Anglican Mainstream

By Peter Stanford, Guardian

[.....] To stand up publicly and be counted as a Catholic in Britain right now can be to invite a tirade, as I found when I accepted an invitation from the Oxford literary festival to defend the role of faith schools against an author who had published a book questioning them.

Five minutes before we went on stage, the organisers announced to me that philosopher AC Grayling had kindly agreed to chair the event. That is AC Grayling, the second-best known militant atheist in the country, hardly your typical neutral chair. And then as we were walking into the hall, Grayling informed me that "Richard" had agreed to make a contribution – Richard Dawkins, that is, the best-known atheist in the country on account of his diatribe against religion, The God Delusion. An even playing field? Of course not, and had a representative of any other minority been set up in such a fashion the entire literary world would have been signing petitions. But I was defending the Catholic church, so normal rules didn't apply.

There is, granted, much that many mass-goers feel ashamed about in their church's recent conduct. The number of Catholic priests in this country accused of sexually abusing children may stand at 0.4% of the total – accused, that is, not convicted – but the revelation that they had so degraded a vocation that Catholics have always been taught to hold in the highest esteem came as a profound shock.

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