a fireside chat with malcolm muggeridge-michael davies 1984

Fireside Chat With

Malcolm Muggeridge

A few weeks after he and wife Kitty' were accepted into the Roman Catholic Church, Malcolm Muggeridge invited British author Michael Davies and Roger McCaffrey, producer of the "Where Catholics Meet" radio program, to his home in Sussex, England. They. met there on Sunday, February 20, 1983, for a long afternoon's conversation. Portions of it can of course be heard on "Where Catholics Meet." But following is the com-plete transcript, edited for punctuation and grammar only. The final section, incidentally, is from a subsequent interview with author Davies conducted in July—the day, in fact, after Mr. Muggeridge's extraordinary interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn aired on BBC-TV. This, then, has become more than a small pamphlet, as we had advertised. It is nothing less than a manuscript for a short book.

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A Fireside Chat With Malcolm Muggeridge MICHAEL DAVIES: Mr. Muggeridge, I expect you know that the fact that you and Mrs. Muggeridge have at last decided to become Catholics has evoked a great deal of interest. I wrote a report on it for a paper for which I write in the United States and there's been a very, very interesting reaction to it. I've had quite a lot of letters—so has the editor. I'd like to quote you from one of them. It's from a gentleman called Michael Reardon who lives in the im-probably named place, Mechanicsville, in Virginia: "It was with a great deal of pleasure that I read of the conversion of Malcolm Muggeridge, particularly since I had been praying for this intention for six to eight months prior to reading that he had become a Catholic in "The Catholic Virginian." I had long wondered why a man who was more Catholic than most Catholics I know, and obviously one full of God's grace was not in fact a Catholic. While watching TV the better part of a year ago, I thought to myself that with a small push he would become a Catholic. It was then that I decided to pray for this intention each day, so my last prayer each day thereafter was 'I pray for Malcolm Muggeridge the grace of conversion to our Holy Faith,' and added a Hail Mary for the intention." I also had a letter from Carmelite nuns in Des Plaines in Illinois, saying that they had been doing the same thing. I wonder if you've had many similar reactions? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: A great many, to my utter amazement. We've had, I should think, something like a thousand letters from all over the world, and I feel quite bashful about it. I think that the Recipient of the prayer must have got rather bored with this name being endlessly put before Him. But I'm very happy to think that they are happy over our do-ing what we've wanted to do for so long. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, well I think that the case must be with a lot of Catholics that they've been very disappointed in the

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A Fireside Chat I With Malcolm Muggeridge

message that is coming to them from the authorities in their own Church and when they read or hear anything that you've been saying, even before you became a Catholic, it echoes what they really believe themselves. And like yourself, I'm a convert. I became a Catholic in 1956, but the Church was very different then. It had a beautiful, awe-inspiring liturgy, it had very clear teaching, it insisted upon this teaching, it taught it without ambig-uity. None of these factors can really be said to prevail to-day and I don't think that in 1982 I would have become a Catholic. I wonder what prompted you to take the step at this time? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well it was certainly the case that the hesita-tion, the long hesitation, was because of polemics in the Church, and the last thing I wanted to do was to, through doing something that I thought was spiritually right, get involved in tiresome arguments. So that, yes, it was something that I foresaw. In my case a very big factor in this was simply an association with Mother Teresa, which happened by chance. One day I got a message that an In-dian nun of some sort was coming over here. The BBC said, "Would you care to come and interview her?" They sent me down some material about her and I read it in the train going up. And then, of course, I saw her, and I realised that she was a very, very exceptional person, and I was en-chanted by her. And she was very eager that I should become a Catholic. We became friends—insofar as some-one as run-of-the-mill as I am myself could become a friend of Mother Teresa—yes, we became friends, and I was able to make a television programme which helped her work along and do a little book on it which also had a fantastic circulation, translated into every language in Europe and things like that. She was very anxious that I should become a Catholic, and we used to talk about it. I had

some feeling that I couldn't, and then at last it seemed clear. And so one of the things that was very pleasant about it was the thought of pleasing her, which it did. And of course she'd been praying, and had instructed all her cohorts of nuns to, so there must have been a big noise made by all that.

MICHAEL DAVIES: I think, in a way though, Mother Teresa's very untypical of the Catholic Church today. I'd like to read here a little quotation of something that you once wrote about liberalism. You said: "Liberalism will be seen histor-ically as the great destructive force of our time, much more so than Communism, Nazism or any other of the lunatic creeds which make such immediate havoc. Compared with the long-term consequences of a Gilbert Murray, a Ber-trand Russell or a Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Hitler was an ineffective dreamer, Stalin a Father Christmas and Mus-solini an Arcadian shepherd."

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I stand by that, by the way.

MICHAEL DAVIES: But I think it's very interesting that, at the mo-ment, the Catholic establishment in countries like Britain and the USA seem to be adopting all the ideas of these people you condemned. Yet you have moved from liberal-ism to authentic Catholicism when the mainstream of, shall we say, the Catholic establishment, is moving in the opposite direction. MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: Certainly, certainly, that's absolutely true. You've possibly read an article I wrote years ago called "Backward Christian Soldiers"? MICHAEL DAVIES: I did, yes. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . which is an analysis of this. Then I wrote another thing which had some circulation called "The

4 A Fireside Chat

Great Liberal Death Wish." MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, yes. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . which was that you could really only ac count for liberalism, it only made sense, when you saw that it was a kind of death wish. And of course, then Tread Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed, or The Devils, as I think the real translation is, and he works that out in the most prophetic and marvellous way, that out of this liberalism, I remember the exact phrase—there's an old Verkhovensky, an absolutely typical liberal, sentimental, highly regarded, and all that sort of thing; then his son, Peter Verkhoven- sky, whose slogan is that, "What we need is some few years of real debauchery, and then a little fresh bloodletting, and the show will start." It is a perfect prophecy because this orgy of depravity, this complete breaking down of every kind of moral principle that is happening in all the Western countries. . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: The Communists wouldn't allow such, of course . . . MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: No, no, and that's very interesting that they wouldn't allow it. I've never been able to discover, I don't know if you have, how it came about, and I've tried to find out from Svetlana and she had an idea, because they started off the Revolution. . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: SVetlana Stalin.

OLLCOLM GERIDGE: . . . with the full, you know, libertarian atti-

tudes—no marriage—and Lenin developed a theory, called "the glass-of-water theory," that going to bed with a lady was no more than drinking a glass of water, so this was known as the glass of water theory and suddenly, reverse gear, and I asked, "How did it happen?", and she had no idea, although she thought her dad was concerned in it.

With Malcolm Muggeridge

ADGER CCAFFREY: Liberalism seems to have paralysed the Church,

whereas Communism seems to have galvanised it. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Absolutely. It's a very interesting thing. And it may well be that liberalism, as I said in that rather ex-aggerated quotation, is a much more vicious and destruc-tive attitude than Communism. It's very much on the cards, because it masquerades as being humane. If you want a simple example which I think is absolutely extra-ordinary: you have this holocaust in Germany under the Nazis, which is shown on television throughout the West-ern world, everybody beating their breasts over it, and at the same time on our side of the fence with abortion, euthanasia and all these things that are going on, you've got a sort of "humane" holocaust taking place which is infinitely more dreadful than Hitler's, and nobody can see the connection between the two. MICHAEL DAVIES: There's a very similar example to that which I read about in a once-Catholic paper called The Tablet, there's a young lady called Mary Kelly, Mary Kenny . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Kenny, yes. MICHAEL

who has moved from being rather liberal to being . . . MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: I was interested in her writing, yes. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, and she had been out to this peace camp on Greenham Common where these militant peace women are picketing the base where the Americans are going to set up their Cruise Missiles, and they were making a great play of children, they'd bring their children out there and were putting big pictures of babies and babies' toys and hanging them on the wire, saying "Our children want to live," and Mary Kenny recognised many of these women

A Fireside Chat

as militant leaders in the abortion movement. MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: I remember seeing that. Very interesting. Very interesting. So people don't connect up these things at all, and of course the media keep it all going, and if you said to them, "Well, what about this other holocaust, done from the highest intentions, perpetrated by the most respected surgeons, etcetera," they wouldn't see the connection, or purport not to. MICHAEL DAVIES: No, and what I find ? lot with the Catholic Bishops today and the Catholic bureaucracy—we're almost having a thing where you could say that the Third World is the opium of the clergy—they're very concerned with hypo-thetical situations about which they can really do nothing at all, and yet on their own doorstep, they ignore abortion, they ignore pornography, they ignore the degenerating standards in Catholic schools, and put a great deal of effort and a great deal of money into grandiose schemes of which nothing can come. They are rather like ecclesiastical Mrs. Jellybys. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Exactly right. And there you are again, you have this same thing that the humane principle when developed without God, without any sort of transcenden-tal aspect, far from being a helpful element in human life, is one of the most destructive. Again you have Dostoevsky. It's really quite extraordinary. But he says the same thing. He says "Doing good without God is diabolical." MICHAEL . .

DAVIES: I think it was St. Paul said that, wasn't it . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Oh, he did. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . that if you give everything, that you can give all your goods to the poor . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: That's right, absolutely, same thing.

With Malcolm Muggeridge

ROXL .. . and not have charity, which is love of God for Himself. . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Absolutely. ROGER MCCAFFREY: Christ also said, did He not say, I know your good works; the lukewarm I will vomit . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Vomit, yes. MICHAEL .

DAVIES: Vomit. Omit.

DcGcELFREy: What about Newman? What influence has he had on you?

trigLIDGE: Well, he's had a considerable one. Of course, I find the Apologia one of the really remarkable documents of modern times. But increasingly, especially latterly, I see that he too had this sense of what was going to happen; that man, supposing that he were self-sufficient, supposing that his intellect could really grasp the whole cir-cumstances of his being— . . . But I think that he saw it and he expressed it without being too aggressive about it. I've been, always am, much too aggressive, because some-how these things hit hard, but he keeps a kind of calm which is very beautiful. ROGER MCCAFFREY: Of course, it was easier to be calm a hundred years ago. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I Suppose it was. But I still think he might have been, even today. He had a scholarly mind, rather than an imaginative mind. But oh, he made a tremendous contri-bution to the whole thing, and so many of his writings illuminate in a perfectly unique way.

I think that one of the best descriptions of the horrors of the liberal mind is Solzhenitsyn's description of Mrs.

A Fireside Chat

Roosevelt visiting one of the labor camps, which is a real masterpiece, how they all had cigarettes on the table and food was spread round the Zeks so that they couldn't con-tain themselves, and they grabbed the cigarettes and stuffed themselves with the food . . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: And she found them rude?

NALCOLM UGGERIDGE: Well, she said, I found the whole thing very

sympathetic, but I thought their table manners were not all that could be desired. I think it's a perfect example of this silly creature, you know, words fail me. MICHAEL DAVIES: We had in this country, I think about two years ago now, it was something called the National Pastoral Congress. All the Catholic bishops decided they wanted to consult everybody on the pastoral strategy for the Church, because consultation, that's the big thing over here now. And they had similar things in America. They had a thing called the Call To Action Congress in Detroit and nearly everybody who came was a liberal, Catholic trendy. The resolutions they passed could have been passed by the British Humanist Association. They were all about the Church being involved in solving the unem-ployment problem, in disarmament and allowing contra-ception, allowing divorce, being tolerant to sexual perverts, and I believe there's hardly a reference to Heaven or the life to come in either congress, in the one in Liverpool in England or the one in Detroit in the USA, and there were certainly no references to Hell. And the whole idea of sal-vation was salvation from material deprivation. I know no one is more concerned about that than Mother Teresa, but I'm sure you'd agree that she thinks that the spiritual aspect of religion definitely comes first. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Of course, and has carried that out in her policies.

With Malcolm Muggeridge 9

MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: For instance, she has forbidden the co-workers, this organisation of co-workers now all over the world, she's forbidden them to devote themselves to collecting money or having bazaars or anything like that. She said, "No, we are taking to people His love, and love is needed more, probably more where you live, than even in Cal-cutta." And so she's never fallen into this trap at all. It's something that doesn't come into her being at all. MICHAEL DAVIES: And there's the in-phrase at the moment, when a bishop says that we must have unilateral disarmament, and that we must have divorce, he's said to be speaking with a "prophetic voice." That's their favourite phrase. But I think that one of the few great prophets in the Church now is a French priest, a Fr. Brukberger, who's a Dominican . . . MALCOLM .

MUGGERIDGE: I know about rum. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, he was the Chaplain General to the French Resistance, and he wrote a wonderful book called An Open Letter To Jesus Christ, and in it he commented on a state-ment that the French bishops had put out, very verbose, going on, I believe, for 21 pages. His letter's directed to Our Lord. He says that He'll notice that, though the bishops mention Him often in this great statement, they never once quoted Him. And he said they never once mentioned that the great deprivation, the great poverty, is to be deprived of Jesus Christ, to be separated from Our Lord. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Of course. MICHAEL DAVIES: And to be deprived of the hope of salvation.

