Professor Tom Devine
Since the crisis in Scottish Catholic ranks broke last month, it has increasingly been defined by Professor Tom Devine. In the face of criticism from some other academics, he has stood firm in insisting that this is the most serious crisis in the church since the Reformation.
I am uncomfortable with the focus on flawed church figureheads. If we are in deep crisis territory, I’d say that the feebleness of the church since the 1982 visit to Scotland of Pope John Paul II in making Christian ethics a guide for meaningful living for a generation of Scottish Catholics, is a far more calamitous development.
Tom Devine is a distinguished member of the Catholic middle class which for some time has wished the church to accommodate itself to the secular age. A church hung up about same-sex marriage, abortion and even assisted dying draws unwelcome attention to itself. Such fixations provoke uncomfortable glances at the golf club, the graduate reunion, or the academic common room especially when it turns out that church leaders may not be squeaky clean in terms of their lifestyle. The percentage of Catholics who are simply numb to these ethical issues means that the church is largely left alone to fight the culture war battles on its Caledonian front.
Cardinal O’Brien at times appeared to be a general without an army. Certainly, few middle class Catholics with access to the media or political influence have shown concern with issues such as the impending closure of the St Margaret’s Adoption Society. This Catholic body has fallen foul of the charities regulator for its unwillingness to refer children to gay couples. Perhaps I have not been looking closely enough, but it’s an issue that the Christian Socialist movement has comfortably ignored. Brian Fitzpatrick is one of its stalwarts but his call for the church to stop obsessing on personal morality and concentrate on economic immorality full-time will fall flat as long as he fails to realise that the personal is indeed the political.
Contrary to what he and Tom Devine may hope, issues like this are not going to disappear and the impeding legislation on same-sex marriage is going to put real pressure on clergy, civil servants and teachers who may well have to set aside their objections to this radical redefinition of marriage in order to keep their jobs and stay on the right side of the law.
I doubt that I’m the only gay man in Scotland who is unhappy at being cannon fodder in a drive by a well-favoured lobby to impose its lifestyle choices on everyone else. Perhaps never in modern times has there been such a radical revision of a law shaping personal life that has so little genuine popular backing. Stonewall and the equality unit are far more isolated than Cardinal O’Brien was but they are wired into the networks that control Scottish society. The RC Church never has been: this has enabled it (with all its flaws) to remain close to grassroots Catholics but it has also made it vulnerable to any drastic changes in elite outlook of the kind which we are now seeing.
I found Cardinal O’Brien’s intervention on same-sex matters too often to be strident and shrill. In 2011, I criticised him in the press for complaining at not being listened to but, at the same time, for turning a deaf ear to Catholic intellectuals aghast that he had given the go ahead for the dispersal of a millennium of Catholic archives located in central Edinburgh. I hesitate to conclude that Cardinal O’Brien’s stance has been hypocritical; what he has admitted about his own personal conduct has led many to reach that conclusion. But he failed to combine his outspokenness with any coherent effort to show how the secular drive to make sentiment the yardstick for shaking up established institutions is a perilous road to follow.
Contrary to what Tom Devine hopes, the precipitate departure of the cardinal means that the church will be unable to defuse this institutional crisis for quite a while. He was swept away by a revolt of a number of his own priests. It is not clear what they now think of their handiwork. The pivotal role though may belong to Catherine Deveney, the Observer journalist who broke the story, an admirable example of the postmodern middle-class Catholic thriving in secular Scotland.
Ultimately, the Catholic Church is not so out-of-step with the rest of Scotland because of its preoccupation with ‘sex and gender issues’. The claim in fact does not stand up to close examination.
For at least a generation, much of the media has insisted there is nothing wrong with young people flouting convention and pursuing emotional and sexual freedom in very individualistic ways. Moreover it is precisely in this inter-personal dimension that governments in Scotland and the UK are keen to be seen as radical. While paralysed by apparently insoluble economic problems, Nicola Sturgeon and David Cameron compete to see who can come up with the most cutting edge ideas to recast society in totally fresh ways.
Archbishop Tartaglia declared himself humbled by the crisis that had shaken his church. I am not sure it is a term that the self-assured Professor Devine would ever have dreamt of using. It was a priest who has shunned the limelight and concentrated on pastoral work among parishioners, prisoners and the forgotten in society who perhaps got to the nub of the matter in reflecting on the tragedy of Keith O’Brien in a homily delivered on the 4th Sunday of Lent:
Shamed in the sight of everyone, stripped of all the external trappings of power, his weakness exposed for all to see, we can only imagine the pain and anguish Keith O’Brien must be feeling now. The same church which dressed him in red and put him on the pedestal he has fallen off will now investigate him, no doubt disown him and condemn him to spend the rest of his life in disgrace. But imagine a different scenario: a church in the future which would treat him with the same love and compassion we heard in today’s parable [of the Prodigal Son]. Maybe, having confronted the truth, he could even carry on being Archbishop of Edinburgh, come to terms with his own sexuality, be reconciled with those gay men and women who found what he said about them so offensive and become the wounded healer he never could be so long as he and we were pretending he was something he was not.
This charitable attitude reflects the views of numerous ordinary Catholics unwilling to grasp that the accusations against the cardinal might have a basis in truth. Keith O’Brien’s former colleagues have been noticeably less forgiving especially as frankly astounding claims continue to make press headlines.
In August, Argyll Publishing will bring out Tom Gallagher’s book ‘Scotland Divided: Ethnic Friction and Christian Crisis’
