The December issue of FIRST THINGS has a lengthy review by George Weigel entitled 'Fail, Britannia!', of A Journey, Blair's recent memoir of his years as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, which is most unfavorable to Tony Blair's leadership record, at least its moral aspect.
However, Weigel devotes more than half of the article to Benedict XVI's recent state visit to the UK. First, the moral hollow left behind by Blair, as the setting for all the anti-Benedict hostility that began in the British media from the day he was elected . Weigel gives a review (still hair-raising when reread today) of all the anti-Benedict vitriol that flowed copiously in the UK media before the visit, whose triumphal success managed to make most of us forget all the venomous ill will that had preceded it. He then proceeds to review the visit quite extensively. I've only excerpted the part about the Pope.
The German Pope understood
the UK's cultural crisis better
than its former Prime Minister
by George Weigel
Excerpted from
December 2010
...And into the hollow soul of Britain during the Blair years roared any number of demons, such as those that could, with no fear of public retribution, describe the eighty-three-year-old Pope Benedict as a former Nazi who ought to be arrested, on arrival in the United Kingdom, as the central figure in an international criminal conspiracy of child rapists and their abettors.
Given that anti-popery was a crucial ideological component of nation-building in sixteenth-century England, it is not altogether surprising that, 181 years after Wellington’s Catholic Emancipation Act, Pope-baiting remains a popular blood sport in the United Kingdom.
Previously militant Protestant (think Ian Paisley), a lot of Britain is now militant secularist in character. Even by local standards, however, the torrent of vitriol visited on the Catholic Church and Pope Benedict in the months before the papal visit was astonishing.
As
The Spectator put it, in a leader (editorial) published just before Benedict arrived, protests against the papal visit “far exceed[ed] those that greet the state visits of blood-drenched dictators.” But, then, blood-drenched dictators don’t embody all that Britain’s Christophobic high culture loathes.
The first to garner extensive British media attention prior to the Pope’s visit were the paladins of the New Atheism, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who, in league with transplanted Australian barrister Geoffrey Robertson, proposed in April that Benedict be clapped in irons on his arrival in Britain and charged with enabling child abuse.
That baseless indictment was repeated relentlessly by the chattering classes for the next four months, with the BBC and other media outlets serving as a
tax-supported megaphone for calumny.
Three days before Benedict landed in Scotland, Channel 4 aired an hour-long “documentary” in which British LGBT activist Peter Tatchell claimed that Catholic teaching on artificial contraception is a prominent factor in global poverty, that Catholic teaching on the appropriate ways to combat the scourge of HIV/AIDS has caused untold deaths, that Catholic teachings against embryo-destructive stem-cell research are cruel and “dogmatic,” and, of course, that the Catholic Church is a global criminal conspiracy of child abusers.
(As Scottish bishop Philip Tartaglia pointed out, Tatchell’s ignorance of the facts about poverty, AIDS prevention, and the curative possibilities of stem-cell research is matched by a certain implausibility in his self-presentation as a defender of the innocence of the young: In a 1986 book, Tatchell, a campaigner for lowering the age of consent, argued that “not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive, and harmful.”)
A few days earlier, Geoffrey Robertson added to Britain’s fund of ignorance about the Catholic Church by claiming, in a lecture at the London School of Economics, that the Holy See (which was involved in diplomatic exchange centuries before the United Kingdom existed) ought not to enjoy
the privileges of sovereignty, which have functioned as a blind behind which criminal Popes have evaded the reach of domestic and international law.
(Mr. Robertson, his eyes on what he imagines to be the Croesus-like wealth of the Vatican, is hard at work trying to bring the joys of American liability law into the British legal system.)
The pile-on continued in the op-ed pages, with
The Independent’s Julie Burchill bawling that “a Church which rails against abortion and then spends decades covering up the most appalling degree of child abuse obviously has no problem with holding two opposing ideas at once.”
But, wrote Burchill, “at least the opposition to termination now makes perfect sense, with hindsight. All those unborn children that could have been molested—what a waste!”
