‘Is it really necessary to avoid meat on a Friday?” my grandmother once asked Dom Antony Sutch. “Well,” my old headmaster replied with a straight face, “I’ve always rather liked crab.”
Benedictines have always, in my experience, had wonderful senses of humour. Another Downside monk, Dom Raphael Appleby, once told me about a dear old lady who visited his parish church every Sunday evening for Confession. After she talked him through yet another quiet and guilt-free week, he announced her penance: “Mary, my dear, go home and pour yourself a large gin and tonic.”
But does this Catholic sense of humour exist across the board? Sadly, I think not. Too often in the last couple of years I’ve come across news stories of Catholic protest and pious outrage. And serious editorial warnings issued by Church publications which, frankly, border on the absurd.
The worst of these articles appear at Halloween. It’s a “dangerous celebration of horror and the macabre” which could encourage “pitiless sects without scruples”, the Italian bishops’ newspaper, Avvenire, pronounced last year. This year, L’Osservatore Romano printed an article headlined: “Halloween’s Dangerous Messages”, and a liturgical expert was reported to have said: “Halloween has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian… we must try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death.”
Really, just how much terror, fear and death can a pumpkin contain? I accept that there may be fragments of truth in the claims about occultism, but let’s face it: for most families this side of Glastonbury Tor, Halloween is a chance for children to dress up in bedsheets and smear themselves with jokeshop blood and green face paint, and to wander nextdoor to ask the neighbours for sweets and chocolate. It’s a chance for mums to carve ghoulish faces into pumpkins – and produce cauldrons of orange-coloured soup to last until the end of half-term.
Halloween is harmless fun, if you ask me. Its biggest flaw is the American tackiness which arrived on British shores with 1980s films like ET. But the bats and witches’ hats don’t justify the dreary Catholic sermons. Was American-born Puritanism included in the deal?
November 5, of course, offers a host of new opportunities for the humourless. “Bonfire Night is antiCatholic,” they say, “and the burning of a Guy is tantamount to religious hatred.” The anti-bonfire brigade certainly have a stronger case than the Halloween bashers. In 1606 Parliament passed an act declaring that November 5 be “a holiday forever in thankfulness to God for our deliverance and detestation of the Papists”. But without doubt the day has lost its original connotations, and is now simply a nationwide celebration of tradition – if you’re proud to be English, cheer those fireworks on.
The Catholic residents of Lewes in Sussex might disagree. There, on November 5 every year an effigy of Pope Paul V is set alight by one of the town’s bonfire societies. You’d have thought the custom would have died out in about 1850, but historians say that’s when it was just gaining popularity.
From the safe haven of Wiltshire, nonetheless, I would say this: let’s not get worked up about it. There’s no reason to suspect malice or anything approaching real hatred in Lewes. So Catholics should laugh it off as, I suspect, the Pope himself probably would.
If you can’t manage that, then you’re probably the sort of person who finds Halloween depraved. And I would only have one piece of advice: go home, and pour yourself a large gin and tonic.
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