UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Catherine Pepinster
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 May 2012
One of the heartaches of being a Roman Catholic in recent years has been the clerical abuse scandal. No pain that any of us suffers from discovering that some of our priests abused children – and even worse – that senior clergy covered up their crimes – can compare with the victims’ plight, of course, but it has knocked for six many devout Catholics’ faith. Some have left the church because of it; others are certainly more sceptical, or even more cynical about the way the church is run and the way that power is used and exploited. Quite a few are clinging on by their fingertips, fretting not only about the abuse crisis but the way that a church that flung open the shutters to the world 50 years ago because of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, appears to be going backwards, becoming more clerical, more obsessed with ritual and gesture.
According to novelist Hilary Mantel, we’re all guilty by association. This weekend the author of Wolf Hall and the newly published Bring Up The Bodies told interviewer Lynn Barber that Catholics weren’t quite the ticket. “I think that nowadays the Catholic church is not an institution for respectable people”, she said. Even Barber, one of the most experienced interviewers around, seemed taken aback, describing this remark as “strong”, although it also had a curiously quaint and dated feel to it, as though being genteel is what counts. When she got Mantel to expand, she discovered that much of her remark was down to the abuse crisis. But there was more, with Mantel going on to damn priests and nuns for being “among the worst people I knew”.
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