Three days later, fifty prominent British intellectuals and writers published a joint statement in
The Guardian insisting that “Pope Ratzinger should not be given the honor of a state visit” to Britain because “the organization of which he is head has been responsible for
- opposing the distribution of condoms and so increasing large families in poor countries and the spread of AIDS;
- promoting segregated education;
- denying abortion to even the most vulnerable women;
- opposing equal rights for lesbians, gays, bisexual, and transgender people; [and]
- failing to address the many cases of abuse of children within its own organization.”
Then, having acknowledged in their preamble that the Pope is a “head of state,” the signatories rejected “the masquerading of the Holy See as a state and the Pope as a head of state as merely a convenient fiction to amplify the international influence of the Vatican.”
The secularists’ anti-Benedictine campaign was given tacit support by the feckless British Catholic left. A former Blair counselor and former public-affairs adviser at the archdiocese of Westminster, Sir Stephen Wall, took to the op-ed page of the
Financial Times to propose that the “demonstrations of hostility” that would greet the Pope had “everything to do with opposition to the Roman Catholic Church as a political entity,” by which Wall meant a community that had not bent its moral teaching to the prevailing sentiments of the chattering classes.
For the Church to regain a foothold in the West, Sir Stephen wrote, it must recognize that “individuals have their own values” and that a “changing moral code is a normal part of social evolution.”
There was some pushback to this torrent of disinformation, slander, and deep theological confusion. One
Guardian journalist, albeit unnamed, told his paper’s ombudsman that his colleagues had “an instinctive hostility to religion” that led them to “stoke our readers’ prejudices and reinforce them. . . . Over the last five to ten years we have adopted a pompous, self-satisfied triumphalism.”
The redoubtable David Quinn, a hardy campaigner against the secularist wave washing over Ireland, made a telling comparison in the
Irish Independent:
BBC 2 last week ran an interview with former Conservative politician Chris Patten, who is helping to oversee the arrangements for the imminent visit of the Pope to Britain. The interviewer treated the strident objections to the visit as perfectly reasonable and understandable. Patten did his considerable best to answer.
The very next item covered the objection of a majority of Americans to the building of a mosque near the site of Ground Zero in New York. These objections were treated by the reporter as manifestations of “Islamophobia.” [Thus] criticisms of Catholicism, no matter how extreme, are now treated as mainstream and acceptable, but criticisms of Islam are seen as indications of bigotry.
A week before the Pope arrived, Edinburgh’s Cardinal Keith O’Brien unloaded on the BBC, charging it with an “institutional bias” against Christianity and describing the forthcoming “documentary” as a “hatchet job.”
But no such broadsides issued from the Archbishop’s House in Westminster, which seemed more concerned with distancing Archbishop Vincent Nichols from the comments of an archdiocesan staffer who described Britain to the Zenit news agency as “the geopolitical epicenter of the culture of death” and a country beset by an “ever increasing commercialization of sex” — sharply stated judgments, to be sure, but not substantively different from the pro-life advocacy of Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor during his years in Westminster.
Sir Stephen Wall warned that, given Benedict’s intransigent “conservatism,” the papal visit would see the Pontiff “whistle into a wind that threatens to blow him, in the U.K. at least, into irrelevance if not ignominy.”
A week later, at the Pope’s departure, Prime Minister David Cameron described the papal pilgrimage as an “incredibly moving four days” and thanked the Pope for raising “searching questions” that challenged “the whole country to sit up and think.”
The winds of irrelevance and ignominy, it seemed, had blown in a direction other than that taken by the popemobile.
From September 16 through September 19, the numbers of those gathered to see the Pope, pray with him, and listen to him were consistently higher than predicted. Lining the streets of Edinburgh to cheer Benedict XVI on September 16 were 125,000 people, and while a combination of aggressive governmental security measures and inept work by Catholic trip planners made getting to the papal venues difficult, hundreds of thousands greeted the Pope in London, and some 80,000 attended an evening vigil in Hyde Park on September 18. (London antipapal activists claimed to have turned out 20,000 protesters that afternoon; the police estimated their number at 2,000.)
Anger was the dominant emotion prior to Benedict’s arrival. But, as Bishop Tartaglia put it, the Pope’s “grace and intelligence” changed the atmosphere among those willing to maintain an open mind and encouraged all those Catholics whom the secularists (and self-marginalizing Catholics such as Stephen Wall) had written off as relics of a lost past.
