“I HAVE no doubt that God does call homosexuals to the priesthood,” wrote Father Timothy Radcliffe in a recent issue of the Catholic weekly The Tablet, “and they are among the most dedicated and impressive priests I have met.” The former Master of the Dominicans proceeds with typical benevolence across the minefield of the Vatican document on gay priests.
The Church should offer a model of a sane acceptance of sexuality in a sex-obsessed world, he says: a priest with a crudely macho heterosexual lifestyle would be just as inappropriate as a priest who frequented gay bars. What matters is sexual maturity: priests who can live celibately because they are at ease with themselves. At a retreat in Nova Scotia recently, a shy priest asked him: “Will this mean that people like me are not welcome as priests any more?” Radcliffe reassures him: “spiritual fatherhood” is surely exercised primarily through care of people, and has no connection with sexual orientation.
Besides, he has known priests who thought they were gay at 30, and then found they were not, and vice versa. The risk is that a gay seminarian might, by being truthful, be lost to the priesthood — while another less honest might dissemble and stay, and abuse his calling. (Remember that after Humanae Vitae, among priests and laymen, a silence descended, even in the confessional.)
Words, and truth, matter to Father Timothy, who is happy to confess in his new book that he, too, can tell a white lie when necessary. His book is What is the Point of Being a Christian? and he wants to know, when I visit him, whether it makes sense. I say yes: it is full of wisdom and insightful aperçus such as: “The opposite of joy is not sorrow but the numbness of heart that makes us incapable of any feeling.” Radcliffe’s whole presence and personality make sense. His physiognomy, his thoughtful manner and his laughter all instantly exude what St Augustine termed delectatio.
He is 58, tall and white-haired with the youthful pinkish complexion that suits a contented friar. At Blackfriars in Oxford, a day that starts at 6.20 and is governed by silence, punctuated thrice by Gregorian singing of psalms, seems a sane way to live. He opens the door in civvies and bounds up two flights of stairs to make instant coffee, before we repair to his small study lined with books. After his nine years in Rome, he had to jettison three- quarters of his books. The scholar Gervase Matthew said no Dominican should possess more than he can carry in one hand. “But then, he had a photographic memory. You’d see him in Blackwells, committing whole books to memory.”
Since he was elected the first English master of his order, in 1992, he has been mentioned as a potential Archbishop of Westminster, even as a future Pope. His laughter is explosive: “I never took that very seriously. We live in the mouths of other people, as one of the desert fathers said. I want to live my Dominican life.” He was about to depart for Lourdes, to preach in French to 40,000 pilgrims.
He had an essentially Edwardian childhood in Yorkshire, fourth of six children in a family whose historic allegiance was to Catholicism before the State. Distant ancestors included martyrs, and “Catholicism was the atmosphere we breathed”. He associated God with silent contemplation while walking in woods around their house, and fell in love with the beauty of the liturgy at Downside: early mornings in the glorious Abbey church, its interior filled with candles and the ringing of bells and the smell of incense. But he was “not at all a pious child” and was almost thrown out for reading the newly unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover during Benediction.
In his gap year he found himself drawn to the Dominicans by their motto, Veritas. When he told his father, chairman of the London Stock Exchange — the first of the family to engage in other than country pursuits — that he planned to join a religious order, his father looked over the top of his Financial Times and gave him his blessing, but said he must first meet a family friend who had dropped out of the seminary: he must feel free to fail. He read theology at Oxford and found his guru in the poetphilosopher Cornelius Ernst (who taught Rowan Williams, too). Christians, he believes, should “puzzle and intrigue people” so that faith appears attractive, not just a lifestyle accessory, such as aromatherapy.
The chapter The Body Electric (Walt Whitman’s phrase) tells of his own crisis when, at the age of 30, shortly after his ordination, he found someone with whom he could share his life. “It was a fruitful moment,” he says, “and an awakening from fantasy” (that is, he no longer had to imagine what it might be like). “If I’d run away and said ‘I’m never going to see you again’ that would have been to shoot myself in the heart.” They are good friends to this day.
Yes, it is a deprivation not to marry or have children, to never know the intimacy of waking up with your love. “But it doesn’t mean you live an emotionally sterile life. A Dominican has to be capable of great affection, of really loving people.” The idea of chastity has great beauty: it bestows the freedom to be wholly available to the service of God. He is sure, however, that the discipline of priestly celibacy (“it is only a discipline”) will change in his lifetime. And that will have disadvantages: disadvantages such as a loss of classlessness. “A married priest would be far more locatable in the social structure,” he says, “and where would he send his children to school?” On women priests he is less sanguine. There must be disputatio — the medieval formula for argument which advances in subtle stages towards a final convergence.
His book leavens its philosophy with good jokes (“Tesco ergo sum — I shop therefore I am”), references to contemporary novels and films and the timeless, universal pleasures of wine. Dominicans insist there must be wine on the table for guests — and that you must have guests every day.
Despite the collective depression he sees in a globalised world which offers instant communication but no shared sense of where we are going, he writes of the hope, joy and laughter he finds among the brethren he visits in war-torn places — Rwanda, Burundi, the Congo. He dedicates his book to “my mother, whose life answers the question”. She is nearly 90, he tells me, and believes, with Julian of Norwich, that “all manner of things shall be well”.
What is the Point of Being a Christian? by Timothy Radcliffe (Continuum Books) is available from The Times Books First for £9.89.
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