Of Gaudí and The Guardian

I hadn't expected Guardian Review to print this, so I'm not surprised that it didn't, but I know that I will get emails about it (or even comments here - go on) if I post it here, so here it is:

Robert Hughes spoils his otherwise excellent article on Barcelona by describing as "extreme" the Catholicism of the late nineteenth century, and especially the dogma of Papal Infallibility. In fact, Catholicism has always simply presupposed the infallibility of what have come to be called Papal Definitions ex cathedra (which are very rare), since it could not otherwise function. Opposition to that dogma's formal promulgation by the First Vatican Council was only on grounds of inopportunity in the prevailing liberal climate of the day, and even then there were only two votes against, followed only by a marginal schism on the part of then-modish Teutonic liberals who happened to be "ethnic Catholics", and whose Nationalist Modernism ended up in a very nasty place indeed.

As for the Syllabus of Errors, each error condemned therein means something specific within its historical context. Thus, for example, "Socialism" means at least a generic Marxism, and certainly not the universal and comprehensive Welfare State, and the strong statutory and other (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwriten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government, all with a view to redressing the grievances caused by capitalism, not least precisely in order to prevent a Marxist (or other) revolution.

Indeed, Socialism, thus defined, is positively enjoined by continuous Catholic Social Teaching from Pope Leo XIII to the present day, and has therefore been strongly supported by Catholics throughout the English-speaking world (even, albeit watered down and without the S-word, in the United States), for exactly the same reasons as Catholics have supported the same principles and policies, though differently named, on the part of Gaullists and French monarchists, or of German Social Catholics, or of Italian Christian Democrats, to name but a few.

Such is the tradition of Chesterton and Belloc, as also, at least in part, of non-Catholics such as Ruskin, William Morris, and the arts and crafts movement. And such, of course, is the tradition of Gaudí, the tradition of resistance to capitalism, not least because capitalism is inseparable from decadent social libertinism and from cultural philistinism. Among much else, that resistant, and now vindicated, tradition produced both Modern English poetry's posthumous father (Gerard Manley Hopkins) and its greatest practitioner (T S Eliot).