by A. N. Wilson
Though the liturgy appeared to be unchanging, even that had undergone some alterations in the twentieth century, with Pius X (Pope from 1903 to 1914), that great persecutor of modernism, introducing the custom of frequent Communion, for example, and Pius XII (Pope from 1939 to 1958) making a number of changes to the Mass. They were minor, and would not have been noticed by any but faddists. His successor, the Patriarch of Venice, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, was crowned in a magnificent ceremony on 4 November 1958, with ostrich feathers waved before him in the incense clouds, as a great medieval triple-crown was placed upon his head. No wonder Catholics the world over believed that the Church was the one rock in a changing world which would never alter.
In fact, the Roman Church was plunged, during and after the pontificate of Roncalli (he ruled as Pope John XXIII), into a crisis every much as divisive and bitter as those which in our time shook other institutions such as political parties and nation states. In 1962, Roncalli increased the number of cardinals to eighty-seven, making the Sacred College more international, and in the same year he opened the Second Vatican Council, on 11 October. The First Vatican Council (1869–70) had been a remarkable piece of backwoodsmanship, declaring the Pope himself to be infallible, and gallantly banging the drum of papal triumphalism as Garibaldi, Bismarck and others reduced the reality of the Pope’s political power in Europe.
Some Roman Catholics, especially the converts, felt that the Catholic claim was of its essence Against the World. Not to have espoused the spirit of our, or of any, age, was one of the hallmark’s of the faith’s authenticity. That was certainly how Evelyn Waugh thought, for example. Other Catholics were troubled. Was it really appropriate to forbid Catholics to read works of literature merely because, like Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, or Voltaire’s Candide, they had found themselves on the lengthy Index Librorum of forbidden books? Was there not something a little crazy about the fact that you could not buy the Dublin masterpiece, Ulysses, in Dublin? (Until the Index was abolished, Catholics who went to university had to acquire special dispensations from their bishops to read books which were sometimes set texts for their examinations.) Were the Protestants, and others, who had studied the Bible in the spirit of textual criticism applied to other ancient texts–were they really at fault? Was the Roman Catholic teaching about the origin of human life, which was largely based on the trials and errors of Aristotle, who died in 322 bc, not to allow any more modern medical research to affect its thinking? Aristotle, for example, believed that the man who planted seed in a woman thereby planted the whole soul of a new being; he did not know that the seed on its own could not produce a baby, and therefore it made no sense to speak of the soul existing in the seed alone. Yet much of the Church’s teaching on why some forms of sexual activity were allowable, others not, were posited on the idea that male masturbators, or homosexuals, for example, were wasting potential souls. (In its cruder form, as dished out in the confessionals, the belief existed that such ‘impure’ behaviour was spilling actual souls.)
More important than these esoteric questions, many Catholics questioned the right of the clergy to be asking them. Many had experienced in childhood abuse at the hands of priests and nuns–either sexual abuse or casual, systematic bullying. Though the full extent of this–surely the single greatest cause of the decline of the Roman Catholic Church in the West–would take some time to be acknowledged, it was part of the psychological story of why many men and women in the 1960s no longer felt inclined to accept everything which their parish priest or their Reverend Mother told them.
The Roman Catholic Church was, in fact, a seething cauldron of human grievance, waiting to bubble over. There were priests, and male and female members of religious orders who wondered how much, if anything, of the old doctrines they still believed, or whether they believed in the old way. The post-war world, as it reconstructed itself in Western Europe and the United States, discovered that it had lost, or discarded, the hierarchical, deferential way of viewing human society. Concepts of authority and obedience were changed, or abandoned. Inevitably, these changes in the secular sphere percolated to the Church. How possible was it, for a Roman Catholic of the 1960s, to accept teachings and practices simply on the authority of a bishop or an abbot or a pope? As Catholics became better informed about their own history, they came to realise that there had been hundreds of years, for example, when celibacy was not enjoined upon the priesthood. Was it still necessary to insist upon a married clergy? What of the struggles of the poor in Latin America, often against regimes which were brutal and unjust? Was it not part of the Church’s mission to identify the Gospel with their aspirations? What of the Mass? Roman Catholic liturgical practice had evolved over many years. Viewed from the perspective of an historical scholar, as well as from that of a pastor trying to teach the faith in a parish, how could the bishops continue to justify, for example, the custom of giving Communion in one kind only (i.e., just the wafer)–a custom dating from a medieval fear of the Plague–if the congregation were allowed to sip together from one chalice? The old Mass, sometimes named after the Council of Trent (‘Tridentine’) but in substance a much, much older liturgy, was in Latin, and the more sacred parts of the texts were not recited audibly by the priest, but muttered rapidly at the level of a whisper. What opportunity did this give to the congregation to ‘hear, mark and inwardly digest’ God’s word?
