Faith by Jennifer Haigh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Believe what you want.”

Aside from pointing out the somewhat extensive analysis of Irish-American Catholic family politics and their impact on the handling of a real crisis, there isn’t much to say about Faith that doesn’t give the game away (the forthcoming twist is fairly apparent from early on; I hesitate to make it any more so). So instead of commenting on the book directly I’ve decided to indulge myself in a short, but I hope informative, rant about its main institutional target, the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church began to self-destruct when it admitted it had made mistakes. This is the real consequence of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s, and not a bad thing. The Church finally confessed to the world that it had been wrong about a number of important matters. It was wrong about the character and culpability of Jews (from the Gospel of John through the Holocaust). It conceded that not everyone who wasn’t a Catholic was damned to hell (a matter of formal doctrine since the 13th century). And it finally succumbed to the recognition that its liturgical rigidity over centuries was nothing more than a sort of cultural prejudice.*

The effect of these admissions was dramatic. If these teachings, some with the force of doctrine, had been erroneous, others might also be - purely theological matters like transubstantiation and rather more practical considerations like prohibitions against birth control. The very core if its system of religion, its hierarchical guarantee of the truth had been fatally compromised. It had lied; its pretence to divine insights was a sham. And the only thing worse than its lies were its confession to lying. For this it could not be forgiven. People left the fold in large numbers.

Knowledge is one thing, ethics is another. Lack of knowledge makes one stupid; lack of ethical sense makes one evil. The one thing that the Church would not admit was that it had no right to claim exclusive moral guidance. Faith and morals were its horse and carriage and as far as it was concerned in its exclusive purview. And even if its intellectual credibility had been compromised, its moral authority remained intact. It still was, in its own view, the repository of ethical wisdom. This was ensured by the way in which the Church was governed, had always been governed - as a self-perpetuating organisation of male power.

According to formal doctrine, the Church is, uniquely among the organisations of the world, a societas perfecta; that is, a self-governing, self-correcting association which contains within itself everything necessary to promote the salvation of the world. Individual members, including clerics, may act badly from time to time, but the Church as a whole will ensure that such behaviour is identified and corrected. And the way it is organised - as a strict hierarchy of rank and authority - is essential to this critical moral function. Even its mistakes are in some way beneficial to mankind in that humane punishment for offenders can be demonstrated.

The scandal of paedophilia which has grown unchecked over the last sixty years is important because, among so many other reasons, it demonstrates the falseness and inherent evil of this idea of the societas perfecta and its moral capabilities. The facts of the widespread abuse of children throughout the world would never have been discovered by the Church alone. And having been discovered, these facts would never have led to the actions necessary to stop the abuse if the matter was left to clerical powers. And even these actions forced upon the Church by law have yet to be executed properly or accepted as uniform practice.

The Catholic Church, it turns out, is a corporate organisation like any other. Its stated aims become short-circuited by its members; bad behaviour is trivialised and rationalised; and scum tends to rise to the top. The Church’s arrogance in claiming a spiritual status which exempted it from the ways in which all human organisations pursue, rationalise, and hide bad behaviour is staggering. That Catholic exceptionalism is no longer a credible claim, means the Church has been doctrinally hollowed out. Its supposed ‘protection’ against error by the Holy Spirit is the central self-serving rationalisation that has now been definitively de-bunked.

The result is that the moral as well as the doctrinal core of the Church is now vacuous. The Catholic Church has become essentially tribal, a declining genetic legacy which has little more than sentimental value. Faith (in both what it professes and in it as an authentic professor), which has been its distinguishing characteristic, has shown itself an unsustainable raison d’être. Increasingly diverse ritual may persist, and with any luck the Church may turn to ethics rather than doctrine for its self-justification.

This is the recurring theme of Faith: “Believe what you want,” just stop inflicting pain on other people. In this the book makes an important philosophical as well as ethical point - and not, of course, merely for Catholics. Religion is good for this reason, or it’s worthless. All this nonesense about faith as a religious phenomenon is a ruse. Faith is a political act of affiliation, a statement of tribal membership. And ‘know them by their fruits’ is excellent political advice.

*Actually it had implicitly and much more quietly changed a range of official teaching from that on the participation of Christians in the military, the morality of slavery, the charging of interest on loans and the reprehensibility of democratic forms of government. The softening of the official attitude toward the Jews, however, provoked much more displeasure among the faithful than any of these.

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