It’s rather intimidating to interview someone who is a master of the art himself, and who has just published a brilliant new biography of the theological firebrand Martin Luther. Yet when I meet the journalist, broadcaster and writer Peter Stanford for a cup of coffee to discuss his Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident, my impression is of someone of modesty who is more comfortable writing about others than being in the limelight himself.
Yet in the limelight he is, as Stanford’s book has been warmly received by reviewers, including non-Christians such as the commentator David Aaronovitch, who highlights how “brilliantly [Stanford] conveys to an atheist like me the nature of the internal battle that Luther underwent”.
I agree. I was gripped by Stanford’s description of the profound physical, mental and spiritual torment that Luther endured in his wrestlings with his own faith and his relationship to God.
Indeed, reading this impressive book it occurred to me, as someone who has suffered two major depressive episodes, that were Luther alive today he might be diagnosed with depression, or possibly as bipolar. Often he oscillates between anguish, or Anfechtung (as he called it), and elation, which is when he tends to write, and in a hurry. His famous 95 Theses, or debating points, when he publicly challenged the abuse of papal indulgences, were written during one such uninhibited “high”, though Stanford is careful not to label his moods in this way.
The book coincides with the 500th anniversary of the pinning of his theses to the door of his local Castle Church in Wittenberg in October, 1517. Its subtitle, “Catholic Dissident”, has been carefully crafted. Unlike many previous lives of Luther, which tend to stress his role in kick-starting the Reformation and dividing mainstream Catholicism ever after, Stanford takes a more nuanced view.
While Luther issued an outspokenly blunt challenge to the Catholic Church, which did indeed precipitate a huge religious and political upheaval throughout Europe, he operated very much from within his Catholic context. He sought to define aims for the future of Catholicism, as well as his legacy, and even where he fitted into the Church of the future.
And fit he does. The Holy Father has enjoined us of late to see Luther in a positive light, even if it has taken 500 years to do so. Pope Francis has been receiving Lutheran pilgrims from Finland and has himself visited Sweden as part of a reconciliation with Lutherans.
Francis’s ecumenical approach is one that Stanford supports. “The Pope understands that Luther was seeking to reform the Church. The celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the start of the Reformation are jointly organised by the Lutheran and the Catholic churches. Like the Pope, I’m optimistic we can finally heal these wounds.”
In his own life, Stanford has also sought to heal wounds. Now 55, he has a kindly air, with smiley eyes framed by his long grey locks which balance his lanky 6ft 2in frame. He was chairman of Aspire, the national spinal injuries charity, for 20 years until September 2011, and is now director of the Longford Trust for penal reform, as well as being a biographer of Lord Longford and someone who visited Myra Hindley in prison. His desire to make a difference in others’ lives comes in large measure from his Catholic faith, which runs through him like coloured sugar through a stick of rock. He was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, the son of a sales director for Hovis. His mother, Cath, had briefly been a civil servant in the Ministry of Supply during the war. The family moved to Birkenhead, just across the Mersey from Liverpool, when he was eight, and he was educated by the Christian Brothers at St Anselm’s College. “Everyone we knew was Catholic,” he remembers of the enclosed world he grew up in.
By the time he arrived at Merton College, Oxford in 1980, to read history, he had yet to meet anyone whose parents were divorced. He chose the college because a teacher advised him that ‘‘They don’t discriminate against us [Catholics] there.”
There’s another reason for his charitable work. “While others measured out their childhood in holidays, I measured mine by my mother’s diminishing ability to walk,” he says, without a trace of self pity. Indeed, throughout our chat he is full of smiles and jollity, making endless self-deprecating jokes, such as the time he was mistaken for a waiter at one of Lady Antonia Fraser’s glamorous parties. Nonetheless, he admits to being sensitive and caring what others think.
His mother had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis shortly before she fell pregnant with Peter: she already had two much older children. At first she walked with a stick, leaning her other hand on Peter’s shoulder for balance. Then she needed a Zimmer frame. By the time Peter was 11, she used a wheelchair. He still remembers his frustration when, as he pushed the chair, people would talk to him rather than his mother.
Despite a youthful enthusiasm to work as a theatre director, he chanced on an advert for a job at the Tablet. A colleague in the postroom of a large City firm, where he was temporarily working after university, congratulated him on having mastered the job there and suggested he could make a career at the paper.
The editorship of the Catholic Herald followed at the unfeasibly young age of 25. He left after four years – during which time he brought in contributors such as Mark Haddon, Cristina Odone and Mel Giedroyc, since of Bake Off fame – to write a light-hearted polemic, Catholics and Sex, with the novelist Kate Saunders. Television fame and a series on the subject ensued. “I’ve always remained grateful to the Catholic Herald,” he says. “I wouldn’t be doing any of this if it hadn’t been for the chance I was given at 25.”
He was inspired to write about Luther as he believes that to understand the Church today we need to grasp the Reformation. “Luther broke the stranglehold of the Catholic Church over Europe and allowed each individual to have a direct relationship with God by reading Scripture. His translation of the Bible into German was a magnificent achievement.”
By fostering such independence of thought, Luther laid down the principles of individual conscience and liberty which have dominated political thought from the 18th century onwards. In addition Luther established the principle of sola scriptura: doctrine must be based on Scripture rather than papal authority. Since only baptism and the Eucharist were unambiguously instigated by Jesus in the Gospels, Luther cut out the other five sacraments (though he himself remained keen on Confession).
Despite promoting such significant changes, Luther is for many today a remote and dusty figure, often confused with Martin Luther King. But Stanford thinks that Pope Francis has a sense of Luther’s true worth, and even has a hint of Luther about him, as, for example, in introducing the principle of mercy over the wrong turns individual believers make in matters such as marriage.
It’s an approach that chimes with Stanford’s own religious beliefs. While he is practising – he worships in his London parish, as well as in his wife’s home county of Norfolk at St Henry Walpole in Burnham Market – he is troubled by the Church’s treatment of women and gay people.
He argues, however, that Luther’s own approach to women needs to be seen against the backdrop of his era. The German leader thought that women should be married so as to be subjected to a husband, that convents should be closed as they gave nuns too much power and should be under male authority, and that if a woman faced death in childbirth she should accept it.
“Luther was a man of his time,” Stanford says. “And remember, when he dies he leaves everything to his beloved wife, Katharina, to run, which she would have done if control hadn’t been taken out of her hands by Luther’s male inner circle.”
Equally, he insists that Luther’s anti-Semitism has to be seen in the context of a time when probably no one in Wittenberg would ever have set eyes on someone Jewish.
Such criticisms should also be balanced by a sense of Luther’s courage. He risked death by attending the Diet of Worms in 1521 to defend his views. As Stanford says, he could have stayed holed up in Wittenberg, defended by Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony. “But he believed God was speaking to him. He described himself as a horse with blinkers on and God was riding him, driving him on down a set course.”
Despite his reservations about some aspects of today’s Church, Stanford still prays every day, and especially at night, when he finds a novena to St Thérèse of Lisieux a particular comfort.
“I’m not trying to change the system,” he says, as he drains his coffee. “But, especially in what I do at the Longford Trust, I’m trying to change one person at a time, which I think is what the Gospel tells us to do.”
And his books? “If in generations to come somewhere in a library vault is a copy of one of my books, then I will be delighted.” It’s a fittingly modest aspiration from a delightfully modest man.
Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident by Peter Stanford is published by Hodder & Stoughton priced £20.
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