Pride and Prejudice

If you were listening last weekend to BBC Radio 4's Sunday programme which goes out at 7am on a Sunday morning, you would have heard Dr Joe Shaw of St Benet's Hall in Oxford, defending the erection of a plaque to four Catholic martyrs in Oxford, an event which had taken place on the Saturday before. Ed Stourton, the redoubtable, Ampleforth-educated BBC journalist asked the customary neutral question at the beginning - so who were these men? - before he began what he appeared to see as his journalistic duty to sneer at what he strongly implied was Catholic jingoism. Joe made the point that these four martyrs were among the footsoldier Catholics of the period ... an interesting social observation, unless you have another agenda.

'Well, it's a long time ago, 1580, why do we need a memorial?' said Stourton. Cutting edge analysis this. In Joe's shoes, I might have been tempted to answer that a memorial is exactly what you need for things that happened a long time ago, but Joe was more diplomatic and referred to the recent beatification of the martyrs.

Beatification? 'So we had saints walking among us, did we?' might have been the next question. But no, Stourton wanted to get to his point which was that this plaque's unveiling was 'tribal'. I am delighted to think of the very un-PC gaffe that this observation represents; after all, tribal customs are pretty standard stuff on BBC programmes, but Oxfordshire tribes are supposed to be more enlightened ... as enlightened, it turned out, as The Tablet which Stourton had been dying to cite as the trumps-all intellekchual Catholics' guide to being in tune with the times. Joe spotted the ploy, and observed that when last week The Tablet criticised the erection of the plaque, they had quoted nobody who actually held to such a negative opinion ...

Now, call me naive, but good journalists are supposed to spot the difference between the editorial voice and the representation of the views of ordinary people. If a newspaper reports on ground-level opposition to something, then by all means let the journalists ask awkward questions. Stourton, however, had this remarkable reply:

'But deal with it nonetheless'.

Why, I thought? If this is not an issue which is important to the people of Oxford, why should Joe Shaw have to answer the the editorial line provided by The Tablet? Why wasn't Stourton interested in unpacking the social dimension represented by these martyrs, or why Catholics nowadays are getting bolder about such public manifestations of their convictions (which Stourton did raise to some extent later), or how many turned up at the blessing of the plaque? Why not all these issues, rather than the opinion columns in The Tablet?

Joe then tried to explain that there are all kinds of martyrs' memorials around Oxford, e.g. Cranmer's, clearly indicating that commemoration of one's predecessors' sacrifices is not a merely Catholic concern. But Stourton interrupted,

'So, it's "me too", is it?'

Stourton could not have made his meaning more clear if he had said, 'So, you're just a bunch of trivia-bound ninnies who feel left out, are you?' If he was being ironic, why? Whose views was he ironically expressing? Joe, a man of remarkable diplomatic powers, agreed, but observed that marking the spot of martyrdom was 'fair enough' for Catholics. I had a horrid vision of the days of Catholic forelock tugging,

"Yes, fair enough, gov'nor, don't want no trouble, just want me little plaque and for to say me prayers."

I think Joe would have been quite within his rights to reply, 'Reducing religious sensibilities to the level of childish obsession is a pretty sure fire way of promoting the kind of predjudice you have just been implying this plaque could provoke. Such hypocrisy might even deserve a plaque itself!'

Finally, Stourton, perhaps reflecting on how prejudiced he has just sounded, began a more reasonable line of questions, remarking objectively that most of the memorials went up in different times, and wondering what was behind the greater interest in martyrdom. Was it token journalism? Joe answered his point ably by remarking that in times of greater tension, such a memorial might not have been possible. But we've moved on since then ... well, except in The Tablet's editorial opinion. Token journalism, then? Who can tell? Who cared at that point? A colleague informed me in an email yesterday that Ed Stourton had kept Joe Shaw 'to the wider picture' ... 'Yes, dear colleague, as wide as prejudices get.

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So, I came home yesterday and sat down with my nephew (aged twenty) over a glass of wine and a few poems. Just for fun we're reading some poetry and writing our own every week, and, as luck would have it, his poem of yesterday (on this week's theme of 'Travel') rang the kind of bells that Stourton and The Tablet would no doubt associate with jingoistic Catholicism:

The Journey

He journeyed from a far off land,
His road was long and winding,
He stepped back on his native sand,
His mission’s vows were binding,


For though the dark was all around,
As the boat touched at the quay,
And the only rustled, muffled sound,
Came from a nearby tree,


Yet forces were abroad that night,
To propel this man to fame,
And well before the dawn’s first light,
The men from London came,


They pulled him off, he gave no fight,
They dragged him through the town,
His face in mud and blood was bright,
As the cart bumped up and down.


They hung him high and stretched him wide,
And cursed his journey long,
They split him then from side to side,
For all he had done wrong.


His head was mounted on a pole,
The queen’s most gory treat,
But the martyr’s life was whole,
His journey was complete.
Chris.


Ask not for whom the bell tolls, dear aging Stourton; it tolls for thee and for the tremulous Tablet.