Good humor, even amid long waits at papal venues, prevailed — as did the British taste for curious expressions of affection: One poster spotted as Benedict entered Crofton Park in Birmingham for the beatification of John Henry Newman read, “We Love Papa More Than Beans on Toast.”
Benedict intended Newman, who got rather short shrift amid the pre-visit polemics, to be the symbolic centerpiece of history’s second papal pilgrimage to Britain: Newman, who embodied modernity’s quest for religious truth amid skepticism and uncertainty; Newman, revered by both Anglicans and Catholics; Newman, who (like Joseph Ratzinger) had a way of doing theology outside the classic Thomistic channels; Newman, for whom the truth of faith was grasped when heart spoke to heart.
Thus, while the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales proposed that the papal visit would be about reaffirming religion’s place in the democratic public square, Benedict XVI (who indeed warned against the dictatorship of relativism and the marginalization of religious voices in democratic public life) focused intently
on holiness and friendship with the crucified Lord as his key themes.
In that respect the most winsome of the Pope’s addresses was to a gathering of students at Twickenham on September 17; it was linked via television to Catholic schools throughout the country. The Pope’s brief remarks were vintage Joseph Ratzinger — over a half century of scholarship distilled into a compelling catechetical message:
It is not often that a Pope, or indeed anyone else, has the opportunity to speak to the students of all the Catholics schools of England, Wales, and Scotland. And since I have the chance now, there is something I very much want to say to you.
I hope that among those of you listening to me today there are some of the future saints of the twenty-first century. What God wants most of all for each one of you is that you should become holy. He loves you much more than you could ever begin to imagine, and he wants the very best for you. And by far the best thing for you is to grow in holiness. . . .
When I invite you to become saints, I am asking you not to be content with second best. . . . Happiness is something we all want, but one of the great tragedies in this world is that so many people never find it, because they look for it in the wrong places. The key to it is very simple — true happiness is to be found in God. . . .
As you come to know him better, you find you want to reflect something of his infinite goodness in your own life. . . . You want to come to the aid of the poor and the hungry, you want to comfort the sorrowful, you want to be kind and generous. And once these things begin to matter to you, you are well on your way to becoming saints.
[I am so glad Weigel picked this out. The Twickenham address to the young people was, IMHO, the most moving and memorable of all the discourses the Pope made in the UK because of the way he reaffirmed his constant call to holiness in the very simple and beautiful words he used with the children.]
At Westminster Cathedral the next day, Benedict addressed the sin and crime of sexual abuse in its appropriate context: as an evil that can be overcome by the power of the Cross.
Directing the congregation’s attention to “the great crucifix dominating the [cathedral’s] nave, which portrays Christ’s body, crushed by suffering, overwhelmed by sorrow, the innocent victim whose death has reconciled us with the Father and given us a share in the very life of God,” the Pope proposed that it was here that we find the courage to address “the immense suffering caused by the abuse of children, especially within the Church and by her ministers.”
And address it Benedict did, bluntly: “I express my deep sorrow to the innocent victims of these unspeakable crimes, along with my hope that the power of Christ’s grace, his sacrifice of reconciliation, will bring deep healing and peace” to broken lives.
Acknowledging the “shame and humiliation” felt by serious Catholics because of the scandal of abuse and episcopal malfeasance, Benedict asked that the Church offer that shame and humiliation “to the Lord with trust that this chastisement will contribute to the healing of the victims, the unification of the Church, and the renewal of her age-old commitment to the education and care of young people.”
That afternoon, Benedict addressed the political and cultural leaders of Britain in historic Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the Palace of Westminster and, as he reminded his audience, the place where St. Thomas More was tried (having been abandoned by the British establishment, a point the Pope discreetly omitted).
Here, Benedict put a crucial question on the table: What are the moral foundations of democracy, and of the democratic commitment to civility, tolerance, and the rule of law?
Can there in fact be democracy “if the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus?”
Would this not lead to a condition of “fragility” that could, in time, lead to democratic crack-up — and either the imposition of a dictatorship of relativism or surrender to another cultural project (such as that of militant Islam) with a very different view of the political future?