10 A Fireside Chat

a LCOLM LkIGGERIDGE: Exactly. That's why these people in these

labour camps that we read about, and that Solzhenitsyn and others have told us about, why it is that they say and Solzhenitsyn himself said, that it was only in that camp "that I suddenly understood, that illumination came to me," and he finishes up: "Thank you, thank you, prison camp, for having brought me this great delight." ROGER MCCAFFREY: Incidentally, you mentioned before the pro-gramme that you had corresponded with Solzhenitsyn. Are you willing to discuss that? MALCOLM MUGGEIUDGE: Well yes, it doesn't amount to very much. I just wrote to him because earlier on there was a question about doing an interview, and he, finally, having once vaguely agreed to it, wrote back and said that he'd had his say about the Western world, notably at the Harvard speech. Of course, it had had no effect whatever . . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: Indeed, after Harvard, he was ignored. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes. ROGER MCCAFFREY: His Taiwan speech was completely ignored by the press in America. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, that's it. And therefore he saw no point in going on, and he's simply settled down to his work of writing, specifically these historical novels which will, as he puts it, will restore Russia, will give Russia back her his-tory. Because, of course, it is an extraordinary thing: their history ends with the coming of Lenin. After that there's no history, because all the years of Stalin are non-history, and the years of Krushchev are non-history, and I suspect that any minute we shall find the years of Brezhnev were non-history. So you've got a great hole, but things have


been going on nonetheless. It is an extraordinary fact that they've already started abolishing Brezhnev, and actually Andropov's putting back a little bit of Stalin. It must be very interesting to be a subscriber to the great Soviet Encyclopaedia because, whenever anybody dies, you get a little letter saying, "Would you please cut out pages so,-and-so to so-and-so and insert the enclosed." MICHAEL DAVIES: There's a very interesting remark that Solzhenitsyn made during a talk he gave in Taiwan. He mentioned the great danger that all Taiwan's allies were abandoning them, and he mentioned the great danger from Communist China, but he also said there was an even greater danger which could become their own weakness, and that was that all prosperous people tend to lose the awareness of danger, and through addiction of the good living condi-tions of today lose their will for resistance. "I hope and I urge you to avoid such a weakening." MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Very sound. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. es. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: COLIFSe, WS exactly what Gibbon . . . You see, Gibbon speaks of Caesar Augustus. He said Caesar Augus- tus very cunningly raised, words to that effect, raised the standard of life in Rome and thereby made them forget about liberty. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, in that point of view Marx seems to have been right. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . raise living standards and religion dies away. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Absolutely. MICHAEL DAVIES: But, ironically, it's dying away in the West and not

12 A Fireside Chat

in Marxist countries.

ttLCOLM JGGERIDGE: Yes, yes, that's right. God's always got a trick

up His sleeve in these matters. It's very fascinating. You suddenly see there, you think just like what you said, and then you suddenly see that no, you haven't got the whole story. The people who, the Marxists' view of life would produce such a ghastly, such a frustrated, hungry popula-tion that they'd be driven back. . . MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. MALCOLM MUGGEFUDGE: . . . to reality. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: And they'd be the most favoured of people be-cause of that, whereas these others, with their talk of "the quality of life," the quality of life, which means simply gorging, fornicating, and never having children and so on. That is the quality of life. MICHAEL DAVIES: It's even more ironic though that in Marxist coun-tries, young people are reacting against that by becoming Christians, but in our society, young people are reacting against materialism by becoming Marxists . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: This is quite true. There were some students from Marxist countries, Christian students, used to come and meet here, near here, and we used to see them, and they were absolutely amazed by the richness of this life in this country and went up to London goggle-eyed and, you know, well, of course, we can't manage anything like that under Marx. MICHAEL , DAVIES: I d be very interested, Mr. Muggeridge, if you could say something about the doctrinal aspect of Catholicism, because you mentioned earlier the great influence Mother


Teresa had upon you and you even said that you thought to a certain extent that you'd become a Catholic to please her, though I'm sure she'd be horrified if she thought that you had become a Catholic to please her. Obviously the ultimate reason for being a Christian or being a Catholic is that one must believe that it's the truth and that it's one's duty to do so. I'd like to read you a little extract here from Newman. Do you know that when he was eventually made a Cardinal this is what he said: "To one great mis-chief, I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years, I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas, it is an error overspreading as a snare the whole earth. Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste, and it is the right of each in-dividual to make it say just what strikes his fancy." MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Marvellous. MICHAEL DAVIES: Well, I have always felt that the strongest attraction of the Catholic religion was that one believed that, in all really essential points, the Catholic Church today was teaching through the Pope and the bishops exactly what Christ taught. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes, well I couldn't believe that. I mean I had to recognise that that wasn't so, and therefore I had to build my hopes and justify the step that was being taken through individuals rather than through any sense of the Church, and one of them was Mother Teresa, of course, and certainly Newman, as someone I'd read; they, and the

14 A Fireside Chat

Pope, the present Pope, in his attitude towards things like contraception and so on. I could feel completely satisfied to be associated with him, but I couldn't dream of thinking of the Church, and, knowing a little bit about the hier-archy in countries like Canada and America, less than ever. But it is true that, after all, the Pope is the head of it all, this is what I said to myself and say to myself now, and that on all these issues, he is absolutely steadfast and there-fore I as it were joined under the shelter of His Holiness.

MICHAEL DAVIES: And you have no problems at all now with any of the teachings of the Church? MALCOLM MUGGEIUDGE: Well, I wouldn't say that, actually, but I've got no quarrel with them. I might find some easier to under-stand than others and so on. But there's nothing in the Church that I would blush for in its traditional values and so on. I think that its very continuance is one of the most remarkable facts—and reassuring to someone who is being received. No, I don't—I suppose you might be thinking of something like papal infallibility or something like that.

MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, es, possibly, but . . .

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: It doesn't worry me, that kind of thing. I mean, in a sense, obviously the Pope is the head of the whole thing and therefore, in certain capacities, he must be con-sidered to be infallible. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, but I think the great point that distinguishes the Catholic religion from other forms of Christianity is that you do have someone who can teach with absolute authority and that one is able to believe that what he teaches is true. MALCOLM MU EDGE: Yes, well, certainly I would agree that the sur- vival of the Church through this extraordinary period of


history as it has survived and with many lapses and dis-agreeable events is that, is precisely because it has main-tained this authority and it's never sought to discuss and to arrive at a consensus. "Consensus," I think, is one of the most sinister words now that can pass one's lips.

Yes I think those points are of immense value, but it's not that that, in itself, would have drawn me in.

MICHAEL DAVIES: No, I think that would probably be true of many converts; that they were brought into the Church by a really good Catholic, and perhaps afterwards they came to appreciate the doctrines of the Church.

There's a very, very radical statement by Newman I'd like to read you and see what you think of this. Newman said: "I came to the conclusion that there was no medium in true philosophy between atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below must embrace either the one or the other." And this, I'm sure, would be because of this principle of authority, that in Protestant Christianity, a person in himself can be very, very devout and have a very good relationship with Our Lord but if it comes down to the point where the Bible is your ultimate authority and you interpret the Bible yourself, in the end, your own mind is the ultimate authority by which you live. So ulti-mately, I think, Protestantism leads to rationalism.

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I think this is right. I think that it leads either to rationalism or to complete scepticism, because it be-comes apparent that one's mind is not capable of under-taking what would be required, if from a purely personal point of view. And there I found great comfort from some-one I admire very much, Pascal. He saw that the intellect, as such, was a cul de sac, and as he had one of the most brilliant intellects of his time, this was important evidence.

16 A Fireside Chat With Malcolm Muggeridge 17

MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. And also I think from your own experience this also seems to have been something that has impressed you. Another point which Newman made is that truth often lies in the extremes. He started off with the via media and he thought that was a good way between Catholicism and Protestantism, but I think that we're finding today that in many ways the via media just isn't practical. For ex-ample, with abortion. You can have an extreme position on one hand that you can have abortion on demand. On the other hand, you can never have it. And then you can have the "reasonable" position in between, you have it when . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: With some exceptions. MICHAEL DAVIES: And I think in many cases where people have thought that the doctrine of the Catholic Church was very harsh, on say divorce, they often bring up examples, well suppose a couple get married and the man abandons his wife after a year, should she have to live the rest of her life in a celibate state. But then, if one gives way to that, what about a man who leaves his wife after thirteen months or after fifteen months or after two years. And the moment you break this absolute, apparently harsh princi-ple, we've now reached the position where I think in America, the divorce rate is getting on for fifty per cent . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Here, too. MICHAEL DAVIES: And I know, as a teacher, in teaching young chil-dren, you can always pick out the children from divorced families in class, you can see they're always looking for attention and they're easily upset, they burst into tears. . . MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: Yes, yes. MICHAEL

and I think it's very frightening for society if

divorce does have these adverse effects on children. If we're going to have a society where over half the children are from divorced families . . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: We're not going to have a society.

NALCOLM UGGERIDGE: And we're approaching that point, we're ap-

proaching that point now. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . and the same with the subject of contraception. The Catholic Church has always said that the act of pro-creation should always be open to life. That has been denied, and logically it's now led to the acceptability of practically every form of perversion. MALCOLM MUGGEFUDGE: Certainly. Well, this is, this is what brought me in. I mean, it was the realisation, especially in the per-son of the present Pope—he never wavered, and he upset the American hierarchy enormously on his visit by not wavering in any way, and I know, and what you've just said, I entirely agree with. Unless you have enough respect for life to write off the whole idea of contraception, the whole idea that eroticism can be a pursuit irrespective of its purpose, which is procreation, and of its condition, which is lasting love . . . That is absolutely true and it was that, as much as anything, that made me feel that I must at the end of my days stand up and be counted with this Church which alone, alone in the whole world, defends this principle. Of course there are many priests and many monsignors and people who don't, and who talk a lot of nonsense about compassionate views and so on. Compas-sion has become a word that I shudder over. It's the cloak of every kind of evil thing. MICHAEL DAVIES: It's rather like, it's got a special meaning. Now if you say "adult," if you see a shop that says adult books, you know what it means. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: You know exactly what it means.


MICHAEL „ DAVIES: If you take a compassionate view, it means to toler-ate every vile thing one can think of. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I mean, after all, the Western world is destroy-ing itself, isn't it? Patently destroying itself. And this busi-ness of believing in overpopulation and believing in con-traception and abortion and all that goes with it is a very large element in that destruction, and in point of fact, it's probably reached a pitch now when, even if you could per-suade people against it, it would be impossible to reverse the process. MICHAEL DAVIES: It almost, in some ways, has become an industry, with pornography, really . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: We're going to give it another great boost here with cable television. That's what cable television is for. MICHAEL , DAVIES: I ve been very interested in how we've had it in this country—and in America it's happening now—some of the militantly anti-Catholic women's liberation groups are now coming out very strongly against pornography, be-cause the people who are speaking out in defense of por-nography are often very eminent liberal people in the de-fense of freedom of speech and that you should be able to publish what you like. These women's groups are now see-ing really that pornography is the exploitation of women and now, of course, sadly the exploitation of children and, as you say, our society seems to be absolutely destroying itself. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: And visibly doing so. ROGER MCCAFFREY: Also, it is true to say that the Church, in the loose sense of that word is destroying itself in the West. But I don't think that you can conclude that—obviously you can't think, if you're a Catholic, that the Church

will die, but that individuals and perhaps, as in the days of the Arian heresy, even the vast majority of bishops and in-deed even the Pope, one Pope in those days was weak and . . . MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: Yes. ROGER MCCAFFREY: . . . and was condemned for being weak about fighting the Arians. Even they can fail without it being said that the Church will die. And you mentioned earlier that the bishops largely were no inspiration to you but . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Putting it mildly.

DeCMFFREY: . . . but it's also true to say that the very fact that we see failure on the part of the bishops, successors to the Apostles, can lead you to a stronger faith in a way, because it forces you to confront the whole tradition that is the Church. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, certainly if you throw your mind back and think of what you would have thought of the pros-pects of the Russian Orthodox Church after 1917, you would have said it's got no future at all. Many people did. But its future is absolutely, is precisely because it has man-aged in the most appalling circumstances to maintain, and perhaps not even consciously but through circumstances, to maintain its position and now, in their desperation, people are turning to it, as they did in the war. It's one of the incidents that never receive any publicity particularly, but was extremely interesting, that in the darkest moment of the war, from the point of view of Russia, when the German Army was 40 miles from Moscow and a similar distance from Leningrad, what did Stalin do? He didn't have readings from Das Kapital or anything like that. He fetched out from the camps the old hierarchy and set it up. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, and he reverted to the Holy Mother Russia idea.

