The misery of secular fundamentalism

Since the campaign to discredit Pope Benedict started, I’ve had messages, veiled and otherwise, asking whether I was still a Catholic.

It amuses me that these people think my belonging to the Church is dependent on the few miscreants among our clergy, or the bona fides of the pope in the abuse scandal. (Mind you, I’ve not found a shred of evidence to make me believe that Pope Benedict purposely hid the abuse of children by priests, or protected any clergy from being prosecuted. But factual evidence is not something held into highest regard by the sensationalists in our media.)

I am not a Catholic because I think the Roman clergy are the best-behaved institutional officials in the world. After being convinced by Christianity, I chose Catholicism because of its universal nature, its timelessness (because it is, to me, the best still existing link to the established movement of faith that goes as far as the Last Supper). I’m convinced about its theology and love the open nature of its enquiring philosophy of life that goes as far as St Augustine, a man after my own heart if there was one among the Church fathers.

There’s a lot I love about the Roman Church, but, truth be told, there are aspects of it which I dislike, especially patriarchal and parochial institutional aspects. But like the former master of the Dominicans, Timothy Radcliffe, wrote in The Tablet last month: “I am not a Catholic because of a consumer option for an ecclesiastical Waitrose rather than Tesco, but because I believe that it embodies something which is essential to the Christian witness to the Resurrection, visible unity.” Waitrose is a posh supermarket, Tesco less so. (Read the full article by Fr Radcliffe) http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/14543

I’ve been disappointed for a while in the attitude of life mostly referred to as liberalism. In its incarnation of secular fundamentalism it makes itself loathsome in my eyes. I despise the manner by which it attempts to construct a collective identity based on hatred for institutionalised religion.

I have no problems with people who divorce their moral choices from religion, or any other form of collective institution; after all this is what liberalism is all about: the belief that individuals ought to be able to determine how best to live their own lives. I agree that morality is not something to be forced on individuals from without, but to be arrived at through one’s own reason. The choices we make are, in short, a matter for our conscience. I do not see why this should not apply in liberalism if it must in religion.

The problem with secular fundamentalism is that it refuses to see that the choices we make sometimes are pro religion, or pro the collective of institutionalism. To them this is nothing but brainwash, or worse stupidity.

It is most striking how narrow, biased and even illiberal liberalism can be when under the clutches of this form of secular fundamentalism. Someone termed it a “feeling of restless anger, which seemed to be in search of a cause”. Hence the present call for the pope to be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity” on grounds of his purported role in protecting guilty clergy from prosecution.

The sad part is that this call does not come from malcontents, but from respected members of secular communities and institutions who want to make hatred for institutionalised religion a mainstream cause for populist mobilisation. It would be a sad day if these frustrated activists were to gain a shred of the popularity they seek, which is obviously seamlessly bound with their individual hatred for religion, and inability to create room for faith in their thinking.

Prejudice against religion, rather than sober reasoning, influences much of secular thinking in our times, laced with the rallying words “freedom” and “individual choice” — as if choosing religious faith was something against individual choice or freedom. Poke a stick into their prejudices, and you will get a gushing fount of personal miseries posturing as concern for freedom and the rest.

Many people, instead of taking responsibility for the choices they’ve made in life, find it easier to blame it on some sinister institution today. And what is more exposed to that than a timeless Church with some sinful clerics?