Collected Essays (39 page)

I think that only those who are above a certain level of spirituality can participate in the sacraments as such. For as long as those who are below this level have not reached it, whatever they may do, they cannot be strictly said to belong to the Church.

It was a strange attitude for a woman who wished ardently to share the labours of the poor, working with broken health in the Renault works, and who in safe England confined herself to the rations of those she had left in France. The Church was for the perfect. She could not see it as a being like herself, anxious to share the sufferings not only of the poor but of the imperfect, even of the vicious. She speaks to us in terms of ‘abandonment’, but her abandonment always stops short of surrender, like a histrionic marble figure caught in a gesture not far removed from pride.

Her claims on our submission to her thought, and on our credulity, too, are vast. She tells us how once when she was reciting George Herbert’s poem ‘Love’, ‘Christ Himself came down and took possession of me’, and again, referring to the Our Father, ‘sometimes also, during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person, but His presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion’. We cannot help comparing this blunt claim with the long painful journey towards the Beatific Vision described by St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila. But perhaps the greatest claim she makes is to a kind of universal inclusiveness:

The degree of intellectual honesty which is obligatory for me, by reason of my particular vocation, demands that my thought should be indifferent to all ideas without exception, including for instance materialism and atheism; it must be equally welcoming and equally reserved with regard to every one of them.

One cannot deny, however, that these claims are sometimes supported by moments of vision: passages of great power and insight capable of drawing many enthusiasts to her side. The essay on Friendship is the most sustained of these passages, but again and again they flash through the contradictions and the muddled thought:

The outward results of true affliction are nearly always bad. We lie when we try to disguise this. It is in affliction itself that the splendour of God’s mercy shines; from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness. If, still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, if we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something which is not affliction, which is not joy; something which is the central essence, necessary and pure; something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow; something which is the very love of God.

What makes us in the end unwilling to accept her claims? What is it that more often than not distorts her genuine love and truth? Is it that confusion arises first from her pride, and secondly – because she was a woman of great nobility – from the tension and pain in her own mind caused by that possessive demon? She claims too much (St Joan heard rightly when she was told to tell no one of her visions), and sometimes too stridently. She talks of suffering ‘atrocious pain’ for others, ‘those who are indifferent or unknown to me . . . including those of the most remote ages of antiquity’, and it is almost as if a comic character from Dickens were speaking. We want to say, ‘Don’t go so far so quickly. Suffer first for someone you know and love’, but love in these pages is only a universal love. She strikes out blindly in her personal pain, contradicting herself, allowing herself to believe that an ‘infinite’ mercy can be shown in its entirety in a ‘finite’ world. She no sooner seizes a truth than she lets it go in the pride of a too startling image. We leave her at the end on the edge of the abyss, digging her feet in, refusing to leap like the common herd (whom she loved in her collective way), demanding that she alone be singled out by a divine hand on her shoulder forcing her to yield.

1951

THREE PRIESTS

1. The Oxford Chaplain

A
PRIEST
presents even more difficulties to his biographer than a writer. As with an iceberg, little shows compared with what lies beneath: we have to dive for depth, but if we so dive we have the sense of breaking into a life more private and exclusive than a bedroom. We need not hesitate much over a man’s love affairs; they are in a sense public, for they are shared with another human being, if not with waiters, chambermaids, that intimate friend; but when a man prays he is quite alone. His biographer – except when controversy, persecution, sanctity, or disgrace lend to the story a spurious drama – must write a life of his hero which excludes the hero’s chief activity.

This Mr Waugh does with a sense of style which would have delighted his subject and an exquisite tact which Father Knox had obviously foreseen in asking him to be his biographer.
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It is no fault of Mr Waugh that the story lags a little in the middle, during the years of the Oxford chaplaincy, the years of the satirical essayist and the detective writer, the years of popularity, the years of ‘Ronnie’. Every Catholic, I suppose, has his favourite type of priest. The Knox of Oxford, the Knox of the rather precious style and of the Latin verses, the chaplain and the translator, had his apostolate in a region which I have always found uninteresting and even at moments repellent. Writing an obituary of Father John Talbot, of the Oratory, Knox describes this world with a, to me, terrible precision. He knew it to the last drain of the glass of dry sherry:

He was always there if you wanted him; and perhaps from long acquaintance you marked yourself as the sort of young man one meets in John Talbot’s room . . .. If the comparison may still be used, the simplest thing to say of him is that he was the opposite number, in London, of Sligger at Oxford; his rooms had their characteristic clientèle, on Sunday mornings especially, which irresistibly carried your mind back to a don’s rooms in the garden quad at Balliol: and indeed there were many there who drifted on, as if predestined, from one salon to the other. . . . He had indisputably St Philip’s own knack of making people come to see him by always being at home when they came; and his clients, like those of the Santo, were in great measure the young men of fashion who are commonly reproached with shunning clerical society.

These priests are as necessary to the Church as the apostles of the darker, poorer, more violent world – the priests I have encountered on the borders of a battlefield in Vietnam, in the region of the Mau Mau or in the dying white world of the Congo, but it is Mr Waugh’s very great achievement that he holds the interest even of the unsympathetic. He is no blind hero-worshipper and long friendship has not made him indifferent to the tiny warts. He quotes Knox’s extraordinary entry in the list of pros and cons which he drew up before his conversion: ‘You’ll be a more important person – but in a less important show’, and Mr Waugh adds:

He was complacently insular, and in many respects remained so all his life. His travels were meagre and superficial; he had a gently humorous distrust of everything foreign; he had been brought up in an age when ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ had no undertone of irony, and the stability and expansion of the British Empire and with it the Church of England, seemed to follow a law of nature. Even so, when all these limitations are considered, the two propositions still seem preposterous.

