Apologia Pro Catholica Non Scripta

Or ‘Catholic Unscripted to Save Civilisation.’

“If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen” …is reasonable advice to those who complain about their circumstances. In my case, the risk of speaking out in public about things that matter is that you make the not unsurprising discovery that some people don’t like you.

Well of course they don’t.

Charlie Goldsmith, a scribbler on Twitter, on discovering that EWTN wanted to publish an interview with me, wrote with some degree of emotional commitment

“A period of silence on the part of the vainest man in South East London would be extreme welcome.”

I don’t know who the vainest man in S.E. London is, but I do know it isn’t me. Mainly because I don’t live there. I would have to enter the lists of the ‘Vainest man in Shropshire’ where I do live mostly; although if I failed there, I might stand a chance of winning the title as “the vainest man in Normandy” a significantly humbler demographic. I live in hope.

‘@Christopher’ shared the following; I thought rather more reasonably:

“I really think you should wait at the least ten years after being received into the Church before you begin to opine about the bad state of it and what you want done about it (which appears, if not here, to be however his regular bread and butter). Very Meghan Markle otherwise.”

I wrote back to say how much I agreed with @Christopher, in principle. And we had quite a sweet conversation- by the standards of ‘X’. I did point out that I had in fact been an Anglican by accident rather than conviction and that I had been grappling with the increasing sense of internal pressure to become a Catholic since 1975, quite a while, the moment I remember first complaining to the Lord about my discomfort with the C of E; and asking if I could either, please be Orthodox or Catholic?

And that I had even spent two years doing postgraduate work with the Jesuits being inducted (amongst other things) into the mysteries of the Second Vatican Council when they weren’t helping me study for a postgraduate degree in the Psychology of Religion in the mid 1980’s. In other words, I’ve been at this longer than he thought.

My main reflection on having become a practicing Catholic is regret that it took so long for me to give in and abandon my former life. It wasn’t that my life had been wasted, but I found I so loved being fully Catholic once it happened that I could wish I had access to the sacraments, the objectivity, the Magisterium, a full-on relationship with our Lady, earlier.

I’m particularly grateful for my very dear colleagues on Unscripted and the generosity of God in having brought us together to reflect on how best to be Catholic, particularly in adverse circumstances.

The two threatening metaphysical ‘weather systems’ that have caused so many of us difficulties, are

1 the ‘commitment to making a mess’ of the last papacy with its delight in ambiguity and making a mess, in combination with a pathological misjudging of holiness for rigidity; alongside a rather de-stabilising attraction to what seems to have become a corrupting death wish with what looked like the importation of the Anglican spirit into the true Church,

And