The affair of the Pope's butler, who has been accused of leaking Papal correspondence, was a violation of papal privacy. It will also have been a tragedy for the butler himself. But I found it diverting. It offered, too, a new perspective on more fraught conversations about the Catholic Church.
Catholics get used to being asked why they are Catholic. Sometimes enlivening, sometimes desultory conversation ensues. But more recently the questions have had a harder, almost accusatory edge. People ask, 'Why are you still a Catholic?'
The tone of this conversation reminds me of the British television series, Silent Witness, with its array of driven forensic scientists and unsmiling police officers awash in body parts, all wholly committed to expose the horror of the human heart, to seek justice for the forgotten and to expose the guilty.
I imagine them asking me, 'Are you not complicit in this?', as they point to the bones of an abused boy episcopally covered up. 'Must you not dissociate yourself from this contempt for women?', they say, waving a religious sister's knife-stabbed robe. 'How can you tolerate this abuse of authority?', they call, opening trays full of the tongues of silenced priests and tracheas with new translations stuffed down them.
The scene takes place at night. The atmosphere is tense and claustrophobic. I am caught without escape.
But suddenly the scene and the characters change. I am in the golden light of the lethal English countryside, and a host of batty aunts, tweedy twits, lovelorn teens, flummery vicars, peppery colonels and salty squires, assorted tramps, main chancers, and the occasional corpses dropped off in copses, who populate Midsomer Murders, converge on a huge crumbling ancestral estate.
We arrive in time to witness the police unmask the murderer, who has also nicked the ancestral silver and is busily melting it down and disguising it as shoehorns. And of course, in the tradition of the great English murder mystery, the villain is the butler. The butler has freed me from the dark world of forensic melodrama into a comic universe.
The story of the Pope's butler offers a broader take on the Catholic Church. The reality of Catholic life, like that of other churches, includes the inexcusable, the brutal, the indefensible and the appalling. It also includes the potty, the mediocre, the bombastic, the confused and the sheepish. And as well there are the idealistic, the enduring, the courageous and the constant.
These three