Where An Orthodox Catholic Ought To Be

In itself, this is good news.

It is a different question of what conceivable interest it is to most Telegraph readers, as such.

However, it illustrates the fact that, while Telegraph Blogs features any amount of (mostly incorrect) material about the Catholic Church, it features little or no Catholic comment as such, and none whatever by its editor, the author of this and most other such pieces, who would not know where to begin.

Why should it? Well, it certainly seems to think that it should. In which case, it ought to be the real thing.

That editor illicitly occupies the position in public discourse where an orthodox Catholic ought to be, and he keeps out anyone who does not subscribe to his wildly untypical economic and geopolitical views, which are not compatible with Catholic Teaching and which never have been.

What were the political opinions of most Catholics in the Golden Age of the 1950s? Which way did heavily Catholic areas vote? In what, if any, way did that contrast with voting patterns in areas containing few or no Catholics? To which party did most Catholic MPs belong? Which party more or less would not have Catholics as parliamentary candidates?

Was it on the votes of Catholics that the Conservatives ran Liverpool, and that their Unionist allies ran Glasgow, in the 1950s? Which way did Catholic citadels from Lewisham (then) to Consett (then as now) vote in 1945, 1950, 1951, 1955 and 1959?

Just for a start, see also the United States and Australia in the same period, and indeed well beyond that period.

As so very, very often, the ostentatious traditionalists to whom he appeals even though he is not himself one, far from being "like all Catholics used to be", are the voice of a tiny minority that was allowed to go unchecked in the pre-Conciliar Church mostly because it was so small, but which then found that the ground had been cut from under it by the Council.

Such people were never normal, or even particularly common.