20 A Fireside Chat

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Absolutely. In fact, the truth is of course that Stalin is the counter-revolution. I mean, he'll be seen in history books, his role, as being the counter-revolution. He destroyed completely the revolution that took place. But that's a separate. issue and, in a sense, just being his-tory, it's not important because history, as such, is not par-ticularly important. Truth is important. And I still believe that this amazing Church that has been a repository of truth with enormous ups and downs over many centuries will continue to do that, and you can detect the signs of it in the fact that it, in these extraordinary issues, just as it set its face against usury, which is an amazing piece of in-sight, and of course if you ever want to annoy leftist people you can always say to them that, if only the people had been up to supporting their Catholic Church, there would have been no capitalist system, because you couldn't have had a capitalist system without usury. And again, the Church's caution over things like chloroform. I mean that you don't rush into this thing. You don't say that because you can make people not suffer or anything in operations that you want to be cautious, you want to be careful about it. I build on all that, and now in our time, Humanae Vitae is the most amazing, amazing gesture to have been made in the circumstances of the twentieth century. Even though many eminent Catholics have not really, either overtly or covertly, supported it. But it was an extraordinary step to take, against the whole trend of things. Of course, Mother Teresa does the same thing, you see. She is the complete contradiction of the population explosion. RoGER MCCAFFREY: Why does the media make—at least in America, I don't know about over here—make such a big thing of Mother Teresa? She is a sign of contradiction to them. But every time, you know, she started convents in Washington


and in the South Bronx, and I mean I know it's a great news item, but they never fail .. . she seems to be an excep-tion to the rule. What's the reason? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I think it's because they, I mean, there are always two motives at work in the media and one is the simple fact of attracting a large audience and Mother Teresa has always been in the position that, whatever you think about what she says, she attracts a large audience. ROGER MCCAFFREY: And she helps the poor, and everybody's inter-ested in that. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Absolutely. Everybody thinks that's good. I mean there are all sorts of things in her which you can pre-sent. There's a lot of other things in her that are seldom mentioned, but they're there. And she has miraculously, miraculously had this now for several decades and has been completely uncorrupted by it. ROGER MCCAFFREY: Is there a scenario in which you can see the media shutting off Mother Teresa from the world as they have Solzhenitsyn? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes. ROGER MCCAFFREY: I suppose if there were an evident miracle done in sight of the cameras, that would be it. After that, there'd be no more. But is there, what do you see happen-ing in the crystal ball? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: They'd love it, they'd love it if they could dis-credit her; I mean if there was some way in which she made some hideous error. There was a moment, for in-stance, when her sisters in Belfast in Northern Ireland, there was some person there, a senior Roman Catholic with the name Murphy, but everybody there has the name of Murphy, so that doesn't get you anywhere, but anyway

22 A Fireside Chat

he told her that her sisters were not welcome, and she im-mediately withdrew them. And there was a lot of talk about it and within the Catholic Church they started try-ing to work out a hostile attitude toward Mother Teresa, but she was in the clear really because you see—as I was tackled myself on the thing, by some Catholics, and I said —she's a very old-fashioned lady, and if she takes a vow, she keeps it, though it seems absolutely strange to you, and impossible even, but it is true that if she says that she will be obedient to a certain ecclesiastical hierarchy, she will be obedient to it. And of course she took them away, and then you'll find that some managed to go back and so on. She can deal with a situation like that so that she's never fallen into any of those traps, you see. When I first realised what a wise person she was as well as everything else was that she would never accept any money from any govern-ment under any circumstances. This could be quite a con-siderable thing for her because she would get grants from the government of India for her work for the lepers and all the children. But she'll never do it because she would be involved if she did that in situations that would damage and ultimately destroy her. It's very interesting. She's got a kind of second sense in all this. She's got her sisters into Communist countries—it's absolutely extraordinary—I mean into Zagreb and into East Berlin and so on, they've got in there and nothing's been said about it. So that I wouldn't myself worry about her being discredited, but it would absolutely delight the media. Another thing, they tried to work up a thing on her house in, one of her houses in London was burnt down, do you remember that . . . MicHAEL DAVIES: Yes. MALcous4 MuGGERIDGE: . . . and there was a terrific to do about it because the sort of fire restrictions hadn't been properly worked out there. Anyway, she dealt with it, I thought, in


a very marvellous way by simply—she said, "We take a vow that we will never refuse anybody" and the woman who burnt the place down was an alcoholic that would not, was not acceptable to any of the welfare places. ROGER MCCAFFREY: If Ralph Nader had walked in he would have immediately cited her. MICHAEL DAVIES: I think the reason for that obviously again is be-cause the basis for her whole apostolate is spiritual and she sees in every individual, however wretched or however much they've degenerated, a person with a soul that has an eternal destiny. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: She sees Christ. She said that you must see Him in every other human being. And, as a matter of fact, she's very funny sometimes because she naturally doesn't like abusing people but, like all of us, she dislikes some peo-ple rather than others and if she dislikes somebody, she says he's Christ in very distressing disguise. That's a rather good device for a blameless piece of abuse, don't you think? MICHAEL DAVIES: Mr. Muggeridge, I think one very interesting aspect of you joining the Catholic Church when you have, in a way it's almost like Rhett Butler at the end of "Gone With The Wind" when he decided to join the Confederates almost at the end of the war. Now it is no part of the doc-trine of the Catholic Church that it is always going to be flourishing everywhere or that it will ever be even a huge organisation when Our Lord returns. In fact, as you know, it says in the Bible, "when the Son of Man returns will He find faith?" MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Right. MICHAEL DAVIES: Father Bruckberger, in his book An Open Letter to Jesus Christ, said that the Church could well be reduced to

24 A Fireside Chat

With Malcolm Muggeridge 25 a handful of faithful living in a dungeon. Some Catholics think that if one makes a prediction like that one is acting contrary to the Faith, which isn't true at all. All we know is that the Church will last to the end of time. It could be very, very small. And Cardinal Newman, towards the end of his life, wrote a letter which very few people seem to know about, in 1877, and this is what he said: "As to the prospects of the Church as to which you ask my opinion, you know old men are generally desponding, but my ap-prehensions are not new, but of about fifty years' standing. I have all that time thought that a time of widespread infidelity was coming, and through all those years the waters have in fact been rising as a deluge. I look for the time after my life when only the tops of the mountains will be seen like islands in the waste of waters. I speak princi-pally of the Protestant world, but great actions and suc-cesses must be achieved by the Catholic leaders, great wis-dom as well as courage must be given them from on high if Holy Church is to be kept safe from this awful calamity, and, though any trial which came upon her would be but temporary, it may be fierce in the extreme while it lasts."

UALCOLM UGGER1DGE: What date was that?

MICHAEL DAVIES: In 1877, just over a hundred years ago. I know that from time to time you have used the phrases about a death wish of our society and I think that at the moment West-ern society does seem intent upon its own destruction. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Unquestionably—if only in the simple thing that it is killing off its children on such a scale that of course its numbers are dwindling. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . and adults are also killing themselves off. I was reading recently some statistics on suicide, and the strange thing was, the statistics I think were something per thou-sand or per hundred thousand, and it goes from something

like 20 per hundred thousand in some of the advanced Western countries down to almost nil in the Philippines and South America where the people are the very poorest. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I understand it, don't you? I mean if I believed what the people do who are sort of trying to make this world work—make our part of the world work—I would commit suicide. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, and I think also probably the problem is when one is materially comfortable, one has nothing to struggle for and one doesn't believe in anything outside oneself and one's own amusement or gratification. You can quite soon reach a point of satiation, which I think explains the great rise in the amount of sexual perversion in the West today...

akLCOLM l_/GGERIDGE: Which is quite fantastic.

MICHAEL AVIES: . . In America in particular the homosexual move-

ment has take on national dimensions. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: They have huge processions in San Francisco. What, a hundred thousand people marching through the streets. ROGER

CCAFFREY: And New York . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: And New York.

VGER CCAFFREY: At the front—at the steps of St. Patrick's Cathe-

dral they unfurl their banner, to the acquiescence of the officials in the Cathedral.

geN

ALCOLM UGGERIDGE: Ws terrifying. GER

CCAEFREY: Does the pacifist movement fit, and where so, in this death wish?

NALCOLM UGGERIDGE: I think it's part of it of course. Let me say first

that for me at my age it's a repeat performance. I've been


through every single thing of this pacifist movement before the Second World War. They had exactly the same marches, and the same—it seemed like the same women; they were probably not; it's hoped the first lot died, but anyway, it seems as though it's the same lot—and all the same argu-ments being adduced. I must say I was very shocked to see Monsignor Bruce Kent producing all this gibberish be-cause I used to know him when he was on the staff of Car- dinal Heenan . . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: Monsignor Kent is the leader of the pacifists here? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes, he. . . MICHAEL .

DAVIES: I think he would say that he wasn't a pacifist. He's a unilateral disarmer, because he thinks nuclear weapons are immoral so we should discard them. But from a prac-tical point of view you might as well be a pacifist if you are going to . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes. This is what I feel about it. It's a perfectly tenable position, provided that you explain to people what the consequences of it would be. But this idea that you can get rid of all nuclear weapons and thereby ensure that you will never be attacked by nuclear weapons is, of course, nonsensical. Absolutely nonsensical. MICHAEL .

DAVIES: I think one explanation for people like Monsignor Kent getting involved in such movements comes from that letter which I quoted from Newman in which he discerned that the movement of unbelief and finding absolute happi-ness and building up a perfect society in this world was bound to lead to the type of society we have now. That society is here, and it's harder and harder to interest peo-ple in anything to do with a future life, and I think many of the bishops and clergy find this discouraging, whereas if

they get in the great causes which, say, the Guardian would espouse in this country or the New York Times in America, they then get terrific media coverage. Now today, being the first Sunday of Lent, we had the Gospel about Our Lord's temptations and I think, in a way, that the offer of the kingdoms of the world today might be transformed into media coverage, and any cleric, like Monsignor Kent, or any bishop who takes up one of these causes like unilateral disarmament or gay liberation, can guarantee getting terrific exposure in the media and feel that he is an important person . . . ROGER f

CCAFFREY: And courageous. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . and prophetic. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: One would like to think that there was some little tiny corner of them that would say, "Am I really talk-ing something that has any serious bearing on the situa-tion?", but I suppose that would be asking too much of them. You can trace in the, before the Second World War, for instance, the peace ballot, when they read the result of the peace ballot— MICHAEL DAVIES: The one in the Oxford Union?

NALCOLM UGGEIUDGE: Well, that was an earlier one . . . that was the

debate, but they organised a ballot in the country and, of course, it said "Are you in favour of peace or war?" I mean, naturally you get a very large majority in favour of peace. But this gave an enormous encouragement to the Nazis and, of course, made it the easier for them to sign up with Stalin. All this is completely forgotten now. MICHAEL DAVIES: And it's so strange how these clerics as well, they totally ignore the record of the Russians even since the war . . .


ti LCOLM lIGGERIDGE: Yes.

MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . in countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan and in Poland.

tILLCOLM GERIDGE: Well, of course, that was one of the great, again,

if you're trying to sort of chart the course that's led me as an old man to become a Catholic, a very big item in that was in 1932, I went to the USSR as a journalist from the Manchester Guardian in its, really in its liberal days when it was absolutely sort of Bible for liberals, to be their corre-spondent in Moscow. I saw this extraordinary phenome-non of all the most famous names in the intelligentsia of the Western world, Andre Gide, Bernard Shaw, all these people, H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, all adulating this re-gime which, whatever else you thought about it, was the exact contradiction of everything they were supposed to believe in. Of course my wife Kitty's aunt, you see, was Beatrice Webb, and her uncle, Sidney—the Webbs abso-lutely swallowed this thing and one was arguing with them and so on. You couldn't get anywhere near them in think-ing how they would arrive at this. Now, what is the ex-planation of it? I've thought about that more than about any other question, I think, in the whole of my life.

I think the explanation is that, which is put in an extra-ordinary way by that very underrated character who wrote the book, you know, Witness, with Alger Hiss, the Alger Hiss case—Whittaker Chambers, in which he said that every single person who reacts against this Commu-nist thing knows that he's joining the losing side, and I really believe that that is true, it has been the decisive fac-tor in this strange phenomenon, that they know, because they see, when you see the absolute sort of elite of what's called Western civilisation grovelling, literally grovelling, in front of someone like Stalin, you know the game is up.

ROGER MCCAFFREY: Well, that's a commentary, a sad commentary on their lack of moral courage if that's really the . . .

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes, but take the Webbs, whom we sort of speak of only because we saw quite a lot of them. They did believe it. I'll give you a small example. In the diary that Mrs. Webb kept, it described my return from the USSR and said that she was a little worried about the, what I'd written on the famine in the Ukraine, which was one of the most terrible famines even of our time, and then she adds in her diary, "But I took the matter up with Mr. Meisky," who was the Soviet ambassador, "and he's cleared it all up for me." Well, I mean, how can you—put-ting aside all questions of what you believe in and what you don't believe in—how can a very highly intelligent woman get to that position, that she would believe that Mr. Meisky would give her correct information to counter-act something that I as a journalist had written? And I've never had the faintest hope for Western civilisation—what's called We:tern civilisation—since that experience because these people have continued to be the great pundits.

MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, I'm wondering if perhaps there really is a death wish and subconsciously they feel that we ought to be destroyed . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: That's it, you see I think the problem . . .

MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . because we haven't had, because what exactly are the Western values that we are upholding against the Communist? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I 've often thought this myself too, and further-more that in a sort of way even the horrors of ultra-modern writing and music and so on will ensure that it won't be worth defending them. It's not worth defending

30 A Fireside Chat

free speech in order that people should use that rubbish. MICHAEL DAVIES: One of the most dreadful experiences I'd ever had was the first time I went to New York and somebody took me to see Times Square, where they had in big neon lights advertisements saying that live human sex acts were being performed upon the stage, and I was reading in a rather Right-wing American magazine on the same day about defending our Christian values . . . MALCOLIvl MUGGER1DGE: Yes. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . against the Communists and . . . MALCOLM MUGGEIUDGE: One of Chesterton 's marvellous remarks about that, you know, when he saw Broadway and he looked at it and he said, "How wonderful this would be if only one couldn't read." It's a perfect comment, isn't it, don't you think? If only one couldn't read. MICHAEL DAVIES: But, as you were saying about this terrible music . . . with this punk music and rock music, it is in a way, it's a kind of anti-music . . .

UALCOLM UGGERIDGE: It is.

MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . and the strange thing is that people who sing it, they're not only, they started off abusing society and all the accepted standards, now they end up abusing their audiences, I think it's very, very alarming the extent to which there really is a cultural gap now with the young people who are growing up. They, it would be hard to communicate with them on the subject of Christianity because their minds seem to be becoming more and more limited, and they have their own sort of punk culture, rock culture and you can't, teachers are finding they can't com-municate with them. . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: This is not only difficult, it's impossible because


they just don't know what you're talking about. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . and I think one can see this as well in the media. I know there are some people who think there is a definite conspiracy, which I wouldn't agree with, to diminish. . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I wish it were true. If it was a conspiracy, you could find out the people and stop it . . . It's much more serious than that. MICHAEL DAVIES: But one can see with the newspapers, even ones like, say, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail that weren't ever great vehicles of culture. I remember when the Daily Mail, say would be seventy per cent news and thirty per cent headlines and photos. It's the other way round now . . . The more this goes on, the less capable they are of think-ing for themselves or working anything out. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Have you read Spengler? MICHAEL DAVIES: No.

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, I read it recently. I'd really recommend it. One of the sentences of his that sticks in my mind: He said that the barbarians never defeated the Romans, they simply reduced society to such a degenerate state that the barbarians just walked in. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, well that's what Solzhenitsyn thinks will happen to the West.

NALCOLM UGGER1DGE: Exactly what he thinks will happen. I think

he's right. I think he's right. MICHAEL DAVIES: Because generally in this country or in the United States or in France or Italy, there is no ideology holding society together as an alternative to Communism, except that we have a higher standard of living . . .

32 A Fireside Chat

ROGER MCCAFFREY: And we're free, they always say—without mak-ing any distinctions. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes, particularly what your freedom amounts to. They, of course, you can get the whole thing in a kind of tabloid thing by, instead of using the word liberty, using the word libertine, which is quite a good idea really, be-cause they think that libertinism is liberty, but of course it's not. But this is true and I'm, I don't know, I think it's quite likely that what we're saying is true, that they are subconsciously denigrating the whole of what's called Western civilisation in order that, when the crunch comes, there will be nobody to think it's worth defending.

MICHAEL DAVIES: No. Now a lot of the signs which one was bound to deplore in society are an indication that people want some-thing more than materialism; even, shall we say, this punk culture. You know, in this country, I don't know if they have anything equivalent in America . . .

ROGER MCCAFFREY: They do, yes. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . you have these skinheads and the punks. Well, the only reason for being a skinhead is that you hate punks, and hate the type of music they have, and hate the kind of clothes they wear, and it's the converse for being a punk. But it gives these people, they actually believe in this, and it gives them a framework within which they can live their lives. It's almost, kind of artificial religion which they've confected for themselves. ROGER MCCAFFREY: Well, it's also more frightening because they're behaving no better than barbarians—or, in short order, they will be behaving no better. Comes the depression, they'll be the first ones out on the streets, breaking into people's homes and stealing what food they can't get


otherwise and things like that. MICHAEL DAVIES: SO We might have hoped that the Church would have, if it stood firm at this moment with a really prophetic voice and given an alternative to that, instead of which most of the bishops seem to think the only way to retain their credibility is to go along with this. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Exactly like these wretched Jesuits in Latin America with their liberation theology. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . well, liberation theology means that you must have things, things that sort of, like what's his name, oh I forget everybody's name, the Communist regime, the only Communist regime in the Northern hemisphere is . . . Castro. That, the thing is that, you know, liberation means Castro . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. es.

ttLCOLM GGERIDGE: . . . and yet at the same time, there was, a little

while ago there was a rumour that there were some visas available in one of the Latin American countries, I think it was Cuba, and ten thousand people gathered outside the consulate at this place to get out of there . . . and yet simi-larly these people go on working on the assumption that that represents liberation. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, well the Berlin Wall . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Same thing. MICHAEL

really is the ultimate sign of that, isn't it? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: But when I think of these extraordinary Jesuits in Latin America who seem to think that they can equate the Gospels with liberation, so-called, I can't help feeling

34 A Fireside Chat

that, as I believe firmly that in, besides celestial music and things like that there is in fact in Heaven a marvellous spirit of irony, that if and when in the Kremlin they chuck Marxism out of the window—which they have actually to all intents and purposes, but one day they'll do it in theory as well—that it's the end, we're not interested in Marxism any more; on that day, under pressure from the Jesuits, the Vatican will bring out an encyclical, De Necessitate Marx-isme, and I would like to think it would come on the same day, because that's .where, on high, this note of irony is which I find so delectable. MICHAEL DAVIES: But I think this liberation theology really does relate to what we've been saying before in that, to a large extent, Churchmen, as opposed to the Church, have gone over to the idea that we must build up a Paradise on earth, and what matters is what happens to us now, and it should be so obvious to them that Our Lord never thought like this at all because the Pope has pointed out that Our Lord never asked people to overthrow any unjust social struc-tures and when He talked about liberation, it was always liberation from sin . . . MALCOLM MUGGEIUDGE: Liberation from the Devil. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . yes, and these liberation theologians, they're almost making an anti-Gospel and they're perverting the obvious sense . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well it is ridiculous, I mean, if they really be-lieved that you could make a perfect life, human beings as such could construct a perfect society, then Our Lord should have accepted the Devil's offer of the Kingdoms of the earth and transformed them into whatever particular pattern was considered to be desirable. A co-operative commonwealth, or whatever it might be.

I worked out once the idea of a fourth temptation which


was that a great tycoon, communications tycoon, was go-ing through the Holy Land when Our Lord was conduct-ing His ministry, heard Him, and thought, "That's really got some very big potential, that stuff there," and so he makes a great offer to let this evangelist that he's just heard talking to a few ragged people come to Rome and he'll take Him, he'll put Him out on prime time and give Him the whole Roman Empire to talk to and, what's more, there won't be any vulgar advertising or anything like that that would upset Him, and they'll get hold of a very highly-respected firm of public relations consultants called Lucifer Inc. and, at the beginning of the programme, will come on a little note saying, "This comes to you by courtesy of Lucifer Inc." and at the end again, "This has come to you by courtesy of Lucifer Inc." Now surely He's got to accept this wonderful offer, because He'd be talking to millions of people instead of this miserable little gang here. But, again, turned down. MICHAEL DAVIES: Would you say probably the nearest thing one could equate to a liberal Paradise on earth would be Scan-dinavia and, say, Sweden or Denmark? I think at the mo-ment they have probably one of the largest suicide rates . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Highest suicide rate ever known. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . and despite all the sexual liberation there, there's a tremendously high rate of sexual crime and vener-eal disease and illegitimate births and . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: And misery. A great deal of utter misery, which is reflected in their literature and in their music. Far from giving them a sort of idyllic life, and after all, that is a very good example, because they were able through their great intelligence and skill to provide the requisite material basis for such a society, therefore it could have gone on and on forever. But it broke down because people couldn't bear it.

36 A Fireside Chat

When I was there once doing some stories on Stock-holm, there was an American negro who was an architect there. I asked him how he liked it in Stockholm and he said, well, it was all right really, he'd got plenty of work and everything, but he said "I don't know why I feel rather miserable here," and I asked why, and he said, "Well, you see, there's no racial prejudice." I mean he couldn't sort of live without this sense of strife, and it all seemed very flat; all these beautiful flaxen girls longing to go to bed with him, yet he missed the piquancy that he remembered at home. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, I think one finds in general, when one has complete liberty, it immediately brings misery. I find that in the school where I teach. On the last day of term, the children don't have to do any work, and they can bring their games to school and play and draw, talk to their friends, do whatever they like. And always, by the end of day, they're getting irritable and squabbling and I think they're much happier when the next term comes and they have knuckled down to discipline again and have to work.

NALCOLM UGGERIDGE: Very good. And the other way round, going

back to Solzhenitsyn, he said, I only understood what freedom meant when I was in the labour camp and had lost my freedom. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. And of course the Catholic concept of free-dom is that one submits oneself to the ultimate good, which is to do the will of God and not one's own good, and, with all the mystics, one is ultimately free when one is no longer subject to material desires . . . MALCOLM MUGGEIUDGE: . . And when you can kneel down and say "Thy will be done" and really mean it in the fullest and most absolute sense, that whatever God wills is the best thing and there's no need to puzzle or anything like that,


that is what you want, that is what you pray for and it's really basically the ultimate in prayer. "Thy will be done." MICHAEL DAVIES: Perhaps the liberal idea of freedom is that one is free to behave like a rabbit, and the Catholic idea of free-dom is that one is free not to behave like a rabbit . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Exactly. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . which is what really distinguishes us from being a rabbit. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Of course, we had that wonderful phrase in our Book of Common Prayer "whose service is perfect free-dom." That's a wonderful book, that Book of Common Prayer, and when the bishop who received us, the Bishop of Arundel, came to see us and I told him that my wife and I had for several years said matins and evensong together every day and we'd used the Book of Common Prayer and then when—he was a very charming man—and when he was going he said it with the Book of Common Prayer and I was able to ask him whether, becoming a Catholic, I would have to abandon this and turn to less beautifully written—no, we could go on using it because it is a trans-lation . . .

140GER CCAFFREY: But you'd have to use the revised, the improved

edition, no doubt. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Nothing in the world would induce me, no bribe could induce me to sacrifice what I regard as one of the greatest works of genius in the English language which has given me infinite delight, because we also read through the Bible several times, you know, right through it, day by day, and nothing could equal. . . When Ronnie Knox was translating the Bible for the Catholic Church, I used to see him sometimes and I was very fascinated because he was,

38 A Fireside Chat

he found it very heavy going doing this translation, and his biggest difficulty was this: that old Knox, who was a very evangelical Bishop of Manchester, the father of the Knoxes we knew, made them learn a chapter of the Bible every day and poor Ronnie knew the whole thing off by heart in this marvellous language and he couldn't just put that down. This haunted him. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, I think that's one very sad aspect of the general trend in Christianity today; that the Anglicans are abandoning . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Oh yes. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . their traditional liturgy and the Catholic Church is abandoning its on the grounds that people to-day can no longer relate to this beautiful language, the beautiful prayers, the beautiful ceremonies, which seems very peculiar when we now have universal education. We have a kind of consumer religion now, that the, I know the Catholic bishops, they think what type of music do young people like today, they like pop music, rock music, so we have the hymns of the Mass based on that, and all the time they're going down to the, trying to . go down, which I think is insulting to young people. They say "We're going down to their level." MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: What's called down market in . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, down market. I know Dietrich von Hilde-brand, who's certainly one of the greatest thinkers in the Catholic Church in this century, said that the Church should all the time be trying to raise men's minds and hearts to God and bring them to what is more beautiful, what is more satisfying, when today it's doing the opposite. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, it is. It's, I find it, well I think it was very sad when Latin was dropped betause I remember doing a television programme on Lourdes and one of the most


wonderful things about it was people arriving there from all over the world, and they'd all go and worship together without any delay or organisation. If you go there now, you hear people shouting "Spanish-speaking priest re-quired, French-speaking priest required." They've mucked up the whole thing. MICHAEL DAVIES: And it's always a mistake to abandon a system that's working. . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Of course. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . and the system the Catholics had for their litur-gy, with it all being in Latin. Nobody ever established that this was alienating people from the Church or that it was harming their spiritual development. Now they've done it, they've found that Mass attendance in France, for exam-ple, and Holland has gone down by more than sixty per cent, in America by thirty per cent, in this country by twenty per cent. ROGER MCCAFFREY: In America, it's down by more than thirty, actually. It's clearly forty or fifty. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: My dear daughter-in-law says, The joy of my life was to go to Mass and now I have to make myself go." What a terrible thing that is. MICHAEL DAVIES: And yet the bishops won't admit that anything has gone wrong. They keep talking about the wonderful litur-gical renewal and the great success that it has been. But I think probably in your life you've noticed that's probably quite a common phenomenon with people in authority: when they initiate a policy that doesn't turn out to be suc-cessful, they won't admit it. MALCOLM MUCGERIDGE: No, they never do. Absolutely right. As all their policies are lamentable failures, we get more and

40 A Fireside Chat more into trouble. ROGER MCCAFFREY: Incidentally, Newman points out—this is not new, but he said it best, I think—that the real reason, the best reason for not changing the liturgy is that it's sacred, it takes on a sacredness simply by the fact that it's been used for centuries, never mind practical considerations, e.g. whether it will work if you change it or not. It simply should not be touched in any major sense because of what it is and has been. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. Basically the Latin word "pietas." That's a concept that has been lost now . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: It's very sad, but then people do this kind of thing because, through this miserable and ridiculous theory of evolution, they cannot get out of their heads that all change is good. . .

