You might have thought that the Roman Catholic hierarchy would have felt it had had enough controversy to be going on with – not least over priestly child abuse and the equally disgraceful attempts to cover it up – without plunging into a new row over its party-political alignment. But its abrasive new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, evidently feels no such qualms.
Last weekend, he gave an interview to the religious affairs correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, in which he slagged off the last Labour Government as “confrontational” and too strongly influenced by a secularist agenda. He made it clear that he felt much more comfortable with the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition’s concept of a “Big Society”, which he claimed had much in common with a Catholic pre-election document urging less reliance on the state.
He went on: “We have highlighted the need for society not to fall into the trap of thinking that everything is to be provided and not live by the myth that everything is somebody else’s responsibility. In recent years, many factors have contributed to a sense that we can leave social problems to be solved by the Government.
“In some ways this sense was created by the last administration which had, in practice, too strong an overarching view of how our society should be. In attempting to create a state that provided everything, it ended up losing touch with the people it was trying to serve. A society that spends a lot on public services can easily end up diminishing and undermining a sense of mutual care.”
All this must be music to the ears of Telegraph leader writers and their loyal readers. But some of them – especially those who aren’t themselves Catholics – may have felt less sure about what followed. For the Archbishop went on to deliver a more overt attack on the last Government, claiming that Labour required a high degree of conformity to its own principles and practices in its dealing with faith groups. Where they clashed, he added, the partnership either ended or the faith group had to conform.
It soon became plain what he was talking about – namely, the Labour Government’s legislation allowing the creation of human-animal embryos and extending the rights of homosexuals. He insisted that more extensive consultation with the church might have made these issues less confrontational. Instead, the Government had adopted “quite strong ideological positions” and had been determined not to concede.
He meant that an elected government whose position on these matters had never been in doubt should simply have abandoned its “quite strong ideological positions” and given way to the entrenched dogma of the Catholic Church. That way, of course, it would certainly have been a lot less confrontational.
And that is what he now seems to expect from David Cameron’s coalition. He saw it as more flexible than its predecessor, and expressed support for Cameron’s much-derided Big Society. “There is a fresh attitude on the part of the government, and so far it looks very interesting”, he said. “There seems to be an attitude that says we will respect the integrity of what a faith group wants to do.”
Unwise, I reckon, but in the long run we should probably be grateful to Archbishop Nichols. At least we know now that every utterance from his pulpit in Westminster Cathedral, however convoluted or obscure it may sound, can be translated into the simple message: “Vote Tory”.
Whether that message will be welcomed by his flock, or even by his juniors in the clergy, is a very different matter. I am only an outsider looking in, but I suspect that I can detect a new mood in the church – certainly in my local one – in which priests and lay people seem willing at last to question the more obscurantist teachings of Rome.
In a way, that mood may have been encouraged by the advent of Pope Benedict XVI, who is so obviously a throwback to a past age of Vatican dogmatism that his utterances are treated with increasing scepticism. He might have retrieved the situation if he had dealt firmly and effectively with the paedophile priests crisis. But he didn’t, and that was that.
How ludicrous, then, that the Church of England should be busy wasting a heaven-sent opportunity to win recruits from its Roman rival by flinging itself into yet another idiotic cat-fight over the genitalia and sexual preferences of its future bishops. If I were a believer, I would despair. But I’m not. So I won’t.
