really, a ‘dictatorship’?” even faithful Mass-goers might respond.  “But secular society allows us to practise our religion, doesn’t it?  We are not yet persecuted for our faith, are we, by any authoritarian regime?” Yet a harder phenomenon, with order and purpose, is indeed what he perceived, and to describe it he deliberately chose a word that conjure up in the mind’s eye a whole picture-library of the outbreaks of totalitarianism that litter the twentieth century.  And for the secular mainstream the term touched another nerve.  It is one thing to criticise relativism,” they might retort, “but quite another to suggest that it could lend clout to any organised form of oppression.  Surely this is a contradiction in terms.  Our permissive society seeks precisely to weaken such tyrannies and to liberate the will of the individual; the more dictatorial the authority, the more fervently we oppose it.”  And some of their number would probably add, “And that includes your Church!”

This choice of the word ‘dictatorship’ is all the more startling because Joseph Ratzinger’s writing is characterised precisely by a careful, restrained use of language (it is more the sort of thing his successor Francis would say!).  And, furthermore, to know even a little about his biography and the events that shaped his youth is to realise that he would not employ the term ‘dictatorship’ lightly.  The young Joseph Ratzinger, like the young Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II), was embroiled in the very cauldron’s depth of the Second World War.  Even during the 1930s he had gone to great lengths to obtain exemption from the Hitler Youth, and in 1945 actually deserted his post in the German army, risking his life in doing so, and made his way hundreds of miles home to Bavaria.  Cardinal Ratzinger, having witnessed from within the rise, realisation and collapse of the Third Reich, knows better than most of us what a dictatorship looks like.  He would not make such an allusion glibly.

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Where and how, then, did the man who was about to become Pope see a dictatorship emerging in the modern West?  Not, perhaps, in its outward appearance — there are no mass rallies, no night raids, no goose-stepping infantrymen — but perhaps he sees it, firstly, in our willing blindness.  The apostles of Western progressivism, in allowing the old morality to be compromised, have missed something: the relativism of moral principles has itself been exalted as an absolute moral principle.  And it is rapidly becoming the only absolute moral principle, stiffening among us silently and ironically behind the velvet veneer of fashion, social convention and even, to an increasing extent, the law.  The reasonable freedom to allow each other to order our own lives as we see fit and the reasonable custom of showing tolerance towards those with whose actions or opinions we may disagree have been fashioned into a new moral obligation, a duty to avoid the assertion, in the public sphere, of any absolute moral principle whatsoever, lest others suspect a curtailment of their individual freedom.  It is the bureaucracy of the dictatorship of relativism that, all across western Europe, has in recent years expelled religious signs from public buildings, attempted to interfere and mediate between parents and children, even taken to test in court the unfashionable views of public servants, and gradually elevated quite broad, shallow and unelucidated notions of ‘tolerance’, ‘liberty’, ‘dignity’ and ‘best interests’ to the status of the tenets of a creed.  Quietly, and, it seems, perceptible only to those on its receiving end, a new force crystallises and hardens.

Still, some secularists might say, “Well, even if the law has to be heavy-handed in preventing interference with our liberty to do whatever we want, does this not still mean freedom for us as individuals?  We are still some way short of dictatorship.  Can we not all just lead our lives as we like, so long as we get along with each other, even if the law sometimes has to make to mind our own business?”  But the Church understands that this idea is really an illusion.  This is actually the very threshold of the dictatorship of relativism, which is capable of holding sway over whole cultures and individual minds alike.

To see why, perhaps the first thing we must do is to perceive, behind the promise of freedom that sounds so good, the quality of indifference that pervades and underpins it.  Even that phrase, ‘just do as we like’, apparently resonant with liberty, is radically and inhumanly self-centred.  If I, the ego, am at the centre of my own existentialist quest, I am less concerned not just about what my neighbour is doing, but also how my neighbour relates to me, and who my neighbour is.  Individualism may prevent me from meddling, but it also liberates me from caring. The loosening of the bonds between human beings may sound just fine to strong, independent people, but not to the vulnerable and downtrodden, whom bonds support as much as they bind.  Is it really others’ freedom for their own sake that is so appealing to the individualist, or our own freedom to care less about them?

Once such indifference to our neighbours is permitted we see — and have seen in our culture in the past fifty years — the rise of a general moral indifference: an ‘OK’ culture, in which the maximum we can reasonably expect of others is the bare minimum.  Although there are certainly many exceptions to this rule — I encounter them daily — it is in many places the lowest common denominator: I’m OK, you’re OK, I’m OK with you if you’re OK with me and we’re all OK with whatever each other is OK with. (Unless you’re not OK with what I’m OK with.  That’s not OK).   The smaller aspects of morality — good manners, common decency and solidarity — are threatened and eroded.  The world becomes a rougher-edged, sharper-elbowed place.  We might now be more reliably deterred from prying into others’ business, but we now lack conviction and the support of others, or even the language to offer people guidance and help if necessary.  

