Almost a year ago there seemed for a moment to be a meeting of minds
between the old man who is the Pope and a young man who is Prime
Minister.
As Pope Benedict left Britain after his visit he said that he
had been grateful “to have the opportunity… to share some thoughts…
about the contribution that the religions can offer to the development
of a healthy pluralistic society”.
Only a few moments before David
Cameron had responded to those thoughts as follows: “I believe that we
can all share in your message of working for the common good and that we
all have a social obligation to each other, to our families and
communities.”
The common bond of which the Pope had spoken, he
said, had been “an incredibly important part of your message to us.
And
it’s at the heart of the new culture of social responsibility we want to
build in Britain. People of faith – including our 30,000 faith-based
charities – are great architects of that new culture.”
The Prime
Minister was careful to keep two words out of his remarks: Big Society –
the slogan which, more than any other, summarise his
localist-flavoured, grassroots-dependent, traditionally-moored One
Nation ideal of what his Government should be all about.
He would
have done so in order not to drag the Pope into party politics, but was
evidently seeking to manoeuvre British Catholics in that direction.
The
Conservative Party, he was indicating, no longer holds that “there is no
such thing as society” – Margaret Thatcher’s words, and ones that
inflicted a slow-burning and decade-lasting reputational damage on the
Tories. We believe, he was suggesting, in solidarity – just as Catholics
do. And we believe in subsidiarity, too: that power is best exercised
when devolved down to the most local level. Your values and instincts
are as ours.
All this gives rise to a lot of questions. Did
Cameron really mean it? If so, was he right? And what should the
Church’s response be in any event?
Perhaps the best place to start is by
searching the Prime Minister and his team for any background in or
sympathy for the Church’s social teaching.
There is always a sprinkling
of Catholics at the top of Britain’s political parties, the most obvious
one in the Conservatives’ case being Iain Duncan Smith, their first
Catholic leader, since then triumphantly reinvented first as founder of
the Centre for Social Justice and now as Work and Pensions Secretary.
The
work of Duncan Smith has been directly inspired by the teachings of the
Church to which he converted.
But from Thatcher through Tony Blair to
Cameron himself, political parties have become increasingly centralised:
the best place to look when weighing up a leadership isn’t around the
Cabinet table but in the private office – among the tight-knit teams who
plan and execute political strategy.
None of the men (and, yes: it is
almost entirely men) who make up the Prime Minister’s inner circle have
ever shown much of an interest in Catholicism – George Osborne, the
Chancellor; Steve Hilton, the Prime Minister’s ideas guru; Andrew
Cooper, the newly appointed head of strategy; and Ed Llewellyn, the
chief of staff.
Merge Team Cameron into one individual, and you’d
have someone rather like the Prime Minister himself: privately educated,
metropolitan, liberal-minded, and if inclined to religion at all then
drawn to a reserved Christianity with a distinctly Anglican flavour.
(The Prime Minister, according to Boris Johnson, has compared the
difficulties of believing in God to the difficulty in picking up Magic
FM in the Chilterns.)
But to establish that no member of Team Cameron
has ever dived into the deep waters of Catholic social teaching is the
start and not the end of the story.
For that team has two utterly
different reactions to it – or, rather, to what it seems to think it
is. The first is suspicion; the second, enthusiasm.
The suspicion
is founded on the view that Catholicism’s social conservatism is at odds
with the age’s social liberalism.
This is drawn from
experience. Section 28, civil partnerships, gay adoption: party
discipline broke down in the voting lobbies over these issues, and the
lesson Cameron’s circle draw from this is that to align oneself with
Catholicism, especially over any matter relating to homosexuality, is to
consign oneself to division and defeat.
The enthusiasm is based on the
conviction that building the Big Society will be impossible without the
faith communities, including the Catholic Church, the second-largest
institutional player. It is based on reflection – on considering the
range and depth of the Church’s contribution to society.
The
Church can never become the property of one political party: indeed, its
teaching is wide enough to condemn only those ideologies that make gods
of class, race, capital or anything else.
But there is enough overlap
between the Prime Minister’s Big Society vision and its own for
cooperation to be possible: that his Downing Street team has no
emotional investment in Catholicism is irrelevant, and that its view of
the Church is conflicted is a fact of modern political life.
Dimly and
hesitantly, it’s possible to see the outlines of a settlement between
the Government and the Church.
For its part, the Government would
revisit its support for recent legislation, tearing up the rules and
regulations that prevent the Church from providing even more hospices,
homeless shelters, employment programmes, projects for people with
substance abuse problems and mental health difficulties, advice centres
for those who are in debt, counselling for people who’ve lost family
members and so on.
And for its part, the Church would review its
attachment to the 1945 settlement, bidding to run some hospitals –
which, after all, are institutions with Christian origins – setting up a
domestic equivalent of Caritas Europa and encouraging its schools to
become academies (if Michael Gove will give some ground over the
inclusion of religious education in the Baccalaureate).
The devil
would be in the detail, figuratively if not literally: at a time of
spending constraint it isn’t easy to see how all this would be
financed. But if there are questions about Downing Street’s commitment,
there are questions about the institutional Church’s response, too.
The
Catholic Education Service is skilled at lobbying on behalf of its
interests.
But the machinery of the bishops’ conference is small-scale,
and its staff have mostly been there for some time.
Continuity is often a
good thing, but in so far as Downing Street has a collective view of
the Catholic Church in Britain – and whether it has a fully formed one
is doubtful – it finds the Church bureaucracy timid and, in the literal
sense of the word, reactionary.
Responding to a big idea like the
Big Society requires, in the first instance, a lot of small competences:
reading the relevant Government documents, knowing who the main players
are, lifting one’s eyes beyond the ranks of familiar Catholic MPs.
Although the Archbishop of Westminster has given the scheme as warm a
response as is prudent, there is no sign that the conference is
grappling seriously with such a programme of work.
All the indications
are that while a few leading figures in the Church are willing to look
forward and test the Prime Minister on the ideals he championed as the
Pope departed, more are inclined reflexively to look back – towards the
familiar comfort zone of the 1945 settlement.