I seldom go to church these days, but when I do, it’s a bit like returning to a once loved home. I may not want to move back in, but I’m certainly comfortable there. I feel wanted, accepted, recognised. I know the routine. My head worries at the paradoxes. My heart listens to some faint but enticing music, beyond all that. And – if I’m honest – it may well be that the Catholic church is a little like Hotel California – you can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave.
I have written for the Scottish Review before about the church, the child abuse scandal and my own marginal experience of hushed-up paedophilia in another context. But the visit of Pope Benedict has provoked more online vitriol than I have ever encountered and – moreover – has provoked a wholly unexpected response in myself. I find myself distressed and angry, to the point of physical pain. Why? Because I’m gobsmacked by the rudeness of so many of the comments. What most of them amount to is, ‘You’re utterly deluded’. This is not the stuff of real debate.
If this could be dismissed as the usual internet trolls at play, it would be easy enough to ignore. And I’ve had plenty of heated, face-to-face debates about religion with friends over the years. I work in theatre. I’ve written plays about belief. There have been long and sometimes emotionally charged discussions, late into the night. And why not? Everyone has the right to a point of view. Everyone has the right to their own beliefs. But these debates were always conducted with a certain amount of decorum. We were never crudely dismissive of each other, however strongly we felt. And we never became gratuitously and personally rude to one another.
To be fair, some of the online debates have been like that: interesting, thought-provoking and allowing an insight into various points of view. But far more of them involved exclamatory and simplistic posts, glib and ill-informed insults from people who, in any other context, would consider themselves to be liberal intellectuals. Worse, one such post would invariably provoke a storm of additional comments. ‘Do people actually believe in a god or is it just faith as an obsessive compulsive syndrome?’ was one of the least offensive observations. ‘As for the Pope, he is not only blinded by his faith but struck brain dead,’ was another, along with a great many ugly and facile jokes, all hailed by the pack as the last word in wit and wisdom.
There is no debating in this context. Even the mildest rejoinder is flamed with such hostility that there is no possibility of further debate. They assert that they are neither militant nor aggressive but ‘just putting their side of the argument’. Which would be fine, so long as they don’t then label anyone who dares to disagree with them ‘a bloody fool’. I’m left wondering whether they are aware that for those of us who wrestle daily with tensions between the spiritual and the secular, this is about a bit more than some ‘sad old guy in a dress’.