The Pope continued with a plea for reason and reason’s role in understanding the irreducible moral dimension of public policy. While warning against “distortions of religion [that] arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion,” Benedict nonetheless proposed that people of faith can, with the aid of revealed truth, “help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles” for the guidance of public policy.
Faith and reason, he concluded, “need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.”*
It was likely an accident, but it was not without poignancy that, on this sixty-fifth anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Benedict reminded those praying in Hyde Park, the night before Newman’s beatification, about the opposite of cheap grace.
Newman’s life teaches us, the Pope said, “that passion for truth, intellectual honesty, and genuine conversion are costly.” Moreover, Benedict noted, “Newman reminds us that . . . we are created to know the truth, to find in that truth our ultimate freedom and the fulfillment of our human aspirations.”
It was a pointed, if tacit, rebuke to a political culture that, as Tony Blair puts it in his memoirs, places
an “emphasis, bordering on the religious,” on the notion that what counts is what works.
Shortly before the Pope arrived in Scotland, the choice before the Catholic Church in Britain was made unmistakably clear in a single story in
The Scotsman. In it, Bishop Joseph Devine of Motherwell and Bishop Philip Tartaglia of Paisley were interviewed. The impact of the papal visit wouldn’t be “great,” Bishop Devine said, because “we have known Benedict XVI for a very long time, or at least the clergy have. . . . [So] I don’t anticipate that [the visit] will have a long, lasting effect. No, I don’t think so.”
Bishop Tartaglia, a man of a different generation and a different ecclesial sensibility, had a strikingly different prognosis:
Let me tell you that with this Pope there will be no lack of insightful, encouraging, and challenging reflections on the Christian message and the condition of humanity today, and I think this will help Catholics and other Christians and people of faith and goodwill understand better the period of history they are living in, in which faith is not the default position of society, when Parliament enacts laws which stand Christian conviction on its head, when fundamental teachings on the sanctity of human life and the nature of marriage are not just rejected but actually considered subversive in our liberal society.
Thus the choice that the remarkable success of Benedict’s pilgrimage to Great Britain has put before British Catholics: on the one hand, institutional maintenance amid downsizing, with a modest place in the public square being accepted as recompense for not being too pushy on “Those Issues”; on the other hand,
evangelical Catholicism, unapologetically and persuasively offering friendship with Jesus Christ and proclaiming the truths that can be known by reason as essential to sustaining free and virtuous societies capable of defending their democratic commitments.
How that choice is made will depend a great deal on the quality of bishops that Benedict XVI appoints in the United Kingdom in the immediate future.
As one lucid observer put it in the aftermath of the papal visit, “The British hierarchy didn’t do much wrong on this visit, but they did contain their enthusiasm until the secular press declared it a success, and then they joined in.”
Five days after Benedict left, Archbishop Nichols of Westminster reflected on the visit in an article in
L’Osservatore Romano and suggested that the thread uniting the Pope’s various talks was that “faith in God plays an important role in modern pluralist societies.” That role should be played, the archbishop continued, with sensitivity, openness, and courtesy. All of this, he concluded, amounted to a “new agenda” for the Church in Great Britain.
Unobjectionable if not inspired, one might say. But
Archbishop Nichols’s summary did seem to underplay several of the points that Benedict stressed in Britain.
The first was the imperative of seeking holiness in truth, and speaking the truth in love. Then, and only then, will the Church’s place at the table of public conversation mean anything.
As the Pope noted in a pointed comment at a press conference on his plane en route to Britain: “A Church that seeks above all to be attractive is already on the wrong path.” In other words, a Church that takes the edge off the truth it bears will be unattractive evangelically and useless publicly.
And there was that business about cheap grace and costly grace, at the nocturnal vigil before Newman’s beatification:
Will the “new agenda” of the British hierarchy include a call to bear the costs of a “passion for truth, intellectual honesty, and genuine conversion”?
That, one might suggest, is the only appropriate strategy in addressing the spiritual hollowness of the Britain Tony Blair left behind —
a Britain whose current cultural crisis is less understood by its former prime minister than by the German Pope who thanked the people of the United Kingdom for winning the Battle of Britain.