Change equals progress. In fact, the inventor, the miser-able inventor of the whole thing, Herbert Spencer, now, I'm glad to think, an utterly, an entirely forgotten man, said that progress is change, and as they are pursuing prog-ress, and the purpose of life is to progress, therefore the purpose of life is to change, and everything is changed constantly. MICHAEL DAVIES: Don't you think it's very interesting, perhaps sig-nificant, that the people between the wars and after the war who were thought of as great thinkers—people like H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell—that nobody's interested in them now? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Nobody at all, Michael. MICHAEL DAVIES: I bet nobody sells a book by . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: No, no, they're dead, dead, competely dead and, of course, rightly so. I mean, because Wells was a


complete ass. He had an interview with Stalin which was interpreted by Litvinov and this was, I think, this must have been one of the most gloriously humorous moments. Wells recorded it afterwards. In an account of it, he said, "I tried to interest Stalin in the Pen Club, but he didn't kindle." And apparently Stalin called Litvinov over, ob-viously whispered in his ear, "What is this Pen Club?" I think he thought it was some branch of the secret police, you see, spelled P-E-N. But the idea that he would some-how jump for joy, "Well, we must join that, I mean, that's obviously the thing for us," which was obviously Wells' idea . . . MICHAEL .

DAVIES: I think people like Russell as well, their reputation's really not from what was supposed to be their great think-ing but from their media exposure . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . Russell, didn't he set, he set up his sort of war crimes tribunal on Vietnam, didn't he . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes he did, up in Norway. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . up in Norway, and that sort of thing, while they were alive, it gave them a reputation. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: He was a most contemptible man, Russell, in every way. Of course, it's only fair to say of Russell—the interesting thing is that—he went to Russia in 1920 and he wrote a book then which was published and which can still be procured in which he said this regime would turn into the most terrible tyranny the world's ever known . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes? es: MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . and then he picked up his latest wife, Dora, and she was very Left, and so he says in his memoirs—as

42 A Fireside Chat


though it's the most natural thing in the world—he said, I decided not to talk in that strain any more. In other words, see, I don't think there was any sort of objective truth about it. That was not within his terms of reference. MICHAEL DAVIES: And the same with Bernard Shaw. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Absolutely. MICHAEL DAVIES: He'll be most remembered for "St. Joan" and "My Fair Lady." MALCOLM MUGGEFUDGE: Yes indeed. What rubbish he talked. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. es. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Even shortly before he died, I remember read-ing a pamphlet, Fabian pamphlet, in which he said what a wonderful thing it is that the countries of the Baltic States had joined the Soviet Union by a huge majority, without any pressure being put upon them in any way; of their own free will, they wanted to belong to this great Soviet Union. It's extraordinary coming from someone like that. MICHAEL „ DAVIES: St. Joan" is very strange though, isn't it? I think he must have had some sort of grace when, in the preface to it, the notes to it, I remember one of the things he men-tions: that people criticise Catholics for being superstitious and yet they believe anything at all if a scientist tells it or a doctor tells it. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: There was, there were elements of sense in him, but he was as all those people—they were tenth rate people really. And this thing, what they loved about that Soviet regime really was power, the power. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Kitty's aunt used to say, "Yes, Malcolm, yes, in Russia people disappear." One felt, if only she had a chance of making me disappear, I soon would.

MICHAEL DAVIES: You know, it's very strange, I know that in Con-quest, that book The Great Terror, about those commu-nists who were being imprisoned, being tortured, and see-ing their friends were, and yet they didn't lose their faith in communism. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: This is interesting. There are cases of that, absolutely, although a great many did, a great many did. MICHAEL DAVIES: But I, well my wife, as I said she's from Yugoslavia, she says it's just an absolutely spent force in Yugoslavia. It was more or less supposed to be obligatory at her univer-sity to go to Communist Party meetings once a week. Often she said not a single person would turn up. MALCOLM MUGGEFUDGE: And "what happened to them if they didn't? MICHAEL DAVIES: Nothing, because nobody went. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: And yet you see the nonsensical thing in that ghastly little Tito dying, and all these old, silly old Thatch-er talking about a great statesman of our time . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: No, and the number of people, proportionally—I should think the number of people he had murdered . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Certainly . . . MICHAEL

from the population of Yugoslavia, might have been greater than Stalin.

ttLCOLM GGERIDGE: Djilas is rather a hero. He's a very remarkable

man. His son came down to see me the other day. He lives in London. ROGER MCCAFFREY: Who is this, now? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Djilas, who was with Tito and saw through him and lived most of his life under house arrest or

44 A Fireside Chat


imprisonment. He wrote a wonderful account of an even-ing with Stalin in the Kremlin, which was one of the best things of its kind ever, ever done and also . . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: Should be reprinted, I suppose. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes, and he wrote an account, he wrote a life of Tito which is very . . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: What was his account of Stalin . . . MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: It was so uncannily like an account I'd read of an evening with Hitler, in which he was surrounded by all these toadies, and they had to go and see a film. Stalin was just the same. All these power maniacs want to show a film. They all had to say how wonderful it was. It's very well described. Djilas is a highly intelligent man and a very interesting one. MICHAEL DAVIES: A very strange thing they had there was that man Mihajlov . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes. MICHAEL

AVIES: . . . who was put in prison for slandering the Yugo-slav state because he said you didn't have freedom of ex-pression in Yugoslavia, so they put him in prison for say-ing that. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: What they actually put him in prison for was his criticism of the USSR. I met him in America. He's in America now; he's got a job in South Carolina. But his book on the mystical experiences in the labour camps is extremely interesting. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, I notice the Russians as well, they're furious with Mrs. Thatcher for comparing them to Hitler . . . MALCOLM MUGGEFUDGE: Exactly.

MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . whereas they're doing exactly the same as Hitler, they're taking over country after country

. . .

OALCOLM UGGERIDGE: Yes, absolutely; much more ruthlessly. And

they're very anti-semitic. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. es. ROGER MCCAFFREY: It's interesting to see in that Solzhenitsyn Tai-wan speech that the press made it a point to ignore. MICHAEL , DAVIES: via you see that one? MALCOLM MUGGEFUDGE: No, I didn't see it even. MICHAEL , DAVIES: I ve got a copy of that. ROGER MCCAFFREY: It says . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I would like it very much. ROGER MCCAFFREY: He allows that it's probable that communism will outlive the Soviet Union and Red China both. He sees them as dying, or at least he implies that they'll die in our lifetime. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, they may, but I think it's, it'll be a corn-petition in the sort of misere game, who's going to die first. I suspect that the Americans will die first, only because—another Spengler saying—he says that the power impulse is always greater than the plunder impulse, and I think that that is true that so much American drive is in terms of money whereas the Soviet drive is for pure power. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, and I think that as long as an empire can go on expanding it doesn't . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Absolutely. MICHAEL DAVIES: The British Empire, as long as it went on expand-

46 A Fireside Chat

ing, was vigorous. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: The minute it stopped, it collapsed totally. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, the same as all of them. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes. The only person who hadn't noticed the collapse was Winston Churchill, which is why his policy was so utterly disastrous. Because he was always imagining that he was safeguarding the British Empire in the clean-up after the war. But he failed to notice that there wasn't an Empire . . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: Did you know Churchill? Slightly? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I knew Randolph quite well. I was on the same paper as Randolph for a time and we used to see each other from time to time. But I did know Churchill. I was asked down to his place once. He was very angry about a cartoon that we did in Punch, which was the end of our relationship, such as it was. Because, you know, he was completely out of it for the last years of his life. Peter Thornycroft was in his Government. I think he was Board of Trade or something. He said Churchill never got to know him. Churchill would always come in and say "Who's that man over there?" and it was poor old Thorny-croft, who was in his Cabinet. ROGER MCCAFFREY: Mr. Muggeridge, there is an item in a recent New York Times about a sex expert, Dr. Mary Calderone, 78 years old, who has been lecturing at Vassar. I'll read ex-cerpts and ask you to give me your thoughts.

"Personally do you believe in pre-marital sex?" a student in English 213 asked the visitor. "What do you mean by pre-marital sex?" the visitor responded. "Well, intercourse," said the student. "Ah!" said Dr. Mary Calderone, "Say it then . . . intercourse." This kind of conversation has been going on all


week at Vassar College. In classrooms, in student lounges, over lunch with staff counsellors, at tea with faculty members, at dinner with administrators and up and down the pathways of the stark and snowy campus. This is because Mary Calderone M.D., Vassar '25, co-founder of the Sex Education and Information Council of the United States and author of several books about sex and the family, is here this week as the president's distinguished visitor. Her opening talk, "Children and Parents as Sexual People" packed the chapel Sunday evening. When it was over she was given a standing ovation by the students. "The uterus is where it all begins," Dr. Calderone said again and again this week. "Chil-dren feel and behave sexually from even before birth. They should be allowed to be sexual." In a bi-ology class here she showed slides to illustrate some of her new research about sexual development. She will present the slides in May at the International Sexology Congress in Washington.

No doubt you have been invited or are planning to attend. Could you give us snatches from the agenda? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Terrible to think of. But of course thisis_the

obsession of decadence, really. That you separate sex from its purpose. Anc—raTerie lost. It's exactly the same sort of thing, only on a different scale, as gourmandise in eat-ing. If you separate eating from its purpose, which is to nourish your body, and then you get into this business of all sorts of sauces and delicacies and flame rings—well it's the same as sex.

And what lies at the end of it? I'll tell you what lies at the end of it, but I don't suppose this good lady would agree with me. What lies at the end of it is impotence. In other words, the Romans, when they were gorging, they finished

48 A Fireside Chat

up in the vomitorium. Well, in exactly the same way, the people who fall for this—and that means nearly every-body, because it starts when they are children—don't have a chance of escaping, unless they have some very particu-lar home and parents. There will be a sort of moral vomi-torium, in which the whole thing of sexuality becomes a horror and they will . . . they become impotent. Actually, of course, it is interesting that everything, if you look into it, the reality is hidden in its ultimate what Blake called "fearful symmetry." And, you see, when D. H. Lawrence wrote "Lady Chatterly's Lover" he was impotent, and his Frieda, his horrible German wife, was constantly com-plaining, and solaced herself actually with one of the little Italian policemen who used to come to the house. And there is a picture that I've got . . . this is something that at the end of my life . . . I don't know . . . it fascinates me more than I can tell you . . . for anything that happens, there are all sorts of incidents and pictures and points which illustrate it, which bring it home to you if you have eyes to see. There's a parable in it all, and there's a picture that I've got of D. H. Lawrence reading "Lady Chatterly's Lover" aloud to three people—Reggie Turner, Orioli (who is a book seller) and Norman Douglas—who were the three leading pederasts of Europe at that time, so that you had this marvellous scene of the German Frau solacing herself with the little copper, you have this poor sick man, nearly dead, completely impotent, reading this nonsensical book to three pederasts, and then this book itself being launched on society, selling millions of copies, as the great gospel of potency. There's the story, and those who have eyes to see, you can't miss the point. The point is that what this lady is promoting—I hadn't noticed before that actually, sort of, fornication in the womb, or something of that sort was en-visaged. You couldn't even allow a little period of develop-ing in the womb without some erotic element. She's. . . the


end of that is impotence, and she's probably trying to justi-fy her own condition by doing it. It would seem the most terrible story when it comes to be written, that a sick so-ciety, overfed, over amused with this television screen and cable television, which is itself, as you know, the channel for erotica. Isn't there something called Joe, or something —Dirty Joe . . . or something . . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: Ugly George. MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: Ugly George. ROGER MCCAFFREY: He goes up to people in New York and asks them on camera to disrobe. By law that must be put on the public access channels of the certain cable . . . MALCOLM MUGGE1UDGE: Well that's the sort of thing that comes of it all in the end. That's the sort of reductio ad absurdem of the whole thing.

