A History of Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch, just published in paperback, and the finest account of the roots, rise and diminution of the Christian religion, is peculiarly relevant after Benedict XVI’s descent upon Britain. His friend, Cardinal Kasper, felt he was entering a Third World country. Benedict himself found atheism an evil in much the same way as Nazism. To borrow a phrase from Auden about politicians, this is “the elderly rubbish they talk.” The need here is for a response from a historian, as learned as polite, but unrelenting. Let me invoke Dr MacCulloch.
Fellow of St Cross, Oxford, and author of admired books on Archbishop Cranmer and the Reformation, scholar without tedium, fair without pulling punches, he is an affectionate unbeliever. Impressed by St Francis, most compassionate, least narcissistic of church heroes, he is perfectly deadly on church crimes – like the First Crusade. “As they gathered in the cities of the Rhineland in 1096, they perpetrated Christianity’s first large scale massacre of Jews, since this was a group of non-Christians more accessible than Moslems to Western Europeans spoiling for a fight.” In his view, contemporary Moslem extremism and terrorism is rooted in historic memory of the crusades: successive incursions into the Middle East of westerners, carrying the cross before them and acting in ways unimaginably remote from the historical Jesus.
Again, Pope Benedict would not relish being reminded that, though most of the churches committed acts of unchristian intolerance, the habit of burning people to death for contentious beliefs, a practice derived from later, nastier Roman emperors, was largely confined to the Roman Catholic church. MacCulloch’s overall judgement is that “For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths.”
The detail, in which he delights, takes us through the history of the many early churches, all of them conceived in good faith and devotion, often surviving in small enclaves in the Middle East. What distinguished one particular set of believers in the imperial capital was a worldly devotion to power. The leadership of the Christian community of Rome in late classical times won the backing of the Emperor Constantine. Everything else followed. The Pope would stand across centuries in a see-saw relationship with the great ruler of the day, masterful when the German Emperor Henry IV was summoned to Canossa by Gregory VII to do penance on his knees, abject when Pius VI and VII were successively treated by Napoleon as incidental princelings of the ancien régime.
Picky about proper names of people and organisations, MacCulloch prefers Joshua the Anointed One to Jesus Christ. Less respectfully, he files the Roman Catholic church as the Western Church of the Latin Rite. He has a point: Katolicos is, after all, a Greek word signalling universal which the Roman affair, in all its pomp, is not. To non-Catholics, never mind us kindly, tolerant unbelievers, all Christians are Christians. All have faith. You would, though, have trouble getting anyone in the Vatican to admit as much. Rome speaks of the faith, definite article, an exclusive (and excluding) body.
It was interesting to watch this question being handled on Newsnight by Monsignor Marcus Holden, a clerical party spokesman, slightly plump and smiling without mercy, as might a spokesman for Exxon or United Fruit. The Archbishop of Canterbury had prayed with the Pope at Canterbury Cathedral, once Catholic, now Anglican: Christians together, surely? Asked by Kirsty Wark if this meant that Anglican orders were recognised by his church and good, the monsignor said the meaningless things official spokesmen say – things that mean “No.”
The Western Church of the Latin Rite makes a blazing issue of the concept of apostolicism. The message being that there is one true continuous church – us! Assured by the transmission of authority back to St Peter, apostle of Rome, it alone and no other body of honest believers wears the mantle of Jesus of Nazareth, aka Joshua the Anointed One. “And when I speak, let no dog bark.”
Immediate griefs and delinquencies relate back to this overweening presumption. This Pope behaves the way he does, confounding refusers of Christian belief with the Hitler-salute people, his church putting murderous irony into the words “suffer little children” through its long, extraordinary accommodation of sexual abusers of infants, because priestly orders need mystique! Those priests need to be above the common clay, an unhealthy elect, essentially above the law.
Yet in all the recent skirmishing about religion, and Catholicism in particular, one hears nothing said about this. Which is the core of it all. I mean clericalism. Other churches have done politics, the Quakers and Evangelicals, you might say, admirably so in their struggle against slavery. There have been plenty of Catholic priests quite as creditable. The South African hierarchy’s stand, led by Monsignor Hurley, is to its great honour, likewise liberation theology and the rebuked and warned-off radical Jesuits working under South American dictatorships. But go to the top, to the curia, and you understand that great 18th century French concept, anti-clericalism, resistance to Rome’s involvement as a priority in secular power. The sacred nature of the church had been proclaimed by kings, their own divine authority reliably enjoined by that sacred church.
Benedict XVI talks as he does, as John XXIII was trying not to, because in that fearful secularist world, the magic notion of priest above man and law, is absurd. And, today, damningly, Roman Catholics think so! Catholics pick and mix, follow or ignore according to conscience and common sense. A papacy obsessed with sex as evil, tried very hard to ban contraception; Catholics ignored it. Many Catholics look to fully ordained women.
The Pope finds himself in the Third World of free speech, contradiction and nobody being above the law – and he can’t handle it. The burden of exclusive truth is as heavy as it is absurd.
