‘I find myself marooned in a sea of unbelief, longing for guidance. My position is not unique’


In her brief audience with the Pope, travel writer Sara Wheeler would ask him to help break down religious divides


Your exhortation quoted above was made in Australia two years ago. Will you hold out your hand even beyond other faiths, to those who cannot find a place within organised religion? The moment could not be more auspicious. Support for the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom is at low tide. More broadly, the zeitgeist has shifted. The lunge towards prosperity and control of the physical world has resulted in spiritual desertification. I was raised, like many in modern Britain, outside a religious framework. By the 1960s, when I was growing up, the Churches for many people had largely lost their social role and the notion of spirituality had been marginalised to the point of invisibility. What counted, one learned, was the here and now. As a result, old eschatological threats lost their power. In middle age, I find myself marooned in a sea of unbelief, longing for guidance while unable and unwilling to commit myself formally to any particular faith. My position is not unique. As you have said, religion in our time is perceived as a cause of division, rather than a force for unity. How wonderful it would be if the Catholic hierarchy could respond to this lamentable development – if only in the interests of self-preservation. No religious group bar the Shakers has


ever abjured that all need to evolve. (Even Amish use telephones now, while Shakers have shaken their last.) Religious institutions do not occupy their own planets. They must adapt.


Rather than shoring up compromised positions, if church leaders fostered a


paedophile priests will be removed from the priesthood and handed to the police. Fortunately, Catholic priests in England


and Wales now know that this is the case, according to a good Catholic priest friend of mine. But our faithful do not yet know this. Such measures worldwide would do much to regain the trust of Catholics. Second, the abolition of celibacy for priests. Early Church Fathers from St Augustine onwards regarded normal sexual activity as a necessary evil, permitted within marriage for the procreation of children, while celibacy was considered a nobler way of life. Today there is a shortage of priests worldwide, particularly in Western countries. Celibacy is discouraging good


non-exclusive understanding of faith, they would appeal to a sense of shared humanity.


I recently spent time with a remote community of Greenland Inuit. They had returned to the “religion” of their ancestors, a transcendent faith predicated on unity with the universe, from the ice hump on the next ridge to the floes in the ocean. No individual has more right to belong, or more value, Inuit believe, than any other. Whizzing along on a dog sled under a starlit Arctic sky, I sensed that my hosts had the right end of the stick, and that our fingers remained clenched dogmatically around splinters at the other end. Many earthly challenges lie ahead, the potential catastrophes of a changing climate among the greatest. Let’s face it, the planet will be all right: it will regulate itself, as it always has. It’s us at risk – selfish, pig-headed, loveable humans. On that reasoning, exclusive, priggish religious attitudes belong to the past, or should. It’s too late for division; for exclusivity; for “us” and “them”. In a moving prayer concluding Deus Caritas Est in the first year of your pontificate, you appealed to the Mother of God to teach us to be “fountains of living water/In the midst of a thirsting world”. Will you reach beyond dogma to slake our thirst?


■Sara Wheeler is a travel writer. She is the author of The Magnetic North: travels in the Arctic, published by Vintage.


young men, who have the desire to marry and raise children, from training for the priesthood. Others leave the priesthood after falling in love and marrying. That is a terrible waste of priestly talent. This law is also illogical because married Anglican priests with wives and families are able to become Catholic priests. Celibacy surely imposes a great strain on all priests, who must expend a lot of energy in coping with sexual frustration and loneliness throughout their ministry. Dear Holy Father, it does not require a


General Council of our Church to make the changes I am requesting, which I believe many other Catholics will support. Please consider making these changes now for the benefit of all our Church.


‘It is the purity of our faith that must appeal’


A writer puts his plea to Benedict to focus on bringing the young back to the Church


On a cross-country rail trip recently, I overheard a young man talking with his father in the seat behind. They were evidently on their way to view a prospective university for the would-be student. The seats in the carriage – admittedly rather narrow – were pronounced, loudly, to be “gay” (i.e. rubbish). The passing place names (in Welsh) were dubbed “stupid”. And as they browsed the university prospectus, the boy read out one course title and commented: “‘Animal Ethics’ – and all that crap”. I felt like turning round and telling him that, as an occasional lecturer at his putative place of tertiary education, I couldn’t honestly recommend it as the right place for someone so open-minded. Joking apart, it seemed to me sad that someone so young had so quickly developed such cynicism. But it did make me think what examples we set for the young – and what possibilities we allow for faith to take hold. In the teenage world, there is little room for the Church. There are so many pressures to conform; in an era of Facebook and texting, it is hardly considered cool to announce one’s belief in God. Of my generation, few still go to Mass. As teenagers in the 1970s, they did not think the Church spoke to them. How much more remote must it seem to teenagers of today? I hope, Your Holiness, that you will bear this in mind during your visit. Rather than crowd-pleasing gimmicks (teenagers always see through such condescension), I think ultimately it is the purity of our faith that must appeal – the all-embracing nature of our belief. It was this that, more than 70 years ago, persuaded my own mother, then a teenager herself, to become a Catholic. When I asked her why she had joined the Church, she said, “I think it was because I saw that people didn’t get all dressed up for Mass.” We Catholics do not make a song and dance of our faith. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. But it is also a sign that we are secure in what we believe. It is those eternal qualities of purity and truth that must convince the young to see the Church as an alternative to the more fleeting appeal of our digital age – perhaps even a subversive one. As a teenager myself, I went through my own rebellion. Yet throughout it all, I felt the persistent pull of my faith; it was the truth to which I could return. If there is one thing you can do on your visit, it is to speak to that cynical young man on the train and offer him a way through life itself.


■Philip Hoare’s most recent book is Leviathan, published by Fourth Estate.


18 September 2010 | THE TABLET | 5


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