D. H. Lawrence talking all his life about a 'phallus'; but actually what he is teaching is the exact opposite of phallus, which is impotence. And then that's the end. MICHAEL .

DAVIES: I think obviously related to that is the present atti-tude that sex has nothing to do with procreation. And I think that is one of the most important things that has happened in postwar society; sex has been completely sep-arated from the idea of procreation. It is seen as an end in itself; which, of course, was pointed out to Pope Paul VI at the time of Humanae Vitae. That encyclical is an interest-ing indication of the way that the Catholic Church is supernaturally guided, because Paul VI appointed a com-mission to advise him, which I don't think he should have done, but the majority of this commission wanted him to go along with the way society was going and allow contra-ception, but a minority of the theologians who advised him said that one shouldn't. And they pointed out that

50 A Fireside Chat

once the Church accepted that the sexual act could be legitimately separated from the transmission of life, there would be no logical objection to any form of perversion whatsoever. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Exactly. MICHAEL DAVIES: And you now have this horrible phenomenon of the homosexual movement, especially in the United States, which has tremendous clerical support. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, going back to the beginning of our con-versation, it was Humanae Vitae more than anything else which made me feel that I must belong to that Church that could have the extraordinary insight and courage to produce that as an encyclical, knowing that it would be absolutely torn to pieces, that it was almost a kind of blas-phemy in the idiotic society we live in. This was one of the things that made me feel that I must be counted up with them, because they alone . . . there is nobody else that has done this you see, there is not another voice that has been raised in any denomination, except some ultra-Protestant ones, to take the same position. And of course it's true, and equally of course, unfortunately, true that the major-ity of Catholics will not follow it. The same as we were talking about earlier—usury—the same thing. It was abso-lutely right to denounce usury. There was one of the en-cyclicals when the crossbow was invented; there came from the Vatican the word that surely human beings could never be so monstrously cruel as to use this villain-ous weapon. That's wonderful! You can see what ... again we think of Monsignor . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: Bruce Kent. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Bruce Kent, yes. But there you are. In a way it's all so clear, isn't it? And yet the great majority of people


don't see it. But it is absolutely clear. One thing is perfectly related to another. There is nothing . . . the picture is complete. ROGER MCCAFFREY: You're apocalyptic. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, in a sense, yes. I think this is happening and no society can survive nonsense like this. Planting in children's minds—which is what upsets me, because I love children—this dreadful erotic impulse almost before they can . . . before they're born, according to this lady Dr. Calderone. And now you see, even . . . someone sent me a cutting from Time magazine the other day, giving a report of someone who has said that this business of debauching children was really quite good for them, you know. It braced them up and it got them ready to face life and so on and so on. And quite good for the old senile people who were doing it. If that's apocalyptic, then I'm apocalyptic. But I'm absolutely certain that if and when people write about this phase of history, that will be how they see it. And again of course, you go back to Gibbon and the Roman emperors, and so on and so on and so on. The same story. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, well, one of the most respected Catholic writers in America is a journalist called Paul Hallett, who writes in the National Catholic Register. I was reading something he had written recently, where he said that St. Alphonsus Ligouri expressed the opinion that no one is damned with-out a sexual sin, or at least without some relation to it. And Mr. Hallett went on to comment: "Sex so pervades life that any weakening of tlie_paudstructure_that 1x.c.t,sMaity_x;;i11777-ier o7iater result in a loosening of all moral, or trinal, loyalties." And I wonder if—a subject we haven't mentione at all—if one can see in this the work of the devil. Because one thing one never hears

mak

52 A Fireside Chat

mentioned today is the devil at all. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I didn't mention it only because I didn't think of it. I am absolutely certain that this is what the devil is at. And the gospels, the writings of mystics, everything else points to that. MICHAEL DAVIES: Because the disintegration of Western society today seems to be so all-pervasive, it seems that if we didn't know of a devil through revelation, I think one could logically conclude that there was some more than natural influence at work, blinding people to the reality of what is happening. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: You can't . . . go back to that lady who's been —isn't Vassar, wasn't that one of the most respectable of all campuses? MICHAEL DAVIES: Oh yes, still is, elite. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I mean, you can't account for her, you can't account for a lady in that particular school and those par-ticular circumstances talking such unutterable and disgust-ing rubbish without some evil influence. And the evil in-fluence is the devil which takes the form of sexuality. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, because I think ultimately the message of Christianity is that life is a great struggle, and Newman again; he said that the important thing is that believing in certain things and doing certain things means either that you are going to be saved or that you are going to be damned, and life really is about salvation or damnation. Which definitely seems to be something that most of the leaders in the Church today don't even want to think about. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well certainly I wouldn't like to pretend that I haven't been a victim of this, and I know that . . . sometimes the most terrible thing, you can catch a glimpse of


your own face in the mirror when you are in such a mood, and it's absolutely shrieking with evil . . . a disgusting hor-rible expression in it. I've seen that in my own face, and I know. I would hate to think that anybody that is listening to this talk . . . that I haven't . . . that I don't understand what this is. But I simply say that when I see young chil-dren being absolutely geared to this, from the minute they meet their elders, I think about what is said about that in the New Testament, that . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: The millstone . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: That they'd be better with a millstone round their neck, than behaving in that disgusting manner. But it's not sick individuals, it's the syllabus of your school, isn't it? MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. And in most British secondary schools today, and I am sure in the United States as well, as soon as girls begin to reach the age of adolescence they are taught about contraception. There's virtually no attempt now to promote chastity. The evil would be to conceive, and they are not taught that sex outside wedlock is wrong. Which more or less indicates that society has thrown in the towel. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: That the devil is free to do his worst. MICHAEL DAVIES: And of course there is an argument one often hears from the trendy theologians that there couldn't possibly be a Hell, because God couldn't be cruel enough to damn anyone for eternity. But I think that these people are dis-regarding the fact that God has given us freewill, and if he gives us freewill and allows us to make a choice, and people opt to reject God; if, as the progressive theologians today would have it, everybody is going to be saved, then we aren't really free people at all, we aren't free to reject God. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: That's quite true.

54 A Fireside Chat

MICHAEL DAVIES: And how would you feel yourself about the possi-bility of Hell? Do you think. . . ? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well what I say about Hell is that I have exper-ienced it. I know what it is. It is to be in the hands of the devil. It is that the light goes out. And when the light goes out you are in Hell, and therefore I know exactly what it is. And one says "devil"—I haven't seen the devil, but I know that there is a force in me and there is a force in society which is evil, and which is turning people to evil courses; and that the most appalling thing about our time is that this evil is able to masquerade as progressive and enlight-ened and loving and all the rest of it. We kill a baby in this country now every three minutes. We murder a baby. If you take the statistics of abortion, you see. And, I mean, how can, you know, words fail one. There's no . . . the people are being so completely deceived or caught up in fantasy—which is more the correct expression—that they can't see that, for instance, between that and having, for instance, the Year of the Child, there is some sort of in-compatibility. Between murdering a child every three minutes and having the Year of the Child. Or alternative-ly, this holocaust is going on, and then somebody manages to germinate an ovum in a test tube, and the whole popu-lation is enchanted by this marvellous thing, and this man, characteristically of our time goes round with the baby and charges for admission to show a baby that has been generated in a test tube. What can we do, except to kneel down and pray in the hope that God will forgive us and help us to see what is real and with whatever possibility there is of communicating with our fellows that we will continue in, if we are considered to be bores for doing it, in this distinction between fantasy and reality. Fantasy in which . . . actually if you look into it the essence of it is


that the evil appears as the marvellous, interesting, varied thing, and goodness as the boring, burdensome, tedious thing. In other words, it is the wrong way round. And that's the first thing Solzhenitsyn said when he landed in the West. He said, you've muddled up—you've got good and evil the wrong way round. And this is to me so utterly clear. MICHAEL DAVIES: And that is so apparent as well when you read the Gospels; in the life and teaching of Our Lord that con-tinually he was concerned with people not sinning, doing the will of God and achieving salvation, whereas, it might seem an exaggeration, but I cannot recollect hearing any-thing about that from a Catholic leader, except for the Pope, for many, many years. MALCOLM MUGGEIUDGE: Thank God for the Pope, he's specially sent, I am sure. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. And I was very pleased when he gave his talk to the United Nations that he mentioned that children's rights begin from the moment of conception. Which I be-lieve they are trying. . . Is that incorporated in the United Nations Charter?

OALCOLM UGGERIDGE: God knows what is incorporated in the United

Nations Charter, but it means absolutely nothing. MICHAEL DAVIES: But I would be very surprised if it was. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: So would I. ROGER MCCAFFREY: You can bet that it isn't. Let me ask you Mr. Muggeridge for a message to your Protestant friends, of whom there are many. You spoke at the National Re-ligious Broadcasters Convention, you have written and published under Protestant publishing houses, you're a friend of Billy Graham's, not to mention several other

56 A Fireside Chat

evangelicals—What would you say to them this day as a convert to the Catholic Church? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: As a convert I would say that by being a con-vert I am in no way separating myself from them, but that for me personally, looking at the world and trying to understand it, insofar as it is possible, and trying insofar as that is possible, to be a true follower of Christ—at any rate belatedly—that I find that this is most possible of realisa-tion for me in the Catholic Church, but I would not de-nounce them or put any kind of barrier between them. I'll tell you a funny thing, you see—almost the only nice thing that has happened to me as a result of television is this fact that people recognise you and they say that they want to tell you that they are also Christians. So that you have this very strange experience of. . . like you might be leav-ing a restaurant and the waiter comes padding after you, and you think to yourself well, you know, he's worried I haven't given him a proper tip, but all he wants is to say "I too am a Christian," and you shake hands. Or, it hap-pened to me in the most absurd situation in the make-up room when some poor young girl was attending to my bat-tered old mug, to try and get it into shape for television, and whilst she was doing it, she suddenly whispered in my ear, "I love the Lord." These things go on all the time, and you know that there is this—contrary to what the media suggest—there is this marvellous fellowship, and I would not want to say to those people, "Excuse me, I mean, but are you a Protestant or a Catholic, or do you belong to the

Anglican Church or . . . ." I mean, it just seems beside the point. I love them because they love Christ and that is there, but these people who publish at such length what this lady's been saying at Vassar would not be interested

in that at all, just as they're not interested in what's going

on in these Communist, in these Soviet labour camps and


so on. They're not interested in what Solzhenitsyn has to say. Perhaps the wisest man of our time, commenting on our society in a very perceptive way, but unheeded. So I don't, I mean, there they are one among those Protestants there are very good people and they must, through that, find some spiritual fulfillment. ROGER MCCAFFREY: Do you think they're drawn, maybe subcon-sciously, to the Catholic Church? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, I was so strongly myself that I have to say yes to that, and I think that there are many people—and I've even detected it in talking to Methodists and people—a slight sort of nostalgia, a sort of feeling that that after all is the Church, that is . . . ROGER MCCAFFREY: A point of reference, as some Protestant, a good friend of mine, said once: The Church is a good point of reference.

OALCOLM UGGERIDGE: Yes, yes.

MICHAEL DAVIES: Well I would think a lot of these people with the Church as it is today find it hard to distinguish between the Church and Churchmen, and as I remember you wrote yourself, at the moment if the Catholic Church had people stationed outside their buildings with whips to drive people away, they couldn't be doing a more effective job. Do you think you could perhaps give a few suggestions to any Catholic bishops who might hear this programme; how they could make Catholicism more attractive to the young people today, most of whom have no religion at all. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, it would be an impertinence for me to, really, to think that I could persuade them, but the fact is that this Church, through thick and thin, through ups and downs, through the most terrible adventures has survived for two thousand years on the basis of a certain

58 A Fireside Chat

liturgy and certain fundamental beliefs which have not been changed and certain marvellous lists of saints and mystics that have never been lacking, and they're not lack-ing now; and that in the circumstances that we're in, in the world today, that the only thing they can do is to be true to that tradition, and to go on fulfilling it and not to allow themselves to be deceived by any nonsensical talk about liberation, or fulfillment, sexual fulfillment, or any of these different things or by this, the most lamentable and dangerous of all fantasies, the fantasy of progress: that somehow we can make things get better and better and better, because we can't. Our life, if I could say one last thing, if someone said to me, and it has been said to me, "Can you tell me, suppose you could just make one thing clear before you depart?," I would be very tempted to say what I'm going to say now, which is that life is a drama and not a process. And, as a drama, seeing it as a drama, with all that means, and seeing it in the context of this sublime drama of the Incarnation, which after all, has cap-tivated all the greatest artists, thinkers, poets for centuries past, I would say to the bishops, "For God's sake, follow that, keep in touch with that, remember that, and let your part in that, however small it may be, be worthy, be wor-thy of its marvellous story, and don't think of these ludicrous ideas of Acts of Parliament and things which can make a perfect society. Remember that it's a drama and fulfill, see that people see it as that and they're participat-ing in a drama and that that drama is an expression of a God of love, not of hate; a God of creativity and not de-structiveness; a God of universality and not particularity." That's what I would say.

