The Cruel Catholic

Recently I was watching an effective TV documentary on the Spanish War – yes, I too am getting square eyes! – somewhat biased against the Francist side.

It is easy to revive the old horror that rose against the bombing of Guernica; easy, and in a sense just; for that bombing was an atrocity.

But we should still try to think straight, and bear in mind that it is precisely the horror of aerial attack on civilians which made Guernica a byword; and that if the Spanish War were being refought today, many of us would be saying that no doubt the horror was most unfortunate, but Franco was a patriotic man, and we would have to back him against the wicked Reds.

One cannot have the luxury of having it both ways.

Personally I do not think we have the right to condone mass bombing of civilians in any circumstances; and I think the directives of Vatican II are firmly behind this point of view; but all I ask of the neighbour who disagrees with me is that he or she should remain logical.

If it was all right to bomb out the Reds in the 1930s, then it is all right now; if it was not all right then, what has the change been since then? I leave this matter to the meditation of my fellow-Catholics.

In the Spanish War most Catholic opinion was behind Franco, because the Republicans were burning down churches and killing priests and nuns; and because their policy included the expropriation of the property of the Church.

Should the Church ever have owned that property? Is there not something gravely wrong when a Marxist can point to an apparent alliance between the Church and the wealthy and privileged classes, and be believed by the common people?

This is the kind of question that more and more priests are asking publicly in Spain and South America nowadays. It is a pity that more of them were not asking it thirty years ago.

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I think it was Lord Acton, the Catholic historian, who said that desire for temporal power had been the demon of the Papacy. Others have seen the political role of the Papacy in the Middle Ages as wholly providential. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes.

But one thing is pretty clear – that wherever the Church has backed and blessed a particular secular pattern of society, and set her face wholly against change, she has invariably weakened her own claim to be regarded as universal; and wherever the secular power, as in Spain, has as it were led the Church willingly captive, so that the will of Caesar seemed to be the will of God, the result has been a warping of the Church’s mission, so that the common people have been inclined to say ‘The Church is a cruel Mother.’

I do not agree wholly with those who claim that the voice of the people is the voice of God. But it has to be reckoned with.

It is not enough to realise that the historical use of the Church’s authority may have been quite frequently excessive or misplaced – to mutter something about the Divine purpose being achieved by means of unworthy instruments – and then to breathe a sigh of relief and say: ‘At any rate, we’re not like that now.’

In fact the Catholic concept of Divine authority mediated through human beings is a bone that sticks in the throats of nearly all Protestants; and we should take our present share of the blame for this. We have to realise that in the eyes of many Catholicism and the shadow of cruelty are still closely connected.

There are three ways in which the Church may seem cruel to the Protestants and indeed at times to those within her fold.

The first comes about through ignorance or malicious propaganda. Thus the Romans honestly thought that Christians wrapped children in dough and stabbed them and devoured them through a grotesque misunderstanding of the doctrine of the Eucharist; and many semi-literate Protestants may still imagine that extraordinary cruelties go on behind the walls of monasteries or convents.

We can quietly argue against this kind of nonsense. It tends to die a natural death where Catholics and Protestants mingle freely, and our non-Catholic neighbours can see how ordinary we actually are.

Still, we have to watch for the possibility of genuine scandal – as, for example, in the case of the excessive use of corporal punishment in certain Catholic schools.

In such cases we would be wise to learn from humanitarian traditions that already exist outside the Visible Church. And we have to keep our own house in order by stamping out, for example, all lingering traces of the hideous mediaeval anti-Semitic tradition coming from a time when Catholics were as ignorant of the customs and doctrines of Judaism as the Romans had been of the true nature of early Christianity.

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I have already indicated – moving into my argument backwards – some ways in which the Church may have given scandal in the past by the way she used her temporal power or by her alliance with various secular Governments.

In this regard I think we should be quite outspoken, saying – ‘The Spanish Inquisition was a public enormity and disaster’ – or – ‘The war against the Albigensians was one of the cruellest in history, and should never have been waged by Christian people.’ Then our Protestant neighbours may be more easily convinced that we have no secret hankering for the days of the faggot and the sword.

There isn’t much point in raking up old scores, and trying to argue that the Catholics were in the right of it because the Protestants behaved just as badly. We have to make an honest repudiation of the faults of our fathers.

There is, however, a third area, much more delicate and difficult, in which it seems to most Protestants that there is an element of cruelty in the Church’s authority. I am referring to the Catholic view of marriage.

We believe that marriage is an indissoluble union; that families should not be limited by the use of artificial birth control; that when the lives of mother and unborn child are at stake, one should not preserve the mother at the expense of the child’s life; that spouses have an obligation to yield to one another’s sexual needs; that husbands are meant to have a paramount authority in Christian households.

