Protestants and Papists

I recently finished the first set of political memoirs I can ever remember completing; Matthew Parris’s ‘Chance Witness’. It’s an enjoyable read, though Parris comes across as a cold fish. The early chapters about growing up a colonial child in Cyprus and Africa are much richer than the usual politicians’ gallop through childhood. They pit the young Master Parris as a cradle curmudgeon, familiar with the uncomfortable truths of conservatism from the onset of speech, against his well-intentioned but unreflective liberal mother. At Cambridge, Parris is disappointed by the tribal instincts of the great minds of his generation, and muses that people join labour/conservative/rugger bugger/etc. cliques simply because of their personality types. While he refrains from dishing the dirt on Tory governments of the 1980s in the way we all wish he would, Parris does give into a peculiarly English phobia; a mild but constant dislike, disdain or distrust of Catholics.

“Our senior philiosophy done at Clare and my director of studies; T. J. Smiley, was an acknowledged genius in his field: logic. Elizabeth Anscombe, the renowned Wittgensteinian scholar, was lecturing at the university and vastly respected – almost mobbed – for her insight. But both Anscombe and Smiley were Catholics. Catholicism is superstition: this much was obvious to me. It did not therefore seem to me that the rigour of Anscombe’s and Smiley’s respective academic analyses could have leaked out much into their worldly lives. Here were two virtuous people who were unquestionably cleverer than I would ever be. My best friend, Andrew Carver, was unquestionably so. But Andrew was casting around unsure what to do, and Smiley and Anscombe were praying to the Virgin Mary. So maybe there was hope for me in the world, maybe I could, after all, get a grip.”

It’s a strange aside, curious rather than offensive, and speaks to a common perception of Catholics as being faintly ridiculous. But there’s another aspect to the widely held English suspicion of Catholics. Reading Parris, I was reminded of Charlotte Bronte’s autobiographical character Lucy Snowe’s mix of condescension and real horror at her encounters with Belgian Catholics. Then again, I thought of Philip Pullman’s trilogy and Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver as illustrations of the (rather good) historical reasons why institutional Catholicism is distrusted by English Protestants, the foot soldiers of the Enlightenment. But finally, I remembered standing in WH Smith’s on Sloane Square reading an opinion piece in the Times which named half a dozen prominent Catholics and asked, given that these people must of course believe in the virgin birth, miracles, saints, and any amount of cant, whether they should have a role in British public life at all. I wondered if the piece would ever have been published, had its subject been prominent British Jews.

But Parris is simply dismissive, and by no means uniform. He has plenty of time for Chris Patten;

“One of the nice things about Patten was that he combined personal probity and religious conviction with a tolerant uncensoriousness of others.”

Which seems to suggest one reason for the general suspicion of Catholics (and indeed Christians in general); the fear of proselytism. Though it still seems odd to ridicule the logicians for (allegedly) keeping their spiritual and professional lives quite separate, and to praise Chris Patten for it.

In any case, ‘Chance Witness’ is an entertaining and informative read, though it relies far too heavily on newspaper columns towards the end and is marked by Parris’ strange aversion to the comma. There are some really choice titbits:

– Parris landed in Yale in the 1970s to study political science. “But at that time everyone in political science in America … was beavering away to show that important truths could be learned about politics through feeding data about the news into computers and establishing ‘correlations’. Five minutes’ reflection was sufficient to conclude this was unlikely to be the case: Yale graduate school looked to spend five decades reaching the same conclusion. I left them to it.”

– “I did not understand New Labour. It feels alien – somehow Soviet – to me. The Tories could be an appalling bunch of shits but they were my shits, and all too human. The new crowd were a very different kind of shit, and behind the warm words I sensed a coldness and a sort of vacuum.”

– “William (Hague) turned up only at the end of that evening at Alan’s (Duncan). He had not joined us for dinner, at which Alan’s other guest was Andrew Sullivan, another Oxford friend. Now a magazine editor in the United States and an acknowledged writer and thoughtful right-wing publicist for gay emancipation, Andrew is one of the first generations of HIV-positive men who are not going to die young, do not need to make a big thing and can get on with their lives. I did not know then he was gay. He was a slight, pale, teasing, alluring, strangely assured young man. Now he’s pumping iron.”