CAN a committed Christian be a conservative in politics? Apparently Tony Blair doesn't think so. The late Maurice Gorham, of BBC/RTE fame, went further: he argued that a true Christian must be a socialist. It's all a far cry from the days - not so very long ago - when Catholics were told that socialism, in theory as in practice, was contrary to faith and morals.
A far cry too from the occasion in the mid 1960s, when the question "Can a true socialist be a Roman Catholic?" hung over the eventually successful candidature of one Paul Johnson for the editorship of the New Statesman. Apparently he satisfied the trustees that his religious faith would not affect his editorial policies. Still, the then choice of a Catholic was as remarkable as would then have been a similar appointment to the Observer or, for that matter, The Irish Times.
However, tempora mutantur, and equally mutable, it would appear, are political convictions. Paul Johnson has long left his socialism far behind. In the present volume, though he denies being an ideologue, his dismissal of socialist thought is at least as doctrinaire as any of the dogmatic pronouncements of such "Marxist dons" as still survive. He happily records that the intellectual consensus has now belatedly joined the commonsense consensus that totalitarianism is the negation of morality. Nor does he appear to envisage the possibility of a non totalitarianist socialism.
And so, none of the great names of the British Left receives honourable mention - with the exception of the Earl of Longford, and that for non political reasons. On the other hand, Margaret Baroness Thatcher is the central figure in a visit to the Sistine Chapel ("kindly arranged by Pope John Paul II") in the company of "this Queen of Politics".
His description of Liberation Theology, then, as a quasi religious form of Marxism, will come, as no great surprise. But the accusation that it is "plainly and simply, an anti Christian heresy without any moral basis, and indeed, as experience in Latin America has show, a source of violence and evil", is as outrageous as it is insensitive to the martyrdoms this "heresy" has inspired in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala and elsewhere. It comes particularly ill from someone who is, according to the blurb, "one of Britain's leading historians" and the author of the bestselling "history" of our times.
For all that, Paul Johnson is clearly an honest man and a sincere Christian. His "personal pilgrimage" seems to follow the old Irish epigram that the pilgrim to Rome won't find Christ there unless he has travelled with him
Johnson is what the English call a "cradle Catholic", "well instructed" since early childhood, and proud of his later education? "by the Sisters of St Dominic", by the Christian Brothers, and by the Jesuits "at my public school". He is strong on moral absolutism and now repents his support for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. But despite all this, he is not without tolerance, and is caringly affectionate towards those close to him, not least when he regards them as hopelessly misguided. Even such a lost soul as Jean Paul Sartre was "not a bad fellow in some ways.
Having experienced "two happy days" as a National Serviceman, Johnson regards the British Army as, in general, "a dear old thing", and regards the Catholic Church in related terms: "a fallible human institution which has been capable of great enormities", but which, nevertheless, somehow "radiates the divine". Still, he does not "necessarily believe that the Commander in Chief is a military genius". And on one issue at least he parts company with the present C in C: he believes that "the all male priesthood . . . is a lost cause".
Whether this book will lead many others to find the God of whose presence the author is so strongly aware is open to question. Parts of it put my own teeth on edge. But then, I'm an Irish Catholic. And some kind of a leftie. {CORRECTION} 96042200088
