Church and statesman
JONATHAN WRIGHT considers an enthusiastically written book that’s otherwise light on fresh research and insight
The Catholics by Roy Hattersley Chatto and Windus, 646 pages, £25
Roy Hattersley explains that, with a few exceptions, he is “riddled with doubt about every philosophical precept and can find exceptions to every moral rule”. He therefore envies Roman Catholics who, on his account, bask in certainty thanks to their faith in scripture, authority and church tradition. Apparently, they claim to know “more often than not, what is right and what is wrong”.
For Hattersley, this goes a long way towards explaining how Britain’s Catholics have managed to survive the tough times that have routinely been inflicted upon them since the Reformation. “The courage of the faithful” derived directly from the “certainty with which their convictions were held.” With this interpretative prism in place, Hattersley traces, as the book’s subtitle puts it: “The Church and its People in Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to the Present Day.”
The trouble is that we already have many such surveys and there would have to be a very good reason to write yet another one: fresh research, a novel analytical framework, or surprising new insights, for example. Hattersley’s book does not score highly in any of these categories, though it is pleasing to see Ireland and Scotland receiving as much attention as England.
Hattersley also writes with great enthusiasm and, at times, manages to capture something of the general mood of British Catholicism in a given period. He is good, for instance, on the tensions that both energised and muddled the church during the 19th century, and his account of the modern era has numerous highlights. A description of the Catholic literary revival, encapsulated by the likes of Belloc, Chesterton and Waugh, is good value and Hattersley takes a refreshingly even-handed approach to more recent developments: he grumbles about the church’s approach to sexuality, but observes how it “heroically argued for an immigration policy which it must have known did not represent the view of the British public”.
Further back in time, the narrative is rather conventional and misses many opportunities to utilise the fruits of recent scholarship. With the Reformation, for instance, we hear a lot about the problems of the late-medieval church and the criticism it provoked, but not nearly enough about the dynamism of
An atheist, Hattersley approaches this complex subject with an open mind
Catholic devotion in the decades before Luther et al launched their protests. With the Elizabethan era, it would have been nice to learn more about the extraordinary diversity of Catholic responses to persecution: all those gestures of partial conformity, compromise and co-existence across confessional lines.
There is room to doubt whether British Catholicism has been as “inflexible” as the book suggests, but Hattersley is to be commended for approaching a complex subject with an open mind and a genuine appreciation for the power of faith: not an easy task for, in his words, “the atheist son of a defrocked priest”.