I did not know that Captain Pugwash was a Catholic until I recently encountered him making his confession—of the sin of envy, at the success of the Muppet Show. Longstanding readers of the Catholic Herald may have suspected this already; while Pugwash’s creator, John Ryan, was busy delighting millions with the adventures of his eponymous pirate and his other popular creations, he was also the paper’s in-house cartoonist for over four decades.
Ryan might well be regarded as having been a Catholic of the establishment: his father, Sir Andrew Ryan, was a distinguished diplomat; at Ampleforth he was a contemporary of Basil Hume, with whom he remained on friendly terms until the cardinal’s death in 1999; his elder brother was Columba Ryan OP, a distinguished priest-philosopher. Nevertheless, his talent for drawing, which had been evident from a young age, enabled him easily to engage readers of the Catholic Herald as they grappled with the burning topics of the day.
His first offering appeared in 1964. It was a turbulent time for Britain generally, and for Catholics in particular. At home, abortion and homosexuality were decriminalised, the pill was made available on the NHS, and in the face of declining censorship of the arts, Mary Whitehouse set up her Clean Up TV campaign. At Rome, the Second Vatican Council concluded its deliberations, and Paul VI set aside the papal tiara; in 1968 the promulgation of Humanæ Vitæ, which reaffirmed traditional Catholic teaching on contraception, took many by surprise.
Ryan could speak to ordinary Catholics through his early work because, as a practising Catholic himself, he was thoroughly rooted in the spirituality and liturgical practice of the pre-Vatican II church in which his audience had also been raised. Not for him the stole-over-chasuble faux pas; the clergy and laypeople who appeared in Ryan’s cartoons looked and sounded like their real-life counterparts. He was a superb draughtsman, of course, but his work about the church was utterly persuasive because he lived and breathed his subject.
He knew his landscape backwards. The episcopal dignitaries off on a “Bishops’ Conference charter flight” to discuss the new liturgy with curial officials appeared in choir dress; although incongruous, it gave Ryan the opportunity to depict them in their long, sleeveless mantellette, rather than their mozzette, because they were outside their jurisdiction and on their way to Rome – to Someone Else’s Diocese. Meanwhile, the imaginary go-ahead publishing house of Wild Oates & Wishbone echoed immediately Burns, Oates & Washbourne, the ubiquitous English-language publishers to the Holy See.
Ryan also spoke with his own gentle authority. Any witty cartoonist might have drawn an angel summoning a scholar-saint with the quip: “You’re wanted upstairs – He says He can’t follow the latest encyclical.” Only one who knew his theology well would have chosen as his subject Thomas Aquinas, and only one who knew his church history backwards could have portrayed the angelic doctor sitting at a table with a curved aperture cut out of it to take account of his enormous belly. Having a Dominican brother played its part, no doubt.
His earthly characters were thoroughly believable, too: from “Our Man in the Vatican” – the constantly-scheming, bungling yet strangely-likeable Cardinal Grotti – to the cheerful young mother in the street, with her seven children, pram and prominent bump, being interviewed about Humanæ Vitæ. “Encyclical? Bless you, I don’t have time to read encyclicals.” Ryan frequently captured perfectly a prevailing sense that the hierarchy and the laity were not necessarily as closely connected as some might have liked to think.
Ryan found much to tease about clergy and laity alike, but his cartoons were neither polemical nor biting; they did their work by being kind, funny and poignant. That did not mean that they could not also be hard-hitting. The bishops on that charter flight mentioned earlier soon discovered that the only other passenger on the plane was carrying a dossier marked “Latin Mass Society”, and that he had brought as his hand luggage a rifle and a belt of grenades.
In their heyday, Ryan’s cartoons were popular enough to appear as collections in their own right – Church Flippant, for example, appeared in 1972. In some cases, the battles that he charted have now come full circle. We might wonder what gems Ryan might have produced in response to Pope Benedict’s visit, or to the implementation of the new translation of the missal.
At the end of last year, Alana Harris and Isabel Ryan brought out an edition of John Ryan’s early cartoons for the Catholic Herald. Alana is a distinguished scholar of modern Catholic history, Isabel is John and Priscilla Ryan’s daughter. Sink or Swim: Catholicism in Sixties Britain Through John Ryan’s Cartoons (Sacristy Press, 2020) presents a selection of Ryan’s work on a range of issues, carefully chosen and set in their proper historical context. It is simultaneously endearing and intellectually rigorous, with much to amuse and to inform.
I should declare an interest. Sink or Swim was supported by the Catholic Record Society, whose flagship journal British Catholic History is published by Cambridge University Press, and of which I am a trustee. As the editor of the Catholic Herald remarked when Ryan retired from its pages, his cartoons “were his way of serving the Church he loved”. There can be little doubt he was a historian, too; a diligent chronicler whose work is of inestimable value.
Dr Serenhedd James is a research fellow of St Stephen’s House, Oxford.
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