Questions which had been asked in the sixteenth century by the Protestant reformers were now asked by Catholic theologians. There is not much evidence that Pope John XXIII, an avuncular figure who kept an excellent tabl.1 ever imagined that his Second Vatican Council would answer many of these questions. He spoke metaphorically of throwing open the Church’s windows. He was a basically conservative figure. He continued to insist, for example, that seminarians were taught in Latin. It would seem likely that he merely intended, by initiating the Council, to institute minor liturgical changes, to remove some of the more obviously offensive or anomalous elements in Catholic teaching and practice, to reform the Breviary (the prayer book used in religious houses and said privately by priests), and above all to improve, if not actually to heal, broken relations with the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. He died in 1963, while the Council was still in progress, and was replaced by a very different man, Giovanni Battista Montini, the Archbishop of Milan, who ruled (1963–78) as Paul VI. Pope John referred to Montini as a bit like Hamlet (‘un po’ Amletico’) and there must have been many moments during his fifteen-year pontificate when Pope Paul could have echoed the Danish Prince’s exclamation–‘O cursed spite–That ever I was born to set it right!’ Montini was an intelligent man, the son of a liberal-minded, prosperous lawyer from Brescia who had got into trouble with the Fascists for his work as a political editor and parliamentary deputy. An Anglophile, Montini had English friends, and during the latter days of the Second World War had enjoyed nipping backwards and forwards between the Vatican (where he was secretary of state to Pius XII) to meet English friends in Rome, and swap talk with them about what was going on. He was the only Pope of modern times to have visited England in his youth, and as Pope he would receive the Archbishop of Canterbury, spontaneously giving Michael Ramsey his ring in a gesture which excited many of the High Church party into the belief that corporate reunion between the two Churches was imminent.
Paul VI it was who brought the Council to its conclusion in 1965, proclaiming an Extraordinary Jubilee (1 January–29 May 1966) to give the Church time to rejoice and meditate upon the very many decrees and deliberations which had been promulgated by the Council Fathers–archbishops, cardinals, monks and friars who had by then jetted back to their separate countries.
Apart from the multiplicity of difficult questions raised by a Church in a state of flux–what to do about the all but Marxist Social Gospel Catholics of South America or the all but fascist liturgical die-hard followers of Archbishop Lefebvre in France; what to do about the question of priestly celibacy; how to heal the breach with the C
hurches of the East and how to stop the flood of monks and nuns abandoning their vows–Paul VI was faced with two major questions: the questions with which the poor Hamlet-like Pope, with his bush-baby eyes and his worried, thin face, will forever by history be associated. One was how to interpret the Council’s recommendations about changes to the Mass. The other was how to interpret the advice given him by a pontifical commission on the question of contraception, especially in the light of the invention of a contraceptive pill.
Die-hard conservatives could see that the answer to these questions was simple: change neither the liturgy nor the moral teaching of the Church. Aesthetes might call for relaxation of arcane sexual teaching, while retaining the liturgy for which Lassus, Palestrina, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven had written their sublimest chords. Christians, of whom there were more and more among the ranks of the clergy, burned with the zeal which had once animated Luther and Zwingli, to share with their congregations the words of Scripture translated into the Jerusalem Bible. They longed for simpler forms of worship in which the laity could partake more fully. They were also aware, through their pastoral work, of the very great difficulties faced by the Catholic faithful who were trying to be loyal to the Church while surviving the strains and trials of married life.
