Befuddled

Stuart Reid writes:

When last month the Spectator debated the motion "England should be a Catholic country again" - the ayes had it, you will remember, and by quite a margin - I wondered what this country might have been like if it had never become Protestant.

What if Henry VIII had been able to keep his feelings to himself? What if the Armada had succeeded and we'd been liberated from Bloody Elizabeth? What if James II had not been booted off the throne by the William of Orange and his Whig dogs?

In his satirical novel The Alteration, which I suppose I should read one day, Kingsley Amis imagined a world in which there had been no Reformation, and, being an anti-Catholic provincial, did not like the look of it one bit. Myself, I think it would have been a pretty glorious place. Maybe the Sarum rite would have been the "ordinary form" in the pretty little parish churches of England, which would still have tabernacles and would still smell of incense and maybe also, even today, of tobacco and honest workingmen's sweat.

I like to think, too, that our faith would have been strengthened by native scepticism and irony. Not for us, at any rate, the occasionally deranged asceticism of Spanish Catholicism or the superstitious sentimentality of the Italian or the touchy-feely excesses of the American.

But no doubt that's just wishful thinking. "What if" may be a diverting game, much like Trivial Pursuit, but it is not going to change anything. We live in a Protestant country. Since Protestant England is the only England I know, however, and since I love my country, I am sometimes tempted to wonder whether the Reformation was our felix culpa, an evil out of which good comes.

Consider. Without the Reformation we would not have had our glorious converts. There would have been no Edmund Campion, no Cardinal Newman, no Cardinal Manning, no Gerard Manley Hopkins, no Ronald Knox, no G K Chesterton, no Evelyn Waugh, no Elizabeth Anscombe, no Muriel Spark, no Graham Greene, no Ann Widdecombe - mind you, there would have been no Tony Blair, either - and William Cobbett would never have written his rollicking (and tendentious) History of the Protestant "Reformation".

Nor would there have been a Westminster Cathedral, with its nice piazza and that very useful McDonald's on the corner. We'd have had to make do with the Abbey.

On the other hand, and I intend no disrespect here to my Protestant friends, if England had remained Catholic we would have had a better class of atheist. Catholic atheists, having been formed in the One True Church, understand what it is they don't believe in. Protestant atheists - people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens - do not, since they were formed in heresy. They have much in common with howling American fundamentalists.

The Marxist Catholic atheist Terry Eagleton has no time for Dawkins and Hitchens, whom he refers to, collectively, as Ditchkins. He is especially scornful of Dawkins. "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds," he wrote in the London Review of Books, "and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

Now, in association with Geoffrey Robertson QC, husband of the comely Kathy Lette, the Ditchkins duo are examining the possibility of having the Pope arrested for crimes against humanity. Headline writers originally suggested that Dawkins would attempt a citizen's arrest during the Pope's visit in September, but like much that has been written on this subject in the past six weeks, that was untrue. Dawkins has no wish to attract the attention of police marksmen.

But what about poor old Peter Tatchell, the former Sunday school teacher? He's been agitating against the Pope's visit for weeks now, and he might be tempted to try a citizen's arrest, but he'd have to grow beard or black-up if he were to stand a chance of getting anywhere near the Holy Father. His is too well known to the cops.

Dear God but these people take themselves seriously. They are without any sense of the absurd. In the course of my research, I checked Richard Dawkins's website, which is so smug and pious and girlish in its atheism that is must count as the sixth proof of the existence of God.

At the moment there is a page devoted to Dawkins's recent birthday. "Happy Birthday Richard Dawkins!" it trills. "Post your birthday messages here!" Fifty messages follow. "I wanted to post a drawing for you," writes one of the faithful, "but I was too busy this week to create one. Maybe later if I come up with something!" Exclamation mark follows exclamation mark.

You sense that Dawkins will never produce the atheist equivalent of St Augustine's Confessions. He is the self-regarding product of pop culture. Unlike tabloid readers, he and Hitchens know the difference between a paediatrician and a paedophile, but like tabloid readers they are angry and unforgiving, and capricious.

Only a month ago, for example, Dawkins was writing in the Washington Post that "faith-befuddled governments" would be "too craven" to arrest the "former head of the Inquisition". (Actually, they would be too sane to do any such thing, but you wonder which government Dawkins believe is "faith-befuddled"? The British? The American? The French? The Spanish? The Swedish?) A month ago, in other words, Dawkins thought it was not worth trying to nab His Holiness. He also thought that the Pope should not resign. "He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice - the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution - while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears."

Let's hope the Jewish community never offends the birthday boy.

Poor Richard, though. I have always rather liked him. He is a nice-looking man, with an agreeable smile, and is a seeker-after-truth, but a seeker in precisely the same way as those loopy Christians in cyberspace.