“Darling, just give me a minute to think,” pleaded Teresa; and she set about reviewing her own attitude to her faith.
Whatever the confessors may say, Catholicism has nothing to do with dogma ... no, no, that’s not quite it, dogma is a very important element, but in spite of not accepting it one can still be a Catholic. Catholicism is a form of art; it arouses an æsthetic emotion—an emotion of ambivalence; because like all great art it at once repels and attracts. When people confronted her with its intellectual absurdities, she felt as she did, when, at an exhibition of modern painting, they exclaimed: “but whoever saw hands like that?” or “why hasn’t he given her a nose?”
Of course, this peculiar æsthetic emotion is not to be found in every manifestation of Catholicism—it has to be sought for; for instance, it is in the strange pages at the beginning of Newman’s Apologia, where, in his hushed emaciated English, he tells how, in his childhood in a remote village, never having seen any of the insignia of Rome, when dreaming over his lessons he would cover the pages of his copy-books with rosaries and sacred hearts. And, when sitting one evening in the cemetery at the bottom of the hill on which stands Siena, she had got the emotion very strongly from the contrast between the lovely Tuscan country, the magnificently poised city, the sinister black-cowled confraternité that was winding down the hill, each member carrying a lighted torch—between all this and the cemetery itself where, among the wreaths of artificial flowers, there was stuck up on each grave a cheap photograph of the deceased in his or her horrible Sunday finery, with a maudlin motto inscribed upon the frame. In the contrast too in Seville between Holy Week, the pageantry of which is organised by the parish priests—a wooden platform, for instance, carried slowly through the streets on which stands the august Jesùs de la Muerte flanked by two huge lighted candles—and the Jesuit procession a few days later, in which Virgins looking like ballerinas and apostles holding guitars go simpering past all covered with paper flowers. One can get it, too, from reading the Song of Solomon in the terse Latin of the Vulgate.
It is an art steeped in a noble classical tradition which nevertheless makes unerringly for what, outside the vast tolerance of art, would be considered vulgar and hideous—chromo-lithographs, blood, mad nuns. This classical tradition and this taste for the tawdry are for ever pulling against each other, and it is just this conflict that gives it, as art, its peculiar cachet.
This was all very fine; but it would not do for Anna.
“Darling, do you think it matters about a thing being true, as long as it’s ... and, anyway, what exactly do we mean when we say a thing is true?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Anna fretfully, “do you believe that the clergyman turns that bread into Jesus Christ?”
After a second’s hesitation Teresa braced herself and answered, “Yes.”
“Well, anyway, Daddy doesn’t, I’m sure and,” Anna lowered her voice, “I’m sure Mummie didn’t either.”
“Well, darling, you know no one is going to force you to believe it—you can do exactly what you like about it.”