To me the beginning and the end of Mr Waugh’s biography are outstanding: the end where Mr Waugh had his ‘villain’ and can show Knox meeting the meanness, jealousies, and misunderstandings of the hierarchy without complaint, and the early pages which include, besides the troubled years of the conversion, a hero of extraordinary interest, Knox’s grandfather, the Anglican Bishop of Lahore. This old man, after his retirement, set out ‘unpaid and alone’ for the Muslim strongholds of North Africa and Muscat and died in solitude attended at the last by a family of Goanese Catholics whom he had never consciously known. Only a writer like Mr Waugh, who has himself travelled in a hard poor fashion, could have picked out so accurately the illuminating details, ‘the waxing incandescent wind of summer’ and’ the dirty upper room of a Goanese grog shop”. which is so distant from the Old Palace at Oxford.

I must be forgiven if I prefer as a character the Bishop of Lahore. He may have been no more a mystic than his grandson, but would he have wished to substitute for the passage of St John translated at Douai: ‘He was in the world and the world was made by him and the world knew him not’, that smooth and ambiguous version: “He, through whom the world was made, was in the world and the world treated him as a stranger’, which seems to echo the Oxford common-room rather than the hut of wattle and thatched leaves where the grandfather began his last agony?

1959

2. The Paradox of a Pope

I
T
is strange to come on a monument to a living man,
*10
for even the greatest usually appear only on tablets and tombstones after death, but if we suppose a close observer wandering through the yellow squares, the churches and the
trattorie
, among the fountains and flower-stalls and broken columns of Rome, he would notice here and there about the city the memorials to a man still living, Eugenio Pacelli: in an obscure side street, on the wall of a house that has come down in the world – ‘In this house was born . . .’: in the hall of a school – ‘Student of this Lyceum during the years . . .’: at the entrance of a church – ‘Here he meditated upon the choice of his vocation . . .’: Pope Pius XII mummified in marble before his death.

Our imaginary observer might well wonder at this great harvest of tablets. For it is not enough to say that Pacelli is the Pope. There have been so many Popes. They stretch away like a column of ants, busy about affairs that have often seemed to the world of small importance. An odd anonymity shrouds the greater number of them – we don’t remember them as we remember Kings, or even as we remember Presidents. Their titles, stiff and unoriginal, have a kind of text-book air. Pacelli becomes Pius XII and already he seems fixed on a page of history (rather dull history) with all the other Piuses (who were they?), fixed like a butterfly on cork, pinned out for dusty preservation.

A few Popes, even to such a Protestant schoolboy as I was, broke through their anonymity, generally because they clashed with Kings or Emperors who were the more interesting characters since they wore armour and swore great blinding oaths and made wars and memorable sayings. The only memorable saying of a Pope that we learnt at school was far too smug – Gregory the Great, remarking,
Non anglised angeli
at the sight of the young blond British slaves. One remembered too Innocent III fulminating against King John, though his victory over the King seemed a bit underhand; corpses lying unburied because of the interdict did not seem to compare in chivalry with burning lead. The Emperor Henry knelt in the snow at Canossa and our sympathy was always with the Emperor (already I have forgotten which was the Pope he knelt to). Pius V (was it?) excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, Pio Nono fled from Rome, conquered by Garibaldi and his romantic Red Shirts. And of course there were the wicked Popes – Alexander VI (the Borgia) and John XXII (I was taught for some reason that it was very wicked to celebrate Mass in a stable, though in our day Masses have been celebrated in places quite as strange, in garages, peasant huts, at Russian breakfast tables).

One knew very little about the living Pope in England in those days just after the First World War. He was associated rather disagreeably with a peace offer the Allies had rejected. We were the victorious powers, or so we then thought, so there was a somewhat disreputable air about premature peace offers, and in any case to the young, peace has small appeal. Our history books dealt mainly with wars, and as for any peace that passes understanding, it was not in the school or university curriculum.

I don’t think it ever occurred to us that the Pope was a priest, or that he could be a saint. A priest was a small sour man in black who had a tin-roofed church in a back street of the country town where one lived: his congregation consisted mainly, so one was told, of Irish servant girls, and he was never invited to dinner as the vicar was. But still, he was a human being and had no connexion with the out-dated tiaraed ruler in Rome. I remember the shock of surprise at seeing a box inside a Roman Catholic church marked Peter’s Pence – I thought that all that had been stopped some time in the Middle Ages, probably by King John.

But even later when I became a Catholic the Pope remained a distant hierarchic figure, and one imagines he remained so for many Catholics until contemporary history began to break into our homes with the sound of explosives and the sight of refugees and the sudden uncertainty – where shall we be next year? The Pope became a man when we grew aware that he suffered from the same anxieties and tensions as ourselves, only infinitely extended by his responsibility and his solitude. When Pius XI was elected on the fourteenth ballot, the Cardinal Mercier said, ‘We have dragged Ratti through the fourteen Stations of the Cross: now that he has arrived on Golgotha we leave him alone.’ For nearly twenty years now we have become aware of the Papacy as the point of suffering, the needle of pain, and a certain love always arises for the man who suffers. Pain makes an individual, whether it is a Chinese woman weeping for her dead child or a patient figure in a hospital bed or this man in the Vatican.

We have worked slowly towards the one particular Pope this priest, not so far removed from our parish priest, forced against his will into a position of responsibility without material power, but we cannot see him fully as an individual man unless we see him in relation to his immediate predecessors. They have all had the same aim – to be the servants of God, to serve the world, to temper the winds of hate, corruption, injustice, to give us such peace as it is possible to get here. Pacelli becomes individual when we see how he differs from the others in trying to attain this aim.