Pope Hamlet agonised, and he knew that whatever he decreed, in either direction, would be greeted with dismay by some section of the Church or another. What he could not know, even though he was much more in touch with the world, and much more intelligent, than his predecessor, was the extent to which the collapse of the whole concept of authority in the Western world would lead to outright rebellion against him, not merely by the disgruntled laity, but also by the religious orders and the clergy. He opted to modernise the liturgy, and to be a conservative over the matter of contraception. His encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reasserted the impropriety of artificial birth control, made him an object of hatred throughout the world, with many who were Catholics, and an even larger number who were not, laying at his door Malthusian denunciations of callousness. The Pope was made responsible in the eyes of such critics for all the problems of overpopulation, including those felt in such areas as Muslim Nigeria or Communist China, which did not recognise his authority. Many felt there was some illogicality in the Humanae Vitae encyclical, since it repeated the traditional Catholic belief that it was allowable for couples to make love during the ‘safe period’. This gave the lie to the notion that a purely Catholic sexual act must always be performed with the intention of procreation, or at least with the knowledge that procreation might result. How did such careful use of the safe period differ from taking a contraceptive pill? The lack of a good answer to this question drove many from the Church and caused others, gradually, to abandon any attempt to follow the specific guidelines of papal teaching about sexual morality. If it was possible for popes to make such muddled and irresponsible pronouncements, it was felt that there was no longer any need to heed what they said about, say, homosexuality or divorce, or sleeping with your steady partner before marriage. Catholics, in short, began slowly during our times to behave like everyone else, when it came to sex, and this would lead many to forsake, wholly or in part, the ways of behaviour which separated Catholics from others. ‘They seem just like other people,’ said Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Catholic masterpiece Brideshead Revisited (first published 1945, revised 1959). ‘My dear Charles,’ replied Sebastian Flyte, ‘that’s exactly what they’re not–particularly in this country where they’re so few’… ‘Everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time.2
For Catholics in Britain, as in the rest of the world, the HumanaeVitae encyclical was a moment of crisis. One MP of a primarily Catholic constituency in Liverpool said, ‘It was hoped in particular, that the novel biochemical function of the Pill, with its regulation of the natural menstrual cycle upon which the doctrine of the safe period had been founded, would enable the theological impasse to be circumvented without betraying the categories of traditionalist reasoning. For such Catholics, the crisis of faith was not provoked by those urging a comprehensive State family planning service, but by Humanae Vitae itself.’3 One distinguished Catholic theologian, Charles Davis, felt this was the moment of truth, when he must leave the Church. ‘The Roman Catholic Church contradicts my Christian faith because I experience it as a zone of untruth, pervaded by a disregard for truth.’4 Once again, it was the encyclical which prompted him. ‘One who claims to be the moral leader of the church should not tell lies,’ he wrote in the Observer. Like many priests, Davis had his sympathies broadened by the experience of falling in love–in his case with a woman called Florence. ‘I myself as well as other people have asked whether I should have left the church if I had not loved Florence or if Florence had been unable to follow me in my decision.’ It prompted the limerick:
Said Charles Davis, ‘I view with abhorrence
A Church without Biblical warrants.
With Vatican II
I’ll have nothing to do.
I stick to the Council/Counsel of Florence.’
Other priests remained, but they would not be silenced. A kindly Carmelite friar, Father Brocard Sewell, an expert on the 1890s and the personal friend of, among others, Christine Keeler and Sir Oswald Mosley, wrote to The Times to say that the encyclical had only intensified the distrust of the papacy which had been felt by the orthodox churches since the time of the Great Schism. He called upon the Pope to imitate the example of his thirteenth-century predecessor Celestine V and resign. Sewell was temporarily suspended, forbidden to say Mass or hear confessions, and sent as a punishment to Nova Scotia, where he continued his gentle researches into the by-ways of English literature. Other priests were not so fortunate, and of the fifty-seven who wrote to The Times to support him, many were sacked by their bishops and never reinstated.5
At the moment the Church was being disrupted by the row over Humanae Vitae, a young Liberal MP in Britain, David Steel–a future leader of his party–was introducing the Abortion Bill into the House of Commons. Up to fifty women a year in Britain were dying as a result of ‘septic or incomplete abortions’, and it was obviously quite wrong for the law not to recognise in some cases the medical need, and in all cases the woman’s desire, to terminate pregnancy. In 1966–67 as the bill was passing through Parliament and becoming law, the current state of medical opinion was that twenty-eight weeks was the time when a foetus became viable. As midwifery and obstetric skills developed, this began to seem very late. Many children were born prematurely at this stage of the mother’s pregnancy and survived to live healthily. There were survivals at twenty-two weeks, just as, more disturbingly, ‘botched abortions’, when the nature of the operation became clear: that it was the killing of a child.
