Is the Pope Catholic?

It’s not a trick question.

After thirteen years of Catholic schooling you’d think I might know the answer. But I saw Sinead O’Connor on the telly this week saying the pope did not own the church. She said she thought it belonged to the people, it’s “our church”, she said, and basically indicated he could get lost for all she cared.

And then, the next morning, I heard on the radio that since the Catholic Church couldn’t convince its members to pay to pray, they were rounding up busloads full of school kids in an effort to fill the stadiums in which Pope Benedict XVI will be appearing over the next few days.

Which led me to start thinking about whom this visit was for. The State is paying, right, so it must be a visit for the British people?

But if even the Catholics aren’t particularly interested, who is?

The gay and lesbian community don’t want the pope to visit. Supporters of women’s rights don’t want the pope to visit. Scientists don’t want the pope to visit. Those protesting the massive cuts in public service spending and objecting to the £10-12 million cost to the taxpayer don’t want the pope to visit. (That £10-12 million figure, incidentally, does not cover policing costs, which will come out of existing, massively slashed, police budgets). I, as an ordinary woman, brought up Catholic but now non-practicing, do not want the pope to visit.

So who wants the pope to visit?

Gordon Brown, so it seems. Yes, he invited the most unpopular pope in living memory to Britain at the cost of the taxpayer. A spokesman told the BBC at the time:

“The PM is obviously delighted at the prospect of a visit from Pope Benedict XVI to Britain.

“It would be a moving and momentous occasion for the whole country and he would undoubtedly receive the warmest of welcomes.”

Hmmm. No doubt we’ll be questioning Gordy’s judgement for some time to come on this and other things. To be fair, though, David Cameron also weighed in on the delighted stakes, saying, firstly (of course), that he was delighted, and then:

“Such a visit – the first in over a quarter of a century – would be greatly welcomed not only by Roman Catholics but by the country as a whole.”

Um, are these people really claiming to have their collective fingers on the pulse of the British electorate?

That deals with the current PM and his predecessor, so what about the one before that, the Catholic convert, Tony Blair.

It’s not for nothing he waited till he was out of office to convert to Catholicism. And, I mean, do you blame him for converting? Which Church would you pray in after you’d orchestrated the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and the destruction of two nations in the face of overwhelming opposition by your own constituents? Probably the same Church that hides, covers up and forgives paedophiles. If they can forgive child molesters, they can forgive Tony, right?

You’ve got to hand it to him – he was always very savvy. I could have swallowed an invitation sent by him; it would have been like an official, public absolving of his sins. But, as I say, Tony was too savvy to believe in his wildest dreams that the British public would support a State-sponsored visit by a pope embroiled in one of the biggest controversies the Catholic Church has faced in the past century.

Gordy probably deserves some credit. There is kind of a reason for the pope’s invitation to visit. Apparently some dead bloke called Cardinal Newman is about to be ‘beatified’, which means he’s one step closer to becoming a saint. And what miracle did Cardinal Newman perform, exactly, to deserve this honour? Well it seems he didn’t actually ‘perform’ anything much, not while he was alive anyway. An American deacon, Jack Sullivan, claims he was cured of all pain after praying to Cardinal Newman in 2001 – 111 years after the Cardinal’s death.

Really?

I will let Richard Dawkins speak for me on that subject.

Back to Gordon. Always hoping to give the guy some credit, I will acknowledge the fact that the pastoral costs of the visit have to be met by the Catholic Church in Britain. Not the Vatican, mind you – one of the world’s richest institutions – but the Catholic Church in Britain. This sum is expected to amount to roughly £7 million. As of this week, the Church had raised £5.1 million, £4 million of which came from rich Catholics (it is unclear if the Blairs donated).

And how are they raising the rest? By charging people to go to the mass and asking for donations in the collection plate at Sunday mass.

The Catholic Church has a massively expanding population here, mainly thanks to immigrants from Poland, Latin America and Africa. It is estimated that there are just over 5 million Catholics in England and Wales, making up 9.6 per cent of the population. In Scotland, the estimate is 700,000, representing 14 per cent of the population. This, however, is only an estimate since many immigrant Catholics are here illegally.

