Twice in the last twelve months friends have written to me warning me not to speak at particular conferences. They have advised me that I will be associated, toxically and perhaps beyond repair, with and by the “wrong kind of Catholic”.
They might be right. Guilt by association is now becoming a common currency of reputational assassination on all sides in the Catholic Church. The conservative Catholic world – that ought to be tautologous – in the US is particularly susceptible to a certain type of visceral party-split.
This tactic is normally the preserve of the Left. In fact, it is one of their favourite and most powerful weapons. It is used to exclude or condemn things, as well as to cancel people.
One of the most attractive things about Jesus in the Gospels was his refusal to be terrorised by the religious establishment into avoiding the untouchables – the sinners.
He associated with everybody. He – as we should, following his example – made a vital and essential distinction between sin and sinner. The question that associating with sinners raises is the degree of confidence one has in God to save the flawed, with the context for this being the cosmic struggle between good and evil.
Jesus’s actions and words constantly emphasised that no one could be written off. And evil should be more afraid of forgiveness and truth than good should be afraid of corruption and lies. Good is more powerful than evil, particularly among people whose fundamental nature is that they were created in God’s image and whose deepest longing therefore is for the good and for forgiveness.
But what about actual things – like money? How guilt-ridden and karma-carrying can things be? It’s worth considering given the Church of England has decided to re-direct £100 million of its historic assets – the so-called Queen Anne’s Bounty, one of the main predecessors of the Church of England’s current investments – to compensate for racism through the practice of the slave trade, with the money going to a nine-year programme of “impact investment, research and engagement”, according to the CoE.
The first covenant warns about the toxicity of the unclean. But the Left have taken the concept and used it as a weapon of ethical destruction without any discrimination or finesse.
It has turned out to be a very powerful tactic. In fact so useful that the temptation to wield it everywhere and at all times is hard to overcome. And it may be that it plays into some deep and buried pagan memory fuelled by natural superstition buried deep in our collective unconscious until recently released.
This is the trap that the Church of England appears to have fallen into, caught out by a perception of involvement with “dirty things” – tainted money – leading to the fit of self-induced progressive guilt behind the payment of £100 million.
This was wrong for a number of important reasons.
It was improperly and bluntly collectivist, and set out to create a bridge of guilt that spanned about ten generations. But more fatally for the argument, it turns out that over-excited by their own anxiety about racist guilt, they had misread their own history. It looks as though no money in the fund in question, the Queen Anne’s Bounty, was actually invested in slavery.
In an article for the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore dissects the issue, including quoting Professor Richard Dale, a business historian of the famous “South Sea Bubble”, the financial crisis that occurred in 1720, centred around the South Sea Company, a joint-stock company that was granted a monopoly on trade with South America.
Dale documents how the CoE have ignored certain salient facts – a combination of a parliamentary statute after the financial crisis splitting the trading company involved, with annuities being “ring fenced” from any trade involving slavery, and further financial machinations – all of which means that, in short, instead of the fund having being augmented by the profits of slavery, the fund appears to have contained no profit from slavery, rather it was generating the sort of lower but safer return you would expect a sober ecclesiastical organisation to seek.
Will these economic facts have any effect on the virtue-signalling establishment? There is no great moral courage in attempting to placate fictitious historical guilt, and which sets out to buy artificial virtue bought cheaply with other peoples’ money.
The Gospels do indeed encourage reparation, but with your own money and in real time, as St Matthew demonstrated. But what we are seeing nowadays are different forms of virtue belonging perhaps even to different religions.
Even though the scale of the CoE’s misreading of the facts leads them to a category error of enormous proportions, the wider issue around the principle of polluted money remains. Should that effect our moral calculations and if so how?
The French worker priest and theologian Michel Quoist wrote a very powerful poem about money and guilt.
It is called “Prayer before a ten franc note”, in which Fr Quoist considers whose hands the note has been through and what they have done with it:
It has offered white roses to the radiant fiancée.
It has paid for the baptismal party, and fed the rosy-cheeked baby.
It has provided bread for the family table.
Because of it there was laughing among the young and joy among its elders.
It has paid for the saving visit of the doctor,
It has brought the book that taught the youngster.
It has clothed the young girl.
But it has sent the letter breaking the engagement,
It has paid for the death of the baby in its mother’s womb,
It has brought the liquor that made the drunkard,
It has produced the movie unfit for children,
and has recorded the indecent song.
It has bought for a few hours the body of a woman,
It has paid for the weapons of the crime and for the wood of the coffin.
O Lord, I offer you this ten franc note with its joyous mysteries, its sorrowful mysteries.
I thank you for the life and joy it has given. I ask forgiveness for the harm it has done.
Christianity does not have guilt by association as a concept. Even ancestral responsibility is cauterised and replaced by personal and not racial, genetic or historical guilt. The prophet Jeremiah puts it succinctly when he reminds his people:
“In those days they shall say no more: The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the teeth of the children are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that shall eat the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge” ( Jeremiah 31.29-30).
For a culture obsessed with progress, the attribution to a collective guilt buried in history seems very close to a form of retrogressive pagan superstition. And the notion that things (money) become and remain taboo, and as “dirty” money, “guilty” money, and can be traced as such, also carries resonances of a primitive threatening paganism.
One of the great liberating truths of the Faith is that we are not bound by other peoples’ sins or failures, wherever they originate from. We are only responsible for our own moral burden; and even that will, if we offer it, be carried by Jesus.
And the power found in things is more likely to comprise of the healing property of relics than the cursed coinage of filthy lucre.
Compared to the superstitious, semi-pagan collectivism that the Church of England and movements such as BLM have given themselves to, authentic Catholic Faith turns out to be as progressive as it is liberating.
Photo: A woman holds a sign during a march following the guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin in Atlanta, Georgia, 20 April 2021. Derek Chauvin, a white former Minneapolis police officer, was convicted of murdering African-American George Floyd after a racially charged trial that was seen as a pivotal test of police accountability in the United States. (Photo by ELIJAH NOUVELAGE/AFP via Getty Images.)
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