by A. N. Wilson
The new Mass caused as much pain to some Catholics as the Pope’s views on the safe period. ‘The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me’, Evelyn Waugh told a friend in March 1966. A month later, on Easter Day, he heard Mass for the last time, celebrated according to the old rite by his friend Father Philip Caraman SJ. Waugh then returned to his house at Combe Florey in Somerset and had a heart attack on the lavatory, where he died at luncheon-time. It was only one of the many instances of the ineluctable tendency of our times to deprive human beings of their dignity, and to turn potentially sad events into comedy.
Religions cohere on two levels, the ritual and the moral. In the 1960s, the words of the Roman Mass, which had been unchanged since the sixteenth century, and in effect unchanged for centuries longer, were rendered into the vernacular with the upsetting consequences which we observed at the opening of this chapter. At the same time, as the novels of David Lodge made wittily and abundantly clear, Roman Catholics began to ask themselves how much of their religion they had ever really believed. In the days of the Old Mass, the faithful at a small tin tabernacle, or in the largest cathedrals, could attend the ceremonies and know that they were at one, in word and action, with their Church throughout the world. Rather in the same way that Muslims, abasing themselves for prayer at the regulated intervals, continued to hear the same words, until the end of our times and beyond. For Catholics, however, the experience of churchgoing in our times became divisive, even for those who accepted the new liturgies; some congregations rejoiced in the chance to imitate the American Protestant tradition, with songs, handshaking, electric guitars and liturgical dance, while others felt that the past had been sold and yearned for the old ways.
Instead of being a focus of unity, the liturgy became a source of animosity and division. Institutions, secular as well as religious, need repetitious rituals to retain their sense of identity, which is why for many non-military-minded people there is still a virtue in the annual ceremonies of Trooping the Colour and laying wreaths at the Cenotaph at Armistice. Institutions also need to believe at least a substantial percentage of what they claim to believe. No adherent to a Church or a political party can ever have truly subscribed to every word of the manifesto, but when the discrepancy between aspirant and actual belief becomes too glaring, then institutions break up.
The destructive paradox of the Catholic civil war was that it was the most extreme conservatives who, in their hatred of the chummy new Eucharistic rite, were least willing to toe the new line. ‘Let us offer one another the sign of peace,’ said a Catholic priest in London at the moment in the rite when he hoped the congregation would shake hands. Jennifer Paterson, the cookery writer, visibly raised two fingers towards the altar.
Father Oswald Baker, in 1975, became the focus of recusancy when he refused to stop using the Tridentine Rite in his church at Downham Market, in Norfolk. The Bishop of Northampton, his diocesan, attempted to remove him, which had the effect of making Downham Market a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of disaffected Catholics. Baker made barbed comments about Masses which were enlivened by pop music and ‘sensuous dancing girls’. He referred in one sermon to St John of the Cross, who was jailed by his superiors in the sixteenth century, and eventually released to become the Vicar General of Andalusia. ‘These bishops,’ said Baker, to an appreciative congregation, ‘they will have their little joke.’ His bishop appointed a new parish priest, who was obliged (since Baker and friends continued to occupy the church) to say Mass to a small congregation in the town hall. Baker was a devotee of the teaching of St Robert Bellarmine’s teaching that a heretical Pope automatically loses his office. He therefore believed that the See of Peter, though apparently occupied in succession by Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II, was in fact empty. In 1984, he surprised a visitor by telling him, that the Pope ‘is no more a Catholic than Ian Paisley–and no more Pope than Billy Graham’. Baker was in a minority, but it was a vociferous and numerous minority, which believed that ‘the new Mass is a sacrilegious parody of the true Mass; it is sinful to take part in it.10
To see the extent of Roman Catholic decline in England, however, it would have been necessary, not to visit the remote parishes of Norfolk, but to go to Liverpool. Liverpool, more than London, was the British Catholic capital. It was to Liverpool in the nineteenth century that the Irish Catholics had fled from the famine, and although many passed through Liverpool on their way to other sources of work, many stayed. The docklands of Liverpool remained for many travellers, until the 1960s, the natural point of departure for America.
Between 1968 and 1996, five docklands parishes closed.11 Mass attendance sank to a fraction of what it was in the proud old days of Archbishop Richard Downey (Archbishop of Liverpool 1928–53), known as ‘the ruler of the North’, a hard-faced bigot who encouraged his clergy, preaching for the Catholic Evidence Guild, to stand on street corners and pour scorn on the Church of England. The Church of England bishop, Dr David, frequently complained to his RC counterpart that priests had ‘terrorised’ the non-Catholic wives of ‘mixed marriages’, ‘using foul language, to tell them that their marriages were invalid and their children illegitimate; in one case a priest was said to have told a Catholic husband that he was quite free to leave his wife because they were not validly married’.12
Both Churches, the Church of Rome and the Church of England, doomed in our times to shrink in numbers, spent time and money constructing cathedrals.
