Semper eadem?
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
The encyclical of Paul VI has been received with bewilderment, anguish—and a dazed wonder: 'what is he talking about?' Some of the comments have been so absurd that one rallies to the Pope automatically. I have learned that I have committed a great social sin by fathering four children when two is the maxi- mum allowed by our deep thinkers. The only one of the critics of the Pope with whom I sym- pathise is the simple evangelical vicar who quoted the Thirty-Nine Articles to the effect that the Pope has no jurisdiction in England. But even in Islington, the Thirty-Nine Articles are not universally known or accepted today.
The opinion of any Pope is, of course, more important than that of any Archbishop of Canterbury. But with all the will in the world, with all the admiration for Pope Paul's cour- age, I cannot think that his encyclical will go down into history as one of the more impres- sive papal documents. I have not looked at the Italian text, but the English text as printed in the Catholic Herald is full of jargon. (I strongly suspect the Italian text is even worse, as ecclesiastical Italian is abominable.) There are many points that could be raised about this pronouncement, but the most important one I wish to raise is that the Pope is desperately handicapped by the fact that he is talking of something he knows nothing about.
A priest or a nun preaching pre-marital con- tinence was preaching a virtue which, despite Protestant suspicions, an overwhelming major- ity of them practised. But enforced continence inside marriage is an experience that, naturally, celibates, male and female, know nothing about. I first began to appreciate how little they knew about it when, out of curiosity, I read some casuistical books on matrimony at a time when my Latin was a lot better than it is now. These books did one thing for me, if nothing else. They enabled me to dismiss as Protestant slanders the view that priests who laid down the law on this subject were dirty old men. What was so alarming about some of the dog- matic decisions given was their innocence.
Some intelligent priests and some intelligent nuns knew they were facing a problem which is perhaps insoluble; what can they say to the laity given their remoteness from actual experience? I had a curious evidence of this in conversa- tions I had many years ago with three different young women whom I knew well, all of whom told me that the only nun they ever confided in in the smart convent school they attended was Sister —. They often liked other nuns very much, but they never discussed with them the problems, not so much of sex, as of love and of the rules of marriage and the duties and hopes of that honourable estate. They did not know why they talked to her; but each of them separately told me they realised why when they read her death notice. When she entered the convent she was a widow.
The encyclical Humanae Vitae suffers ob- viously from Paul VI's remoteness from the realities of matrimonial life, and from pastoral life. But it suffers equally from the fact that it was the work of an Italian. It will, among other things, evoke that strong distrust of the Italian Church which is so marked in France among clergy and laity alike, and is not unknown in other countries. And if Paul VI does not realise how much the Curia—at any rate the Italian part of it—is suspect outside Italy, he is ill-in- formed—as I suspect he is. The number of anti- Curia stories in circulation among pious Catho- lics since the Middle Ages could fill up all the new telephone books the Post Office is threaten- ing us with.
Some complaints flow from the Italianate character of this encyclical. The faithful are supposed to read into it a series of nuances which the cloudy text does not make plain to non-Italians. The difference between Cardi- nal Heenan's kindly interpretation of the rules of the sacrament of penance and the absolutism of the Archbishop of Cardiff is already causing confusion among the faithful, as can be seen from reading the popular and the Catholic press. It can be seen in this journal, where Bishop Wheeler of Leeds appeals almost entirely to authority, although he is addressing a largely non-Catholic audience. Yet Bishop Wheeler has less excuse than the Pope, because he did not receive merely a seminary education but an Oxford education in which the kind of argument he now falls back on was not en- couraged.
A generation ago a very learned and intelli- gent Jesuit, C. C. Martindale, said that it was the laity in the next generation (that is now this generation) who would have to show heroic virtue. The Pope and the Archbishop of Cardiff do not seem to realise how heroic the laity may have to be, and this is much more than a ques- tion of abstaining from sexual intercourse : it is a question also of the terrible risks that Catholic parents—and other parents—take in becoming parents. Of course, all compassionate and pious Christians have to suffer a great deal for their faith, whatever it may be. So do non- Christians have to suffer a great deal from the' unsatisfactoriness of the human condition. The limitations of the clergy in this matter are not confined to the Roman Church. My mother used to tell me a story of her mother's closest friend, a good Presbyterian called Mrs Mack- intosh. She had already lost four children from m when the fifth died; and when her minister came to comfort her, all he could say was, `Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.' She replied, 'Well, he must be gey fond o' me.' Yet the minister if he was a married man, as he probably was, and a father, as he may well have been, had run risks that the clergy of the Roman Catholic do not run. It will not be only the laity who have to show heroic virtue; it will be the clergy who will have to manifest their understanding of the problems of the laity in more than words. This will be a novelty for a good many of them.
The authority of the encyclical is rather un- certain. It is not quite infallible but it is part of the magisterium. The Catholic Herald has unkindly printed a facsimile of the front page of a celebrated encyclical of Gregory XVI, just as much an authority as the new encyclical of Paul VI, but completely reversed by a decision of Vatican II. Indeed, one wonders how much meaning to attach to the principle semper eadem?
I am puzzled by the Pope's appeal to the secular powers to take up his dogmatic pro- nouncement by means which are not specified.
This appeal is not confined, as far as I can see, to Catholic heads of state or even Christian heads of state. If it were, there might be some sense in falling back on the dictum of an eminent Catholic statesman of the late nine- teenth century who laid it down that a church should say, 'Believe this or be damned.' But the days of Leo XIII and Leopold II, King of the Belgians, founder of the Congo Free State, are over. And the appeal to non-Catholic heads in 1968 seems astonishingly ill-timed. We can assume that Mrs Gandhi will not do much to help the Pope, and we are told in the Catholic Herald that Cardinal Gracias of Bombay is dis- tressed by the encyclical, as well he might be, although we are also told that Indian Catholics have the lowest birth rate of any group in India. But to think that General de Gaulle will take measures which might untie the fissiparous French left under the popular banner of WTI- calisme: voila ferment? or that Mr Trudeau, who has already announced that the govern- ment has no business in the bedrooms of the nation, or Dr Kiesinger, who has his own troubles in Germany and doesn't want to add to them, pious Catholic as he is, will do anything to meet the Pope's appeal is to show credulity that surprises one in a countryman of Machi- avelli.
I have thought, indeed, of the previous Popes Paul VI reminds me of. I thought of Boniface VIII who launched his powerful denunciations of secular rulers and was kidnapped by the gorillas of General de Gaulle's predecessor, Philip the Fair. I have thought of Pius II, who in vain called on the Christian princes for a crusade against the Turks after the fall of Con- stantinople. But the real parallel of the crisis of authority is supplied by an Anglican saint, King Charles I. On trial for his life, making a sound legal defence wearing the Order of the Garter, he seemed to command the situation.
But he dropped his gold-headed stick and waited for someone to pick it up, and when no one did pick it up, he realised that he was simply Charles Stewart and no longer King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland. Paul VI has dropped his crozier, and although many people have rushed to pick it up, notably my old friend Cardinal Muggeridge (for I have long been con- vinced that Malcolm is a cardinal in petto), the number of people who are not willing to pick it up is .very large, very impressive—and is not likely to decrease.
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