Occidental Partridge

Having planned to write this piece for some months, in order to coincide with Maundy Thursday, events have rather conspired against its apparent timeliness. At a time when public religious services lie under an unprecedented ban, this now seems an odd time to argue – as I am about to – for a conspicuous increase in social contact in religious services, albeit one in particular. But this mournful period too shall pass, and I hope that one day the argument will be viewed in the light of normalcy.  Likewise, a piece predicated on recent moral failings on the part of big hitters in the British Royal Family seems suddenly passé as the media once again becomes awash with admiring columns about our Queen’s pitch-perfect calm in a storm. But one doesn’t need to delve too far back into the fickle media cycle to find an example of a royal putting his foot in it. I closed ranks around the Prince of Wales in his ailment as much as the next Twitter monarchist. But one might humbly ask HRH if tha

In the latter 1920s, a foundational thinker of Western Marxism lay incarcerated in an Italian prison cell. Much as we’re told now by cheery memes not to ‘waste’ lockdown and learn a new language or stage an opera with sockpuppets, Antonio Gramsci used his time inside to reflect on the state of the stalling International Communist movement. The result was the Prison Notebooks , which identified cultural hegemony as the main obstacle to be surmounted; that bourgeois value systems would have to be displaced by revolutionary ones across society’s institutions, to establish strength in a ‘war of position’ before a ‘war of manoeuvre’ was viable. In the 1960s, the German activist Rudi Dutschke took up the baton, calling for a “ long march through the institutions ”, as a tribute to Chairman Mao’s bloody Long March during the Chinese Civil War. Anyone who has been to a British university has probably encountered the practice of this theory, whether unconsciously or by design.               

It often feels as though I am the last one in the country but I am one of those Catholics that have never been quite able to reconcile the Church of Rome with Britishness. I am more likely to be found in a CofE church on Sunday than an RC one, and in self-description am increasingly tending to insert an ‘Anglo’ before ‘Catholic’, thus standing in the Great British tradition of having one’s fudge and eating it. It seems all the more ridiculous when there are so many examples of Roman Catholics who want for nothing in patriotism, from G.K. Chesterton to Jacob Rees-Mogg, for whom there is no contradiction in bowing to the House of Windsor and kneeling before the Bishop of Rome.  And when I attend an RC Mass among the diverse congregation smell the incense, hear the hymns I grew up with, I feel the gravitational pull, back to the Holy Mother Church. But it isn’t long before I think of the pews in some Anglican edifice I know, generally older, almost always emptier, but no less