[What a wonderfully ironic note to end with!]
William Oddie remonstrates against some of Weigel's comments about Britain:
George Weigel on the ‘hollowness’
at the heart of post-Blair Britain
He doesn’t think much of our bishops, either-
but what about the US?
By William Oddie
9 December 2010
In his autobiography Tony Blair writes about the funeral of Diana but
George Weigel, in an article in
First Things, dealing at length with Tony Bair’s autobiography and then with the papal visit to England and Scotland, has a great deal to say that many of us would agree with.
He links these two apparently disparate phenomena in an interesting way, not one which does much for our national self-esteem.
He doesn’t seem to see much hope for our future, or for that of our Church: and that’s where I think he’s just wrong.
“Blair’s recounting of the death and funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales” he writes, “brings into clearest focus the hollowness at the heart of the Britain he helped midwife into being… her state funeral, the prime minister decided, ‘had to be dignified; it had to be different; it had to be Diana’.
What it didn’t have to be, at least by Blair’s account, was Christian, despite its being held in Westminster Abbey, ‘hard by the shrine of St Edward the Confessor and the sacring place of the kings of England’, as Evelyn Waugh once wrote.
Somehow, according to Blair, ‘Elton John singing Candle in the Wind and doing it rather brilliantly’ was ‘in keeping with Westminster Abbey’. Well, yes, if Westminster Abbey is simply a stage, a shrine to the Real Absence on which any romance may be produced.”
“That this woman’s death,” comments Weigel, “however tragic, sent an entire country into a nervous breakdown says something deeply disturbing about the culture of contemporary Britain. That Tony Blair perceived this national crack-up as ‘a tide that had to be channelled’ rather than a nonsense that had to be confronted suggests that he is not quite the Churchillian figure some of his American admirers would like him to be.”
And that is the nation, argues Weigel, that in his gentle way Pope Benedict did confront. It was a confrontation that many of us had feared. For, as Weigel memorably puts it, “into the hollow soul of Britain during the Blair years roared any number of demons, such as those that could, with no fear of public retribution, describe the 83-year-old Pope Benedict as a former Nazi who ought to be arrested, on arrival in the United Kingdom, as the central figure in an international criminal conspiracy of child rapists and their abettors”.
Yes, but, but, but. If we are all so totally hollow, how come the British public generally (for, as we all noted with enormous relief, it wasn’t just Catholics) ignored the demons and responded so overwhelmingly positively to the Pope when they saw what he was actually like? That positive response was also an indication, just as powerful as the general response to the death of Diana, of the national soul: maybe it was even a sign that we had all moved on.
Weigel doesn’t seem to think that there’s much of a chance that Catholics in this country will respond in any lasting way to the challenge of the papal visit. He thinks little of our hierarchy, and quotes someone he describes as a “lucid observer” (I wonder who?) saying: “The British hierarchy didn’t do much wrong on this visit, but they did contain their enthusiasm until the secular press declared it a success, and then they joined in.”
Well, it may be true that “into the hollow soul of Britain during the Blair years roared any number of demons”, Dawkins and Tatchell being the chief archdemoniacs: but demons can be driven out: who listens to the “atheist coalition” now?
And though I have great respect for Weigel, I wonder if he really thinks that this alleged hollowness is basically a British phenomenon to do with Blair (though undoubtedly “the people’s Tony” epitomised it to perfection here) or has to do more with the aggressive secularism that Pope Benedict has identified throughout western culture. What about the US, George? A certain hollowness there, too?
The Pope, I believe, released something in English, Welsh and Scottish Catholics that had been waiting to come out for years. I think that even lukewarm bishops (and none of them, have you noticed, have been anything less than publicly enthusiastic about the Pope since his visit, though quite a few were less than encouraging about it before it happened) will not be able to talk us down from that new confidence in ourselves and our religion.
We just need a few good episcopal appointments from Cardinal Bertone to send a sign from Rome confirming that we are no longer on our own: and our churches, North and South of the border, will go from strength to strength. Don’t write us off yet, George Weigel: you just may have got us wrong.