In Caesar’s Pocket

Apart from his being a cardinal, which is pretty daunting, George Pell, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, is a very large man of imposing, if not menacing, presence. He has great intellectual acuity, a good education (DPhil, Oxon), is forthright, witty, and writes well. These qualities make life at least purgatorial for his enemies, with whom he is credited for a fair number. Serves them right.

The cardinal is also a great shaker of the certainties of non-enemies. His new collection of essays, God and Caesar, published jointly by Connor Court and the American Catholic University Press, presents a forceful case for church involvement in politics, given an intriguing ambience by the observation that Jesus was not a political activist but “subversive of all politics”.

I have always been rather impressed by the biblical abjuration to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”, and a keen, not to say noisy, supporter of a signposted separation of church and state. It is a post-Reformation position that enjoys wide popularity. However, Pell’s measured argument in God and Caesar that Western society is the creation of Christianity, and cannot survive a divorce from it, has raised an unfamiliar concern that I may have fallen too deep into Caesar’s pocket.

Pell argues that, without the influence of Christian values, the US Constitution and the United Nations charter would be profoundly different documents. Many great civilisations, he says, citing Rome before the advent of Christianity, showed no concern for social justice and, in fact, considered such ideas a sign of weakness. He then asks rhetorically:

“What are the sources of a secular society’s values? Can it be taken for granted that Westerners will always be committed to human rights and concern for the poor? Or does the commitment to these values need to be renewed with each generation? If so, where does the energy for this renewal come from? … And what sustains the commitment against the powerful appeals of individualism and consumerism and the fantastic rewards that come from material success for the lucky few?”

Well, I respond defensively, separation of church and state applies to power exercised by two institutions and does not mean that Christians (and members of other faiths) should not be active in politics, guided by religious principles. On the contrary. However, I believe, perhaps more tentatively after reading God and Caesar, that this work is best left to civilians—basically, in a democracy, to individual voters consulting their religious beliefs at the polling booth. The major role of the clergy, it can be reasonably if not definitively argued, is to guide and instruct the civilians in the traditions and tenets of their religion.

My attitude to political priests is, I guess, coloured a little by acquaintance with Evelyn Waugh’s sinister Jesuit, Father Rothschild, often to be seen pedalling his bicycle around Whitehall in the early hours of the morning. Waugh did not specify what Father Rothschild’s politics were, but his role as a stealthy infiltrator of the political process was clear. Although aware of Waugh’s masked reference to the Jesuit martyrs who stealthily infiltrated Elizabeth I’s totalitarian England, and not unattracted by the notion of Father Rothschild pitting his wits against cabinet ministers and civil service mandarins, I suspect him of neglecting his priestly duties, if only by staying out so late that he would inevitably be tired at morning Mass.

While a bit censorious of Father Rothschild as a political string-puller, his modern successors, spouting their sometimes foolish personal opinions in counterfeit ex cathedra style, stretch to their limits my probably meagre resources of Christian charity.

A singularly disingenuous interview given by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to a British Muslim magazine last November came close to emptying my store. (A churchman becomes as open a target as any other controversialist when he wanders out of his protected zone to lay down secular dogma.)

According to the Archbishop, as reported in the Times, the United States “wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain in its imperial heyday”. Contrasting America’s attempt to “accumulate influence and control” with Britain’s governing colonial India, he said:

“It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it … It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and you can move on and other people will put it back together—Iraq, for example.”

Poppycock, as anybody is entitled to say to a bishop when he puts aside his mitre to give Caesar a bollocking by falsifying history. Reliable reports have India colonised and looted by the rapacious and ruthless East India Company, a capitalist church separated by the thinnest of membranes from the state. History also records Britain’s being driven meekly out of India because the Second World War had drained its capacity to hold down an overseas empire, as it had done to other European colonial powers.

No sub-continental state had bombarded London, as Islamists did New York and Washington, to invite the bursts of violence inflicted on Indians by the East India Company.

Australia is over-populated with priests and bishops as uninhibited as Archbishop Williams in giving their opinions. The most prolific of these is a conglomerate, the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference. In the two years 2006 and 2007, the Conference issued more than 130 media statements and position papers, around a quarter of which dealt with unequivocally secular issues.

Among these was the incarceration at the American military prison at Guantanamo of the Australian collaborator with Islamist terrorists, David Hicks. The Bishops’ Conference asserted in December 2006 that, “according to reputable human rights agencies” the conditions under which Hicks was being held were “tantamount to torture”. When a robustly healthy Hicks was sprung from Guantanamo last year, after a plea-bargaining admission of guilt, it became clear that the bishops had been listening to the wrong human rights agencies: other reputable ones had described conditions at Guantanamo as superior to those of most civil prisons in Western countries.

The bishops also took strong stands on immigration, income distribution, workplace agreements and Middle Eastern and indigenous affairs. The ubiquity of their interventions concerns me more than the quality of their judgment. Supply seems significantly to exceed demand. Prior to the recent federal election, for instance, the Conference issued an eight-point advice to Catholic voters, its summary encouraging Catholics to:

“look beyond their own individual needs and apply a different test—the test of the common good. Catholic tradition holds that the common good is underpinned by the promotion and protection of human dignity. Implicit in seeking the common good is the desire to serve the poor, the marginalised and the forgotten in our society.”

For all but the compulsively suspicious, the bishops’ election guide was even-handed and unexceptionable. But was there any need for Catholic bishops to take a corporate stance on the election? Did it serve any good purpose, have any effect?

