Arthur Bell
on the persecution
of his father
Robin McMillan
on a remarkable
pilgrimage to Scotland
Jill Stephenson (26 March) is puzzled at my intervention
(19 March). In the face of revelations showing just how hard it was for Catholic clerics to transcend their physical urges and concentrate on preaching God’s word, I was suggesting to Tom Devine and Brian Fitzpatrick that it was premature to focus on the social gospel when the state and popular culture are driving forward particular agendas concerning interpersonal behaviour.
Tom Devine is an accomplished and unretiring academic and Jill will have to await my book to find some more of my thoughts on his role and influence. Even though I may not agree with all of her thoughts on the Catholic Church and personal ethics, debate is overdue and some of her ideas and concerns are constructive and timely.
But I make no apologies for using ‘middle class’ in a pejorative sense. The Catholic middle class is very much a facsimile of the bigger Scottish affair. It is very much careerist and conformist and inclined to assemble around whatever are orthodoxies of the moment. Jill Stephenson can decide whether the craze for Celtic among west of Scotland Catholics who can afford season ticket prices is a sign of that orthodoxy or a rare streak of rebellion.
We both live in Edinburgh and I see little sign of the civic energy which the middle-class supposedly possesses, being used to rescue that city from its torpor. The paralysis over the costly and disfiguring trams fiasco would appear crazy to the good burghers of Stuttgart (a city she may well know) where a similar scheme to knock down the beautiful central railway station has sparked off a civic rebellion that may even threaten Chancellor Merkel’s re-election prospects.
I go to Germany from time to time and also spent six months in different parts of the USA several years ago. From these experiences, I came away with one rule of thumb: a neighbourhood has standards and socially aware citizens if its residents clean up in public after their canine pets. Plenty of US and Middle European neighbourhoods qualify. But there are plenty of parts of middle-class Edinburgh where such a convention has never caught on. I am sure it would cheer us up in this interminable winter if we were to list what are the admirable features of the Scottish middle class. Is anyone game?
Tom Gallagher
In Jill Stephenson’s spirited article in defence of Tom Devine and the Catholic elite, she makes the bizarre claim of being ‘agnostic’ on gay marriage, then goes on to state that she does not ‘really understand why a civil partnership isn’t sufficient’, and conflates this with whether or not gay people should have anything ‘to do with churches’.
As a woman, I would have thought that matters of equality would have been obvious and important to Jill Stephenson. Why should a group of people have to settle for a form of union which is not recognised (and classified) in the same way as a marriage? To highlight the inequality: if I were a bisexual person, I could marry a woman, but not have the same status of union with a man, yet the love I would feel for a person of either gender would be exactly the same. This clearly makes no sense in the modern world. And the thing which nobody thinks to mention to Scotland’s Catholic figures when they talk about this issue, is that marriage equality exists in Catholic countries such as Argentina, Spain and Portugal.
Also, clearly, there are gay/bisexual/whatever people who are religious. It is utter madness that Jill Stephenson tacitly expects such people to choose one life or the other. Why can’t they have both?
The point is that whether or not society chooses to label a group of people in a particular way, for whatever reason, they are still people (and should be considered as people first and foremost, before any sort of label is applied or not), and people are all supposed to be equal (ever heard of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Jill?), aren’t they?
While her piece was interesting, she seems to have unwittingly exposed her own ignorance (or prejudices?) in the passage about marriage equality. Because the issue at stake is equality; but Jill seems to want some people to have more equality than others.
David Myers
‘If I were gay’ pronounced Jill Stephenson, ‘I’d want nothing to do with the churches’. From the gist of the rest of her article, I presumed, rightly or wrongly, that this marked the status quo for the non-gay Jill as far as the churches were concerned. No difference there then and so what exactly was the point of her statement?
Somehow this sentence brought back a memorable, if equally incongruous statement uttered by my eldest nephew all of 25 years ago: ‘I would love to play water polo’ this teenager suddenly announced out of nowhere, ‘if only I could swim!’ My need to read, re-read and analyse Jill’s sentence was exacerbated by her earlier comment about the Church of Scotland’s ‘bickering’ over the gay issue, for the religious spectrum on the subject is as broad as its secular equivalent, featuring both exclusive and inclusive.
Far from mere bickering, the churches are driven by the subject, to the point of a split, which is, sadly, already underway and can have not only destructive consequences, but salutary lessons for us all. The key word here, I believe, is one which Jill uses, namely, agnostic, a term shared by religious and secular alike.
The problem for the early church remains a problem for the church now and that is agnosticism’s obverse agnosticism with its temptation to believe that we know more than we really do or can do. Many gay people want to have a lot to do with the churches and the ministry within the church and that should give us pause for thought – and welcome.
Ian Petrie
I’m sure as a former professor of modern German history, Jill Stephenson will have a grasp of modern German history, although probably best in translation. That 1968 newspaper headline is unlikely to have been ‘Wie sicher als die pille (‘How safe than the pill’). No. Not even in 1968, Jill. So sicher wie die pille, maybe?
Heinz Giegerich
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SR is having a short break over Easter and will return
on Tuesday 9 April
