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 categories do not represent different groups of people. They and their possibilities run through each human heart, from Pope to peasant. So the unpleasant company that we find ourselves keeping in any church has also to hold its nose when keeping company with us.
So whether we can responsibly still stay in the Church is not decided by the list of bad or absurd things Catholics, from high to low estate, do, however authoritatively. The question is whether the story, the hope and the shared life that have held us in the Church can accommodate and handle our constant discovery of the disreputable company we keep.
In my judgment the story that lies at the heart of our faith does accommodate massive evil and stupidity, and also encourages us to hope for a better church and world. The story tells how the son of God shared our human life, called a group of incompetents to join his inner group, experienced the darkest side of human malice, including betrayal and denial by his friends, and appalling torture and execution after trial in a kangaroo court.
Then he rose from the dead to show that life is stronger than all the things that make for death and to invite us to live generously.
If we base our lives on this story we should expect to find in our Church and world the depth of horror in Silent Witness and the superficiality of bumbledom in Midsomer Murders.
But we would also need to find our faith supported by evidence of goodness, of refusal to give up on justice in Church and world, of love, hope, constancy and forgiveness in the most unpromising of people and of places from prisons to cathedrals.
Those of us who still stay in churches have found these things run even deeper than the indefensible, the unspeakable and the ridiculous.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.