Prince of Darkness . . .

It might appear at times that I am presenting myself, however outlandishly it might seem, as a defender of the Catholic Church. Not necessarily so. My experience of an Irish Catholic upbringing left me with few, if any, nostalgic memories. By my time, the Church had long since become a machine, an institution, no different from any other institution in its reaction to threats and dangers. The problem for it was, however, that it was expected to be much more than that, and was likely to be held to much higher standards of accountability than your average secular institution. Which is why it is in the bind it is in at the moment.

My decision to involve myself in the broader debate wasn't particularly fuelled by any desire to defend the Catholic Church. Rather it was prompted by a relatively intimate knowledge of the forces seeking to bring it down—and that is what is ultimately afoot—and the consequences for human life and freedom and happiness should such forces be allowed to win.

I remember sometime around the late 1980s, an academic from either Oxford or Cambridge writing an op-ed piece in the Daily Telegraph bemoaning the loss of religion and speaking of the need to restore it—for the little people! To him religion was a method of social control, a true 'opium of the people', and certainly not something to be believed in by anyone of a rarified intellect similar to his own, an opinion which he made abundantly clear in the article. And one's instinctive reaction was to take the patronising little prat and give him a kicking—if such a thing had been possible.

There is no doubt that religion has been often used historically for the purposes of social control—for keeping the rich rich and the poor consoled in their poverty. This was often the remit of the institutional Church (indeed, the institutional churches), whose higher benefices were usually reserved for the upper classes.

Writing, for example, of Hungary around the time of the French Revolution, one historian could say that it 'boasted perhaps the largest nobility in Europe. There 75,000 Magnates, and lesser gentry, had things their own way. They owned all the land, had exclusive right to office, filled all the places in the Church, the Army and the Universities; like nobles elsewhere they were exempt from all regular and most special taxes' (The Empire of Reason: Henry Steele Commager, Phoenix, 1978).

Yet that is only one side of the story—the side of the corruption of religion, not of religion itself. Nor is it surprising that people should have turned against religion in such situations, coming to see it, not as part of the solution, but as a major element of the problem. Neither is it surprising that those with deeper agendas should often have sought to take advantage of the perception.

Yet the fact is that there is much more to religion than bishops touching up altar boys or simony or enforced sexual repression—for some reason, though it is in no way relevant, the opening sentence of Anthony Burgess's novel Earthly Pursuits keeps pushing itself into my mind: 'It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.'

As I say, there is more to religion than the faults that are being heaped at the door of its institutional arm. There is, as there has always been, even in pre-Christian and post-Christian times, a religion of the heart, found often among the least sophisticated of people, and truer in its instinct than much of the more elaborate dogma and ceremonial of the churches. Although this is not to suggest that such a naive faith is something necessarily lacking in the established churches either.

I used the phrase above, the 'post-Christian' era. And really I think that this describes the epoch we are living in. From as far back as the 18th century, the philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment tended to identify religion—and specifically Christianity, and specifically within Christianity, the Catholic Church—as the linch-pin holding together all the evils of the world that kept man in chains. Simply abolish religion was the more or less general prescription and men would become as gods.

Now the succeeding centuries, right up to the present moment, have acted as a laboratory for this view, as religion has become ever more increasingly marginalised. And has it produced a new and reformed human nature? Or has it instead uncorked the bottle and—outside of the limited world of the liberal and chattering classes—let the genie of human unregeneracy fly free? Are people on average, or even in total, any happier or any better as a result of the undermining of religion? Have men, indeed, become as gods?

Sociobiologists—basically another name for the Neo-Darwinists that we have been in previous mailings discussing, and who believe that there is nothing else in the universe, or nothing else needed to explain the universe, than simply the material processes of Darwinian evolution—use a phrase 'survival value'. What this means is that if something has survived over the countless aeons of human development, then it has done so simply because it has played a useful role in the evolution of mankind.

Which is why for them religion is a problem: go back to the remotest periods of recoverable knowledge and you find evidence of religious beliefs and practices. Therefore if religion, and the religious instinct, continue to survive today, then it is only because they have had a positive influence on the course of human development.

Forced to recognise this fact, the sociobiologists attempt to explain it away. Religion, the religious instinct, is purely an accident that—equally accidentally—happened to be favourable to our development as a social species. In itself it means nothing. It is just a happenstance thrown up by evolution that has proved useful to us, in much the same way as the circumstance of being double-jointed might be of benefit to a contortionist. Given their fundamentally materialist (atheistic) beliefs, what else are the sociobiologists to say?

