The Pope? Nope

Naturally, British Catholics want to welcome the Pope in Britain one day. But he shouldn't expect the ecstatic reception he received in the States: we're not that kind of country

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• 
• • Sue Blackmore
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Sunday April 20 2008
  • Article history

If the Pope came to Britain, would he get the same rapturous reception he is getting in the States? And should he?

That's the question I'm being asked, and my answers are "I hope not" and "No". But I was physically shaking when I emerged from the studio after debating these questions with Catholic writer and broadcaster Joanna Bogle on the Jeremy Vine show (listen again to Thursday show). She accused me of a "silly childish rant", of ignoring the beautiful teachings of Jesus Christ, and almost made me feel personally responsible for the historical repression of the Catholic church, the fact that the crime rate has soared, and the claim that "we've lost our moral compass".

Bogle began by saying how delighted she was to see Papal adoration on such a large scale. The Americans see things in the broad and celebrate the larger values: they see the "noble and the good" and understand "the greatness of God and the moral law". Here, she said, "they'd get someone to denounce it" and to go on about abortion and war (hmm, that must be me, I thought).

"It's called hypocrisy," I responded, imagining all those thousands of people taking mass in the baseball stadium, and wondering just how many really do agree with all the Papal edicts and dogmas to which every good Catholic is supposed to sign up. I did precisely as she expected and mentioned the horrors perpetrated by the Catholic church, the teenage pregnancies, deaths by illegal abortion, Aids prevention prevented, and so on.

"Don't be silly about hypocrisy," she scolded me, "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. None of us lives up to the great traditions of Christianity and the beautiful teachings of Jesus, but at least we know we should." Even the Pope himself is a sinner, she said.

So that's it? We are all sinners, but it is better to claim faith in a tradition that includes wonderful moral teachings, even if it has a long tradition of repression, war, cruelty, and child abuse, and even if you know you cannot live up to those moral teachings? I agreed that some of the principles are fine and admirable, but many are not. If you pick and choose from the Bible you can select all the good ones, but there are plenty of racist, sexist, violent and cruel acts condoned there, and good Catholics are not supposed to pick and choose.

"I think it's quite silly to have a silly childish rant against the Ten Commandments," she said, and went on to describe the mess we are in: "A nation without great principles will collapse, and we're seeing that now." She suggested that squeezing Christianity out of our schools was to blame for our moral destruction.

At this point, Jeremy Vine jumped in with the right question: "How do we get back shared moral values?" That's what we should really be considering - all of us, atheists and religious believers alike. We can't go back. As I tried to explain, most of us are now too well educated, know too much basic science, know that we humans evolved here on earth and didn't need a creator God to put us here and look after us. We simply can't go back to believing in the old religions in the way that people used to. So where do we find our moral values?

Happily, most people do want to be good, to love and care for others, and to protect their own planet from destruction. We may not be very good at it, but deep down we find ourselves born with moral principles concerning fairness, love, reciprocation and honesty. We can build on these. We can try to understand the evolutionary roots of our moral feelings. We can find out what really does make people happy. We can learn how to live better together. It's not easy, but mass adoration of a Pope who stands for ancient dogmas is not going to help.

I find myself admiring the very British principles I was brought up with - that religion is something rather private. You can believe all sorts of weird things if you wish to, and worship any god or gods you like, but please don't force it on everyone else.

If the Pope came here, I hope that Catholics would give him a fine welcome and that the rest of us - the vast majority of us - would quietly ignore them.