Mary who?

The English are too forgetful to dislike Catholics seriously.

Amnesia is one of their virtues
DO the British dislike Roman Catholics? As the country prepared for the state visit by Pope
Benedict XVI due to begin on September 16th, the mood looked surly. Luminaries from the arts and
sciences denounced Vatican teachings on gay rights, condom use and abortion. Newspapers
demanded to know if the pope would meet victims of clerical sex abuse. More than half those
questioned by Populus, a pollster, said they were against a single penny of public money being
spent on the four-day visit.
Some conservatives detected the whiff of ancient bigotries. They pointed to figures such as Richard
Dawkins, a polemical atheist, who called the pope a “leering old villain in a frock”. They noted the
lack of outcry when a columnist declared that, for Catholics, “doublespeak and duplicity are second
nature”.
Other voices, among them successful Catholics, counsel calm. Sir Stephen Wall—a former
ambassador and adviser to England’s Roman Catholic leadership—says traditional anti-popery has
little to do with the pope’s chilly reception. Instead, the Vatican’s handling of priestly child abuse
has damaged its moral authority. More broadly, the “fundamentalist” character of today’s Vatican is
out of step with the secularism and social liberalism of modern Britain (indeed of many British
Catholics).
Both camps have a point. As so often in modern Britain, a key to the riddle is historical amnesia.
In Britain (or at least England), the tradition of sectarian enmity was not so much purged from the
body politic as mislaid. Anti-Catholic prejudice was rife in polite English society until surprisingly
recently: countless families can tell tales of scandals or feuds triggered by a mixed Anglican-
Catholic marriage, up to the 1960s or 1970s. Sectarianism lingers on in Northern Ireland, bits of
Scotland and some English cities like Liverpool. Yet in much of England, people under 40 cannot
remember why Catholicism caused their grandparents such alarm.
This ignorance cuts across class and educational lines. In the centre of Oxford stands a handsome
Gothic memorial of honey-coloured stone. Erected in 1841, it looks decorous and benign, but is in
fact a work of anti-Catholic propaganda. It remembers the “Oxford Martyrs”, three Anglican
prelates burned at the stake during Mary Tudor’s bid to reimpose Catholic supremacy in England in
1553-58. This was rough stuff: a botched execution left one ex-bishop to cook even more painfully
than normal. All in all, more than 280 Protestants were burned under “Bloody Mary”. For centuries,
their deaths were a plank of national mythology (less was said about the 200 or so Catholics
strangled and disembowelled soon afterwards by Elizabeth I). For many Anglicans, and for a long
time, Roman Catholicism was not just a foreign, superstitious creed, it was demonstrably cruel.
Well into the modern age, this was a potent political argument. The 1841 Martyrs’ Memorial was
built as a rebuke and warning to Oxford theologians such as John Henry Newman, as they
questioned the legitimacy of the Church of England’s split from Rome.
Today, religious elements of Britain’s founding myth draw blank stares. In an unscientific straw poll
at the Martyrs’ Memorial this week, students, tourists and even an Oxford don chaining up her
bicycle (sturdy frame, wicker basket) could not say what it commemorated. The martyrdom of
Archbishop Cranmer, said the don at last, grimacing with embarrassment. Whether he was a
Protestant or Catholic martyr, she could not say.
On September 19th, Pope Benedict is due to beatify Newman (who converted to Rome and became
a cardinal) at a mass in Birmingham: the ceremony is meant to be the highlight of his visit. If
religious enmity explained British surliness towards Benedict XVI, Newman’s mass would surely
witness the greatest protests. Half a century ago, for a pope to beatify Newman on British soil
would have been an “intensely provocative act”, suggests John Wolffe of the Open University.
Newman was widely seen as a “spiritual traitor”. Today, his beatification causes barely a flicker: all
attention is on child abuse and Vatican social teachings.

Forget but don’t forgive

That fuzzily secular amnesia of the English has wider political consequences. Jonathan Powell, a
former chief of staff to Tony Blair and prime ministerial envoy to the Northern Ireland peace
process, has written that Mr Blair’s “relative ignorance” of Irish history was a peacemaking
advantage: his boss had no “historical baggage”. You can take the thought further: a settlement in
Northern Ireland was arguably possible only once most English voters ceased to comprehend
sectarian hatreds in that province.
Yet very little of this has ever been debated consciously by the English: that is the cost of their
national genius for forgetting rather than forgiving. This is a shame, because the death of overt anti-
Catholicism is a rather hopeful story—involving reciprocal tolerance and socioeconomic progress.
One big change came when the Catholic church in England became less hardline towards its own
flock, says Eamon Duffy of Cambridge University. Before the mid-1960s, bishops would still tell
devout youngsters where they could safely study, and denounced marriage to non-Catholics as a
threat to the faith. For Diarmaid MacCulloch of Oxford University, English tolerance of
Catholicism moved in lockstep with the emergence of a mainstream middle class among Irish
immigrant communities.
An optimist might see a chance there for Islam, another conservative religion currently causing
alarm. A bit of affluence here, a bit less defensiveness there, and before you know it, the English
cannot remember why a minority worried them so much. It is a muddled, imperfect solution (just
ask Catholics offended by this week’s pope-bashing). But with the English, muddle is often as good
as it gets.