Saturday’s issue of The Guardian wasn’t exactly a souvenir edition for the pope’s imminent visit to England but it had several articles on Catholicism.
Under the headline “The Vatican is a nest of devils” Sinead O’Connor was given two pages to share her views on religion. Page 17 had a report on child abuse by clergy in Belgium. Ben Goldacre devoted his Bad Science feature to the recent discovery that the official Catholic position is against the use of condoms and page 11 was given over to a feature headlined “Atheists, activists and apathy await pope”.
There has been a gap in the market for a paper with scarifying stories about the Whore of Babylon since Ian Paisley was obliged to close down the Protestant Telegraph in 1982. It looks like “the world’s leading liberal voice” has decided to fill it. Channel 4 has spotted the niche too. Peter Tatchell is presenting a documentary on the general malignity of Catholicism and by the purest chance there’s a feature on the Belgian abuse cases on its news show tomorrow night.
Here’s my theory.
The secular, liberal left doesn’t like religion any more than it is partial to revolutionary Marxism. Making rude remarks about the less appealing parts of some Muslim or Orthodox Jewish practice might blur the distinction with people like the EDL. You don’t want to do that but you still have to let off steam about how cross religion makes you.
Who is it really easy to take a pop at? Christian fundamentalists in England are an insignificant minority. It’s pretty hard to get outraged by Anglicanism. The Catholics are the obvious targets. Much of their senior management have been compromised by involvement in the cover ups; their rituals and costumes are flamboyant and often ludicrous and they are generally perceived as alien and marginal in English society.
“Foreign, dirty, poor and ignorant” aren’t just some of the usual epithets Mrs Mac uses when describing me. The historian Eamon Duffy applied them to the view of Catholics in England since mass Irish migration to the country in the nineteenth century. He was backed up in this opinion by the Tory David Starkey in a radio interview they did together. Starkey used the example of his own mother to illustrate the depth of historic anti-Catholic prejudice in England and the endless flow of reports and articles which a lot of Catholics would be entitled to find offensive suggest that its got a few decades left in it.
Liam redux 
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