ORWELL AND CATIlOLICISM
Rossi, John P.
ORWELL AND CATHOLICISM JOHN P. ROSSI "IWTRITING IN THE Catholic World " shortly after George Orwell's death, the critic and essayist Neville Braybrooke chatacterized Orwell's outlook as that of a...
...He praised certain Catholic writers, some quite lavishly...
...F. J. Sheed, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh were writers whose work he deeply admired, even when he disagreed with them...
...Orwell was doubtless correct in noting the tendency in certain Catholic apologetics to believe your opponent knows he is wrong and resists the truth out of selfish or stupid motives...
...He made numerous references in his notebooks for the essay but never got around to writing it before his death in January 1950...
...This "Hebrew-like pride and exclusiveness of the genuine Catholic mind" Orwell found offensive...
...He even carried this view one step further, noting a tendency among Catholic writers to give themselves all the good lines and all the witty retorts in their debates with Protestants and non-believers...
...The latter he said were less ultramontane and more patriotic than the converts...
...While it would not be quite right to characterize Orwell's attitude as an obsession with the evils of Catholicism, it is nonetheless true that he warred throughout his public career with Catholic influence and Catholic ideas...
...In spite of what he considered certain improbabilities Orwell felt that the Catholic characters were believable and faced problems that one would meet in real life...
...While Orwell recognized that the Spanish situation was a complicated one, he still believed that it showed that the Catholic Church would always support the reactionary cause in any showdown...
...The same man who correctly called attention to the slavishness of his fellow leftists before Stalinist terror could also argue seriously that Catholicism was the most "conscious, logical, intelligent enemy that democracy has got in England . . ." This comparison of the tendencies of Catholicism and Communism was a constant one with Orwell...
...This view seriously overestimated Catholic strength intellectually or politically and is ludicrous in light of the menace of Communism...
...Orwell's dislike of Catholicism was further fueled by his own deep sense of patriotism, another major theme running through all his later work, both his fiction and his essays...
...Like so many outsiders he overrated the monolithic quality of Catholicism and seriously underestimated Catholic internal differences on religious, political and social questions...
...To Orwell, who was always fair to those who disagreed with him, this attitude was disgusting...
...In particular, Orwell thought that Catholicism's danger lay in its ability to demand unquestioned obedience from its communicants...
...His patriotism might also explain his antipathy to many of the English converts to Catholicism whom he accuses of forever having to justify themselves and their conversion...
...Orwell also regarded Catholicism as a definite threat to freedom of speech...
...To Orwell Catholicism was the personification of these evils which he feared so much...
...Many of Orwell's observations about Catholicism were penetrating in their insight even when they occasionally were wrong-headed...
...To Orwell the whole novel was improbable...
...George Orwell would have none of this...
...Toward the end of his life, as tuberculosis ate away at his vitality, he was planning a long essay on Waugh and, in particular, on Brideshead Revisited which fascinated him...
...Orwell shared with this radical tradition a suspicion of power, authority and bureaucracy, themes which he developed so powerfully in Animal Farm and 1984...
...The Spanish civil war, in which Orwell passionately supported the republican cause, also added to his contempt for Catholicism...
...Whatever else he might have been, George Orwell was the very quintessence of everything English...
...Moreover, the Catholic characters did not move onto a different intellectual plane as soon as their religious beliefs entered the story...
...This refusal to treat your opponent as honest Orwell found in the writings of Catholic apologists like Chesterton, Belloc, and even Monsignor Knox...
...ORWELL AND CATHOLICISM JOHN P. ROSSI "IWTRITING IN THE Catholic World " shortly after George Orwell's death, the critic and essayist Neville Braybrooke chatacterized Orwell's outlook as that of a moralist without religious faith...
...Orwell's reaction is revealing, and in some ways worthy of a nineteenth century fundamentalist foe of Catholicism: "Long may they fight, I say...
...had their elites, their party faithful and both had strict rules for dealing with dissent or with heretics...
...One of the main opponents of the Spanish Republic was the Catholic Church...
...This reaction, more typical of a Charles Kingsley than an urbane leftist, I think contains the key to understanding Orwell's attitude toward Catholicism...
...All this does not mean that Orwell was incapable of reacting positively to Catholicism...
...As Michael Meyer has noted, Orwell had a blind spot where religion was concerned-he thought it an evasion of the world's problems...
...He seems at times to question their intellectual honesty, something not as noticeable in his comments about born Catholics...