These cumulative facts have often given Protestants the impression that the Catholic view of marriage is somewhat rigid and anti-human. Though I do not think we have any right to set aside the Church’s teaching on these matters, we should at least endeavour to show that she is not being cruel.

We could point out at first that the Church has never demanded that husbands and wives who were wholly incompatible should continue to live together. The Church does permit separations. Again, we can argue justly that marriage was never meant to exist in isolation from the other Sacraments of the Church.

The marriage of two devout and practising Catholics which has its obvious difficulties and points of monotony or misery or conflict might be quite unworkable if either or both the spouses abandoned the practice of their Faith.

There is a true parallel for the Catholic between marriage and a religious vocation, As the ex-nun Monica Baldwin recently pointed out, a religious had to put himself or herself into the hand of God, and this may sometimes mean being led to the brink of the precipice or actually over it.

Again, if cruelty is the matter under discussion, one can point to the very real miseries of the divorced person – weighing one situation against another, is an unhappy divorcee necessarily in a better situation than a wife and mother who continues to struggle with a difficult marriage?

The Church – apart from the fact that she cannot abandon the rulings of page 525 her Founder in regard to marriage – may be less cruel and more responsible when she urges on her members the indissolubility of Christian marriage than our secular leaders who accept divorce but have no remedy for the woes of the people – who have perhaps rushed into divorce and later lived to regret it.

These, and other considerations, are worth bringing up when our Protestant neighbours argue that the Church is too harsh and rigid for human nature to endure it.

The issue of artificial birth control is undoubtedly a difficult one; and many Catholics are themselves divided in conscience about it. Yet one could suggest mildly that our modern depersonalised, industrialised society may itself have its defects; that it is a trifle obsessional for a healthy woman to dread a large family more than she dreads T.B. or cancer; and that a partial celibacy is by no means impossible for people who are practising their Faith.

One could at least raise the possibility that one of the sources of tension in modern households was precisely that the spouses are thrown directly on each other’s company without the diversions and necessary upheavals that a large family could provide.

These are uncertain matters. But I do not think we should give over all the ground of argument into the hands of the opponents of the Church. In this regard the Church may ultimately be wiser and more merciful than she seems to be.

The notion of marital rights may seem thoroughly mediaeval in the eyes of most modern people; yet it is founded directly on Scriptural authority, and it does have its own psychological wisdom.

Many who oppose the idea have a mental picture of some male domestic tyrant enforcing his ‘rights’ on a shrinking and defenceless wife. They should read Chaucer’s story of the Wife of Bath who had – if I remember rightly – buried four husbands, and was on the look-out for a fifth. The balance may be more even than they suppose.

I think that the notion of marital rights is part of the traditional Catholic view of marriage as a principle of mercy – that either man or wife should recognise strong sexual need in their partner, and try to accommodate themselves to it, so that there will not be too much humiliation or resentment.

It is a matter of being sometimes prepared to make gifts rather than to demand them. Undoubtedly it presupposes an average degree of mental and physical health in the partners concerned. Though in the modern world this notion has flown out through the window, I do not notice that married couples are conspicuously better adjusted because of the change; indeed, one of the several causes for the breakdown of modern marriages may quite often be the total neglect of that old principle of mercy.

The problem of abortion turns ultimately on quite a simple pivot – whether a child becomes a human being at conception or when it takes its page 526 first breath of air. If at conception – as our theologians have assumed with good arguments on their side – then abortion is murder, and there is no more to be said about it.

No person in their senses could claim that it was just to kill a living, breathing infant so that the mother might live. And indeed many women who consciously condone abortion or have themselves practised it have a most powerful subconscious reaction against the practice.

I am not well fitted to argue whether or not husbands should be heads of their households, since I am myself a husband and a father, and might see that situation as personally gratifying – but I have frequently heard women say that they would, if it were socially possible, prefer their own husbands to be in control of the family; and I have heard other women quite simply attribute the break-down of certain marriages to the fact that this principle has fallen into disuse.

The bellowing bullying tyrant is undoubtedly a figure of Victorian fiction. I have often wondered if he was as common an apparition in real life, Certainly, in modern society, if the neighbourhood is disturbed by shouting, it will be a woman, not a man, who is doing it – and perhaps when her nerves are a little calmer, she may look at herself and regret that there is no person whatever in authority over her who could say quietly: ‘Now, Sarah, that won’t do. What’s the problem this time?’

In enjoining that husbands should be the heads of families the Church did not simply give them authority; she also gave them a difficult responsibility. Perhaps now that the principle has lapsed, a source of stability and calm has been removed from the world.’ Nevertheless, when all this has been said, we still have to consider the likelihood that our own practice of the Faith may have elements of rigidity or uncharity, of something that may seem to others to verge on cruelty.

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