Last month I visited Thorens-Glières in the Savoyard Alps, the birthplace of St Francis de Sales. I have felt a particular devotion to this saint since first reading his Introduction to the Devout Life, which is so understanding of human frailty yet so uncompromising in the high standard of holiness to which he feels the laity should aspire. With my wife, I walked to the fine castle in which he was raised, a mile or so from the village, and climbed to the small chapel at the foot of the high mountains surrounding it, struggling in the thin mountain air.
St Francis, the patron saint of writers, was intended by his father for high office in the government of the Duke of Savoy, but after a spiritual crisis he became a priest, bringing back to the Catholic faith the Protestants living in the Chablais, north of Thorens and south of Lake Geneva. He was made
Bishop of Geneva but, since the city was Calvinist, governed his diocese from Annecy. The Gex, that part of his diocese to the north of Lake Geneva, remained Protestant because it fell under the jurisdiction of King Henry IV of France. Henry admired and was fond of St Francis but, to bring an end to France’s wars of religion, he did not want to disturb the status quo.
Confusing jurisdictions remain to this day. To reach Thorens, we flew to Geneva, disembarked in Switzerland, which is not in the European Union, walked through into France which is, rented a car, found ourselves once again in Switzerland, and only after weaving our way through the southern suburbs of the city got back to France.
Inevitably, my thoughts were of our imminent referendum, and I wondered to what extent our feelings about Europe, like the border between Switzerland and France, date back to the Reformation. In 2009, I debated Europe with a friend from my childhood, David Heathcoat-Amory, in the pages of Standpoint magazine. David, a veteran Brexiteer, thought that the EU was a Catholic conspiracy to draw Britain into a new Holy Roman Empire. I did not disagree: this was the vision of the founding fathers, and undoubtedly my love of Europe, and wish to throw in my lot with my fellow Europeans, came partly from my Catholic faith.
Why, then, did so many of my Catholic friends vote to leave the EU? Some told me it was on the issue of sovereignty – the way in which judgments made by the European Court of Justice trump those of the House of Commons or our own Supreme Court. But wasn’t this the argument advanced by Henry VIII to justify his break with Rome?
Others said that the EU had become anti-Christian: I was referred to an article by Robert Royal on the internet journal, The Catholic Thing, which called the EU “one of the world’s most militantly secular and haplessly bureaucratic entities – which also labours mightily to spread its errors in the world …”
An example given of EU tyranny was a directive forcing the Finns to re-introduce 9,500 wolves into their forests. This may be a sin against subsidiarity, but it is hardly evil. I can think of no EU directives that I find objectionable. The laws passed in my lifetime that are truly inimical to Christian values, such as those on abortion, cloning, or same-sex marriage and adoption, were passed not in Brussels or Strasbourg but Westminster.
The referendum has stirred up strong passions that normally lie dormant. It was the same at the time of the Falklands War. In the early days after the Argentine invasion, Newsnight broadcast an item asking whether it was wise to go to war. It provoked outrage: the editor was compared to Lord Haw Haw.
Last week I was taken to task by a Brexiteer friend for having said in a Charterhouse chronicle that the British, unlike the Germans, had never come to terms with their past. He said this suggested an equivalence between the cruelties of the Raj and the atrocities of the Nazis. Of course it did not: but a beam in the eye of another does not mean that one does not have a splinter in one’s own. Clearly, he thought that to wash one’s country’s dirty linen in public was unpatriotic; and also that a lack of patriotism was implicit in a vote to remain in the European Union.
He was the son of a vicar, and his vision of England had an Anglican tinge, like that of the philosopher Roger Scruton – evensong, fox-hunting and cricket on the village green. But what of that of Charles Moore or Jacob Rees-Mogg or Sir Bill Cash who are Catholics? Do we still have to prove to our compatriots that we are not agents of Philip of Spain?
Piers Paul Read is a novelist, historian and biographer
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