A report by the Cambridge-based Von Hugel Institute in 2007 entitled “The Ground of Justice” found that Catholic Churches in London were being overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing numbers attending mass. Some parishes began running services all day Sunday to meet demand and many were acting as de facto job centres. The report urged the leadership of the Catholic Church to act immediately to help the migrants and recommended investment in new resources to do so.

So it’s a good time for the pope to come to Britain – a little meet and greet, if you will, of the new members of the only Christian Church to be growing in numbers in Britain.

And how does it respond?

By getting poorly paid immigrant workers to chip in in the Sunday collection. And with £7 million to raise, it’s no small feat. I can just see the Polish workers in the pews figuring out how to donate a little more out of the wage they receive from working as a carer at an old people’s home. If the extra £2 million is to be raised this week, those Polish builders might have to start charging an average British wage and then where will the renovation plans of the British nation be? Up the creek, that’s where, along with the pope and several Belgian bishops.

It’s not that I mind, particularly, about the pope coming to Britain. Free speech and all that. (Plus, I remember when I was in primary school in Australia and the pope visited there, we all got a day off. It was summer and I played slip and slide on my best friend’s front lawn. I wouldn’t want to deprive any British Catholic school kids that kind of privilege.) It’s just that I object to the way it’s being paid for. Even more than the cost to the State, I object to the Catholic Church charging people to go to mass. They insist they are not charging people to go to mass, they are merely asking people to contribute to the travel and accommodation costs of the pope. Tickets were originally £25 a pop for the beatification ceremony, although I now believe the rent-a-crowd are hopping on buses for free. Accommodation costs include 30 Vatican officials staying at the Goring Hotel in Belgravia where the cheapest room is £375 a night.

What happened to the vow of poverty? Did it somewhere along the line turn into a “vow to keep the parishioners in poverty by making them pay for our excessive travel and accommodation costs, all while we sit on one of the world’s largest – and most secretly guarded – fortunes?”

Nobody knows for sure how much the Catholic Church is worth, such is the notorious secrecy of the Vatican, but it is undoubtedly the world’s richest institution. The Italian-born Vatican critic Avro Manhattan wrote a book, The Vatican Billions, in 1983 that quoted the United Nations World Magazine estimate that the Vatican owned several billion dollars worth of solid gold, some of it kept here in Britain. His conservative estimate of the Vatican’s share portfolio came in at more than $500 million (bear in mind this was more than 20 years ago), and the gold and shares were just the tip of the iceberg. But even this man, who spent much of his life studying the Roman Catholic Church, had to admit defeat.

“The Catholic church is the biggest financial power, wealth accumulator and property owner in existence. She is a greater possessor of material riches than any other single institution, corporation, bank, giant trust, government or state of the whole globe. The pope, as the visible ruler of this immense amassment of wealth, is consequently the richest individual of the twentieth century. No one can realistically assess how much he is worth in terms of billions of dollars," Manhattan wrote.

And yet here comes the pope and his entourage on the will of the British taxpayer and the collection plates of immigrant workers.

Selling tickets to mass.

Maybe the Church is hoarding its billions in preparation to pay the many thousands of victims who suffered child abuse at the hands of Catholic priests? It’s a thought, but I doubt it.

So, is the pope Catholic? Maybe the pope represents Catholics and maybe he doesn’t. None of the Catholics I know seem to believe in him or the Church’s stance on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including stem cell research and contraception to name but two. The views and teachings of the pope and the Catholic Church are anathema to some of the most basic tenets of British society (indeed any free society) and I therefore object to my taxes being spent on his extravagant visit. The pope, and the whole Catholic Church, are irrelevant to me and to most British people.

So, as a Catholic, will I be marking the pope’s visit? I certainly will be – in the protest march. I think Tim Minchin said it best when he said:

"Fuck the motherfucker."

Only narcissists need read

I was a bit surprised he didn't ask me out

I don’t love Bret Easton Ellis’ latest book, Imperial Bedrooms.

Of course, you probably never could love a Bret Easton Ellis book, but you can enjoy his writing. You can admire the way he captures an idea. You can admire the way he uses the simplest prose to paint a picture of horrific proportions, and at the same time, to just convey the everyday.

So you love it, but you don’t love it in the way you love Jane Austen as a teenager or, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez or William Boyd in Any Human Heart.


Imperial Bedrooms feels to me too much like a justification of the book itself.

