Over the years I've occasionally been asked by colleagues to fill in blank taxi receipts and sign them with a false name so that they can claim the money as business expenses. Even though this might have been for a legitimate work journey, it has always thrown me into paroxysms of moral torment.I recognise that it's terribly wrong - not to mention a serious criminal offence - to collude in a fraud. But then a part of me thinks it would be a worse sin if I refused to cooperate.
After all, taxi drivers frequently dish out blank receipts with a knowing wink, thinking they're being helpful to shifty-looking folk like me. Why should my friends be denied reimbursement for properly incurred expenses, just because I happen to be a prig with a visceral aversion to forgery?
Now, most people would either sign or refuse to sign the wretched receipt and have done with it.
But I've always put myself through this excruciating ethical inquisition before making up my mind. Whichever option I've chosen - and I've plumped for both in my time - I've always bitterly regretted my decision for weeks afterwards.
Dilemmas
If you ask why I get so worked up about these moral dilemmas, I'll have to admit that it's probably because I'm a Roman Catholic. I'm a lousy one, mind, who hardly ever goes to church.
Indeed, I sometimes catch myself praying fervently to Almighty God that He will forgive me for my inability to believe in Him (and if you can unravel that paradox, you're a lot cleverer than I am).
If you ask why I get so worked up about these moral dilemmas, I'll have to admit that it's probably because I'm a Roman Catholic. I'm a lousy one, mind, who hardly ever goes to church.
Indeed, I sometimes catch myself praying fervently to Almighty God that He will forgive me for my inability to believe in Him (and if you can unravel that paradox, you're a lot cleverer than I am).
But I'm an RC all the same, with an RC mindset, burdened by two millennia of Catholic guilt.
From my earliest years, I've wished that I'd been brought up in my father's Church as a member of the good old C. of E., instead of being saddled with my mother's Catholicism.
This had a lot to do with every schoolboy's horror of being different, and the fact that from the age of eight I was one of only half a dozen Catholics in a school of 100 boys.
My Anglican schoolmates used to tease me constantly, chanting "arsee, arsee" (RC, RC), accusing me of treacherous loyalty to a foreign Pope and mocking my supposed belief that a priest could turn a piece of bread into flesh, muscle and bone by uttering a magic spell.
(In fact, the differences between Catholic and Protestant doctrine over Communion are so minute that it's a constant wonder to me why so many thousands of gallons of blood have been spilt over it since the Reformation.)
Suddenly, however, I find that I'm no longer in a minority and that for the first time since Henry VIII, Roman Catholicism is about to become the majority religion of the United Kingdom. This is an astonishing development in our social history, which would have been utterly unbelievable as recently as my schooldays 40 years ago.
There are plenty of demographic reasons, to be sure, for the resurgence of Catholicism in the UK.
One is Rome's insistence that the children of mixed marriages must be brought up as RCs. Indeed, my father was made to sign an undertaking that he would bring up all his children as Catholics before my devout mother was allowed to marry him.
Another is the tendency of Catholics to have more children than Protestants, which owes as much to culture and family tradition as to the Pope's hostility to contraception.
(Many, perhaps most British Catholics, including myself, guiltily ignore the Church's teaching on birth control, but we still seem to end up with large families.)
Tenacious
More recently, of course, Catholic church attendance figures have been swollen by the huge influx of migrants from Eastern Europe - and these are the people who are pushing me and my mother's side of the family into the majority.
More recently, of course, Catholic church attendance figures have been swollen by the huge influx of migrants from Eastern Europe - and these are the people who are pushing me and my mother's side of the family into the majority.
But none of this fully explains why Catholics tend to hold to their faith so much more tenaciously than Protestants, surviving centuries of persecution to become the dominant Church once again.
The answer to that, surely, lies in the rock-steady certainties preached by the Vatican in a changing world desperately crying out for something to cling to.
Meanwhile the C. of E. - a branch of the intelligentsia, like the BBC - has bent and swayed with every puffof passing fashion.
You won't catch a Catholic priest suggesting like David Jenkins, the former Anglican Bishop of Durham, that the Resurrection may have been just a "conjuring trick with bones".
For my lot, Christ rose bodily from the dead - take it or leave it.
Nor will you find the Catholic hierarchy tearing itself apart over the rights and wrongs of homosexual intercourse. For Rome, it's always been plain wrong and always will be - never mind what the Guardian may think.
(Mind you, practically everything else is wrong, too, so gays needn't feel picked on. I well remember one of my journalistic heroes, Auberon Waugh, writing that he could think of only two pleasures that hadn't been specifically condemned by the Vatican: sniffing tangerine peel and riding a Solex-powered bicycle in France without a crash-helmet.)
Don't misunderstand me. There's a lot that I love about the Anglican Church - the beautiful buildings (stolen from us, of course), the sublime Book of Common Prayer, the Authorised Version of the Bible and the hymns. I love its come-all-ye tolerance, too.
(Is it really true that the old Army recruitment form used to say by the box marked religion "If none, write C. of E."?)
Rudderless
There's much that I dislike, too, about the Catholic Church - the kiddy-fiddling clergy, the banal new liturgy, the 'liberation theology' that smacks more of Marxism than Christianity; oh, and our tendency to bang on about our religion (sorry).
There's much that I dislike, too, about the Catholic Church - the kiddy-fiddling clergy, the banal new liturgy, the 'liberation theology' that smacks more of Marxism than Christianity; oh, and our tendency to bang on about our religion (sorry).
But I would never dream of converting. It would be like switching from full-strength Marlboro Reds to Silk Cut Extra Mild.
Funny, isn't it, that you so often hear of Anglicans converting to Catholicism, but only very rarely the other way round?
There's a lesson in all this for the Government. Do you know that in modern Britain a burglar stands only one chance in 32 of getting caught - and then, as we learned the other day, a smaller than 50-50 chance of being sent to jail, even when he has a string of more than ten previous convictions?
So what's stopping us all from becoming burglars? I'll tell you what: it's the belief, mercifully still held by most of us, that burglary is morally wrong.
Instead of dumping on the Catholic Church from a great height, as they did over their insistence that church adoption agencies should farm children out to gay couples, wouldn't it be a good idea if Ministers heeded the concerns of what is fast becoming the most powerful force for morality in this morally rudderless land?
Come to think of it, to judge by MPs' travelling expenses, released this week, a healthy dose of the terror of Hellfire wouldn't do our legislators much harm either.
Which reminds me. Let me end by begging one thing of my colleagues: please, please don't ask me to forge a taxi receipt. Get somebody else to do it. (Now, there's a moral cop-out for a Catholic - and another sure-fire ticket to Hell.)
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No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
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Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce