Christopher Pearson, asceticism, hedonism, the Roman church and rites that pass beyond understanding

(Above: Sandro Botticelli's painting based on a story from The Decameron, showing how sooling the hounds on a woman is the surest way to domestic bliss, a theory in relation to women successfully followed by the boys' club Catholic church for a couple of thousand years. You can see the painting in the Prado in Madrid - one of the great collections justifying a trip to Spain - and more on the painting here).

We have a homosexual Catholic priest in the family. He goes about his daily business without fuss (the church these days needs every servant it can get), he has a partner discreetly in the background, and a reasonably comfortable life without any offensive, ostentatious materialism.

I've never asked him about his relationship to the church or his partner or eternal life - where to start - but his relationship with the hierarchy would suggest a 'don't ask, don't tell' strategy is at work. He doesn't work hard at keeping the secret, but he doesn't flaunt it either. And in any case it doesn't take a flock long to work out what's going down.

I remember when a handsome young priest turned up in our local parish and cut a swathe through the female flock, and it only seemed to act as advertising for fresh scalps. Eventually he was moved along, but I'm sure his reputation travelled along with him, and served to pave the way for a lifestyle which really called for the skills of a dinkum Giovanni Boccaccio (and if you haven't read The Decameron, do yourself a favor).

But these kinds of Catholic sagas makes it all the more strange to read Christopher Pearson in The Australian, under the header No regrets about act of faith despite church's woeful state.

For the church is indeed a broad church, which lets in almost anybody (such as the SSPX mob), and which has always seen turf wars between its own brands of liberalism and conservatism. At one time, this conflict was painted across the whole of Europe, these days it's conducted in the cloisters in a much smaller patch of turf.

Usually faith is a matter for private contemplation - a bit like affairs between older men, and younger women, if you're not a politician - but as Pearson celebrates his tenth anniversary entry into the Catholic church, we can see what makes late changers tick - a bit like that famous convert John Henry Newman, who rocked the boat by moving over to the Roman church in his forties.

Newman of course had a friend:

He was a man of marked individuality and Newman paid tribute to him in his Apologia. In The Dream of Gerontius, Edward Elgar's piece based on Newman's poem, the character of the Guardian Angel is considered to be based on St. John...

Newman wrote after the death of Ambrose St John in 1875: "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine."

In accordance with his expressed wishes, Newman was buried in the grave of his lifelong friend, Ambrose St. John. Previously, they had shared a house. The pall over the coffin bore his cardinal's motto Cor ad cor loquitur ("Heart speaks to heart"). Inseparable in death as in life, a joint memorial stone was erected for the two men; the inscription bore words Newman had chosen: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth").

Perhaps our reading for the day should be Matthew 5: 27-28 and wayward men who look at other men:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a man to lust after him hath committed adultery with him already in his heart.

I keed, I keed. But there is, I think, a certain tendency in the male club that is the Catholic church that reminds me of the conditions in boys only private schools in England, as one friend evoked for me the pleasure of mutual masturbation by the lads after the cry of 'lights out'.

But back to Pearson:

Despite my apprehensions that Catholicism wasn't going to be a bed of roses, it was clear to me that if I wanted to return to the practice of the faith, there was nowhere else to go. I could never have been happy as a gay Christian -- with or without a rainbow sash -- because it always seemed to me a contradiction in terms.

There was no getting around the fact the New Testament said we were all meant to be chaste or monogamously married and I had reluctantly concluded that St Paul was right about homosexual sex.

Well of course he would think that, and St. Paul continues to exercise a baleful influence on conservatives in the church, whereas I tend to favor Plato:

Homosexuality is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love - all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce. (here, where you can also link back to the controversies surrounding John Boswell).

Never mind. Pearson couldn't see much in the alien world of the Eastern Orthodoxy, and reading Newman had persuaded him the Anglican tradition was flawed, especially its tendency to ignore the more inconvenient aspects of patristic theology:

Aside from the fact belief in the resurrection had become optional, Anglicanism was beset by strange, divisive fads.

For example, given that a male priesthood had always been a distinctive element of Judaism, preserved in the new covenant by Christ at the Last Supper, ordaining women was ultra vires. In the face of nearly 2000 years of continuous tradition, nothing 80s feminism had to say on the subject could be in the least persuasive. It was perverse and ahistorical to see the theological question of holy orders through the prism of equal opportunity, as some sort of entitlement.

Not to mention the benefits of keeping control of the boys' club by the boys. And as for prism, how handy that only men have that direct connection to god, and women can only get there by going through the man, not that we're some sort of strange handed down male entitlement theory on how the world should work.

Some of my friends said at the time that I must have crossed the Tiber for the sake of beautiful music and ceremony. But as Gerard Manley Hopkins told his family in reply to similar charges, if it had simply been a matter of aesthetic preferences, the Church of England would always have been far more congenial. Hopkins deplored the kitsch that mostly characterised Catholic devotional life in England then. Heaven only knows what he would have made of the banality of the present-day English liturgy.

So it's not truth is beauty, beauty truth, but all the same banality and kitsch deserves a lashing? Well Hopkins had his own particular issues:

Some contemporary critics believe that Hopkins's suppressed erotic impulses played an important role in the tone, quality and even content of his works. These impulses seem to have taken on a degree of specificity after he met Robert Bridges's distant cousin, friend, and fellow Etonian Digby Mackworth Dolben, "a Christian Uranian". Hopkins's biographer Robert Bernard Martin asserts that Hopkins’s meeting with Dolben – on the occasion of the boy's 17th birthday – at Oxford in February 1865, "was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of [his] undergraduate years, probably of his entire life". (here, and if you're unfamiliar with the term Uranian, a link there will take you to a more detailed explanation, but let's just say the notion of gender stretches).

