As Pope Benedict’s visit approaches, Katie Grant, a cradle Catholic, feels torn between her loyalty to the Church and anger at its callous insensitivity
In 2005, shortly after Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, my then 19-year-old daughter and I walked into St Peter’s in Rome. I don’t like St Peter’s, so superior and crushing, though the dead popes with their paper skin and velvet slippers offer a chilly thrill. I spied a confessional box in the dim distance and after I’d recited a dull list of sins, a young voice — urgent, American — asked, ‘Do you ever gossip?’ ‘Good Lord!’ I said. ‘I’ve got five sisters, and that’s what sisters do.’ Silence. ‘I suppose,’ I was a bit flustered now, ‘our gossip isn’t kind, but it’s not wicked.’ He disagreed. I slunk out like a murderer.
My daughter went in. Two minutes later she shot out, pelted the whole way down the basilica, through the doors and across St Peter’s Square. I shot after her. She was crying. The urgent American had asked how many times, during her six months in Italy, she had missed Mass. ‘Only twice,’ she said rather proudly. He soon put her right. Missing Mass was a mortal sin. Mortal sins were a ticket to hell. She should be terrified. She was. Only the queue at security prevented me from kicking that priest into kingdom come. I was fair game, but it was unconscionable, right in the heart of the Vatican, to turn a teenager’s all-loving God into a vengeful Gorgon and her Catholicism into a curse. I was livid.
Three days later, I went to St John Lateran. It was closed but a man with a hoover was hanging about. Hoovers mean carpets, possibly red. Of course! It was the Feast of Corpus Christi. The Pope must be coming. When he finally arrived, I found myself barely 20 feet away from the altar, though the confessional brutality of the recent visit to St Peter’s afforded wide emotional distance. I fought to keep this distance. I was still angry. Yet gradually the antique mystery of the papal office undid me — that and a beautiful gesture of the Pope’s, acknowledging the applause of the crowd while directing it away from himself and towards the monstrance in which the Host was displayed. When I joined the river of pilgrims processing towards Santa Maria Maggiore, I was not an observer of the crowd, I was embedded in the crowd, witnessing to the faith that spoke to me neither sentimentally nor with the stamp of God’s awful foot, but with hope, the promise of redemption, and love.
Although the damage done to my daughter was so bad I forbad her to go to Mass until she could do so without shaking (I’m happy to take the rap for that, if there’s a rap to take), in the intervening time I have tried to rekindle my own faith as it was that Corpus Christi. I come from a recusant family, so normally if I wobble, I simply remember my ancestors who, despite great suffering and hardship, remained so steadfast that William Cecil, later Lord Burghley and treasurer to Elizabeth I, decried us as a family of ‘more than usual perversity’. After a bit, the wobble passes.
This time, however, feels different, not because of the urgent American, whose theology was as faulty as his manner was pitiless; nor because of the child abuse, rotten as it is; nor even because of those historical-turned-theological (such a clever trick) ‘no go’ areas like women priests and priestly celibacy. Authoritarianism, wickedness and the odd lunatic pronouncement are hardly novel, and in the case of lunatic pronouncements, there will almost certainly be ‘modifications’ as the Church moves, just as it did after previously ‘unthinkable’ changes were approved by Vatican II, ‘from one state of certainty into another’. If you understand the foundations on which the Church’s teachings rest, they are possible to understand.
What is neither understandable nor forgivable is the current collapse of the church into slithery, prickly victimhood. When, over child abuse, senior members bleat about the Church being unfairly singled out ‘although every institution has its rotten eggs, doesn’t it?’, I find myself shouting at the radio, ‘Do you understand nothing, you silly creature? If you claim to be conduits of God’s grace, you must expect a bit more stick than a judge or a policeman.’ Of course it’s only a small minority of priests who are or have been involved in child abuse, but how can the Church’s leaders not see that that’s beside the point? Sometimes, out of devilry, I’m tempted to go back to confession and say to the priest ‘Bless me, Father, have you sinned?’ That would be mean. As I say, most priests are good men; some very good indeed.
Yet the goodness of individual priests is no longer enough. There is no greater claim than to the guardianship of people’s souls, so if the church cannot feel and show genuinely abject horror at its own shortcomings, I will not be the only Catholic wondering whether the forthcoming papal visit, with its hopeless management, escalating costs and slight sense of missing the point, will scupper my faith for good and all. It may be that if I go to Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park, proximity to the successor of St Peter will once again work its magic. It’s hard to tell because I’ve no idea whether we’ll be presented with the Church Irritable, the Church Defensive and the Church Complanatory, or the Church Hopeful, the Church Redemptive and the Church Loving.
Many Catholics believe this should not matter. In one way they are right. Although non-Catholics may not believe it, the faith is actually bigger than the institution. Yet even when current troubles pass, there is another problem, and this does affect the faith.
I mean no disrespect when I say that, like opera, the Catholic Church teeters between the sublime and the ridiculous. The sublime marvel of the whole extraordinary notion sweeps you along — the stories, the sacraments, the sacrifice, the radical conviction that once had students debate whether Resisting the Known Truth was a worse sin against the Holy Ghost than Final Impenitence.
This sublimity is what attracts converts. For cradle Catholics the sublime is elusive. Everything is too familiar and the dirge of the ordinary parish Mass successfully snuffs out most reviving sparks. Through teeth gritted against the dreariness, it’s easier to be assailed by a dreaded but irresistible sense of the ridiculous.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not an Old Rite nostalgic, though I once was. I just want a return to dignity; to see clerics more fearful of God than of the press; to see them cherish the faith more than the institution; to know that they understand that if the Church is to be run by men, these men must stand up like men.
You may wonder why I haven’t already left the Church. Currently, I can supply only a glib answer. I hang on in there partly because of my ancestors, partly because I remember Corpus Christi 2005 and partly, too, because before I could ever think of leaving the Church in which I was hatched, matched and will most likely be despatched, I need to tell Father Urgent American that if my daughter and I are going to hell, he’s coming with us.
Katie Grant is the author of The Perfect Fire Trilogy (Quercus).
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