MICHAEL DAVIES Yes, because I remember that Cardinal Newman also said if we got to the point where the Church was com- posed virtually of no one but lukewarm Christians, it


would be far better to have a great winnowing, and have most of the chaff blown away and just be left with a tiny remnant and he had a very good sermon, entitled "The Religion Of The Day," and he described the religion of the day as it was becoming apparent in the Church of England at that time. He said, "Religion is pleasant and easy, benevolence is the chief virtue, intolerance, bigotry, ex-cessive zeal are the first of sins. It includes no true fear of God, no fervent zeal for His honour, no deep hatred of sin, no horror at the sight of sinners, no indignation and com-passion at the blasphemies of heretics, no jealous adher-ence to doctrinal truth and therefore is neither hot nor cold, but in Scripture language, lukewarm." And then he said a really astonishing thing that I think few people would believe Newman had said. He said, "I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction that it would be a gain to this country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at present it shows itself to be." MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Very interesting, very interesting and very honest. There's nothing, there's no misfortune that can befall us except to be separated from God. There's no other misfortune. Everything else is history. The only ter-rible thing is to be separated from God, and that rests with us. We don't have to be. We never need be. We can wait on God and He'll be there. But when one talks in the way that we've been talking, we're told to be doomsayers and such and such things, which is nonsense. The doom, the only doom would be if these mad plans would work, you see: if there really had been a process whereby primeval slime had over billions of years turned into Bertrand Russell. That would be bad news indeed. But it isn't true. MICHAEL DAVIES: But I'd be surprised if at any time in history the general run of people, particularly of young people, have

60 A Fireside Chat

been less capable of assimilating the great ideals that are put forth in the Christian religion. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I think it was pretty shaky in that fifth cen-tury, you know. And if you read about it, I mean, the games were awfully like—they had an utter obsession with these games—very like television, and the reliance on free food coming in from North Africa was very like a welfare state. The same sort of thing; and when the crash came, there was just nothing there to fight, there was nothing, it was a lost cause before it began. And you have this Chris-tendom which, after all, has had a most marvellous story which will be the admiration of mankind for ever, and what's it built on? It's built on the Gospels. That's what's inspired it. If you were to subtract from what's called West-ern culture, if you were to subtract the Gospels and related matters, there would be practically nothing left. The cathedrals would all be lost, the art would all be lost, the literature would all be lost, the mysticism would all be lost —everything. MICHAEL DAVIES: That's something that's really struck me about Russia. Now, suppose you went to Moscow and removed all the ecclesiastical buildings that are there and you just had left what they've done since the Revolution, it's absolutely . . .

NALCOLM UGGERIDGE: Absolutely abysmal.

MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . and throughout Europe, when you have humanists and people attacking the Christian faith, you imagine if in England they removed all the parish church-es, all the cathedrals, the beautiful . . . MALCOLM MUGGEMDGE: I had a very funny experience when we were doing the Dostoevsky programme in Russia because we wanted to do some shots in a monastery for the talk about


The Brothers Karamazov, you see, and of course the guide said, first of all, well, they'd never allow you to go there. And then he said, well, there aren't any monasteries, you know, that's how they go on. Anyway, I said well, we'll go to one that's being restored because you're restoring buildings very wonderfully. And we went to one quite near Moscow. It's very beautiful, it's the only good building—it's very interesting, it's the only good building that's gone on in the whole range of the Soviet regime restoring these old buildings—so all right, they were work-ing away it and in my commentary I said that this was be-ing restored, and no doubt it was with an eye to tourism which is a very important element in their economy. But I said afterwards, a Christian might almost imagine that they were getting ready for the monks to come back. Well, our tour leaders with us, they really blew their tops over that. They said, "What are you talking about, how could you possibly suppose?" I said I hadn't said anything, I only said a Christian might suppose that, and Christians are barmy, we know that, they're absolutely crazy people, you don't attach the slightest importance to them. However, it got into the programme all right and I was very pleased with it because in a sort of way, it might be true. Why should they show, in restoring these buildings, this wonderful skill and taste whereas in the blocks of flats and, well, other buildings like Moscow University, designed in Stalin's time—I should think it's one of the most ugly and horrible buildings in the whole wide world, not excepting the American efforts in that direction. But there you are, and their mad rage and excitement over this single sen-tence was so interesting, and it's in their minds all the time.

MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, well, I think Hilaire Belloc said that Europe is Christianity which, to a certain extent, with the United

62 A Fireside Chat

States even—which is sort of an off-shoot of European cul-ture—would be true. And I think perhaps that when one tries to remove the Christian element from our culture, there's really nothing left. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Nothing at all, nothing at all, there's not a picture, not a building that's worthwhile, not a statue, nothing, nothing, no sacred music

. . .

MICHAEL DAVIES: Even in art, you think all, really most of the great art in Europe is Christian art, isn't it

. . .

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Of course, of course. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . I'm trying to think, can you think of any great, I don't think there has been a great Soviet artist, has there? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: There hasn't been any at all. And that's what made poor old Blunt to me seem such a tragic figure. He was supposed to be an art historian and he was boosting that regime, and if you see the standard of art there, it's about the same as when you have a Mayor of Stoke, or something like that, and they say, "We must have a por- trait of the Mayor in the debating room." It's about that standard. MICHAEL DAVIES: And when the Soviets want to do anything abroad, they always, if they come over here, perform plays by Chekhov, or ballets by Tchaikovsky

. . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . of course, of course, of course, because there's nothing else. They haven't even, they haven't got anything. In the days of the Stanislavsky theatre, which was going when I was there as a journalist in '32, old Stan-islavsky was still there producing, and the only way they could fill the theatre for their terrible plays—they had plays like sort of "Slag" or "Cement" or something like that—was that they never published the play that it was


going to be, you see. So you'd go there hoping to see "The Cherry Orchard" and you'd get this "Slag." Of course we European journalists would just walk out, but the Russians didn't dare to do that because there were a lot of GPU men there of course, and if they'd seen them walking out, they'd have been straight for the Gulag. They had to sit through "Slag." But the productions like of Chekhov and of "Dead Souls," things like that, I can never forget them. They were marvellous. But of course they were all pre-Revolutionary. MICHAEL DAVIES: That is probably why—something we mentioned earlier—the Orthodox Church is making so many con-verts simply through its liturgy . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Absolutely. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . I once met a young Scottish Communist who had gone to Russia with a young Communist delegation and he walked into an Orthodox Requiem Mass and he came out converted. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well of course. I tell you, the most moving service that I've ever been in the whole of my life was when I went down to cover that famine in Kiev, and on a Sun-day I went into the Church. It was packed out, absolutely packed to the gills, because the Ukrainians hate the Russians anyway, rather as in Poland. I've never known such a feel-ing of people worshipping because the theme that you could sense, even though you couldn't understand it, was that we are now in a situation in which only God can help us. There's no other possibility, no other hope, don't men-tion anything else, only God can help us; and this was so strong that one was weeping; you couldn't help it, the ef-fect of it was fantastic. And that was at the height of Stalinism, aboslutely the height of it. They have got this wonderful liturgy and they are very, very fortunate and

64 A Fireside Chat

blessed in that it's there for them. ROGER McCAFFREY: Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Mug-geridge. You are an inspiration.


July, 1983.

MICHAEL DAVIES: I must say, you're looking very cheerful at the mo-ment, but I was reading a comment recently by Sir Charles Curran who was chairman of the BBC. He accused you of Manichean pessimism. This was, I presume, because of your consistent analysis of the direction in which contem-porary Western society is heading. MALCOLM MUGGE1UDGE: That's so. Actually, Curran was a curious case; he's dead now, in point of fact. He never seemed to under-stand that it doesn't mean you dislike life if you attack certain features of the society in which you live which are destructive of life. He never seemed to grasp that at all. The word optimism has played a very sinister part in the collapse of our way of life. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, I hope we can discuss that in a moment. Could you first tell us what you think is the direction in which you think contemporary society is heading.

tIALCOLM UGGEIUDGE: Well, oversimplifying greatly, I think that it is

more and more feeling that the whole responsibility for what's to happen in the world and has happened in the world is on the shoulders of men and that they can create their own destiny, they can create a Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and, of course, in point of fact they can't. As Pas-cal says, once people don't believe in God, they don't ac-cept the existence of a God, then one of two things hap-pens: either they think they're gods themselves and be-come mad, as for instance Nietzsche did . . . in very drama-tic circumstances, or they relapse into being mere animals; and this is what's wrong with our society. MICHAEL DAVIES: How long have you held this opinion? MALCOLM MUGGEIUDGE: I haven't always held it coherently, but ever

66 A Fireside Chat

since I went as a correspondent to the USSR in 1932. I'd been brought up in a socialist home to believe that if good men managed to become the Government, then we would live happily ever after. And it was when I saw, in the USSR, this proposition put into effect, and the catastrophic consequences of it that I realised that to believe in man's capacity to create his own circumstances is a doctrine of despair. MICHAEL DAVIES: It's interesting you should mention the USSR because a few days ago I watched your TV interview with Solzhenitsyn. I thought it was rather like watching a meet-ing between two Old Testament prophets. I certainly found it one of the most impressive programmes I've ever seen on TV. But at the same time I found it almost terrify-ing. Solzhenitsyn seemed to be inspired. You could almost feel God warning us through him, and yet, I thought, he's like some latter-day Cassandra. What he prophesies is true, but no one really believes him, at least to the extent that it would change their lives in any fundamental way. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I think that's profoundly true. And he feels that. He feels that he's had his say about this, it's had no effect, and there's no point in his just going on saying it. And therefore he's settling down to do the two things that he thinks he should do. One is, interestingly enough, as he puts it, to restore Russia's history because the coming of the Communist regime has made a great hole in it and there's nothing there . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . therefore he feels a duty to write books which will give back Russia's history; and the other thing, which I think is the very noble side of him, in fact one of the most noble things I've heard of in our time, that when he left the Gulag and got away from the camp and began


to write and momentarily was successful in Russia, and then was sent abroad, that he felt that, whatever hap-pened, he would always somehow try and speak up for the people he'd left in the camps. And that is another aspect of his duty. You see, what I think many people wouldn't un-derstand is that, after the publication of A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, he could have stayed in the USSR as their most famous writer. He could have been the Gorki of the situation, he could have done everything he liked, he could have gone on writing, he could have had a villa in Italy, anything. But he wouldn't do it because he was determined to speak up for those people who were still in the camp. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. And he certainly agrees with your analysis of the situation in the West today. One particularly telling point he made was that, I quote: "lithe West does not find in itself the spiritual forces, the spiritual strength to rise again, then, yes, Christian civilisation will disintegrate." I think the most important point here is that he posits a spiritual solution to our problems, whereas the universal consensus in the West is that the solution must be a material one.

LtI

ALCOLM UGGERIDGE: Right. ICHAEL

IES: Now, on this consensus theme, which is something I would like to go into some detail on, you have spoken of this consensus undermining the entire structure of Chris-tian ethics, and you've even spoken of a deathwish in our society. In one of your lectures you commented, concern-ing the media: "The media are playing a major role in the disintegration of Western civilisation by carrying out a mighty brainwashing operation whereby all traditional standards and values are denigrated to the point of dis-appearing, leaving a moral vacuum in which the very

68 A Fireside Chat

concepts of good and evil have ceased to have validity."

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I repeat it with more emphasis than when I originally made it. It seems to me precisely what the situa-tion is. And a good many years of working in what are called the media of one sort and other, including, of course, television, that view is more than ever supported.

MICHAEL DAVIES: And I note too that another theme you bring up is this fallacious belief in progress which pervades Western thinking, that things must constantly get better and better.

MALCOLM MUGGEIUDGE: Well, yes, and that again would seem to me to be the perfect formula for self-destruction. The idea on which it's all based is that change is per se good, change per

se makes things better, and therefore you must seek change for its own sake. This is the most destructive idea that could possibly take possession of anybody. And it's sup-ported by what I regard as one of the most bogus beliefs in all human history, which is this naive belief in Darwinism, in the idea that the position of man today is a consequence of a process of change. I don't think that human life is a process. I think it's a drama, and the great strength of the Christian faith is that it's based, not on the notion of pro-cess, but on the most sublime drama of all.

MICHAEL DAVIES: And yet this concept is almost universally accepted in the major Christian denominations today.

MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: Indeed, and taught in all the schools, including all the Christian schools, as not even an hypothesis, but something which is intrinsically true—for which there's practically no evidence at all. You know, we're very lucky here. We live near the place where the Piltdown man was found, and every time I go by that place I instinctively bow my head in thankfulness, because in that we have a perfect illustration of the slender sort of basis of all its assumptions.