...In particular he found the central idea of the novel that "it is better, spiritually higher, to be an erring Catholic than a virtuous pagan" preposterous...
...He did not expect anything along these lines from the Catholics, believing that their record proved they would squash differences of opinion whenever necessary...
...This led him often to lump Catholicism with Communism as ideologies dangerous to freedom and liberty...
...Orwell had noted that Catholics often make better novelists because they understand the tragic dimension of life better than their materialist contemporaries...
...This was in sharp contrast to Orwell's own largely negative views of Catholicism...
...His insistence on speaking out when it was in danger was one of the reasons he became such an unreliable Socialist...
...Both were painfully sensitive, ineffectual men who failed to solve their own problems and took their lives...
...Both had strict hierarchies...
...What made Catholicism so dangerous to Orwell was its uncanny ability to survive and come to terms with differing political systems...
...One of his final notes on Waugh could well serve as a fitting epitaph for his own view of Catholicism...
...Orwell could see no such similarity between the characters...
...He bitterly attacked The Heart of the Matter in a review for the New Yorker in 1948 while still complimenting Greene on his literary gifts...
...What particularly irked him was the inclination of both systems to deny that any opponent could be both honest and intelligent...
...The role played by Catholics in supporting fascist movements throughout Europe confirmed his negative view...
...A perusal of the four volumes of Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus) reveals a constant hostile attitude toward Catholicism...
...His outlook was in many ways closer to the English radical tradition of William Cobbett or William Hazlitt than to any of the great philosophical systems of the nineteenth or twentieth century...
...Writing to an old friend, Dennis Col-lings, in August 1931, some years before his acceptance of Socialism, Orwell told of visiting some Protestant Bible Society shops...
...He wrote in the Partisan Review in 1947 that if Catholicism "is allowed to survive as a powerful organization it will make the establishment of true Socialism impossible, because its influence is and always must be against freedom of thought and speech, against human equality, and against any form of society tending to promote earthly happiness...
...From this negative view Orwell never deviated...
...He bitterly attacked Catholic writers who tried to expound upon or explain these difference...
...Being deeply offended by Waugh's snobbishness and the pat ending of Brideshead Revisited where the unconscious Lord Marchmain makes the sign of the cross before dying, Orwell wrote simply: "One cannot really be a Catholic & grown up...
...For example, after the war he was convinced that Catholicism was now one of the main inspirations of reactionary thought in Europe and thus a great danger to democracy...
...Yet Orwell's distrust of Catholicism predates his formal embrace of Marxism...
...Considering the lamentable record of Catholicism along these lines, Orwell was correct...
...What appealed to him about Brideshead Revisited as compared to other overtly Catholic novels was the fact that it was rooted in reality...
...so long as that spirit is in the land we are safe from the RCs...
...In one he noted a sign: "The Douay version not stocked here...
...He also believed that Catholic writers adopted a stance of moral superiority toward those who disagreed with them...
...He did not elaborate on this assertion other than to say in one of his London Letters to the Partisan Review in 1941 that Catholics prominent in the Foreign Office and Consular Service were so anti-Communist as to be effectively pro-Fascist...
...Orwell could not respond to Scobie's plight even though there was a touch of Scobie in his own creation of John Flory in Burmese Days...
...For example, he was very impressed by Greene's abilities as a literary craftsman although he did not respond sympathetically to the religious overtones of novels like The Power and the Glory or The Heart of the Matter...
...He was never at ease toeing the party line on any given question, and this is why some of his sharpest criticism was directed at his fellow Socialists for their failing to uphold high standards of honesty...
...From the days of "Bloody Mary," to be a Catholic was in some way to be anti-English...
...In the last years of his life Orwell's work, especially Animal Farm and 1984, was lavishly praised in Catholic circles...
...Later during the early stages of World War II he argued that many Catholics secretly hoped for a fascist victory...
...What Orwell saw as the rigidity and dogmatism of Catholicism affronted his sense of decency...
...To most observers Orwell's animosity toward Catholicism would derive from his Marxism, an ideology which was traditionally antithetical to any form of supernatural religion...
...They were playing what Orwell called a "handy-pandy game" in which the more implausible Catholic doctrines, such as a belief in miracles or the Virgin birth, were to be explained away on the grounds that they either did not happen or no one believed them any more...
...That this apt view should appear in a Catholic periodical is in some ways highly paradoxical...
Vol. 103 • June 1976 • No. 13