Hopkins was completely taken with Dolben, who was nearly four years his junior, and his private journal for confessions the following year proves how absorbed he was in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts of him.

Getting the picture here? Newman, Hopkins ...

Never mind, Hopkins is an interesting, if tortured poet, and his work is freely available on the intertubes. Back to Pearson:

What I most wanted was not beauty, crucial though it is, but certainty: immutable doctrine and valid sacraments. As an Anglican, the closest I had come to "the peace which passes all understanding" had been through the sacraments: in the confessional and at the altar rail. By my late 40s it felt like time to come back to them.

Well sadly this is the same motivation for any other conservative religion. In the face of a hostile, uncertain, always and rapidly changing world, with death the only certain outcome, what will certainty? And perhaps pie the sky, an after life in paradise, and as a bonus for members of certain boys' clubs, 72 virgins, eighty thousand servants and a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby (though I start to get worried as to whether the eighty thousand servants have also each scored 72 virgins and eighty thousand servants. The implications of this kind of pyramid scheme are mind boggling),

Never mind. If you don't want the 72 virgins, you can always settle for asceticism:

Making a commitment to regular examination of conscience was unexpectedly therapeutic. It led me to trade in my double bed for something more austere, observe the Lenten fast and try, for the most part, to avoid low bars. I read again the Confessions of my patron saint, Augustine of Hippo, who had famously prayed: "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet", and knew how he felt.

But wait, it seems that asceticism is just one short step away from blatant hedonism:

The welcome I got, especially from people in the Latin mass community, was a warm one. Mostly Irish and working class, its gatherings often involve shucking oysters or shelling prawns, washing them down with Guinness and singing folk noir ballads, as black in their way as Nick Cave's, about convicts, moonshine and infanticide. The same men and a bunch of their home-schooled children thought nothing of driving 100km each way to sing anthems by William Byrd in an Anglican church at my mother's funeral last year.

Well whatever floats your boat, I say, and if Guinness and oysters is austerity, then bring it on in lashings and oodles.

Having come from a cosseted middle-class background and a career in publishing, I had not seen their kind of piety and their respect, bordering on veneration, for the clergy, despite a shared conviction that the church has been going to hell in a handcart since Vatican II. Because the overall standard of preaching in Catholic churches here has been woeful for as long as anyone can remember, the congregation in the churches I frequent tend to tune out during the sermon.

And I guess the way asceticism and hedonism can go cheek by jowl, so too veneration of the clergy can go hand in hand with the notion that the church has been going to hell in a handbasket since Vatican II. Sob. It was the loss of the Latin, you see, never mind that the pious platitudes of the average cleric have rung down through the ages as worthy of inclusion in the great encyclopaedia of dullard talks, while nodding off in church as been standard since the days of Mr. Pooter:

We stayed till four, and the walk home was remarkable only for the fact that several fools giggled at the unpolished state of my boots. Polished them myself when I got home. Went to church in the evening, and could scarcely keep awake. I will not take port on the top of beer again. (The Diary of a Nobody here)

But back to Pearson, in case you're having trouble keeping awake:

There is another strand, Irish in origin and much less appealing, still heavily represented in contemporary Catholicism. I'm talking about the lace curtain brigade. They tend to a continental form of Puritanism called Jansenism, are obsessively concerned with the sins of the flesh and pride themselves on their instinctual anti-intellectuality and indifference to music. Frances O'Brien, in the ABC TV series The Librarians, epitomises the type. Still, say what you will about Jansenists, at least they are in no doubt about the reality of evil. Many Catholic clergy don't seem to take the notion of sin and its consequences seriously any more. I am sick of going to funerals where the deceased are spoken of as though they are already in heaven and have no further need of our intercessions. Typically the celebrant wears white vestments, rather than customary black. The coffin, like a pharaoh's, is littered with grave goods for the journey -- a football scarf, a stubby and reading glasses -- rather than a pall. Make no mistake. Father O'Bubblegum, Auberon Waugh's caricature of trendy clergy of the 80s, is alive and well in the Australian church.

Dearie me, well I'm not certain where that leaves the Pellite heretics, but is there a quest here for persecution and perhaps even a persecution complex?

When I converted, as an adherent of the Latin mass I became a member of a minority, as marginalised and persecuted as the first generation of out-and-proud gays. In fact, it was a lot like reliving the 70s. I also got the distinct impression that a number of acquaintances in the hierarchy had been more cordially disposed towards me in my unregenerate middle age. Perhaps they wondered whether it was really necessary for me to make what pastoral care jargon calls "lifestyle sacrifices". All I can do is quote another of Muggeridge's paradoxes: "One of old age's pleasures is giving things up."

Well I'm glad all this works for Pearson, even if it means that he has to suffer the horror or reliving the seventies (do they have the Bee Gees on heavy rotation as part of the punishment), but somehow it doesn't work for me, nor would it work, I suspect, for the priest who in the family, who has a much more sensible balance between asceticism, hedonism, redemption and the reality of ordinary, human living.

And perversely, I can't give up reading Pearson, though I do wonder how anybody could take his prescriptions and nostrums seriously, at least with regard to the way the world works, or how people should live their lives.

Let's just say I'll stick with the double bed, thank you very much ... and let everyone follow their dream to whatever corner of the pond it might take them, because we all lead strange lives, and that's about the only enduring, wondering, wonderful comfort as we all head towards the inevitable conclusion ...