The Protestant building was begun during the time of the second Bishop of Liverpool, Francis James Chavasse, a man whose anti-popish bigotry would have been a match for the anti-Protestantism of Archbishop Downey. As Rector of St Peter-le-Baily in Oxford, Chavasse was responsible for founding St Peter’s Hall, a specifically evangelical college, designed to counteract the unmanly and Romish tendencies of Pusey House. The parish church, later the college chapel, had a memorial window to Chavasse fils, also a Bishop (of Rochester), celebrating in emblematic form his career as an Olympic athlete and as a chain-smoker–he had an Episcopal ring which doubled as a cigarette-holder. Giles Gilbert Scott, a very young architect, was the grandson of George Gilbert Scott, who designed the Albert Memorial and St Pancras Station. His vast cathedral on St James’s Mount, begun in 1901, was consecrated on 19 July 1924, but it was not completed until 1978, when the Daily Telegraph wrote:
In such a setting, does not her Anglican Cathedral look like a huge anachronism? Even some of the devout seem inclined to apologize for it, on the grounds that money (all of it raised by private subscription be it noted) might have been better spent on works of mercy or on some more utilitarian place of worship.
Such sentiments are wholly out of place. The Church proclaims her message by striving, as the architects of Liverpool Cathedral did, to build for as near to eternity as is humanly possible. We should surely by now have learned the error of supposing that Christian virtues will continue to flourish in a society which fails to nourish the faith from which they spring, and great ecclesiastical architecture is one of the most fertile sources of such nourishment. This Cathedral will stand, even to the eyes of the unbelieving, as a symbol of what patience and devotion can achieve in the face of endless difficulties and some catastrophes. It is a triumph and proclamation of hope.
The cathedral is in fact built at one end of Hope Street, at the other end of which the RCs erected a very different structure.
Liverpool itself, under the reforms of Peter Walker and Heath, became a questionable entity. As one social historian of the city put it, ‘Inner urban decay and suburban sprawl melted Liverpool with Merseyside. In April 1974 the new metropolitan County Council of Merseyside was born, governing over 1. 1/2 million in an area of 250 square miles. Where once it was hard to define Merseyside, now it was hard to distinguish Liverpool.’13
Anyone who turned their back on the Protestant cathedral and walked towards the Roman Catholic one will have time, in their procession between the two buildings, to meditate on what had happened, n
ot only to Liverpool, but to Britain since the older of the two structures was conceived. When the foundation stone of the Protestant cathedral was laid, Mr Gladstone had been dead for only three years. The fine Georgian terraced house in which he was born in Rodney Street still stands. When the cathedral was conceived, the great thriving industrial port of Liverpool stood at the centre of the British Empire. Riddled with poverty as Liverpool was in its dockland slums and elsewhere, Liverpudlians were ‘universal merchants’, bringing in American cotton, colonial tobacco, sugar, Midlands metals, Cheshire salt, Lancashire coal and textiles. It had founded its fortune, as Gladstone would guiltily remind himself, on the slave trade. It was the hub of commerce, and of the relentless efficient machine of manufacture and trade which made Britain tower over all its rivals in the world. In spite of the extreme poverty of the Irish working class here, it was a city of enormous pride. The great Mersey was overlooked by the majestic Exchange and Town Hall, and in the nineteenth century it had acquired a superb art gallery, an excellent university, all paid for by the voluntary donations of the rich, who lived here in some splendour.
Shipping went. By the time HeathCo had submerged Liverpool into ‘Merseyside’, the great old days of the Anchor Line, Brocklebank, Cunard, Lamport and Holt and the Ocean Steam Ship Company were over. Twenty-five thousand men worked in Liverpool Docks in 1963, compared, by the end of our times, with fewer than a thousand who, by means of improved technology, actually shift a bigger tonnage and make more profits.14 Lancashire barely made any textiles any more, nor did Cheshire produce salt. Liverpool’s reason for existence had been removed, partly by politicians, partly by circumstance. It was not surprising perhaps that the Militant Tendency (Trotskyite infiltrators into the ranks of the Labour Party) should have begun in the late 1950s and early 1960s, long before their destructive significance dawned on the minds of the National Executive of the Labour Party, to take seats on Liverpool City Council.15 But at this date, the power of the Catholic Church in working-class Liverpool was greater than that of the Trotskyites. ‘Caucusing for support within the Labour Group [on the Council] had long been a feature of city politics in Liverpool. In the 1950s and 1960s Jack Braddock and his allies formed one caucus, whilst “the left” and “Catholic Action” formed two others.’16 The Protestant cathedral by the end of our times appeared as if it had been built in a ruin, and at the end of the twentieth century it symbolised something of which the Daily Telegraph might be expected to have approved, a defiant gesture of old values, which had been left behind by all around. Its mountainous height, its grandiose claims to be taken seriously, rose up in the surrounding wasteland, impressive but rather mad. Around its walls, as the faithful few gathered for the evening service, swarmed teenaged prostitutes, plying their trade.
