According to the Guardian this week, the recent canonisation of two twentieth century popes is very dangerous and should be thoroughly resisted by Western atheists in order to guard against a “menace to millions”. So argues Simon Jenkins. Canonisations are just one of a number of Catholic doctrines that come under an all-encompassing anti-Catholic broadside. The virgin birth, papal infallibility and transubstantiation also come under fire.

Mr Jenkins says he can sympathize with “intelligent Catholics” at this time. I’m sure they’re (we Catholics who do accept much of this nonsense apparently don’t come under that category) absolutely terribly grateful for Mr Jenkins’s sympathy. It’s incredibly tolerant of him. Still, vague sympathy and passive tolerance, while not particularly welcome, are at least to be preferred to outright hostility.

More concerning is where this patronising but tolerant attitude becomes a rather more sinister opposition to all religious practice. According to Simon Jenkins sensible people should “guard against this nonsense”.  Apparently these rituals and doctrines are a menace to millions. What precisely is meant by all this guarding is very unclear. If it is to be limited to angry blogs on the Guardian website then believers can rest fairly easy. Yet if these doctrines are genuinely believed to be a real and present danger to the world (the causal link seems a little under-developed) then presumably the hope is for a rather more robust anti-religious approach of some sort.

This is necessary because apparently religion holds back the “march of reason and civilization”. This early-twentieth-century-sounding modernist line of thought, sadly for Mr Jenkins, is dying out rather faster than religious views. The march of reason and civilization, such a popular trope in Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist thought seemed rather to lose its potency and appeal after the utter collapse of such progressive narratives in World War 2 and the horrors of the reality of Cold War communism. In Britain today what secular political model still has a genuine vision for an end goal of humanity – the fulfilment of rational progress? Politics today is made up largely of a mixed bag of technocrats, comedians and bureaucratic tinkerers, leaving little space for anything as grand as civilization and reason to go marching anywhere.

Perhaps that is why Mr Jenkins is so worried by, and opposed to, Catholic doctrines and traditions. In the march of reason and civilization these views should have withered away. Instead it is the certainty in our rational progress and end goal that seems to be in its death throes, while Catholicism trundles on, still drawing millions to the canonisation of two saints. Far from going extinct, as was long predicted, the Church retains an immense worldwide following. The modernist utopian dreams of a march of reason and civilization, free from the arcane trappings of religion, by contrast, are almost entirely spent. No amount of anti-Catholic polemic will change that now.

Ben Ryan is a researcher at Theos

Image from wikimedia available in the public domain