Interview with Piers Paul Read: ‘Pope Francis unquestionably provides good copy’

Piers Paul Read, the Catholic novelist and historian, has just released his new one-volume book A History of the Catholic Church (which can be bought here). Read is no stranger to non-fiction, having famously written Alive; The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974) as well books on the Templars, the Dreyfus Affair and Chernobyl. These historical investigations have been produced alongside numerous novels, from the early Game In Heaven With Tussy Marx, through A Married Man, Monk Dawson, The Upstart, Polonaise, A Season in the West and many others. The novels depict with clarity the operations of grace in the lives of the characters and the results of its rejection or acceptance. Read’s thoroughly researched and very readable historical works, like the novels, depict characters who stay with you long after reading about them. I caught up with him to talk about his latest book, whose subject is nothing less than the Catholic Church itself.

AM

What prompted you to write a one-volume history of the Catholic Church?

PPR

I was by struck how my eldest grandchild, a pupil studying for her `A’ levels at a prestigious school in West London, knew all there is to know about Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf, but next to nothing about Jesus of Nazareth, the Catholic Church or even the Apostle Paul after whom her school was named. She had been baptised but had not been raised a Christian, and clearly Christianity was now out of fashion; but, given that the Church played such an important role in the development of European culture, I felt she would benefit by learning something about it.

AM

Your book is very much a warts-and-all history of the Church – what are you hoping to achieve with it?

PPR

As Edward Norman has noted, Christianity in today’s secular society “is regarded, often with very insubstantial historical backing, as tainted with racism, social conservatism, as the agent of slavery, of persecution, and a large catalogue of evils identified by modern Humanism as inhibiting social progress”.  Certainly, when the Church became enmeshed with the World after the conversion of Constantine, some of its methods, such as the burning of heretics or the use of torture, seem abhorrent to us today, but a number of charges levelled at the Church are found to be, after dispassionate historical investigation, the residue of calumnies from the time of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. A Catholic may regret the forcible conversion of the Saxons by Charlemagne, or the sack of Constantinople by the armies of the 4th Crusade, but the evils of the Inquisition, for example, have been exaggerated, and the motives of the First Crusaders maligned.  Little credit is given to the Church as the sole source of social welfare from the fall of the Roman Empire until well into the nineteenth century.  

AM

Who are some of your personal heroes in Church history?

PPR

There are many – heroes and heroines – from my patron saints, Peter and Paul, St John Fisher and St Thomas More to Pope Benedict XVI. I am particularly devoted to St. Francis of Sales, the patron saint of writers, and St. Margaret Clitheroe, the butcher’s wife from York, crushed to death on a bridge over the Ouse for sheltering priests.

AM

What are some of the differences and similarities between writing history and writing fiction?

PPR

A historian’s duty is to the truth.  Clearly he makes a choice of what facts he regards as relevant, and he must judge the reliability of his sources, but there can be no distortion or invention or exculpation if he is to be true to our vocation. A novelist, on the other hand, draws on his imagination.  He invents.  He may draw on his experience but in the telling of a story, if all goes well, the characters take on a life of their own.

AM

You have never been shy of writing uncompromisingly about the reality and ugliness of evil. Why do you think this is important in fiction and history?

PPR

The Church’s teaching on Original Sin, as G.K. Chesterton pointed out, is the key to an understanding of a human being.  For a Catholic novelist, this understanding is reflected in his characters and his account of their behaviour.  In my fiction I have tried to show how the Devil wanders through the world for the ruin of souls – acting subtly in the drawing-room or boudoir, showing his hand in the death camps and gulags. But I have also tried to convey the true deus ex machina – viz. the working of God’s Grace.

At the start of my career, my novels were criticised by some for their graphic treatment of sex.  I condemned the “polite” novel which avoided depicting the power for both good and evil in people’s lives – in particular insidious deceptions of Yahweh’s great rival, Baal, the god of fertility, so blatantly in the ascendant in the present day.

AM

Much of your book documents the tension between Church and State. What do you see as the proper relation between the two? Does the contemporary Church seem to you to get this relation right?

PPR
The early Church, having suffered so grievously from persecution in the first three centuries of its existence, was transformed after Constantine’s victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, and the subsequent Edict of Toleration, into a favoured minority, and finally under Theodosius into the religion of the state.  This led to an involvement with secular affairs that lasted until the French Revolution of 1789, and beyond.  Many Christians abhorred this compromise with the Prince of this World, and like St. Antony, withdrew into the desert, to a mountain-top retreat like St. Benedict, or behind twelve-foot walls like St. Bernard.  

In his excellent book Catholicism and Democracy, the late Émile Perreau-Saussine, shows how the behaviour of despots such as Louis XIV was restrained by a Catholic conscience. When Europeans ceased to believe, there was no such restraint. My history has a chapter on the evolution of Nazi ideology entitled “The Teutonic Religion”.

AM

Does our ordinary moral experience suggest the need for a Church focussed on the transcendent? Does Church history suggest an answer to this question?

PPR

Most of us today refuse to accept that there is life after death; we don’t want to be immortal; we would rather that death was a matter of switching off a light.  Yet Catholics believe, as Ronald Knox pointed out, that we will all end up either in Heaven or in Hell.  Given this momentous destiny for each and every human being, it is puzzling that the Church today says little about repentance, the prerequisite for salvation.  It appears to present the idea of a Church as a community of both repentant and unrepentant alike – todos.  And it often seems more concerned with our corporal well-being than the salvation of souls – with social welfare and the fate of the planet in this world than the beatific vision in the world to come.

AM

Does Church history as recounted in your book suggest that inter-religious dialogue/ecumenicism currently needs to be approached differently? 

PPR

Ecumenicism, by which was meant the unification of the different Christian churches and denominations, was the Church’s principal project following Vatican II.  Fine phrases were exchanged at symbolically significant meetings between popes, patriarchs and archbishops. There were high hopes, particularly in England, where George Basil Hume, the Abbot of Ampleforth, seemed a perfect candidate for a combined see of Westminster and Canterbury.

Such unity was not to be. None of the non-Catholic denominations were, in the last analysis, prepared to accept the over-riding authority of the Bishop of Rome; and the popes in Rome were not prepared to give up the powers bestowed by Christ on St. Peter. Moreover, the Church of England, disregarding the teaching of both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, ordained women to the priesthood and later consecrated women as bishops – thereby demonstrating that it did not consider itself to be part of the Universal Church.  

AM

Your book ends with Pope Benedict XVI. Do you think his pontificate and resignation should be judged partly in terms of what followed on from it?

PPR

There is no doubt in my mind but that Josef Ratzinger, first as Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under St. John Paul II, and later as Pope Benedict XVI, saved the Church from implosion in the decades following Vatican II.  In The Ratzinger Report (1985), later in The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), and then in Dominus Jesus (2000), he insisted that, despite dissenting views of many theologians, claiming to be acting in `the spirit of Vatican II’, the Church still taught what it had always taught: the magisterium was unchanged.  He also set limits to the praxis of those liberation theologians who taught that to take up the Cross was to take up a Kalashnikov.  `Christ,’ said Ratzinger, `was not Spartacus’.

AM

In the light of previous Church history, are recent pronouncements and events unprecedented and if so, in what way? 

PPR

My History of the Catholic Church begins with the patriarch Abraham and ends with the abdication and subsequent death of Pope Benedict XVI.  “As a history reaches the present day,” I conclude, “it becomes journalism.  Archives remain unopened and memoirs are yet to be written: the story of the Catholic Church becomes subject to what editors think will interest their readers.”  Pope Francis unquestionably provides good copy.

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