Confessing Evangelical

A couple of interesting articles in the Saturday's Telegraph on the subject of the papacy. Damien Thompson wrote a fascinating piece on the Roman Catholic Church's delight and astonishment at how the British Establishment - past and present political leaders, the Royal Family, the Archbishop of Canterbury - have lined up to honour Pope John Paul II (Fr Michael Seed: "It was like a miracle ... This is a time of God's blessing on the earth").

His article includes some entertaining thoughts on Cherie Blair's mantilla ("Is Cherie wearing what I think she's wearing?" "Good God. I haven't seen a mantilla for 20 years") before going on to explain the "innocent and rather sweet reason" why she chose to wear an item of clothing that is "the equivalent of a modern City banker sporting a bowler hat". He then goes on to provide some insightful comments on why people shouldn't be getting too carried away by the events of the past week (emphasis added):

[T]he strange death of Protestant England, and what the historian Mark Almond calls "the hollowing-out of the Protestant Succession", is emphatically not the same thing as the rebirth of Catholicism.

Cardinal Hume discovered this when he incautiously talked about "the conversion of England", and then spent the next decade watching his churches empty. Mass attendance will be higher than usual tomorrow, but will quickly revert to its disastrously low level.

A better clue to this week's Mediterranean-style outpourings is a saying attributed to G K Chesterton - that when people cease to believe in something, they do not believe in nothing: they believe in anything. The death of the Pope, like the death of Diana, has briefly satisfied a spiritual hunger that feeds off emotion and spectacle rather than doctrine.

Then Charles Moore contributes an opinion piece based on a comment made by Rocco Buttiglione when he was asked to explain why so many young people seemed to love the Pope:

He said that nowadays we find ourselves stuck in "a Kingdom of Boredom" and that the young, in particular, resented this: the Pope had shown them a way out of this kingdom.

Moore suggests that "Republic of Boredom" is a better phrase, since it has no single monarch. But, he continues:

Whatever the precise, formal constitution of boredom, it is certainly a tyranny. "Boredom", indeed, is a fairly modern word, and describes an essentially modern phenomenon.

It means more than the lack of variety and excitement that has characterised many, perhaps most, lives throughout history. It means the mood that comes from pointlessness.

Its symptoms are manifested in a variety of ways:

...at airports, in screens in bars which no one is watching, in channel-hopping, in shopping malls ... in astrology, in talking about football because you think you're supposed to, in Big Brother, in waiting for the results of the National Lottery, in recreational drugs and binge-drinking, in the devout political/commercial belief that no one has an attention span of more than 20 seconds, and, to be honest, in a great deal of feeble religious liturgy...

Boredom seeps through government press releases ("transparent", "accessible", "commitment to stakeholders") and innumerable advertisements. It is in the free magazine you are offered at Tube stations, the mission statement sent by public companies to all shareholders, the spam e-mails and pop-ups on our computers.

In short, "Every day, hundreds of messages confront us with the triviality of our own wants and invent more that we didn't know we had". Young people are particularly vulnerable to this tyranny of boredom, "because advertisers and politicians regard them as persuadable", and due to the requirement on them to be cool: "the most coercive of all 21st-century social pressures".

Pope John Paul II's genius, Moore suggests, was to see how "the medium that is so often the arch-priest in the Kingdom of Boredom, the television", could be used to assail that same Kingdom "to the ends of the earth".

I think Moore overstates his case when he suggests the cries of "Santo! Santo" from the millions gathered in Rome represent the first stirrings of a revolution against the Republic of Boredom. My vote is with Damien Thompson and the "Diana effect". We have, after all, been here before: does anyone else remember "the death of irony" after 9/11?

But that phrase, "the Republic of Boredom", is a great reminder of the enemy the Gospel faces both inside and outside the church. A number of people have remarked in recent months on the decline of atheism in the West. But in many cases it has been replaced by "apatheism": people just couldn't care less whether God is there, or what He is like if He does exist.

And inside the church, what CS Lewis called our "horror of the same old thing" is a continual problem (see Charles Moore's reference to "feeble religious liturgy"). As Lewis put it:

I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks".