Peccavi
A.N. Wilson
No illusion can remain intact forever. One of my illusions was that no one ever reads book reviews, which was why I was so happy to become Literary Editor of the Spectator a year ago. Anything for a quiet life. Since then, I must have commis- sioned some 350 reviews. Not all of them have been equally excellent. But there is on- ly one which I now regret having published. It was written by myself.
I wrote it six months ago, but I am still receiving comments and letters about my notice of Paul Johnson's biography of the Pope. Needless to say, it is not because my correspondents are remotely interested in me, or in Mr Johnson; but they are fascinated by John Paul II. I have found myself in the disconcerting position of be- ing rebuked by those whose opinions I respect and admire, while congratulations trickled in from atheists, spoiled priests, liberal theologians, gay libbers and cam- paigners for universal abortion.
As the Pope's visit to England approach- ed, my office began to fill up with moun- tains of papal pot-boilers and souvenir albums, all glowing with sugary praise for the Holy Father's varied genius as a pastor, skier, poet, philosopher, orator and pon- tiff. I began to think of one of Evelyn Waugh's letters in which he said, of Paul VI, 'He has two very fine houses of his own in Italy. I think it very vulgar of him to go touring with the television'. By the time I sat down to review Mr Johnson's book (which was by far the best of a very mediocre lot) any sympathy I possessed with the Pope had been eroded, and I decided that it was time to give the Devil's Advocate his voice. Anyone who had such universal appeal must, surely, have had something wrong with him, particularly if he numbered among his most commercially astute admirers Lord Longford and Mr Norman St John Stevas.
I found plenty of grounds for attacking the Pope. Unlike Paul VI, he has been an unashamed absolutist. He has suspended apparently harmless professors of theology whom he regards as heretics. He has refused to laicise priests who have abandoned their ministry. He has reasserted the very odd doctrine of infallibility. He has laid in to the Poor old gays. And do we really want a Pope who gives his unreserved blessing to Opus Dei, the sinister-sounding Spanish
religious organisation (or 'Catholic Moonies' as they have been called) of which we have all read such disturbing accounts in The Times and elsewhere?
Along these bumbling lines, I proceeded. The Pope, I averred, was a bullying autocrat who was using his 'charismatic' crowd-control to bring about a Counter- Reformat:on. He had not used his infallible powers to bring back the one unambiguous- ly good feature of ancient Catholicism that is, the old Latin Mass. But he seemed as much an enemy of the Intellect as the most authoritarian of his predecessors. He was, in effect, restoring the Index, the witch-hunts against the modernists, and the highly questionable doctrines of his own freedom from error. He was therefore a bad thing, and I felt entitled to abandon good taste in my account of him.
In the six months which have elapsed since I wrote my (actually rather feeble) ar- ticle, hardly a week has passed in which it has not been abundantly clear that I was seizing upon irrelevancies and ignoring the obvious. The Pope's final speech before his recent departure from Spain makes the point more clearly than I could hope to do myself. At the cathedral in Santiago, he pleaded for peace in 'Old Europe'. The political, economic and spiritual problems which face us can only be solved by an affir- mation of Europe's Christian heritage. 'Precisely in this are found the common roots that have matured the Continent's civilisation, its culture, its dynamism ... in one word, all that constitutes its glory'.
These are not empty words. More than any other nation in Europe, the Poles have been forced to an absolute conflict between the atheist materialism of their tyrannical eastern neighbours and the values of 'old Europe'. Hilaire Belloc recognised this long ago when he used to repeat, 'Poland is the test'. And he used to say — which is a paraphrase of what the Pope said in Spain — 'The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith'.
The things which threaten to destroy the fabric of Europe, and have already destroyed much of it, are many and various. Eastern communism is not the only enemy. Materialism, in different forms — the worship of Mammon — has made equally hideous scars on the Western land- scape. Our cities have been destroyed by 'developers'. Our butter, our wine, our meat, at the bureaucratic whim of greedy men, are hoarded or destroyed rather than being sold cheap. Our leaders, busily engag- ed in heaping up nuclear weapons and jug- gling with inflation figures, are powerless to prevent unemployment. And the unhappy consequences of our sexual liberation are too obvious to be worth cataloguing.
But, it may be argued, even if this is true, why should one lump these apparently very different ills together? The reason is this. They are all a consequence of our abandon- ment of Christianity. Many Christians themselves like to speak rather gloatingly of the end of Christendom. They are ap- parently pleased at the collapse of a civilisa-
tion which produced Dante, the great Gothic cathedrals, the older universities, our libraries and our laws. Doubtless it gives them the cosy feeling of belonging to a little, club; the beguilingly superior sensa- tion of being in a minority.
One Christian, however, refuses to speak in these terms. In all the surrounding darkness, he holds up a light. By that light, we see that he is standing on a rock. There is no reason, if enough people rally to his call, why the values of 'Old Europe' should not be reasserted.
It is no accident that the holder of the lantern comes out of Poland. The Poles have had a clear choice, and they have decided, with extraordinary courage and vi- sion, to fight. To us, the choice has never seemed so clear. Many of our most disastrous mistakes have come about because we thought we were acting for the best. By stepping westward, John Paul Il has illumined areas where we should be on our guard. The things he says are not always 'nice', which is why he originally repelled me. In personal terms, I remain im- mune to his rabble-rousing charms. But, when a war is on, it does not make sense to ask whether a general is nice; merely whether he understands what he is about. There can have been few vicars of Christ who understood more fully the nature of their charge than this one; and few who have made a more plausible claim to be the earthly leader of all Christian people.
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