The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amends for a Guilty Generation

I share a generation with Karen Armstrong. We are baby-boomers. As such we also share a responsibility for the world as it currently exists. It is we who fought and subsequently ran the most destructive wars in history; we who pursued our personal economic success regardless of the cost to society; we who believed in the pursuit of ideals for making the world better, watched as it became less and less habitable; and we, those who happened to be Catholic anyway, who contributed to the destruction of the institutional credibility of the Church in which were brought up. Only this last would I, and possibly Armstrong, classify as an achievement.

Not that I regret my Catholic upbringing; nor does she. Catholic education in the 1950’s and early 1960’s was well-run, thorough, and remarkably consistent across national borders. It was conducted largely by women who dedicated themselves for little compensation and less recognition to children whose parents could not have afforded such pedagogical competence anywhere else. I have no doubt that we survived and prospered in life because of the discipline and habits of work those women instilled in us.

And they didn’t just teach academic and practical skills. The environment of the Catholic classroom was unremittingly moral. Virtue was more important than intelligence. Conscience was more compelling than law. I don’t think any of us could have known how distinctive this form of education is. How could we? Until, of course, we left it. And even today, after a longish life in business and academia, I find the world at large somewhat strange, precisely because it doesn’t share the ideals of virtue and conscience that I absorbed during 12 years of not just education, but of what religious communities call ‘formation’, the process of creation of responsible human beings.

But my gratitude to the Catholic Church for what they provided is tempered by a recognition. The institutional system that economically permitted this level of public service was founded on an abhorrent form of spiritual subjugation. The women who voluntarily devoted themselves so totally to my future welfare were actually subtly and insidiously exploited by men whose only rationale was that such subjugation was God’s will. The harm that this regime did to the women who accepted it was profound, as Armstrong reports in The Spiral Staircase and in her first book, Through the Narrow Gate. This harm, tempered and cooked in the young lives of their students, also takes a lifetime to live through.

Many of these women, like Armstrong, came to recognise the reality of what they had considered their divine calling - a way, certainly, to honourably avoid the oppressions of traditional Catholic marriage while pursuing an admirable profession; but also achieved at the cost of personal emotional stagnation and, often, the experience and repression of enormous rage. The consequences for their charges included not just a refined physical brutality but also a level of spiritual intimidation which clearly emanated from a projection of their own dissatisfactions.

Mortal sin is the dread of the Catholic child. It cuts him off entirely from communion with not just God but also with the rest of the Catholic community. If in such a state, he becomes a pariah in his own mind. He is told there is only one therapy, humiliating conversation with a man who alone has the divinely ordained power to repair this terrible condition. To be charged with an offense considered mortally serious is therefore of utmost impact. Hell is a compelling motivation to an eight year old.

Sex was frequently the matter involved but not solely so. Mortal sin, we were instructed, included: not completing one’s homework assignments properly (as this constituted the grave offense of not fulfilling one’s station in life); failure to carry-out the most trivial of religious rituals, like prayer before meals (thus demonstrating a profound disregard of divine beneficence); and disloyalty or disobedience to any member of the clergy, even regarding matters of some questionable virtue like commercial activities during school hours (a favourite was the collection of flower sets in the large cemetery for sale back to the local florists - for the African missions of course - which was to be kept secret from one’s parents).

It is a cliche to blame the dramatic decline of both ‘vocations’ to religious communities and Catholic liturgical devotion, to the changes instituted by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960’s. My experience is that these changes merely allowed reflection on what Catholic religious practice had become, especially among religious congregations: an unthinking acknowledgement of obedience to authority as the only essential virtue. When the centrality of obedience was moved ever so slightly off-centre, the entire church-edifice trembled in eccentric, erratic movement. The structure of compulsion revealed itself and my generation fled from it in considerable confusion but intent on forgetting it. If only it had been that easy.

The spiritual abuse visited on the children was ingrained. But that was only an echo of the heavy-weight persecution visited on our teachers. Armstrong, herself preparing for life as a teaching sister, recounts many of the techniques used, and alludes to many more. They are often ghastly and senseless, but always justified as necessary for a closer union with God. It wasn’t enough to accept humiliation and degradation; one was expected to want it. Once seen for what these techniques were - methods of control by power - it is remarkable that an even greater number of religious congregations weren’t dissolved and churches closed.

The doctrinal certainty of the Catholic Church in its own ‘perfection’, which persists still, is the source of the delusions of my teachers as well as most of the continuing institutional problems of the Catholic Church. Paedophilia, misogyny, financial misconduct, organisational cover-up, and impermeability to administrative reform are all promoted and protected by the lingering idea of the societas perfecta., the self-proclaimed principle that the Church has everything it needs within itself for redemption. But of course it doesn’t.

Like any organisation the Catholic Church is prone to error. It needs to be criticised by those who can see it more clearly from the outside. To admit this however would be to admit its dependence on the world, something it dare not do. So it trundles on, effectively persecuting itself - first its clergy, then its congregations and most importantly its children, who have no defense against whatever visions of Hell are being used at the moment to enforce conformity. It’s self-image is as a religion of love. Many of us however experienced it as a religion of utmost fear... and even hatred.

Today the convent which housed the nuns who taught me is a police station. Karen Armstrong’s house of studies has become a graduate college of the University of Oxford.* The recycling of the buildings is somewhat easier than the recovery of the Spirit, the story of which Armstrong so movingly tells through her metaphor of the struggle up The Spiral Staircase. In it she is making amends, however incrementally, for the harm our generation has wrought in the world. Not as penance but as liberation.

* Coincidentally, my near neighbour in our small Cotswold village is an administrator of the charitable trust established with the proceeds of the sale of this building to Linacre College and the dissolution of the convent. My step daughter did her post-graduate work in this same location. Less than six degrees of separation, clearly.

Postscript: This piece, which demonstrates that the drive for Power is institutionalised to such a degree in the Catholic Church that even its leader can not mitigate it, appeared just after I posted the review: https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/12/2...

Post-post script: I have just seen the remarkable German film, Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross), the story of a 14 year old girl brought up in an ultra-Catholic family of the 21st century, but summarising much of what was global Catholicism in the middle of the 20th century. I highly recommend it for therapeutic as well as artistic reasons.

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