INTERVIEW: John Cleese explains his ‘mixed view’ of the Catholic Church

How does it feel to give an interview to a Catholic publication?

The question slightly amuses me, but I see why I’m being asked that. I do have a very mixed view of the Catholic Church, because I think what happens to most religions is that after the initial spiritual height of the early generations ministering the religion, that spirituality slowly diminishes and the churches begin to take on an ordinary human egotistical aspect.

For example, you have Christ’s teaching, which is primarily of poverty, humility and tolerance; then 2,000 years later you have a Catholic Church that is very rich and very powerful and quite authoritarian. Similarly, I find it hard to believe that Jesus Christ would have regarded burning people alive as a correct interpretation of his Gospel of love.

There can be a very large gap between the teachings of the founder of the religion and the people centuries later who are administering it. This does not mean that there are not some very fine people within the Catholic Church. I have known a couple myself and they work within the Church, trying to do the best job they can even if it is within a framework that they often cannot truly believe in.   

So, I have no worries at all about being interviewed by a Catholic publication because some of the people reading the interview will understand and probably be reasonably sympathetic to my views.

How would you describe your personal relationship to faith and religion, and its development?

I think my lifelong quest, albeit a very dilettante one, has been to try to find meaning. And I think that any such meaning that would satisfy me would have some element of religion about it.

However, when I’m asked if I believe in God, I simply have to say I don’t know what it means.

I do believe there may be a real purpose in the Universe and I believe that there may be a force out there that people who have a religious experience contact. I think some people who have undergone rigorous spiritual training may contact that beneficial force more often than most of the rest of us are lucky enough to do.

And I believe contact with that benevolent force is very beneficial to the people who manage it and even to the people around those individuals who manage it.

Also, I don’t think there’s any question that some degree of stillness sometimes brings a spiritual experience which causes people’s behaviour to become increasingly unselfish.

Did you ever think that religious people would one day regard ‘The Life of Brian’ in a positive way?

The answer is no, we never thought that anyone would take it seriously, although we were making very serious points in the film.

It’s clear at the start of the film that we present Jesus talking about the Beatitudes, and that is treated with the utmost respect.

But we then pan to the people listening, who are engaged in the most futile of egotistical arguments. Our purpose was to show that because someone claims to be a Christian, that does not mean that their behaviour is particularly in tune with Christ’s teachings.

One only has to see the ridiculous nature of prosperity with much of Christianity in the United States to realise that some people can take a teaching and more or less turn it on its head.

So I think that’s the main lesson that The Life of Brian is saying: that people can take a religion and more or less do the opposite of what the founder counselled them to do, while maintaining all the social prestige of being able to call themselves, in this case, Christians.

Nowadays, opposition to the film comes less from the religious side and more from the politically correct side. What do you make of that?

I think political correctness starts out as a very warm, generous and good impulse and then deteriorates rather rapidly until it becomes, in its reductio ad absurdum, quite harmful.

I think people who try to make other people good by forceful legislation always finish up with something far worse than what they had started with.

I think that laughter is an extraordinarily positive force. The fact is, also, that laughter always has a critical aspect to it, but I see it as nudging us in the direction of behaving more intelligently. I don’t see it as mean spirited if it is true humour.

There are mean-spirited jokes and they are extremely nasty and should not be made, but I don’t know that we should be censoring people’s language in the way that we are presently.

There have been more academics fired in the last few years under the impact of woke-ness than there were in the entire McCarthyite period of the 1950s in the United States.

I believe this is wrong. To seek out something that somebody said seven years ago and then to get them fired for that is the opposite of kindness and charitableness, and also the opposite of every decent and important principle in liberal democracy.

I think that laughter is an incredibly powerful force and that when people laugh it puts them in a more positive part of their minds, from which they can then deal with difficult circumstances better than if there is no laughter to be seen.

The woke people who try and cut down on the amount of laughter in the world reminds me of the Puritans who deemed that a Christmas pudding was sinful and idolatrous. I think that a lot of their ideas are completely wrong and based upon a distorted view of post-modernists, who have done enough damage anyway.

Photo: John Cleese; screenshot from ‘Die Tagesport’ at die-tagespost.de.

John Cleese is an icon of British comedy who had a lasting impact through his groundbreaking work in cinema and television. As co-founder of the legendary Monty Python group, Cleese was instrumental in classics such as ‘The Life of Brian’ and ‘The Knights of the Coconut’, which are now considered milestones in film comedy. He also set standards in television, particularly with the series ‘Fawlty Towers’, which is still regarded as one of the best British sitcoms of all time. In addition to his success in the UK, Cleese also ventured into Hollywood, where he shone in blockbusters such as ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ (leading role and screenplay). John Cleese will be 85 years old in October 2024.

This article originally appeared in the weekly newspaper Die Tagespost, Germany’s leading Catholic newspaper for politics, society and culture; and is reproduced here with kind permission. Die Tagespost also runs the Tagespost Foundation for Catholic Journalism and the Pope Benedict XVI Institute.

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