Not On This Rock

This morning's Thought for the Day had Clifford Longley trotting out all the lazy old liberal clichés about Vatican II and what such people imagine it to have said and done.

Longley at least managed to blame that misreading in part for the "child abuse" (sex between men and teenage boys, definitely child abuse but a very specific form of it and very often treated entirely differently in other contexts) that followed the Council. But only by blaming "confusion" between a supposedly reactionary centre and supposedly, as he would see it, radical bishops and theologians from, he sought to imply, the ends of the earth. In reality, they came overwhelmingly from North-Western Continental Europe and from North America, and they were not particularly typical even there.

Clifford Longley is or has been an employee of Rupert Murdoch, whom he has vigorously defended, including on Thought for the Day. The order that the Murdoch Empire cheered on George W Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard in imposing on the world by force of arms is the order that those newspapers cheered on as it entrenched itself economically in the 1980s, and which they were key to inventing in the aftermath of the Swinging Sixties.

Including, as that last did, the misappropriation of the name of Vatican II, which not only opened the way to 1970s pederasty, 1980s Mammonolatry, and the constitutional vandalism at home and the warmongering abroad of the Blair years, but which in many ways actively encouraged them, and really could not have expressed itself except in their terms or by their means.

Likewise, the hedonism of the 1960s, via the total free-for-all of the 1970s including in relation to sex with children, could not but have become the self-indulgence and greed of the 1980s, in the intellectual formulation of which the advocates and practitioners of the legalisation of drugs and of the abolition of the age of consent were extremely active. In turn, that could not but have become the wars waged by Clinton, Blair, Bush and Howard, together with Clinton's repeal of Glass-Steagall and his victimisation of the poor, together with Blair's subservience to global capital in every policy area and his ruination of the British Constitution that had made possible progressive social justice at least from Wilberforce and Shaftesbury onwards, and together with the closely related attempt to abolish the monarchy in Australia.

All of which were cheered to the rafters, and in some cases even ordered up, by the media interests of Rupert Murdoch. But none of which could have happened if, among other things, Vatican II had not been misapplied in the terms still favoured by Clifford Longley on Thought for the Day. The Catholic Church either without that Council or renewed in actual accordance with it would not have been the only bulwark against such abominations. But she would have been a vitally important part of what might very well have been the successful holding of the line by and for truth, goodness and beauty.