A History of the Catholic Church
Piers Paul Read
Meid, £25, 560 pages
Piers Paul Read – veteran novelist, historian and biographer – has produced, in his ninth decade, a book that evokes the prophet Micah’s vision of Bethlehem Ephrathah, “little among the thousands of Judah”: which is to say, humble at first glance, but coming very much into its own later on. Much of this is down to the plain and unevocative cover – curious for a book of this kind – by which of course the rest should not be judged.
As Read explains in his preface, writing it was something of a labour of love, prompted by the discovery that his eldest granddaughter “in her last year at a prestigious secondary school in London – named after a Christian saint – knew all there is to know about Virginia Woolf but next to nothing about Jesus of Nazareth or the Catholic Church”. Many teachers may well identify with that situation, especially as Christmas approaches.
Not only do the pupils at this unnamed (although perhaps guessable) educational establishment know little about the Church, what they do know about it seems to have been unfavourably curated by their sources of information. Read follows Edward Norman in observing a modern tendency to regard Catholicism as tainted by “a large catalogue of evils identified by modern Humanism as inhibiting social progress”.
Read finds more succour in the writings of the late Rodney Stark, who taught comparative religion for decades at the University of Washington in Seattle. Stark, who was not a Catholic, noted in Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History (SPCK, 2017) that “in recent years some of the most malignant contributions to anti-Catholic history have been made by alienated Catholics.”
Among these, Stark included “seminary-dropouts, former priests, or ex-nuns”, and insisted that “I did not write this book in defence of the Church. I wrote it in defence of history.” No doubt this is true – there are plenty around – but we might also add that much anti-Church rhetoric comes from those who have been alienated from the Church by the suppurating scandals of abuse. Some brickbats are thoroughly well-deserved.
That said, Read does not set out to write a modern apologia for the contemporary Church of his birth and baptism. In fact, as he observes, two friends who read the text in manuscript form (one Catholic and one agnostic) both said that “after reading it no one could possibly want to become a Catholic”. Read regards this as a singular badge of honour: “as evidence that my efforts to be dispassionate had succeeded”.
This is not a polemic, then; but nor is it a “normal” history of the Church, whatever we may think that looks like. Even St Bede, the father of Church historians, limited his magnum opus only to the history of the English people. Read concedes that the monolithic task he has embraced inevitably has its limitations. The book is mainly Eurocentric, for instance, with an emphasis on France
and England and very little on the New World.
Furthermore, Read does not cover much spirituality, and although the Reformation appears, obviously, he only touches lightly on other theological controversies. He therefore sets himself a daunting challenge, because when all is said and done, the entire history of the Church, from the Acts of the Apostles to the Synod on Synodality, is a long series of theological controversies, one after another, which show little sign of abating any time soon.
Instead, Read takes readers through 127 short chapters dealing with subjects that he has identified as relevant to his quest. Divided into seven parts, these run from “The Chosen People” to “The End of Time”, which seem pretty catch-all bookends. It’s an eclectic (and slightly scattergun) approach, but it does mean that the doorstopper can be easily picked up and put down again – which makes it particularly appealing.
This eclecticism also lends Read’s work much of its strength, however. “The Mass” appears in the same general area as “The Early Church”, “Persecution” and “Virgins and Martyrs”, which is naturally where its consideration properly and essentially belongs. “The New Mass” appears much later, in the company of “Vatican II”, “Feminism” and “Signs of the Times”. He circumvents the present battle-lines by ending with the papacy of Benedict XVI.
As the book progresses, themes, rather than strict chronology, carry the day. An exposition of the Church’s attitude to relics takes in the development of pilgrimage in the early-medieval period and some of its coincidental side-effects across the centuries: “It was while on pilgrimage [to Gargano, in Puglia] that Norman knights saw that the surrounding territory was ripe for the taking.” By-products of piety, then: the God of surprises strikes again.
Read is the master of the droll turn of phrase, but then that is what is to be hoped of such an experienced writer and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. As he ranges through countries and centuries in the course of 550 pages, his prose is engaging and a pleasure to read, but (and I suspect he would agree) while it piques the interest, the earlier material does not necessarily bring anything new to the historical canon. He comes into his own later on.
In the more modern sections, Read focuses on his personal interpretation of experiences that have belonged to his own life and work: “As it reaches the present day,” he says, “I write about events that I have witnessed rather than learned about from books.” This is what readers will treasure and cherish most, even if Read doesn’t always give the Church an easy ride. And why should he? There is much of which to be proud, and much of which to repent.
And so Read marches through, among other selected topics, “Humanæ Vitæ”, “El Salvador”, “Karol Wojtyla”, “The Ratzinger Report”, and “The Ordination of Women”. In “Liberation Theology” the Society of Jesus takes a starring role, with John Paul II telling a conference of Jesuits in Rome that “you were a matter of concern to my predecessors, and you are to the pope who is talking to you.” “Abuse” is particularly chastening, as might be expected.
This is a feisty tome, which deserves attention. For such a gargantuan project, the plethora of minor mistakes that might have peppered the text are few and far between: a wrong date here; a misspelled name there; nothing to spoil the whole. That in itself is something of an achievement, and testament to the carefulness which Read has brought to the venture. It would benefit from an index, but in its absence the contents pages are a useful vade mecum.
I’m not sure it should be called A History of the Catholic Church, though. It should be called Piers Paul Read’s History of the Catholic Church, because that’s what he’s actually written. He tells us what he thinks, and, when all is said and done, it’s all the better for it.
On those terms, then, it’s a tour de force in the company of one of our most distinguished Catholic writers – although for some of his readers, perhaps not an entirely comfortable one.
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