The Pussy Riot Affair And Catholics In England And Wales

Once again, it seems to me, the Pussy Riot affair has shown just how compromised Catholicsm in England and Wales has become.  All of the discussion of the sentencing of the demonstrators has focused on them: on why they did what they did, on how an attack on President Putin and the servile Patriarch is "right" even if we would have preferred it not to have happened in a Church; and that two year sentences are outrageous.  All of this is, I think, to miss the point as badly as a recent Catholic Herald article which advocated separating public opposition to abortion from public opposition to euthanasia.

There can be no justification for desacration: it can never be right to profane a sacred space, to remove that which is sacred from a sacred place, to attack the holy in its home.  Yet every description of what the Russian women did, every attempt to explain why they did it moves the focus away from the profanation and on to the women themselves.  This is the approach of the worldly.  Surely any Catholic's starting point should be the utter and appalling wrongness of anything happening in that place other than the sacred Liturgy itself, the end for which is was created, the Action which has sanctified the place and has turned it from mere bricks and mortar to a liminal place on the border between heaven and earth.  This is the place in which angels bow down to cry "Holy! Holy Holy!" and yet there are Catholics who are joining the world in worrying about whether a suspended sentence after the time already served would have been better than two years in prison.

How many English and Welsh Catholics have called for or have made public acts of reparation?   And how many, bravely vocal about the relationship of another country's President with another Church's Patriarch, are as vocal about matters a lot nearer home, about the compromised relationship of their own Hierarchy with the concerns and interests of the secular state.

(I actually wonder how many English and Welsh Catholics have the first idea about the dynamics of modern Russian politics and the relationship between the Orthodox Church and the State in 2012 Russia: none if they rely on the British press for their information; and possibly no more should they have until they have attended to the rather large piece of wood in their eyes.)

The Catholic Church here seems to have lost its role of mediating God to Man in favour of becoming part of a sort of Religious and Moral Affairs Directorate of the Cabinet Office, at a time when radical secularism has taken hold of the British Establishment.  The Hierarchy cannot change the state from the inside; by participating in it they have become compromised in it.

I have said before: the battle line in the Catholic Church in England and Wales isn't about the language of the Mass: it is about whether the Church is a part of society, or a Society apart.