It is with some relief that I can announce that the pope has left Britain. It's not that I'm one of those 'fundamentalist aetheist', aka Richard Dawkins, that came in for much criticism in the previous week. I am well aware of the peace that can be found in any faith. But our propensity to institutionalise faith into a religion has done far more to destroy it than any amount of sex, television, or Jimmy Choo shoes.
I can never erase the years of ritual learnt as the child of a High Church of England mum who was intent on saving our souls. I can still recite the Nicene Creed should ever the need arise. But in seeking solace in a church I have been asked too many times what faith I am to sort the wheat from the chafe at communion time. I cannot lie. I am a sort of protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, humanist type of person. I always wanted to be Catholic as they had a much better youth group in our small town, and much prettier ceremonies, and it's far less confusing just being one thing. But that wasn’t enough to convince the priest that I should share in the body and blood of Christ. I thought flashed through my mind. Had the story of my fall from grace reached these churches that rejected me …? As altar girl in our parish church I got to carry the tall cross before visiting dignitaries but shortly after crashing it into the ‘Everlasting Light’ above the altar the priest ran off with the organist. Really, he did. I was never sure that the two weren’t somehow connected as for punishment I had to spend my Sundays for what seemed like eternity with a succession of locum priests who liked to finish off the wine.
During the pope's visit, the disturbance of such memories was joined by an increasing queasiness at exhortations to combat secularism in Europe by returning religious values to the State. Of course when the pope and all the other British leaders past and present sitting in Westminster cathedral talk about religious values they are not necessarily referring to anything other than Christianity. Otherwise I would imagine they would stop fussing over Iran. My queasiness became worse at the emphasis on a need for more 'morality' in our society. Now fair enough, I never sat through a whole speech, instead relying on Britian's less than moral media to cherry pick what they'd like us to hear/read, but if I was playing Word Bingo and had 'morality' in my list, I'd be winning.
In my book of psalms when any religious leader uses the word morality what they are referring to is the length of a woman's skirt and people's sexual orientation. Now I've read the bible, several times, the old and new bit (note religious childhood mentioned above). I've been to bible study classes, I've waved my arms around, yelled Hallelujah and probably even spoken in tongues. But nowhere in any of this do I recall Christ getting hung up on morality. He socialised with sex workers, tax collectors and lepers. He had a temper tantrum and threw people out of the temple. He was a radical political activist arguing for change in the institutions of religion as it was practiced at the time, with all the inequalities, segregation and patriarchy that has never gone away. And for all of this he was assassinated as befits anyone who suggests that things may need to be a bit more just.
Given that this country, already with growing levels of inequality, is about to enter a time of savage cuts in public services, rising unemployment, crime and anti-immigration politics, I would have thought that a more apt message might have been: 'it is easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of heaven'. But then an institution as rich as the Vatican (whose bank is currently under investigation for money laundering) may not wish to be reminded of its own mission statement to take a preferential option for the poor.
