AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON THE INQUISITION

Losing their religion (Brendan O’Neill, The Spectator, May 5th, 2005)

Of course, some of them (lapsed Catholics)will invent a grand battle over a ‘‘matter of conscience’’ to make their slippage seem more sexy and profound than it is. As Father Hal Stocker, a Byzantine parish priest from New York, wrote in a short, witty piss-take of the Lapsed for the website Domestic-Church.com, entitled ‘‘How to Become a Lapsed Catholic Quickly and Easily’’: ‘‘Have an ideological fight with the Church. Pick out a ruling and find something wrong with it — pick a fight ... Tell [your priest] why you can no longer be a practising Catholic ...and then tell friends at cocktail parties, people on street corners ... and clerks at checkout counters.’’ It would never do to come across as an aimless drifter, so the Lapsed select a justification for their Lapsing from a seemingly set list, taking issue with the Church’s stance on abortion or contraception, or attacking the Vatican’s hoarding of riches, or making banal statements such as ‘‘I believe Jesus was a good bloke, but I don’t think he had magical powers and stuff.’’ They then proclaim these doctrines of the Lapsed to anybody who will listen, almost evangelically (hence those dinner-party ear-bashings) and suddenly their religious listlessness appears as an honourable stance.

Worse, to be a Lapsed Catholic is to wallow in today’s victim culture. In its most extreme form it is informed by the backward belief that we can never truly overcome the ‘‘damage’’ done to us in childhood (and some of the Lapsed seem seriously to think that there’s nothing more damaging to a child than dressing him in his Sunday best and making him sit in a pew for an hour or two). I have heard Lapsed Catholics complain that they are not very good at relationships because of what some priest said 20 years ago about sex being dirty; that they feel guilty about everything (especially masturbation) because of a telling-off they got in a confession box when they were 12. A friend of mine, every time he splits up with a girlfriend, says the same thing to me over a consolatory pint or five: ‘‘It’s the Catholic in me, it always screws things up.’’

Here, the Lapsed disavow responsibility for their adult lives and loves, and blame the difficulties they encounter on having been raised a Catholic. This, of course, is the cop-out de coeur of our therapeutic times: ‘‘Don’t blame me, guv, it was my demons wot made me do it!’’ Indeed, some go so far as to describe themselves as ‘‘recovering Catholics’’ and there are websites to aid their recovery. One says, ‘‘I use the term “recovering Catholic” to describe myself because, like alcoholism, Catholicism is something that’’s always part of you even after you separate yourself from it.’’ Catholicism, it seems, is less a religion that one subscribes to or renounces than a sickness that infects us for life, a recurring virus that can apparently stop us from developing fully as sensible adults. The Lapsed and Recovering are not as radical as they think. They have drifted from one religion only to take up with another —today’s oversubscribed Church of ‘‘Blame Someone Else!’’, whose doctrines include: avoid responsibility for screw-ups; always be in a state of ‘‘recovery’’ from something or other; and have a generally low opinion of yourself and everyone else.

What really grates is to see some pretty woman go all mewy over one of these jerks while you are getting nowhere with “I’m a lapsed Protestant” as a pick-up line.