A second string to the argument is the contention that even if a thing was beneficial to human development in the past, that does not mean that it is necessarily so any longer. This might be seen as a justification for the more aggressive school of scientific atheism—the Dawkinses and Hitchinses etc—whose aim isn't just the marginalisation of religion, but its annihilation.

And this raises the question, how do you destroy a religion or the religious outlook?

A new development in the field of genetic science—epigenetic theory—seems to offer the possibility that it might be possible to eradicate belief and the instinct to belief by radically changing the intellectual and cultural environment, and that any such change might also, to some extent, be transmissable down subsequent generations. [Indeed, although it is somewhat early to say yet with any certainty, epigenetic theory threatens to provide the possibility of a radical corrective to conventional theories of evolution.]

Such a programme for eliminating religious belief was attempted in the Soviet Union under Stalin, except that historical factors intervened before its conclusion, so that the jury must remain out on its actual efficacy. The German invasion of 1941 forced Stalin to take the Orthodox Church once again aboard, prompted by the cynical calculation that the Russian population might be more likely to fight and die for 'Mother Russia' than for communism.

A second arguable way of seeing off religion is to take it on at its own game. The French revolutionaries, post-1792, attempted to install a Cult of Reason in place of the Catholic religion, a process that included placing an actress, symbolising Reason, on a throne on the high altar of Notre Dame cathedral. Something similar was tried some fifty or so years later by Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, a philosophical movement which, broadly speaking, disallows the consideration of anything that cannot be factually proven, and which arguably underlies all the subsequent developments of materialistic and atheistic thought right up to our own day.

'Comte spent his old age devising for this Religion of Humanity an intricate system of priesthood, sacraments, prayers, and disciplines; and proposed a new calendar in which the names of pagan deities and mediaeval saints should be replaced by the heroes of human progress. As a wit put it, Comte offered the world all of Catholicism except Christianity' (The Story of Philosophy: Will Durant, Simon and Schuster, 1926).

The failure of both these attempts at creating man-made religions—religions that eschewed the divine—seems to demonstrate the inherent futility of the project.

The third, and most sinister, and most relevant, method of destroying a religion is to undermine it from within, to hollow it out to the extent that it inevitably collapses in on itself. This involves a Gramsci-ian type interventionism under which a head of pressure is built up for modernisation and liberal alterations to the liturgy and dogma of the religion concerned. Such movements are often led by provocateurs, people deliberately planted within the particular church to achieve the intended end—really, the interim end; for the ultimate end is always the destruction of the religion—which is basically to turn the church into a parody of itself. The supporters of such programmes—at least at rank-and-file level—are often naive and susceptible to manipulation; what Lenin in another context described as the 'useful idiots'.

If we take the Catholic Church, for example: at the moment it is under enormous pressure to make concession after concession, in the form of resignations and self-abnegations and apologies. The fact is, of course, that no amount of concessions is ever likely to be enough to satisfy the demands of those making them. Indeed, each concession is likely only to whet the appetite for new ones. For at the end, whether all those involved in the campaign perceive it or not, the real impetus is not for the renewal of the Chuch, but for its destruction.

The best recompense that the Church can make for its past failures is to ensure that they cannot happen in the future. Let it issue its apologies and make its compensatory payments and whatever else, but at some stage, if it is not to be destroyed, a line has to be drawn under the matter and a decision made: this far and no further.

No more than allowing, say, the mothers of children killed in motorcar accidents a decisive role in the framing of road traffic legislation, it does not make sense to expect the broader Catholic Church to surrender totally to the chorus of the damaged, and the cacophony of liberal cheerleaders urging them on from the stalls. This is not intended as either a dismissive or callous comment. But the fact is that, in both of the situations mentioned, there is likely to be too much emotion, too much hurt, too much of a reactive looking for vengeance, for it to be possible to arrive at any commonsense rational consensus.

People in general—and especially those who enjoy the luxury of not being immediately involved—need to stop and think and take a deep breath before they dig a hole that they may regret ultimately having got themselves into. The end result of giving in to pure emotion in any situation is to risk not just throwing out the bathwater, but often the baby with it as well.

Of course, on the other hand, the world is coming down around our ears, and there is no reason why the Catholic Church should be immune to the deficits—of ability, of intellect, of leadership, of honour—that are affecting all other institutions. With the rest of them, it may indeed be forced ultimately to fold its tent and steal off into the night—or at least into the desert, where, shorn of its wealth and power and perhaps much of its membership, it will have to undergo a long and painful process of self-renewal. And who is to say that this may not by the happiest option?

It is just that, in the meantime, things seem to be developing in such an unpleasant and hysterical manner.