‘Being offended’ is the doctrine of the intolerant... and it could spell the death knell of our Angelus

ON his radio programme last week Ray D’Arcy declared that he is ‘offended’ by the Angelus bell. Not that he doesn’t like it, nor that he has a reasoned argument as to why this particular tradition has no place in a modern cultural landscape, but that he is ‘offended’ by it.

Being ‘offended’ is, of course, the wonderfully unassailable refuge of the selfrighteous, virtue-signalling, ‘like’-courting liberals on social media. Being ‘offended’ means never having to debate or defend your views – the mere fact of your hurt feelings is enough to stifle any challenge. Nobody must ever be ‘offended’, even if free speech, honest opinion and cherished values become the trifling cost of appeasing the intolerance of the offended.

Being ‘offended’ is a licence to unleash the sewer of begrudgery, cowardice, smart-alecky malice and anonymous venom that is Twitter upon the ‘offender’. And when the cause of the offence that pains you is the Catholic Church, well, you can just go and fill your boots. Nobody has ever taken a roasting on social media for slagging off the Church to which, at last count, almost 80% of our population still claim allegiance.

Celebration

I don’t know whether Ray D’Arcy was ‘offended’ to hear a Trinity College lecturer, Ali Selim, declare on Prime Time earlier this year that he was in favour of ‘female circumcision’, or female genital mutilation, as it is more accurately known. But it seemed to me that the liberal and social media here were vanishingly mute on the professor’s repulsive endorsement. Imagine the outcry if a Catholic bishop had said he still quite liked the idea of ‘churching’ new mothers to cleanse them of the sin of having had sex – even though that particular ritual doesn’t involve maiming anybody with blunt razors or broken glass?

But then militant Catholics don’t tend to storm the newsrooms of satirical magazines and slaughter journalists who take them on. Express the slightest reservation about the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, for example, and you’re reviled on social media as an Islamophobe: slag off the Catholic Church for the most innocuous of customs, and you’re a Twitter hero.

Ray D’Arcy is ‘offended’ by the sound of the Angelus bell because, he said, ‘every time I heard it I am brought back to child sexual abuse’. So a sound as old as civilisation, a ringing bell; a mild manifestation of Christian culture; a one-minute period of reflection that has in its elided origins a call to prayer, reminds Ray of child abuse? That’s an alarming association, and really deserved a more elaborate explanation. Because if it’s simply his knee-jerk response to sounds or sights associated with the Christian faith, then I’ve bad news for him.

He may not be aware of it but, thundering down the tracks, there’s a whole, month-long festival of celebration that also has a Christian belief at its heart. Like the Angelus, it too has been sanitised and rinsed and purged of any overtly Christian imagery that might ‘offend’ the selectively intolerant. The Angelus bell is now accompanied by bland footage for fear of outraging those who cannot abide any glimpse of another’s faith (depending, of course, on which faith we’re talking about) much as you’d be hard-pressed to find a Christmas card bearing a Nativity scene these days.

Courtesy

But we still insist on calling it Christmas, no doubt to the likely grave discomfort of those who are ‘offended’ by any reminder of the implicit creed. And unless you are very careful, over the next few weeks, you run the serious risk of hearing a tune called a ‘hymn’ in a shop or on the radio. Some of these tunes will make scandalous and shameless reference to ‘holy nights’ and ‘angels’ and infants in mangers, when they should just be all about gifts and shopping and parties.

There’s no question that Christmas has become a great big celebration of consumption, indulgence and materialism. Yet the prevailing liberal doctrine is that venerating greed and excess is far better than remembering a homeless family, an impoverished infant born in a borrowed shed, and a message of peace and goodwill and tolerance. Whoever you believe he was, Jesus taught the very principles which, 2,000 years later, we now know as ‘human rights’ and we still struggle to honour. It is profoundly ironic that tolerance – of your enemies, of difference, of other faiths and none, even of equality between the sexes – was central to the 1st-century Christian message. That’s the message, by the way, of which liberals in 2018 can’t stomach any reminders without feeling offended. Go figure.

Tolerance is not about shutting down or deriding other people’s cherished beliefs. Tolerance is the courtesy of the offended, rather than the obligation of the offender: the clue is in the word. It’s about tolerating the views of others, even when you don’t share them, even when you don’t like them. If you are not a Catholic or a Christian, then the Angelus bell means nothing to you. It is just another noise in a noisy world, capable of being silenced at the push of a button. But denying others a comfort that means nothing to you, when it means a huge deal to them, is classic dog-in-the-manger behaviour.

Integrity

My elderly parents stop whatever they’re doing, every day at midday and six o’clock, and they kneel down and they say the Angelus. Yet Ray D’Arcy, and all those who share and applaud his views, would appear to want to silence the bells that call them to prayer so as to spare themselves ‘offence’. And they would do so in the name of tolerance.

My parents lived through tougher times, I suspect, under the cosh of the Catholic faith than Ray D’Arcy’s generation. My widowed grandmother took in orphans from a local institution to help out on the farm every summer. Those poor kids remembered this summer respite so fondly that we still get Christmas cards from their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren: the cruelty and austerity of the regimes they lived under, and to which they had to return when the harvest was done, would have been no secret in those days. Yet my grandmother remained a devout Mass-goer and nightly Rosary woman who never missed an Angelus until the day she died: like most of her generation, she did not conflate the arrogance, venality and inhumanity of the people who ran those orphanages, with the simplicity and integrity of the Christian message. To taint her honest faith, and that of the majority who want the Angelus retained, with complicity in child abuse is cheap, lazy and unworthy of the national broadcaster.

Ray D’Arcy can only think of child abuse when he hears an Angelus bell. But if I hear it at all, I think of my parents, at home in our kitchen, on their knees, of my grandmother. Most of all, when I hear it, I think with gratitude of a national broadcaster that has resisted the trendy stampede towards conformity, and in a sea of increasing inanity on the airwaves, has retained a couple of minutes a day to take a breath, to pause before the latest bout of bad news, to celebrate those traits and customs that make us unique.