Once a Catholic

Pope Benedict announced his resignation this week. What is going on with the Catholic Church? The first pope to resign since 1415. It’s an historic occasion. Back in early April 2005 I was sitting in a café in the sunshine in Dharamsala, Northern India. I was spending a week there, taking the opportunity to see the Dalai Lama and the home of the Tibetan government in exile. It was the fulfilment of a long held ambition. I had read Heinrich Harrer’s ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ when I was about seven years old, and was entranced by the story of the Dalai Lama. The news had just broken that Pope John Paul II had died. An Irish couple shared the café table with me, and we discussed popes and Catholicism. They had been in India when the previous pope had died, on their honeymoon. Here they were, visiting India for their own significant anniversary, and history was repeating itself. I was very aware that with the death of the pope the only spiritual world leader on the planet was living and preaching a matter of yards from where I was sitting. I appreciate that the Dalai Lama has handed over political power to Tibetan representatives, but he is still considered to be a spiritually motivated political leader by many, including the Chinese government. A couple of years later I visited Rome, and went to St Peter’s Square on the Sunday morning to see the Pope give his blessing from his balcony. I was there for the rugby, and it was my non Catholic companion’s idea to go and see the pope. Catholicism is still something I resist and reject in many ways, and a pope’s blessing would not have been high on my list of ‘to do’s’ when in Rome. It was fascinating to see the crowds of tourists there, most of them spiritual tourists I am sure. There were the obvious groups of nuns, but there were also young people bursting into happy hymn singing for the occasion. It was a very different way of identifying yourself as a card carrying Catholic. Some years later I attended a series of lectures at Nottingham Arena, given by the Dalai Lama on one of his visits to the UK. There was a question and answer session, and someone asked him about the difficulties he was experiencing becoming a good Buddhist. The Dalai Lama gave some very interesting advice, and I am sure many people there may not have welcomed it. He recognised that many of the people who are drawn to Buddhism in the west are spiritually inclined, and this inclination comes from having been born into a recognised religion. Basically he said follow the religion you were given by birth, work to make it what you need it to be. For me this was a very radical statement, and I think for many there it went over their heads. It set me thinking. I have been drawn to Buddhism throughout my life, perhaps as a result of reading Heinrich Harrer’s book. I have even thought of becoming a Buddhist nun, but I have never taken the decisive step of becoming aligned to any of the Buddhist organisations that exist in the West. I am one of the growing number of people who describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious. I have struggled with Catholicism most of my life to. As a teenager in a convent boarding school I became very sensitive to its hypocrisy, and resisted having religion shoved down my throat. Luckily at a girls’ school it was only religion that was. As the years have gone by a series of scandals have hit the Catholic Church, usually involving priests and those they were responsible for. I am sure it was ever thus, but there is a culture of revelation now, both within the church and in the wider media. The Magdalene Laundries, ‘Oranges and Sunshine’ and the scandal of Australian orphanages, powerful films like ‘Doubt’, the Jimmy Savile scandal – people forget he was a Catholic. My own education and upbringing was as a Catholic in Manchester, with a lapsed Catholic father, but my mother took us to church every Sunday and we went to Catholic schools. It was an appealing culture influenced by the Irish backgrounds of many of our school friends. Convent boarding school was something different. The nuns there were part of the culture that could maintain and condone the Magdalene Laundries. Teenage girls in the late nineteen sixties and early seventies were seen as the embodiment of occasions of sin, damned before we had started, in spite of going to confession and communion weekly. There was an insidious cruelty, sometimes physical, but more often than not psychological, part of the creation of the famous Catholic Guilt. Everything we did was wrong, and we were worthless sinners. There was a comic element to all of this too – boxes of tampax and non-regulation underwear were confiscated when discovered. Psychological cruelty started at the junior branch of the school, where children were made to sleep in a room they thought was haunted as a punishment. The nuns wouldn’t have believed for a minute that it was haunted, but they knew the power of fear. Throughout my four years there my younger sister was a pupil at the junior part of the school. My middle sibling and I were at the senior school, literally across the road. We were not allowed to cross that road to visit or maintain family contact with our youngest sister, who started at boarding school when she was seven. The older I get, the more horrifically unkind and uncaring I find this attitude. At worst, religious Catholics, especially the clergy, consider themselves above the law of humanity. They can go to confession, make penance, have their sins forgiven, and guarantee their place in heaven with the Nine First Fridays. How ridiculous is a religion that bans contraception, makes the use of condoms a sin, even where Aids and HIV is rife, insists on celibacy for its clergy and dares to tell people how to manage their personal relationships. As teenagers we were intrigued by the rebel Dutch priests who broke away from the church and married in the sixties. I wonder what became of them. It’s no wonder that the abuse of power has resulted in priests sexually abusing those in their care, whilst vilifying same sex relationships. How can I reconcile myself to the faith and the church I was brought up to be part of, as the Dalai Lama suggests? Strangely, I find myself drawn to fellow Catholics, especially lapsed ones. There’s the shared childhood history, attitudes of generosity and acceptance, ‘do as you would be done by’. It’s the ones who have rejected the pomp and circumstance of the religion who seem to live the most thoughtful and caring lives. The Catholic Church has done much for the poor in some parts of the world, and priests have been punished for being political rebels. Perhaps a new Pope, elected in these strange circumstances, before the death of the old Pope, heralds in a shift of attitude. I don’t imagine that he will be anything other than conservative, whichever country he comes from, but at least the possibility of a non-European Pope is being talked about. I have enjoyed the Father Ted related Facebook posts, proposing Dougal or Father Jack for Pope. In fact ‘Father Ted’ with its very Irish Catholic scenarios and humour helped reconcile me to Catholicism when I first discovered the TV series. Recently there has been a lot of publicity about American Catholic nuns working for ecology. I have bought the book ‘Green Sisters’ and look forward to reading about them. The Catholic Church has been responsible for so much harm in so many ways over the centuries. I’d like to think I could reconsider its role in my life, as the Dalai Lama suggested, even if it is simply to reconcile myself to the fact that I was once a Catholic.