I Really Don't Want to Pick on Father Brian D'Arcy..

..since it seems a little like kicking a man when he's down. (Although being lionized and back-slapped by the Irish media and a good chunk of the population might be a strange way to be "down", but even so...)

I have to say I found some aspects of his interview on Marian Finucane's radio show today refreshing. He denied being a "liberal", and he insisted that he had never and would never question a "defined dogma" of the Church. It's true that his view of Church teaching seems far too minimalist to me. (He mentioned as examples of defined dogmas the Assumption of Our Lady and the Immaculate Conception. Of course, there are very few dogmas in that sense of the word, and the authority of the Magisterium extends beyond ex cathedra declarations.) For me, if the Pope declares that the subject is closed-- as he has on clerical celibacy and women's ordination-- then the subject is closed.

But at least Father D'Arcy (and he said it explicitly at one point) accepted the principle that there are perameters beyond which you cannot go and continue to be a Catholic. Not all of those dissenting from Rome would be so clear. One dissident priest I heard on the radio, when challenged by the claim that a lot of Catholic dissent had strayed into the region of Protestantism, essentially replied: "So what?"

Another claim Father D'Arcy made was that he was simply accepting that his parishioners were flawed human beings, in the same way that Christ accepted sinners like the tax collectors and the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well. "Of course he said go and sin no more", Father Brian added. "But who can say they're never going to sin no more?" He then described being put outside of a confession box at nine years of age because he refused to promise he wouldn't commit some childish sin again. "I didn't want to make a promise I couldn't keep." His mother, on hearing the story, told him he was right and, since then, he has accepted her word over any theologian's.

But this is one of the great paradoxes of Christianity; that the same Saviour who said "I have not come to call the righteous but sinners", also said, "Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect." And, if this demand seems utterly hopless to us (as of course it must), we also need to remember those infinitely comforting words: "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."

Look at this another way. Racism is today considered one of the worst of evils, and yet it is also considered to be so all-pervasive that we are all, more or less, racists. (Personally, I think the prevalence of racism is greatly exaggerated, but I am simply using this as an example.) Would a professor of Equality Studies, after telling his class that we are all inevitably afflicted with racist assumptions, go on to say: "So, you see, trying not to be racist is futile. It's OK to be a little bit racist"?

Or would a journalist who admits that there is no such thing as complete objectivity, then boldly declare, "So I aim to be only a wee bit biased in my reporting"? Of course not! She would aim at total objectivity, even if she knew she could never reach it, just as the Equality Studies professor would try to completely avoid racism.

I have read very little of Father D'Arcy's writings. But in this interview he seemed like a reasonable and well-intentioned man, and a dedicated priest. Let's all pray that these fissures in the Irish Catholic Church are soon healed, and that all of the priests and faithful of this country submit themselves to the teaching of the Magisterium and the guidance of the Holy Father. We do, after all, have a country to re-evangelise.

Mind Yourself Now

I don't choose to listen to the Marian Finucane show. I am a passive Marian Finucane listener. On Saturday, it's on the radio in my house, and I can't help catching bits and pieces of it as I pass in and out of the kitchen. (My exposure to RTE radio is, thankfully, rarely for longer periods than it takes to boil a kettle.)

Today, Marian interviewed advocates of a new, non-religious spiritual discipline. One contributor was careful to point out that it did not conflict with her Catholicism (nothing too surprising there-- more and more Irish Catholics find Catholicism to be an extraordinarily elastic life philosophy). This latest consciousness-raising fad is "Mindfulness".

One lady with an Asian accent explained how it worked. It was all about joy. If you lose your job, you still have your health. And you still have your family and friends. Then she told a touching anedote about a time when she was in the dumps and, walking out into her garden, suddenly noticed that her trees were in bloom. In that moment, she realised the joy had been there all along. All we have to do, she told Marian, is to access the sources of joy.

Then a male voice, in educated and clinical tones, explained that worrying doesn't actually achieve anything helpful.

I don't want to be too cynical. Depression can be truly horrific, and anything that helps to lift depression (and doesn't actually do more harm than good) is to be welcomed. And we are always in danger of looking past the beauty, awe and marvel that is all around us every moment of the day.

But isn't there something soul-witheringly banal in platitudes like "turn back to the sources of joy"? It seems anti-climactic beyond words. It doesn't do justice to the fathomless yearning and excitement that we all carry about inside us, the faith that we all had since infancy that we were destined for something that would transcend all our wildest dreams-- not anything, not everything, but something.

It seems to me that only the particular fulfils this yearning, or even promises to fulfil it. This craving cares nothing for abstractions like world peace or social justice or harmony with the pulse of the cosmos. It cries out for an object, something concrete.

