All the Pope’s Men (Book Review: Part Two)

As I say, much of Allen’s self-declared aim is to render communication between the Catholic Church and the Anglophone world (again, Ireland excepted) much better. And to do this, it is necessary to **stimulate imagination** by asking the parties concerned to **really imagine** the very different grounds on which they stand.

Without this, as when Americans (who as an American himself, Allen largely has in mind here) simply assume Catholic values are identical to their own, there can be no impetus, no call to the imagination.

That is, Allen suggests conservative Americans often simply assume that conservative Catholics are the same as they are. Again: ‘pro-life, anti-communist’ – and that’s that. But Allen here provides a stimulus to imagination – by showing what a vast gulf really exists here.

Rather than say much more today, I’m simply going to quote more from Allen’s very fine book:

“Cold War politics made temporary bedfellows out of the Vatican and the US, and what is re-emerging now is the caution and reluctance that have always characterized Vatican attitudes about America. In other words, perhaps [the cold war] alliance … was [an] aberration …

From this point of view, the clash of cultures most exacerbated by the Iraq War may not be between Christianity and Islam, but between the Holy See and the United States.

The war [helped to suggest] to Vatican observers that the ghost of John Calvin is alive and well in American culture …

The deepest thinkers in the Vatican have always harbored their doubts about the United States, seeing it as a culture forged by Calvinism and hostile to a genuinely Catholic ethos … One archbishop put it this way: ‘Americans have a bad combination of youth, wealth, power, isolation and very little serious Catholic intellectual tradition …

Key Vatican officials … have long worried about aspects of American society – its exaggerated individualism, its hyperconsumer spirit, its relegation of religion to the private sphere, its Calvinist ethos. A fortiori, they worry about a world in which America is in an unfettered position to impose this set of cultural values on everyone else.

The Calvinist concepts of the total depravity of the damned, the unconditional election of God’s favoured, and the manifestation of election through earthly success, all seem to play a powerful role in shaping American cultural psychology.

The Iraq episode confirmed Vatican officials in these convictions. When Vatican officials hear Bush talk about the evil of terrorism and the American mission to destroy that evil, they sometimes perceive a worrying kind of dualism …

After Cardinal Pio Laghi returned to Rome from his last minute appeal to Bush, just before the Iraq War began, he told John Paul II that he sensed ‘something Calvinistic’ in the president’s iron determination …

[One Vatican official] told me he sees a ‘clash of civilisations’ between the United States and the Holy See, between a worldview that is essentially Calvinistic and one that is shaped by Catholicism. ‘We have a concept of sin and evil too’ he said, ‘but we also believe in grace and redemption’ …

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago made a similar statement [saying] that U.S. citizens ‘are culturally Calvinist, even those who profess the Catholic faith. [American society] is the civil counterpart of a faith based on private interpretation of scripture and private experience of God.’ He contrasted this kind of society with one based on the Catholic [focus on] community and a vision of life greater than the individual."

Yes, Allen’s book is largely oriented to America. And as I say, to helping Americans really imagine the very different place the Vatican is really ‘coming from’. For this alone, it has enormous value. But I hope, in due course, to suggest that his book is most valuable as a stimulation to our cultural imagination in many other ways as well …