Thursday 16 April 2009

A Special Kind of Self-Confidence

For those in the Catholic Church, there is the comforting knowledge that there is an earthly source of infallible knowledge. For really serious questions, the Pope is there to answer them. And when he does, his answer is, in a sense, gospel.

So you'd have to have a really inflated sense of self-worth to be a Catholic who disagreed with His Holiness on a liturgical issue. Only someone really, utterly, convinced of their own rightness could do such a thing. Step forward ... Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, no less. Tony (or, as his friends call him, "God"), now a Catholic, has decided that the Pope is wrong and he is right. Wow. It must feel wonderful to be so clever.

Sadly, there are some dissenters. Vincent Nichols, for example, although he is "only" the Archbishop-elect of Westminster, so what would he know. Anyway, in a delicious quote that I enjoyed so much that I constructed an entire blog post around it, he said:
‘But I am afraid the way the Catholic church thinks is rather different to that, and I think I will take my guide from Pope Benedict actually.’

Wonderfully put. You can just feel the contempt oozing gently...

9 comments:

  1. Yes, it was wonderfully put. And very polite too. The Bishop was generous enough to call Mr Blair "a very fine politician."

    Wait a minute. Perhaps that wasn't supposed to be a compliment.

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  2. Thank goodness that when people like Mr Blair say "Jump" there's one institution that still has the self-confidence politely but firmly to say "No" rather than "how high?"

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  3. 'Is Mr Blair Catholic?' both in a patently obvious sense and in an ecclesiastical way.

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  4. YMB - truly, Blair is indeed a fine politician. A compliment so laden with meanings as to be worthy of the man himself...

    Albert - welcome! Presumably you would equate the Church to the Rock, rather than the hard place?

    Hi Measured. I think you may have highlighted the source of the confusion. To be infallible is to be always right; Blair has (in his mind) been so right for so long, that maybe he thinks himself infallible. And now that he is a Catholic, maybe he is angling for a new grace & favour residence? In Rome, no less...

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  5. Patently, thank you for your welcome. Yes, to continue your lapidatory theme, you could say I'm a hard-core Catholic.

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  6. your lapidatory theme .... Look, all I said was that my piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah, alright?

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  7. There's always one, isn't there.

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  8. Blair is a fool. His views on liturgy are probably rubbish too, though you don't say what those are.

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