Dawn Through the Shadows by Linda Anne Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The New Catholic Ideology

Linda Anne Smith’s story about Catholic religiosity and its methods and its effects on university life is familiar to me. I hope she doesn’t mind if I comment on her book by adding my own story to hers as a sort of confirmation of her sensibilities.

I was brought up as a Catholic. Identifiably so since it was evident from my birth certificate, school uniforms, university applications (yes Dorothy, it was legal to ask in those days), and military dog tags. I would allude to my Catholic background in casual conversation with equally casual acquaintances without hesitation. At the moment I am striving with my remaining vigour toward the three quarter century mark. And during a fairly cosmopolitain life on several continents, among a variety of colleagues, friends, and occasional enemies never have I encountered any anti-Catholic sentiment, much less an abusive remark. Not once, ever.

Until, that is, I arrived as a ‘mature’ graduate student (aged 55) to embark on doctoral studies in theology at the University of Oxford. Almost immediately I was confronted by derisory remarks about my background and religious attitudes. Not by pagans, or Protestants, or Muslims or Jews, but by fellow Catholics who identified in me as an apparently ‘unwoke’ consciousness of the historical persecution of Catholics and the contemporary effort by politicians and hostile academics to marginalise Catholicism. I must admit it: I was impressed. My critics were intelligent, often experienced people who appeared to know and to have experienced things that I hadn’t.

Oxford is an oddly religious place with its chapels in every college, daily evensong at many of these, and sectarian societies of every spiritual brand (including atheist). Most of the colleges and halls were originally religious foundations and retain much of the spiritual culture from which they emerged. So religion is an acceptable and frequent topic of discussion, especially, of course, among the theology aficionados. Through these conversations it gradually became clear to me that none of the militant righters-of-Catholic-wrongs I was encountering had ever been victims of even the slightest persecution. Their experience was the same as my own, a general indifference to religion in daily life. Yet the shoulder-chips were obvious.

But their experience was precisely what they were objecting to - the fact that their Catholicism, whatever that meant to them, was entirely irrelevant to the rest of the world. That the world ignored them was was a sign of persecution. It was not individual Catholics who were being belittled or discriminated against; it was Catholicism itself. The Faith was being attacked even if the faithful were left unscathed. What more clever plot could the forces of darkness - mainly liberal thinkers who had their intellectual roots in the ‘failed Renaissance Project’ - have conceived? Fortunately, they had spotted the demonic plan and had begun the counter-attack on a number of fronts.

The first component of this strategy was to politicise the students. In the absence of wrongs to individuals, a communal issue was required. This was discovered in an historical inequity: there was a monument in Oxford to the Protestant martyrs of the Catholic ‘Bloody’ Queen Mary, but no equivalent monument to the Catholic victims of her sister Elizabeth. Petitions were signed, demonstrations organised, debates conducted. With only negligible resistance (regrettably from the point of view of the protestors), the University caved and installed a plaque at an appropriate location (ironically on a building of New College, which had recently eliminated its theology faculty, and is the academic residence of that infamously militant atheist Richard Dawkins).

The second component was political. Conveniently an academic theological movement called Radical Orthodoxy, centred on a former Oxford don and well-known academic, was just coming into fashion. Although it’s leaders were high church Anglicans, its thrust was very much Catholic in spirit (indeed several of the leading lights did convert). Radical Orthodoxy seeks to recover the historical spiritual order in England (read pre-Henry VIII), even down to re-instating the civil parishes as the principal components of the English polity. The movement had penetrated the Tory party at rather senior levels and could claim credible influence with policy-makers among the so-called Red Tories (cf. Jacob Rees-Mogg and his in-your-face militant Catholicism)

The final strategic element, one which is always essential, was finance. Several Oxford Catholics led the Westminster Archdiocese’s organisation of a series of Ethics in Business and similar conferences in London. These were high profile affairs, clearly meant not so much to improve the behaviour of British businessmen as to make contacts among the movers and shakers and suss-out who might be vulnerable to a touch for donations. In my rather pedestrian role as tutor and librarian at the Catholic Blackfriars Hall, I began to receive international calls from various organisation of Catholic businessmen, requesting possible contacts. The Catholic mafia, it became clear to me, was indeed a global affair when it came to money.

Throughout this experience, of course, was also the persistent dogmatic undercurrent. The Latin Mass Society was in ascendancy, the C. S. Lewis Society flourished, the Newman Society conducted a civil war among the Jesuits who ran it (the Traditionalists came out on top), and naturally the secretive Opus Dei popped up with its criticisms with increasing frequency. It seemed that I was encountering the outposts of militant Catholicism with its penchant for the world of Tridentine certainties everywhere - among the Dominicans at Blackfriars, the Benedictines at St. Benet’s Hall, the Franciscans at Greyfriars Hall, and the Jesuits at Campion Hall (still fighting with each other).

Then it finally struck me, what all this persecution business was about. It was fake news but it was news that inspired solidarity, particularly but not solely among the young. It was news that provoked what seemed to be a discovery of something that had been hidden, that is, an epiphany of the precise sort that young minds at Oxford expected. Oddly, the narrative of a beleaguered Catholicism was energising in a way that its doctrines and history were not. The fact that Catholicism was confident enough to attack (precisely what was being attacked was left vague) was itself worthy of interest. Not everyone snapped at the bait; but enough did to make the environment highly unpleasant.

So I get Smith’s concerns. There is a movement afoot of a militant Catholicism in America and Britain (and more generally Christianity; see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). What matters to this movement is not the welfare of individuals, not even their salvation; and certainly not the interests of the planet or its other inhabitants; but the power of the tribe, consisting of those who affirm the words of the creed and obey their spiritual masters. The number of clergy may have declined because of scandal and general lack of interest, but the proportion of those remaining who are fanatically dedicated to regaining institutional dominance has increased.

This movement has been remarkably successful by a sort of backdoor approach to acquiring devotees: get ‘em while they are young and vulnerable and looking for answers; but give them attention and food before you even listen to their questions; get them socialised before you get them believing in your answers. These are, of course, the tactics of all ideologues. And they will continue to work... until they don’t.

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