Steel in later life came to feel that the law should be changed to limit abortion to the twenty-week period. He admitted that he had no notion, when bringing in the legislation, how many women would avail themselves of the chance to abort their babies, though he also noted the statistical fact that ‘the rate of abortions in Britain is slightly lower than in Catholic France, Spain and Italy, and substantially lower in the U.S. where the subject is much more of a hot potato.’6 The annual rate of abortions in Britain in the twenty-first century stands at over 180,000 per year.7
The abortion issue remained, perhaps, one of the few where Roman Catholics, together with some others for religious motives, differed from the majority. Most Britons came to feel that, even though the life inside the womb was one which could grow into a child, it was not quite of the same status as a child. They might mock Catholic explanations, based upon St Thomas Aquinas, of when a foetus develops a soul, but they would actually themselves be just as hazy about when (as David Steel showed with his shifting from twenty-eight to twenty weeks as the ideal cut-off point for abortions) a foetus became ‘viable’. No one pretended this was an easy question. The Roman Catholic Church conti
nued to hold a position which, until the Second World War, had been not only the majority view in Britain, but also the law of the land.
The matter of birth control was only the catalyst which hastened the process of disillusionment for many British Catholics. The Archbishop of Westminster, John Carmel Heenan, an uninspiring, conservative-minded man, was wholly unequipped, both intellectually and pastorally, to deal with the crisis, but it is doubtful whether anyone else could have prevented what happened–namely that the Roman Catholic Church lost about half its practising membership in England, Wales and Scotland, and that in Ireland, where many other factors needed to be taken into account, it would in many areas of life suffer almost complete wipeout.
It was a feature of our times that institutions began to question the very reason for their existence. Political parties and trades unions all underwent deep changes, and loss of active membership. Colleges and clubs which had continued for decades, sometimes for centuries, more or less unchanged asked themselves by what justification they limited their membership on grounds of gender, class or race. It is against this general background of institutional dissolution that the story of the Roman Catholic Church in our times must be read. Even when allowance has been made, however, for the fact that it was a period of change and upheaval in every sphere, the story of the Church’s numerical decline, especially in Britain, is difficult to ignore. From 1965 to 1996, these are the statistics in England and Wales–Sunday Mass attendance fell from 1.9 million to 1.1 million. The number of priests fell from 7,808 to 5,732. Even more devastating are the statistics which reveal that the dogged 1.1 million who continued to attend Mass towards the end of our times were themselves ageing rapidly. The number of child baptisms over the period halved–134,055 to 74,848–and the number of Roman Catholic marriages fell from 46,480 (in 1960) to a mere 17,294 in the 1990s.8 Then again, the statistics relating to Roman Catholic schools in England and Wales would not be encouraging to anyone intent upon the propagation of the faith. ‘Faith’ schools during our times retained their popularity among parents who wanted a disciplined and old-fashioned structure for the education of their children, regardless of theological observance. This would explain why the decline in attendance in Catholic schools, from 870,430 in 1980 to 808,774 in 1996, was comparatively small. The percentage of non-Catholic pupils in Catholic schools reflects this fact–only 3.5 percent of non-Catholics in state secondary schools in 1980 but 17.7 percent in 1996; and in the Independent Catholic schools, 50.4 percent of non-Catholic pupils and 45.1 percent of non-Catholic teachers.9 It is clear that in this situation the extent to which the schools really are propagating Roman Catholicism is merely notional. There will be fluctuations in these statistics as more and more Eastern European Catholics, especially Poles, come to live in England, but the key statistic is little over 17,000 Catholic marriages per year.
