Quite Staggering Christmas Ill-will

I hold no brief for Tony Blair. I voted for him twice and couldn’t stomach doing so a third time. I left his party entirely because of his leadership. I could go on for some time about the man’s failings. But I don’t think I could have worked up quite such gouts of bile as the right wing of the Catholic Church has , following his reception into the Roman Church a couple of days ago. It made me feel that Blair must be quite a saintly man. I’m sure that, even were I not inclined to do so anyway, I would have told Uncle Joe Ratzinger where he could stick his magisterium after this treatment.

There is a blog where these graceless ultramontanes congregate. I read it because it’s interesting and about interesting subjects, and even contribute to it when feeling confident enough not to mind being told I’m going to Hell. The general line – there are exceptions, but they risk fierce execration – is that it is an utter scandal that Blair has been allowed to join the church without giving public recantations of his position on abortion (natch), homosexuality, and anything else that what I call the Khartoum faction demands a recantation on. The fact that Blair has (one assumes) never performed or been responsible for an abortion or (again presumably) engaged in homosexual relations is neither here nor there. Nor has he been personally responsible for widening access to abortion – what he is being blamed for is not narrowing it, and not actually ensuring that women are put in jail for doing it. A doctrinal paper drawn up by none other than one J. Ratzinger, in a previous job, states that only politicians who persistently vote for increased abortion should be condemned by the Church. I don’t know why Blair didn’t vote for a reduction in the time limit on abortions (I mean, the man has four children – hasn’t he ever seen an ultrasound scan?) but, presumably, if he had, he’d still have voted for some legal abortions, and the ultramontanes would still have condemned him.

You'd think Catholics would be glad to have Tony Blair; not because he's an international celeb, but in the spirit of welcoming a lost sheep back to the fold. Jesus didn't go round demanding public recantations; he just said "Go and sin no more" - no doubt more in hope than confidence, the Man wasn't stupid.

It is obvious that these people simply do not like Tony Blair, which I can understand. But the main reason they don’t like him is that he is a left-of-centre politician; the same blog carries attacks on US bishops who are indulgent to the Kennedys. It would seem the only politicians with whom the Church hierarchy ought to be hobnobbing are the likes of Generals Franco and Pinochet, who got off notably lightly. Generally speaking the Catholic Church has always believed in making its accommodations with secular power, in support of its own claims to temporal as well as spiritual authority. It just prefers torturers and rapists to people who are liberal on poor women who see no alternative to abortion. What’s more, I suspect that some of these people do not actually believe in the substance of the Christian faith: the fundamentalist wing are merely a useful tool to mobilise Catholics in support of political objectives, these objectives being inimical to liberal democracy and having a stronger connection to a political philosophy beginning with F. Titus Oates, where are you now that we need you?

I know the original Cipriano Mera rejected all religion: partly because the only one on offer where he was was the utterly corrupt, decayed and politicised Spanish Catholic Church, which deserved to be wiped off the face of the earth. But I do not think I am departing much from his spirit when I say that Britain must remain, not a wholly secular country, but a Christian (C of E) country. A secular country would have to give equal status to all its religions: no. We have an established religion which places liberal tolerance very high in its list of values. It deserves to be placed higher than the homophobic abortion-fetishists; higher than the gynocidal sharia-boppers, and higher than all those who use their religion to enforce cultural norms on the unwilling. No, C of E for ever: the absurdity of the supremacy of the woolly and über-tolerant is precisely the point. Let’s hear it once more for Antidisestablishmentarianism.