Romantic love can absorb its titanic pressure, at least for a while. "A real girl in a real place", to quote Philip Larkin, can satisfy it-- the way she folds her hands together, or the suddenness of her smile, can somehow become the focal point of all knowledge, all history, all time and space and possibility.

Patriotism can serve this purpose too-- for a whole generation, sometimes, although the fever seems to subside after that. The image of the white cliffs of Dover, or of green fields, or barefoot children playing on the streets of little towns in Connacht, can fill the caverns of the soul to overlowing, and make any devotion and commitment and sacrifice seem a little thing.

But-- surprise, surprise-- I think nothing answers this deep inner call better than revealed religion. Not just Catholicism or Christianity, though I believe Catholicism is the true religion and the others are mere shadows. For all that, I am aroused the images and stories of other faiths-- the seagulls that saved the crops of the pioneer Mormons from the insects that were devouring them, for instance. I find nothing to despise in these scenes and stories, and I fully understand how they move ordinary men and women to heroics, or at least to lives of total dedication.

There is one thing common to all the great faiths-- and by great, I mean those that survive more than a few generations. They are not banal. Islam is not banal. Mormonism is not banal. Sikhism is not banal. Texts and stories and rituals that are practiced for centuries can't very well be dreary or inspid-- even in false religions (to put it bluntly), the folkloric genius of the collective mind rubs away the trite, the platitudinous and the obvious, leaving only those elements which can truly ignite the imagination and set the soul trembling.

Partisans of a "rational religion" seem to be missing the whole point to me. Those who want to distill the supposed core meaning from out the morass of rituals, myths and revered texts are, almost if not quite, throwing away the orange and eating the skin. Nobody's soul was ever exalted by the thought of Kant's categorical imperative, as it might be by the image of a child asleep in a manger, or a picture of a man hanging from a cross, a mocking inscription above him proclaiming who he truly is.

At the very least, I would rather be told to consider the lilies of the field, how they toil not neither do they spin, than be advised of the cognitive advantages of mindfulness and the ever-present sources of joy. And it seems somehow more uplifting to be told that I cannot make one hair of my head black or white through thinking about it, than to be informed in a fussy voice that worrying has been found to be a counter-productive approach to personal problems.

Heard on the Marian Finucane Show just now...

..."I've been working in the media for many years. We always hear the Catholic bishops complaining that the Church doesn't get a fair hearing. And then they behave like this!"

Not verbatim, and I don't know the name of the man who said it, but I assure you that's a fair rendering.

How do you argue with that anti-logic?

Along with this, several of the panel (it was a discussion regarding the Vatican disciplining dissident clerics) spoke about their desire for "change" in the Church.

How do you argue with the unthinking worship of "change"-- never "change" from, "change" to, "change" aspiring to a particular ideal which, when reached, will no longer require "change"-- but simply "change" simpliciter?

And when we get the change-- do we then desire change from that?

And change from that?

And change from that?

To what end? By what criteria? Against what ideal? For what motives? By what standard?

There are lots of words bandied about today that make me squirm. One is "comfortable." ("I'm not really comfortable with that phrase".) Another is "progressive". (Progress towards what?) Another is "conversation". (We need a "conversation" in society, in the Church. But surely the conversation has to arrive somewhere eventually?) Another is "exclusion". (All character and specialness would be drained from the world without exclusion of one form or other. A tweeny girls' sleepover party would be rather ruined by the addition of five strapping Hell's Angels.)

But surely the daddy of all blood-boiling, nebulous, mendacious, point-missing, thought-neutralising words-- when it is reduced to a mere fetish-- must be "change"!

Whatever Happened to the New Atheists?

William Reville has an article in this week’s Irish Catholic headed “Religion is not Anti-Scientific”. It goes over some very well-trodden ground indeed (has anybody anything original left to say on this subject?), but what struck me was the very first line: “The New Atheists claim that religion is inherently anti-scientific...”

The New Atheists! Remember them? Richard Dawkins, the biologist. Christopher Hitchens, the journalist. Dan Dennett, the philosopher of mind. Sam Harris, a professional atheist with no other obvious claim to fame. AC Grayling, the British philosopher. Philip Pullman, the writer of children's fantasies who drew on Milton and Dante to attack the central doctrine of those authors. PZ Myers, a particularly nasty science blogger who profaned the Eucharist for kicks. And a whole supporting cast of sympathizers, some of whom had been damning and blasting religious belief for decades, but who suddenly seemed to have caught the wind of the zeitgeist; the Amazing Randi, Stephen Fry, Ian McEwan, Ian McEllan, Terry Pratchett, Ricky Gervais, and a whole gaggle of other notables-- not to mention an apparently innumerable swarm of bloggers, protestors, letter-writers and lurkers on various internet sites.