By corporatising themselves in 1959, with a permanent secretariat that has doubtless included a few Father Humphrey Applebys, the bishops created a need for product—the product being, in the case of their Conference, expressions of opinion, which over the years have developed into an assembly-line flood. Lacking the intellectual edge and attributable responsibility of individual argument, the consensus (in some cases, perhaps only collectivist) positions promulgated by the bishops tend, I suspect, to irritate at least as many people as they inform.

How have lay Christian activists influenced Australian public life? Writing in the Australian after the November election, David Barnett, a knowledgeable Canberra journalist and biographer of John Howard, dobbed in the Religious Right as significant contributors to the Coalition’s defeat. They were the force, Barnett wrote, that drove John Howard “away from the modern and the metro-sexual … controlling pre-selections, getting their right-to-life members into safe seats, forcing a socially conservative agenda on the party”.

Assuming party infiltration to have been as thorough as Barnett believes, the conclusion must be that the Religious Right (there doesn’t appear to be a non-clerical Religious Left) is a choreographer of defeat, with, in the absence in Australia of America’s strong evangelical tradition, little penetration of the hearts and minds of voters.

The Religious Right is generally considered to include the Family First Party, its policies declared by its name, and the most energetic and successful presenter, among the activist organisations, of its own parliamentary candidates; the Baptist-aligned Christian Lobby, led by the vigorous and engaging former SAS commander, Jim Wallace, and advocating the Ten Commandments as the appropriate code of conduct for participants in public and political life; four other (than Family First) groups promoting family interests, including the Fatherhood Foundation and the Australian Family Association, mainly Catholic, a descendant of B.A. Santamaria’s National Civic Council, and an opponent of abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage; the Festival of Light and its political wing, the Christian Democratic Party, an evangelical outfit founded and led by Rev. Fred Nile, a member of the New South Wales Upper House; two anti-feminist groups, the Endeavour Forum and Above Rubies; Right to Life, Australia, anti-abortion campaigners; the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist sect; Media Standards, Australia, which aims to cleanse the media of sex, violence and Left radicalism.

A disparate assembly, one might conclude, and perhaps even less likely to find harmony within their own ranks than the ALP factions. The National Alliance of Christian Leaders, which aspires to bring together politically active Christian organisations, has its work cut out.

Having, so to speak, swept the table clear of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference and the Religious Right (as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury when in the embrace of the zeitgeist) what have we left to defend us against false gods? All-out secularism would be unacceptable in Australia, where, whatever their practice, 70 per cent of people declare religious belief, 64 per cent of them Christians, according to the 2006 census. Secular “ethics”, lacking substantial moral and philosophical foundations, provide frail protection. Delivering the Centre for Independent Studies’ 2006 Acton Lecture, the author and journalist Paul Kelly observed that: “There is recognition that the idea of the state as value-neutral was a phony proposition.” It would be harder, I believe, for a declared atheist to become prime minister of contemporary Australia than for even a practising Catholic, or—to relinquish this safe stance—a Muslim.

The great abstraction, the church, remains on call and, now I have been compelled to think it over, is probably indispensable.

Bishop Tom Frame, former chief Anglican chaplain to the armed forces, argues that there is no constitutional separation of church and state in Australia, only provisions guaranteeing freedom to practise religion and excluding the favouring by the state of one religion over another. Therefore, Frame reasons, there is no justification for impoverishing political debate by excluding religious perspectives.

Before he became prime minister, Kevin Rudd invited “the church to speak directly to the state”. This would take a while for secularists to get used to. One recalls the ruckus that broke out when Cardinal Pell and the Catholic Archbishop of Perth, Denis Hickey, warned Catholic members of the state parliaments that they would “loosen their bonds with the church” by supporting legislation authorising the research use of embryonic stem cells. This measured pastoral counselling was inflated by controversialists to a threat of excommunication and anathema. Green Party members accused the two archbishops of committing contempt of parliament, and referred their cases to privileges committees. The committees took no action, although the speaker of the West Australian Upper House wrote impertinently to Archbishop Hickey of his own accord, instructing him not, in future, to address MPs in so personal a manner.

As it turned out, the New South Wales and West Australian politicians may have been hustled into premature action by importuning scientists. A few months after they passed their legislation (with the support of most Catholic members), new research indicated that adult stem cells, collected without harm to the donor, might, through replication, provide all the material needed for research into therapeutic cloning.

In any case, this seems a classic instance of justified intervention by churchmen in an issue profoundly involving the traditions and values of religion. Scientific ethics have become immensely dishevelled. Evangelical Darwinians preach of our being on course to become self-made Supreme Beings, if not today, guaranteed for tomorrow. “Because we can,” is effectively the response of biotechnologists queried about their reasons for undertaking epochally risky projects. Clearly there is need here for a moral pathfinder.

In God and Caesar, Cardinal Pell asserts responsibility for the “moral ecology of society”, a phrase borrowed from the American Catholic philosopher Michael Novak. Pell writes:

“The argument that personal moral views should not be imposed on others when it comes to lawmaking is incoherent and misleading … When arguments [for example] for abortion and euthanasia are based on rights, the appeal to rights is a moral argument, and it is this appeal to moral authority that gives force to laws enshrining rights.”

He adds: “Privatisation of belief does not favour neutrality. It is a way of silencing opponents and favours the dominant secular cultural identity.”

The cardinal is, however, an advocate of selective intervention by his church which, he writes, “does not have to take a view on many or most political questions … When no basic questions of faith and morals are at stake … confidence in the ability of Catholics to think for themselves is appropriate.”

A corollary to this view is, I think, the comment of Peter Jensen, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, after attending a preview of The Da Vinci Code: “If anybody takes this seriously, it is evidence of the failure of Christian education.”