Book Review

Only ‘real’ catholics allowed

Hell and Other Destinations

Like Christian in the old Lenten hymn, the novelist Piers Paul Read sees the faith encircled by the Hosts of Midian, which “prowl and prowl around”. In this collection of articles, reviews and lectures, with Christian he would “up and smite them”. He does this because, despite good things like the Mass in the vernacular, which flowed from the Second Vatican Council, he believes that a thing called “the spirit of the Council” has produced a “covert apostasy disguised as renewal”. The Hosts of Midian are ecumenism, which plays down the Real Presence and the papacy to accommodate Anglicans; liberationism, which obscures “the essentially spiritual import of the gospels”; feminism, which diverts women from their proper task of raising families and performing household duties; and moral relativism, which undermines in particular the Church’s teaching on sex.

In the “smiting” there is more sound and fury than careful argument, but substantial attacks are launched on some of the enemies. So the left-wing political commitment of liberationism is countered by fairly traditional right-wing politics, which owes less to the Catholic Catechism than to faith in those “economic truths” which hold that the poor only become richer when the rich get richer still. Read is in favour of “temporal works of mercy” but not of the insistence that “divine justice demands a common sharing of material goods”. Read thus puts himself at odds with the Catechism which supports St John Chrysostom’s insistence that “not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them” for “the goods we possess are not ours but theirs”. Read misses out on the Church’s social teaching and reduces morality to matters of sex. There is not much of that “joy and pleasure” of which the Catechism boldly speaks, but instead a dour getting down to the duty of procreation. He claims that a “distaste for the erotic” is part of Catholic orthodoxy. In fact it comes more from the ghost of St Augustine’s Manichean days, which has haunted the Church but which can be exorcised by reading Pope Benedict’s Deus Caritas Est.

When it comes to Hell, Read really gets the bit between his teeth and produces a substantial essay. The trouble is that the leaden literalism of his treatment of the images of punishment in the parables of Jesus masks what is surely the fundamental issue – Hell as, in the words of Chesterton, God’s “greatest compliment to humanity”, that gift freely to choose even against the Giver. This is the point which makes von Balthasar in his Dare We Hope? raise the insistent question: If we set no limit on human ability to say “no” to God, should we not even more set no limit on the power of God to overcome that “no” with his love? It is a question not of some sentimental belief in innate human goodness, but of the reality of the power of this love.

I confess that I am glad not to be Read’s parish priest, not simply because I would soon be a target for his fiery darts but also because he seems to need so much cheering up. For reasons hinted at in his autobiographical fragments, he peers out on the world as a vale of tears and misery. Of course there are many tears and much misery, all of which cannot be brushed aside by some “over-optimistic reading of the signs of the times”. But when John XXIII threw open the Vatican windows, he did not do it to let in the spirit of the age but the Holy Spirit who blows not just through the Church but where he will. It is belief in the presence and goodness of this active, creative God which gives joy and hope.

We need critics to wake us from our bouts of credal amnesia, and having read this book I went out and preached a homily on Hell. However the scriptures for the day told me that the Lord’s wrath was directed not at those who wallowed in sexual misdemeanours but at those who spoke contemptuously of their fellow human beings, and that it was this absence of love, which dug that deep divide between Heaven and Hell. What worries me most about this book is that it shows someone who, having had the Catechism beaten into him at school, now feels the need not just to defend the faith but to beat up those he deems to be “not still Catholics”.

These make up quite an impressive list. Starting with his former parish priest Oliver McTernan who, Read says, was still to be converted to the Catholic faith, he strikes out at Clifford Longley as “a cafeteria Catholic par excellence”, the eminent theologians Karl Rahner and Herbert McCabe, the psychiatrist Jack Dominian and The Tablet. Under its former editor John Wilkins, The Tablet is said to have become an “alternative magisterium” while the English bishops stood by, actually promoting this new Protestant “Reformation”. The Tablet has recently produced a list of “Britain’s top 100 lay Catholics”, which rightly includes Piers Paul Read as a fine novelist. But what a varied assortment of bedfellows he has. On the subject of their faith, they would argue as fiercely as their predecessors did in medieval Paris. However, this is not the Tower of Babel but real Catholicism where variety is the spice of its life and all its quarrels family ones. It is good to have Clare Short and Ann Widdecombe, David Lodge and Piers Paul Read all aboard the Barque of Peter. The one thing these passengers must not do is to throw overboard those with whom they disagree. That is the way not to protect the Catholic Church, but to produce a nasty little sect.

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