Thus is set — very low, it must be said — an upper limit, a kind of ceiling of cultural morality.  But where is the lower limit; where is the minimum?  For how long does the ‘OK culture’ remain merely vaguely, lukewarmly ‘OK’, before it curdles into callousness?  Perhaps the question is now to ask how individuals might respond to life in such a culture, and the answer is surely that many would soon come to permit themselves lower standards.  If my ego believes I am entitled to all the freedom I can get that does not impinge on others, I will naturally be tempted to exercise my own freedom to the full, to the very limit of my neighbour’s freedom.  If that limit is contestable, how long will it be before I am indeed tempted to contest it?  And then how could I be sure, without some external and absolute moral rule, that I was not riding rough-shod over my neighbour?  Would I have the self-discipline to stop short of that limit, if I did not acknowledge any moral authority over me?  Many of us might, much of the time, but we all know enough about the nature of human beings to see how precarious this arrangement is.  This is how yawning temptation and the keen encouragement to fend for oneself consolidate the inward power of the Dictatorship of Relativism, and its command over individual hearts and souls. 

Soon a vicious circle emerges: such changes repeated in many souls all add up to a culture of competition and self-seeking, which, in turn, again strengthens its influences on the individual.  The Church is often accused of ‘scaremongering’ — and no doubt is very adept at scaring people — but the trouble is that the cliché is true: relativism really does lead down a slippery slope towards ever-lower standards of personal behaviour.  The evidence is before us: we can see for ourselves what happens when principles are compromised in the name of some economic or political benefit.  There are modern Britain’s dismal marriage statistics, the slave trade’s legacy in America, the volume and aggression of road traffic, the gradual ruination of river estuaries, and so on.  The effects of the general relaxation of certain laws or moral rules tend to match, even to outdo, the worst fears of those who wish to retain them.

A culture filled with individuals who revere personal choice and freedom above all will not only tend towards self-seeking and indifference, but may also use coercion or the application of heavy pressure to protect its interests, at precisely those troublesome boundaries where the freedoms of individuals collide.  The distance is surprisingly small from an insistence on personal autonomy to the compulsion of others to provide for that freedom, in ways both great and small.  Thus, in liberating the radio broadcaster from the watershed, children’s freedom to tune in is severely reduced; thus, for the sake of motorists’ freedom, rural settlements are subjected to the severing swathes and sempiternal howl of motorways; thus our easy equivocation about the humanity of the unborn compels midwives to supervise and co-ordinate staff involved in abortion procedures.  Now it all begins to look more like a dictatorship.  Or, if I leave my words unminced, the tyranny of the spoilt brat.

This dictatorship has other victims, too, for those whom it does not coerce it may abandon.  For example, to those who use their freedom unwisely it can give only the cold shoulder.  Sartre, the founder of existentialism, acknowledged this with honesty.  The existential doctrine that offers us freedom to form our selves by ourselves never claims to offer any positive guidance other than that we must keep within our boundaries; it ‘accepts no liability’ if people come to regret how they have used their own freedom.  But who, then, will teach us how to use our freedom properly?  The Church understands that the free will that God has given us leaves us with the capacity to do ourselves great wrong and great damage — but is not indifferent to this risk.  As we have seen, the Church proposes moral rules and guidance to help us to use our freedom for greatness, and offers the channel of God’s mercy to help us when we misuse it.  A culture of relativism is not so good at doing this.

Yet even if moral relativism did not produce the coercive lowering of standards, its inhibition of a heightening of standards is equally tyrannical.  Relativism has nothing to say about sainthood.  It is perturbed by holiness.  It prefers to bury itself in a stifling mediocrity of morality.  If somebody actually asks, like our brethren in the Gospels, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ — in other words, ‘How do I live excellently?’ — what happens?  They are brushed off with a curt, dismissive ‘Whatever you wish’: no answer at all.  That too is dictatorship.  People are deprived of the gold standard of living for which they were made, for which they thirst, and to which they are entitled.  The ‘OK culture’, in the guise of liberty, forbids the true freedom obtained by meaningful living. 

For the Church has a revolutionary understanding of freedom that is radically different from the world’s.   The freedom that the modern world offers is, as we have seen, the freedom to do whatever we please at the present moment as far as possible.  But there is another kind of freedom.  For we also call an athlete’s highly-trained movements free; we speak of the freedom of a musician’s thousandfold-practised performance.  Hard-won fluency in a language is a freedom.  But these achievements do not come about by accident.  The athlete, musician and linguist have not spent their lives casually doing what they want.  No; they have made a definite, hard effort to train themselves in a particular direction and to conform to certain rules, of physics, of music, of grammar, that are not of their own making.  Beyond the press-ups, the scales and the verb-tables lies a greater freedom that can be achieved only by conforming to those apparently restrictive and arbitrary rules.  Surely it makes sense, then, that the same principle applies to the moral life.  Bishop Robert Barron, one of the greatest living evangelists of the English-speaking world, has set this out in an article here, which is worth quoting at length:

