For the past few days, if not weeks (and sometimes it feels like months), I have had regular email updates from Peter Tatchell detailing his opposition to the papal visit. The latest, only hours ago, informs me that there has been a “Pope cover-up of gay Cardinal Newman”.
Never mind that Tatchell is raking over what is by now a very familiar story, and coming up with some rather dubious “proof” for his assertion — “Newman was not exactly macho. His soft, gentle, effeminate demeanour is typical of what we often associate with some gay men” (!!).
I like Peter, have known him through journalism for around 15 years now, and regard him as a brave man whose one-time militancy has matured into a principled and selfless stance that he has maintained at great personal cost.
Nevertheless, Peter and his colleagues in the Protest the Pope movement do not seem to have enjoyed conspicuous success so far. Areas specifically set aside by the police for demonstrators in Edinburgh were empty when the 24-hour news channels were covering His Holiness’s arrival in the Scottish capital yesterday.
The greatest opposition so far seems to have been coming from the Rev Ian Paisley — and I hardly think he is the kind of ally Peter and his friends want. (In fact, if they wanted to protest against Dr Paisley, I’d join them at the barricades any day. But that’s another story.)
Great joy of the faithful
Could it be that large numbers of people, disgusted as they are by the paedophile abuse scandals involving Catholic priests that have been unearthed, are still nevertheless able to distinguish between the evils associated with the Church, and its harsh and inflexible rhetoric on all sorts of sexual behaviour — and the good that it does, and the comfort and social solidarity it supplies to many people throughout the country?
I merely point out that many of the Pope’s most vehement critics, from Polly Toynbee (who wrote a very spirited piece in the Guardian on Tuesday) to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and, yes, even Geoffrey Robertson in the New Statesman, are all metropolitan liberals. Members of the middle classes, yes — but more or less in the same way as David Cameron is, which is to say, part of a privileged minority.
Whereas I bet that if I went to any of the Catholic churches I attended as a child — in which the congregations were overwhelmingly working class and an RP accent stuck out from a mile off — the view from the pews today would still be of great joy that the Pontiff has come to the country.
Could it be that, even if coffee mornings, lunches, early-evening drinks and dinner parties across Hampstead, Islington, Holland Park, the newly affluent parts of Hackney and the cutting-edge borders of Peckham were cancelled, the protesting crowds would still be thin during the Pope’s time in London?
If so, one might be left with the conclusion that almost the only group that is really, bitterly, foot-stampingly furious about the visit of the leader of the world’s one billion-plus Catholics is the members of a metropolitan elite.
I may be wrong. In fact, I must hope I am proved so. Because that would not speak very well of the tolerance of which liberals — and I write as one — profess themselves to be such earnest defenders. A tolerance that draws its limits so sharply and aggressively is not worthy of the name at all, surely?
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