The first pages of the book are spent painstakingly trying to disassociate the author from Clay. It feels very much like Bret Easton Ellis’ attempt to disavow Less Than Zero as an autobiography.

And why is he so interested in doing that? Not because he’d rather be Patrick Bateman. Here is my theory: He’s just returned to LA, the city his books so defile. He’s lonely, he’s bored. He re-reads Less Than Zero and he does not want to believe – cannot believe – that he was ever Clay. If he’s to be happy in LA he can never have been Clay. So, in Imperial Bedrooms, he turns Clay into a monster as if to prove that Clay is not himself; as if to say: “See! I told you I wasn’t Clay – look how he turned out!”

I confess: I am a fairly new recruit to the fan club of B.E.E. His books always seemed too horrific to me, too uncomfortable, too willing to shock with violence and sex and drugs; and, anyway, aren’t violence and sex and drugs the oldest tricks in the book if you want to shock?

Reading Less Than Zero recently, I saw something else. I heard the words. I read the minutiae. I was hooked. Then I went to a reading of his in London. And I was in love.

So I love him, but I don’t love his latest book. It feels forced, false, flat, which may – or may not – contribute to the outstanding use of language on some of the pages. The banality, passivity and absolute apathy of the language, tone and narration make the masterpiece.

Take this passage, for example:

The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. The real Julian Wells was murdered over 20 years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location. His head was crushed – his face struck with such force that it had partly folded in on itself – and he had been stabbed so brutally that the L.A. coroner’s office counted one hundred fifty-nine wounds from three different knives, many of them overlapping. His body was discovered by a group of kids who went to CalArts and were cruising through the streets off of Hillhurst in a convertible BMW looking for a parking space. When they saw the body they thought the “thing” lying by a trash bin was – and I’m quoting the first Los Angeles Times article on the front page of the California section about the Julian Wells murder – “a flag”. I had to stop when I hit upon that word and start reading the article again from the beginning. The students who found Julian thought this because Julian was wearing a white Tom Ford suit (it had belonged to him but it wasn’t something he was wearing the night he was abducted) and their immediate reaction seemed halfway logical since the jacket and pants were streaked with red. (Julian had been stripped before he was killed and then re-dressed.) But if they thought it was a “flag” my immediate question was: then where was the blue? If the body resembled a flag, I kept wondering, then where was the blue? And then I realized: it was his head. The students thought it was a flag because Julian had lost so much blood that his crumpled face was a blue so dark it was almost black.

The kids went to CalArts. They were driving a convertible BMW. They were looking for a parking space near Hillhurst. Julian was wearing a white Tom Ford suit that did belong to him but he wasn’t wearing it when he was abducted. These details, these everyday observations, make the prose both easier to read and harder to swallow. As I said, they make the masterpiece.

Yes, I can say masterpiece and also say I think the work is a slightly boring, indulgent piece of narcissism. Maybe I can say it because I am a new fan. A new devotee so willing to be pleased and yet so let down – like a young woman awaiting her first time with a guy she's lusted over for years only to end up thinking, “Is that it?”

Or maybe I think it’s boring and narcissistic because I am a narcissist and it all just seems so…. run of the mill. So what if Clay’s a narcissist? Not all narcissists have to be demonic. B.E.E’s just trying to prove a point about how damaging narcissism can be. Doesn’t Clay say all writers are narcissists?

Am I really a narcissist?

The story is so horrifying in parts that it totally desensitises me. Hooking up with my 25-year-old neighbour starts to seem like just as big a deal as hiring two prostitutes to beat each other up and watch them eat their own faeces.

And there I go, making it about me again.

Am I a narcissist? Am I a narcissist just like the Clay we are all made to hate in Imperial Bedrooms?

“Not everything’s about you.”

Maybe I don’t like it because in its pages I see a mirror reflecting my own horrific qualities? I’m not talking about the sick sex stuff. I’m talking about Clay’s complete inability to believe that there are things bigger than him, that don’t involve him in any way and that he can’t control.

What stops me from loving (or owning up to loving?) a B.E.E book is that all the things that lead to the terrible state of shock are the things you can’t believe (the things you would never do), the things that you don’t want to believe about yourself.

What I am trying to say, I guess, is this: As much as you revile Bret Easton Ellis' protagonists, you cannot help but relate to them. And that is the work of a genius.

Which brings me to the inscription in the front of the book.

“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye