Pope Benedict: due to touch down in Edinburgh on Thursday
In the past, Catholics who lost their faith or disagreed with important items of doctrine or morality would usually cease to regard themselves as bona fide Catholics. What is curious about today’s situation, as Dowd’s programme revealed, is the number of people who believe that rejecting basic Catholic principles doesn’t make then “bad” Catholics.
Andy Burnham, the former Health Secretary and a candidate in the Labour leadership contest, defended his voting record on gay adoption and stem-cell research by turning his fire on the Church’s “alienating” style of lobbying on such issues: too “full-on, black and white”, he claimed. He expressed sadness that anyone should regard him as “not a true Catholic” just because he voted in favour of the government’s proposals, and against Catholic teaching.
Andy Burnham: with friends like this in Parliament, who needs Evan Harris?
In fact, the Church has traditionally held that Catholic laymen and -women have a duty to enter the political sphere, to bring Christian values to bear on various aspects of the government of society. Recently, however, Catholic M.P.s like Burnham have come nearer to the position adopted by many nominally Catholic U.S. politicians: “I’m personally against X/Y/Z, but…”.
What this has meant in practice is that, although there are still some prominent Catholics in Parliament, they feel no obligation to speak or to vote consistently in accordance with Christian principles. They argue that any such principles are private and personal, and therefore needn’t prevent them from actually supporting anti-Christian legislation.
Of course it is wrong to claim to be a dedicated follower of Christ “except for…”, but this elastic approach has become far commoner over the last ten or twenty years, and will probably continue to have a corrosive effect within the Catholic community for a long time to come.
The views of two Catholic teenagers, one boy and one girl, who are due to meet Pope Benedict during his visit, chimed with Andy Burnham’s.
Dowd asked the girl first of all what “being a Catholic” meant to her. She answered: “Like, just feeling a part of the church, and, like, especially at church…the community and being able to, kind of, express yourself”.
I hope I’m not being nasty when I say that some reference to God and Christ would also have been welcome here, but the girl’s words do confirm a tendency among modern Catholics to regard the community itself as somehow the centre and object of faith. And this is another aspect of the somewhat shallow thinking that characterises so many otherwise earnest believers.
Questioned further, the schoolgirl went on to say that, in her opinion, Pope Benedict didn’t seem to quite realise that we’re living in the 21st century, and that his views on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage are “outdated”.
Dowd then asked: “Do you think it’s possible to be a Catholic and to be pro-abortion and in favour of same-sex marriage?”, to which she replied: “Yeah, I think it is. I know I certainly am, and I don’t have, like, a problem admitting that and being a Catholic.”
The boy then chipped in: “I think that, yeah, the community aspects of the religion are fantastic, the stuff that’s more “help thy neighbour” and more social is definitely right, correct to believe in; but I think some of the stuff that’s a bit restricting - things almost like chastity and things like that - but I think the best thing about being a Catholic is the fact that you can kind of pick and choose which bits you'd like to believe in, as long as you kind of, worship God, really.”
I'm at an age now where I experience real distress at such ghastly mangling of the English language - but we'll leave that aside. More important, I don’t regard these opinions as untypical of large numbers of Catholic youth. Whenever I’ve expressed reservations about the standard position of church youth workers and the like - “our wonderful/committed/caring young people”, etc. - I’ve been roundly dismissed as negative, “anti-youth“, “always exaggerating”, and so on.
Such reactions are evasions. The issue is really whether Catholic parents, teachers, pastors and youth leaders propose a full, integral vision of Christian moral life - including the struggle to live the ideals of chastity, the marriage covenant and Christian family life - or whether moral formation is reduced, as it often seems to be today, to campaigning against poverty and environmental damage: the easy, approved, fashionable causes.
At the same time, it’s probably wise not to lay too much store by the opinions people express in their teens, especially in the chaotic moral climate of contemporary Britain.
The best thing that could happen is that, as today’s young Catholics get older, they’ll come to appropriate more deeply the wisdom of a tradition of sexual ethics that only appears at first glance to be “outdated” and “restricting”.
It would be nice, of course, to have a few more Dominic Savios and Maria Gorettis in our communities - models of youthful purity. But failing that, a few more Augustines and Dorothy Days - adult converts who abandon the errors and sins of their youth to come finally into the light of the gospel - won’t do us any harm either.
"Give me chastity," the young Augustine famously prayed, " - but not yet."
But that won’t happen if we imagine that our best strategy is to dissemble the demands of the gospel.
We need to stop being frightened by today’s army of frivolous media pundits with their shrill catchphrases about dogmatism and intolerance, and we need to stop believing that young people will only respond to trendy compromisers.
They are capable of valuing a coherent moral philosophy, courageously maintained despite ridicule and misrepresentation. During his state visit to Britain this week, I’m sure Benedict XVI will prove to be a shining example of just such a stance.
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