To mangle Byron:

We counted them at break of day--
And when the sun set, where were they?

I shouldn’t be too flippant, as one of their luminaries (Christopher Hitchens) tragically died last year. But even before that the movement seemed to be losing steam, and now it seems downright quaint to hear the name invoked in the first sentence of a newspaper article. I think the New Atheists have joined the Y2K bug , video nasties and Swine Flu in the Museum of Failed Apocalypses.

And that they were an apocalyptic movement is beyond doubt. They may not have heralded a literal end of the world, but they certainly seemed to proclaim the end of one era in human history and the dawning of another (although backward people in poor, ill-educated parts of the world might have been expected to take some time to catch up).

Scientific rationalism was now the gold standard of knowledge, and reason was by definition anti-supernatural. Religion wasn’t just an embarrassment, it was potentially lethal. If someone thought they were in touch with a supernatural entity, after all, what limit could logically apply to their nuttiness? The apple-cheeked old lady at the parish cake sale was a not-so-distant relative of Osama Bin Laden.

Rudeness towards believers was not only permitted, it was positively a duty. There had been too much wishy-washy tolerance. The searing light of rationality would penetrate into all the murky corners of supersition, and soon nobody would get away with proclaiming a belief in the soul, miracles, Providence, or grace. It would not even be allowed as a pious fiction or a figure of speech.

What amazes me in retrospect is how much their clamour intimidated me. I was a religiously-inclined agnostic when I read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, the anti-Bible of the New Atheists. Even at the time of reading it, before I started really delving into the arguments for and against religious belief, I found its logic unconvincing. (I also had no idea, before reading it, that the scientific case for religion was so strong—even in attempting to rubbish it, Dawkins couldn’t help publicizing it.)

But it wasn’t the logic or the arguments that hit me in the solar plexus. It was the bitterness of the rhetoric, and also its confidence. The message was stark: religion was to be driven beyond the pale. Faith in God was no longer intellectually, culturally or socially respectable.

And for a while, it really seemed like that.

But now, the spell seems to have been broken.

The would-be blockbuster film taken from Philip Pulman's atheistic fantasy, The Golden Compass, flopped at the box office, while Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia-- all fantasy franchises with an unabashed Christian message-- triumphed.

The Pope visited Britain and Germany, to almost universal acclaim. Predicted widespread protests turned out to be a damp squib.

The recent Irish census revealed that nine out of ten Irish-born people consider themselves Catholics. Not many more than five per cent described themselves as non-religious, and the high-profile campaign of Irish atheist groups encouraging respondents specify that they were atheist or agnostic (there was apparently no box for this on the census itself) only resulted in about three thousand such declarations.

All of the candidates in the Presidential election supported the broadcasting of the Angelus bells on RTE. Even the liberal candidates spoke of their spiritual values.

I visited the GPO over Christmas, and was happy to see the Christmas crib still enjoying pride of place, despite grumblings about this from God-bashers.

The closing of the Irish embassy to the Vatican has drawn a backlash from the public way beyond what might have been expected.

Every other day, it seems, there are lively discussions on religion, especially the Catholic faith, on the opinion page of the Irish Times. The topic seems an almost ever-present in the Letters to the Editor section. Is the interpretation of Christ's message, in our day, any less a matter for burning public debate as it was in the time of Newman and the Oxford Movement?

A new RTE radio show on religion, the God Slot, has proved very popular, while the BBC have produced an acclaimed documentary on the lives of Catholics that apparently (I have not seen it) is sympathetic and objective in tone.

Even in the field of British comedy-- apparently a New Atheist bastion if ever there was one, with the likes of Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg, Alan Davies, David Baddiel, and many others making rather a meal out of their unbelief-- there has been a change in the wind. Frank Skinner has recently appeared on stage with the Archbishop of Canterbury, while the situation comedy Rev takes faith seriously and has won prizes and rave reviews, as well as cameo appearances from stars like Ralph Fiennes and Richard E. Grant.

So the mood seems to have changed, and to reveal that the moment of the New Atheists, after all, was only that-- a mood.

What lesson to draw? Simply, I think, that believers should not be too impressed by these ebbs and flows of public opinion. I am reminded of these lines by GK Chesterton, from a poem dedicated to his friend Edmund Bentley, in which he remembers the rationalism and decadence of the Victorian era in which he grew up:

A cloud was on the mind of men
And wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul
When we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity
And art admired decay;
The world was old and ended:
But you and I were gay...
Life was a fly that faded,
And death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed
When you and I were young.

(...)

This is a tale of those old fears,
Even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand
The true thing that it tells—
Of what colossal gods of shame
Could cow men and yet crash,
Of what huge devils hid the stars,
Yet fell at a pistol flash.