The view of liberty which has shaped our culture is what we might call the freedom of indifference. On this reading, freedom is the capacity to say “yes” or “no” simply on the basis of one’s own inclinations and according to one’s own decision. Here, personal choice is paramount. We can clearly see this privileging of choice in the contemporary economic, political, and cultural arenas. But there is a more classical understanding of liberty, which might be characterized as the freedom for excellence. On this reading, freedom is the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good, first possible, then effortless. Thus, I become increasingly free in my use of the English language the more my mind and will are trained in the rules and tradition of English. If I am utterly shaped by the world of English, I become an utterly free user of the language, able to say whatever I want, whatever needs to be said. 

  In a similar way, I become freer in playing basketball the more the moves of the game are placed, through exercise and discipline, into my body. If I were completely formed by the world of basketball, I could outplay Michael Jordan, for I would be able to do, effortlessly, whatever the game demanded of me. For the freedom of indifference, objective rules, orders, and disciplines are problematic, for they are felt, necessarily, as limitations. But for the second type of freedom, such laws are liberating, for they make the achievement of some great good possible. 

  St. Paul said, “I am the slave of Christ Jesus” and “it is for freedom that Christ has set you free.” For the advocate of the freedom of indifference, the juxtaposition of those two claims makes not a bit of sense. To be a slave of anyone is, necessarily, not to be free to choose. But for the devotee of the freedom for excellence, Paul’s statements are completely coherent. The more I surrender to Christ Jesus, who is himself the greatest possible good, the very Incarnation of God, the freer I am to be who I am supposed to be. The more Christ becomes the master of my life, the more I internalize his moral demands, the freer I am to be a child of God, to respond promptly to the call of the Father. 

  Finally, human beings are not hungry to choose; they are hungry to choose the good.

This final flourish explains a great part of the Church’s mission.  People of good will want to know how to do good, and they want trustworthy instruction.   The Church is not there just to make life difficult for us, while the world handily tries to work out what the minimum is that we can get away with.  The Church is there (among many other things) to discern the way of life that leads us to our highest dignity.  It offers, in Christ’s example, the gold standard of morality, which is the gold standard of both justice and mercy.  Quite often the path diverges from our own wishes, and very often it is extremely difficult to follow.  We might say ‘this is a hard saying’ (John 6:60) and disregard it.  But it is the way home.  The Church is simply setting out as much of the truth as has been given to us to understand.  We are not obliged to follow the Church if we choose not to, but the Church is itself obliged to put the truth forward intact, and thereby to offer the possibility of sainthood to us all.  In the cosmic scheme of things, grace notwithstanding, it is only a slight simplification to say that practice does make perfect, including when it comes to practising a religion.  The more we practise opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit, the less attached we become to our bad habits, the more used we become to good habits and the freer we become to do what is right.  Perhaps St. John Paul II put it most pithily: freedom consists ‘not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought’.  The fleeting satisfaction brought by the freedom of indifference is a dull thing compared to the greatness that the freedom for excellence would lend us.

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But St. Paul had another insight.  If we choose not to pursue that freedom for excellence, it is not the case that settling for freedom of indifference simply provides us with a tolerable second-best.  The freedom of indifference offers no guarantee against falling into slavery, the slavery of the ‘devices and desires of our own hearts’, or ‘all the tricks men play and their cleverness in practising deceit’, and indeed the way there lies clear.  For relativism’s ultimate aim, to achieve freedom by abolishing moral authority, is impossible.  We are all religious creatures; we all have our objects of worship, even if we do not realise it.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and there is always something, good or bad, set on the altar of our hearts.  How easy and how tempting it is to place on that altar ‘our own ego and desires’, and become slaves to them.  This would be the ultimate triumph of the dictatorship of relativism, which is ultimately the dictatorship of the self.  By this it claims as its third set of victims those who think they are doing rather well out of it.  The tyranny of the spoilt brat, even as it is inflicted on others, always ends up by turning on the spoilt brat himself, ruining and enslaving, by his own greed and selfishness, a person who could have been a saint.

All this goes some way to show, I hope, why Cardinal Ratzinger chose such an arresting phrase for his homily.  It was not because he was just another grumpy old man in the Vatican wanting to spoil everyone’s fun, as the world’s media somehow persisted in believing, against all the evidence, for eight long years.  Rather it was because, as a keen observer of Europe and the world, he could see forces at work, turning us in on ourselves, towards self-slavery and away from the dignity and glory for which we were made.  He knows as well as we do how hard it is to be good, how much help we need to avoid making mistakes, and what the Church’s vision of freedom means.  This is why, in that homily, and all through his pontificate in one way or another, he urged us so boldly to reject the lure of the Dictatorship of Relativism, and to seek instead the Kingdom of God.

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Pope Benedict is ‘photo-bombed’ by H. M. the Queen