Make the twenty-first-century pilgrimage through the desolation and dissolution which lies between the two buildings, however, leave behind the self-confidence of Edwardian England and you are confronted with an emblem not only of poverty-stricken, wrecked Liverpool Roman Catholicism but of the late 1960s in which it was finished. The original architect for the RC scheme was none other than the great Sir Edwin Lutyens, architect of Imperial New Delhi and of the Cenotaph in London. He had estimated the cost at £3 million. In 1955, the RC authorities authorised Adrian Scott to ‘scale down the Lutyens design’, but it was still too expensive. In the event, they chose Frederick Gibberd.17 to produce a completely different design, the gimcrack vulgarity known as ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’, which was built on the cheap and within decades was showing severe signs of structural strain. This frail concrete eyesore, which lasted such a short time, was an architectural parable of the 1960s, and of the attempt of the Roman Catholic Church to move with the times.
Anthony Kenny, philosopher-priest, who was laicised and became the Master of Balliol, was only one of many who left the Church. He was laicised in 1963, and by 1970 Cardinal Heenan was ruefully remarking to another priest, ‘The path which Tony trod has now become a high road.’ Kenny was more eloquent than most, not least because he was so restrained in his account of loss of faith in the supernatural claims of the RC Church. ‘It is true that many of the things which I objected to in Catholic practice have altered since the Vatican Council, and it is true that many priests will now cheerfully deny in the pulpit doctrines which I could only doubt in solitary guilt. But I am old-fashioned enough to believe that if the Church has been wrong in the past on so many topics as forward-looking clergy believe, then her claims to impose belief and obedience on others are, in the form in which they have been traditionally made, mere impudence.’18
17
The End of Harold Wilson
Harold Wilson had won a third election victory for the Labour Party, hitherto an unheard-of achievement in British politics. He had not expected to win. In the event of his defeat, he planned to go into hiding at the Golden Cross Hotel, Kirby, and to resign as party leader at once.1 He had already signalled to colleagues that, in the event of a victory, he would not serve a full term. With his keenness for statistics and breaking records, he had some desire to break Asquith’s record for length of office, and he was therefore prepared, once he became Prime Minister in March 1974, to stay on for another two years.2 But, already at fifty-eight years old, he was feeling exhausted by the workload. He told Barbara Castle that the stress involved stomach pains.3 which cannot have been helped by persistent pipe-smoking and by an ever-increasing intake of alcohol. ‘Are we to be led by a neurotic drunk?’ Anthony Wedgwood Benn had asked when George Brown stood against Wilson in the leadership election of 1963.4 No, was the answer on this occasion; but by the time of his third administration, with the glass of brandy forever at his side, Wilson had turned into just that. He had lost his zest for infighting and intrigue, and his capacity for hard work. The first quarter of 1975, for example, involved eleven Cabinets, twenty-eight meetings with industrialists, twenty ministerial speeches, two visits abroad, one to Northern Ireland, where the situation was deteriorating, thirteen other public engagements at home. He did not find time for a single private or social engagement in the entire period.
The economic situation was bleak indeed. Ted Heath had asked the electorate the question ‘Who Governs Britain?’ Heath had maintained that miners’ pay was 8 percent above the average for industrial workers. During the election it emerged that he had made a mistake and that the pay was in fact 8 percent below.5 No wonder, when Heath had been humiliated, and ousted from leadership of his party, the first person whose name Margaret Thatcher recommended for a peerage should have been Joe Gormley, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. But for Wilson, as Prime Minister, the insoluble problem of the balance of payments was waiting for him as soon as he took office. Oil prices had quadrupled since the end of 1973; there was a record trade deficit in Britain; inflation stood at 15 percent; there was decline in industrial production and a slump in living standards.6
Inevitably, given the discontent in the country at large, and the appalling state of industrial relations, the left weighed in to support the workers, and in so doing eventually to wreck the Labour Party. Wilson realised that, although he had won the election, his opponent Ted Heath had been right. The country could not afford to pay out money which it did not have, without the prospect of eventual ruin. It is out of such pain that successful political careers can be born. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the former Gaitskellite Viscount Stansgate.7 had come to realise that he was never going to impress Harold Wilson, but as Tony Benn the People’s chum he stood a good chance of becoming the next best thing, a man who was perceived by the public as a conviction politician. He could become a rallying point for the disaffected left, the more so, since Michael Foot, the obvious guardian of the left’s flame, had pledged loyalty to the leadership and become the Secretary of State for Employment. Wilson had thereby made the poacher into a gamekeeper, and turned the most eloquent possible advocate for the miners’ and other workers’ cause into the boss who would have to refuse them pay r
ises. It left the field for nuisance-making open to Benn. After the 1970 election, when Labour had expected to win, Tony Benn and Caroline, his very rich American wife, had been buoyant in mood. ‘We’ve never been happier,’ they told Susan Crosland. Benn now saw himself ‘as the left-wing answer to Enoch Powell’ calling in the wilderness. ‘Enoch has more effect on the country than either Party,’ said Wedgwood Benn, adding that he intended to make ‘a major speech every three months’.8 Wilson noted, as Wedgwood Benn embarked on this successful new piece of self-invention, that he immatured with age. The relentlessness with which Wedgwood Benn created this role for himself helped the party descend into the feuding which would all but destroy it.