A joker, as you know, a practical joker had put some bones down, and he hadn't even chosen bones from the same animal, they were just some miscellaneous bones in a shallow grave, and these things were found, and, of course, it's interesting to me that one of the people who found them, and who played a big part in promoting them, was non other than Teilhard de Chardin. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, who was promoted by Huxley, wasn't he, as the great scientist? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes indeed. Absolutely. And by many Chris-tians as the great Christian. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. I know very little about science, but I know something about his theology. I find his theology very suspect, and it seems that his science is very suspect too.

UALCOLM UGGERIDGE: More than suspect, I think, because this was

pure charlatanry; and he was the person who found—after they'd found the bones, in order to absolutely prove the truth of it, they found also a tooth, and it was Teilhard who found the tooth, you see, and so it's difficult to credit him with any sort of capacity for judgment in scientific matters, which is the more extraordinary. He never re-pudiated the thing. At the end of his life, when it had all come out, he was asked to comment and he refused to comment. MICHAEL DAytEs: And yet Teilhard is almost universally accepted by the Catholic intelligentsia today as the great prophet of our time. . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes indeed. MICHAEL

which I think is another example of this con-sensus view. The consensus says he's a great thinker, a great theologian, a great scientist, a great prophet, so he must be.

70 A Fireside Chat

trLCOLM IGGERIDGE:

Absolutely. You know there were five hundred doctoral theses written on that subject . . .

MICHAEL AVIES: No I didn't.

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE:

There were, five hundred men with doubtful qualifications based on a thesis on this great discovery, and it was just a joker putting a few old bones in a shallow grave and Teilhard de Chardin picking up a tooth. MICHAEL DAVIES:

No, I didn't know that at all. It's almost like an allegory of our time. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE:

It is, and you know I can't help feeling that our time and all times are full of allegories and that one of the fascinations of living is that if you look into anything, you find that it is an image of truth. It's a parable. It's not by chance that Our Lord spoke in parables because it is the only way in which you can convey this deep truth, as in-deed, is the whole story of His life, death and ministry.

M ICHAEL I was rather disturbed at our recent General Elec-tion. I noticed in the policies of all three part:es that they seem to be totally materialistic. I was very glad the Social-ists were defeated. I think that would have been a disaster for the country if they'd won. But I think the reason that the people elected Mrs. Thatcher again was because they thought she was more likely to protect the standard of living than the Labour Party.

MALCOLM

JGGERIDGE: Exactly. That's why on questions like abortion

the consensus has won. There are people in the House of Commons who take very strong views about abortion, but it doesn't express itself in their speeches and so on. MICHAEL DAVIES:

And, it's very sad, I think, that the Conservative Party isn't prepared to commit itself to anti-abortion, or to


any policy upholding basic Christian moral values. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, it would be sad if it wasn't absolutely obvious that that's how they must and would react be-cause good and evil are not acceptable words in politics. MICHAEL DAVIES: So what one could say is that politicians really have reduced themselves to the extent of being concerned only with the standard of living. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: With the standard of living—because that is what people want and, on all other issues, trying to find out—and that's where these rather spurious opinion polls come into play—what is the opinion of people, what is the general opinion of people because that general opinion is what they will consider to be the correct orthodoxy. MICHAEL DAVIES: And can you think of any political figure in the world today who would be an exception to this? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, it's very difficult, and offhand I can't think of anybody. Actually, I would say that one of the most maligned figures in the world today, namely Presi-dent Reagan, is one of the very few politicians who has spoken out in the most emphatic terms on the question of abortion, and who has also said publicly that he's going to go on persistently trying to induce Congress to overturn the judgment of the Supreme Court that it is unconstitu-tional to teach Christianity in American public schools. And he has said that in the most emphatic terms, and he'll have to fight the next election, assuming there's some very big opposition to it, with that on the record. MICHAEL DAVIES: And if he succeeded in that, I think it would be the most dramatic event in American politics since the war. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, let me tell you what happened, a strange thing, and it was a touching thing in a way. I got a message

72 A Fireside Chat

from the American Embassy that the President was going to quote something of mine, he wished me to check it to make sure it was correct. Anti what it was was a sentence to the effect that probably the most important thing going on in the world today was the recrudescence of the Chris-tian faith in a very unlikely place, the labour camps of the USSR, which is indeed true, and about which Solzhenit-syn and others have written. Well, the quotation was cor-rect, and I wrote a note and said that I was honoured that he would do it, and that very, very few people in public life, in my experience, ever wanted to check anything they quoted. They were quite happy to quote it as they wanted it to be. So then I received a cassette of the speech in which he used this, and never have I heard in a public speech a more definite and unequivocal attack upon abortion or a more specific guarantee that he would go on sending that back up the Hill, the resolution to undo what the Supreme Court did in that judgment. Now in our consensus, he passes for being a warmonger, a reactionary, a stooge of certain interests and all these different things. MICHAEL DAVIES: That's very encouraging and, as I said, if he could do that, it would almost be a miracle, wouldn't it? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: It would be a miracle, even that he should try to do it. But what also interests me is that if you ask the ordinary person in the street today what do you think of President Reagan, he'd say "Oh, he's a very backward-looking figure, he's a warmonger, he wants to keep the Cold War, wants to go back to the Cold War," etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and they would regard that as absolutely true and unanswerable. MICHAEL DAN:1ES: Well, he certainly is a figure who's held up to ridi-cule in the media. mAt.coLm muGGERIDGE: Undoubtedly, and they've got away with it.


When he came here, there was an arrangement that he was to address both Houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall in the old historic place and the Left was able to pre-vent it by saying that such a lowdown figure should not be allowed to speak in this great hall where our marvellous democracy was born . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: Oh dear. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . in itself, a fairly rum statement. MICHAEL DAVIES: It would, for instance, have been comparable to bringing, say, Franco over here. Franco could never have ... MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Oh yes. No, no, no, no, no . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . and yet Bulganin and Krushchev came over ... MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . oh, adored, adulated . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . well, they were rather like, treated like Laurel and Hardy . . .

traTELEIGE: Laurel and Hardy was too good for them, yes . . .

NLYEAV" . . . but they were treated as a kind of likeable . . .

IlcaLRTD E . . . they were, absolutely, absolutely. This is again part of the consensus. The goodies and the baddies. The consensus decides on the goodies and the baddies. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. And again, Tito was really feted when he came over here . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . yes, and imagine when he died, you'd see it in people's obituaries, Mrs. Thatcher saying, "This great statesman has just died"—Tito, who was in many ways a more contemptible figure than Stalin. He wasn't a worse figure, because Stalin killed many more people, but he was more contemptible . . .

74 A Fireside Chat


MICHAEL DAVIES: But I'm told in proportion, Tito killed more . . .

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: .. . yes, killed more, and he was a contemptible

figure in every respect. miCHAEL DAVIES:

Some of my American friends have told me that the reason for the downfall of Nixon, who probably did have his faults, but the main reason for his downfall was that he was tending to go against the consensus.

MALcoLm MUGGERIDGE: Absolutely true. I know exactly when the hatred of Nixon started. The hatred of Nixon started be-cause, in what was then called the Un-American Activities Committee—and I was a correspondent in Washington at the time—the Alger Hiss case came up. Truman and the others were determined not to let it develop because an election was coming and they didn't want to have any-thing to do with it. But it was Nixon who was the vice-

chairman of the Un-American Activities who fought and fought and fought to keep the story explored, to keep it go-ing. And that's what the press hated him for, and they hated him with a hatred that's difficult to convey. And when this ridiculous episode of Watergate cropped up, which I quite agree was an absolutely stupid thing, they all with one accord set to destroy him. But the reason was

that. MICHAEL DAVIES: So the power of the media is really almost impossible

to exaggerate? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: You cannot exaggerate it. They did not want that case to be pursued. Nixon forced them to pursue it and they had it in for him and they got their own back, in exactly the same way that Stalin was determined to kill Trotsky, and he just waited and waited until he could get someone there who could knife him.

MICHAE DAVIES:

L In our last talk, I mentioned Sir Charles Curran

who is the Director of the BBC, his comment concerning your alleged pessimism. Now I think it's not uncommon for realism to be confused with pessimism. Churchill prophesied the inevitable conflict with Nazi Germany and he was frequently accused of being pessimistic. I wonder, would you think that Sir Charles Curran's thinking and the thinking of media people in general on this is coloured by the fact that they are media people? Because to a certain extent, the media generally have to evoke an optimistic at-mosphere, don't they, especially on the television, because if they didn't I suppose they'd have hardly any viewers. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: But much more important than that, they wouldn't mind so much the viewers, they'd have hardly any advertisements. That's what would worry commercial television. Beaverbrook, in the days just before the out-break of the 1939-45 war, sent round a little memo that the note in the paper was to be optimistic, and the reason was that, if it wasn't so, it didn't appeal to advertisers to buy space. MICHAEL DAVIES: And I would imagine that the fundamental fallacy with this consensus optimism is that they base it upon the inevitability of progress, which we discussed earlier, and they would assume that eventually standards of living are going to rise and that that will bring happiness, but the fallacy is that one can't achieve happiness simply by a rise in the standard of living. MALCOLM MUGGEFUDGE: Of course not. You can't achieve happiness by any form of materialism. After all, Our Lord Himself did say only people who hate their life in this world can hope to have eternal life. In other words, what He was taking a shot at was the idiot optimism of the materialist—which

76 A Fireside Chat

has been carried in what's called the American Dream to the most fantastic lengths—what they also call quality of

life. MICHAEL DAVIES:

You've remarked that, since Vatican II, the Catho-lic Church is dropping to pieces and that it's turning its back on all that attracted you to it. Do you see any sign of

this process stopping?

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE:

No I don't. But on the other hand, I think I was wrong in thinking that therefore the Catholic Church had nothing to offer, because it has its great history to of-fer and, though it's destroyed its liturgy to a considerable degree, it still can have a Pope who is absolutely certain in his attitudes to things like abortion and euthanasia, the evil things. I personally take a pessimistic view of its pros-pects, but I still think that it contains in itself what has kept it going for two thousand years and then, some way or other, since God wants it to go on, this appalling diver-sion that's taken place will be counteracted.

MICHAEL DAVIES:

Yes, in that sense, you have changed your point of view, because I remember William Buckley reproaching you for the fact that you were allowing the Catholic clerics to put you off from joining the Church before, which he

said wasn't really logical . . .

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I agree then, I was wrong.

MICHAEL DAVIES: . . .

he would probably be gratified that you . . .

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE:

Well, he is pleased actually. I was wrong. I don't think I was wholly wrong, but I was wrong in the sense that, you know, with God all things are possible; and also because there are in the Catholic clergy and hier-archy people like the Pope who have not deviated from the

true way.


MICHAEL .

DAVIES: This was the distinction, of course, that St. Thomas More had to make between the Church and Churchmen, because the consensus opinion at his time was that Henry VIII was the supreme head of the Church and every bishop, except St. John Fisher, agreed with that. And there was very widescale corruption within the Catholic Church, not so much in our country as in a lot of coun-tries abroad, and I think that there is a very good example of a man of complete integrity who was able to put princi-ples first and go against the consensus. But, of course, the consensus got him . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . as of course it did Our Lord. MALcoLm MUGGERIDGE: Yes, as it did Our Lord, and as perhaps it always must; and perhaps that is in some mysterious way what God intends life to be, that through that drama, end-lessly repeated in all sorts of different forms, it alone can show us the truth. . . this may well be so. What I would hasten to say is that the fact that I have had the honour of being received into the Catholic Church does not in any way alter my opinion about these priests and prelates in it who have turned their backs on what has made it great. MICHAEL DAVIES: No, and I think perhaps that this has come about in our day, more than perhaps at other times—though the Church has always been influenced by the society it's lived in—by the all-pervasive influence of the media. And I think we've reached the stage now where the inflexible Catholic moral standards which I know you've always ad-mired, they're still the official teaching of the Church, but a teaching which is widely ignored by many of its members. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Not only ignored, but they do the exact opposite. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, I believe you had a personal experience of this

78 A Fireside Chat

when you were rector of Edinburgh University . . .

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I did indeed, which is, in a way, when I look back on it, funny, because I was elected rector at Edin-burgh. You have to represent the students, you see, and the governing body. They asked me, or indeed, in a sense, ordered me to propose that contraceptives should be freely available to students without any questions being asked by the university medical unit, and, of course, I refused to do this. I thought to myself when I did, well, there are about a thousand Catholic students and there's a Catholic chap-lain in the university and I can absolutely count on them being on my side. And the first attack that came on me in The Scotsman was by the Catholic chaplain. And then I ventured the opinion, I said, well this man is bound to become a bishop. And he has. MicHAEL DAVIES: So that would certainly be inevitable today. I re-member very well, at the time of HuTnanae Vitae, you could never turn your television on without seeing some Catho-lic priest attacking the encyclical.

ttLCOLM GGERIDGE: Again I remember I was running a programme

at the time, and I wanted to get a priest who would come and be a hundred percent in favour of Humanae Vitae, and I had the utmost difficulty in getting hold of one. MICHAEL DAVIES:

And I think that since then, the situation has deteriorated considerably, because at that time, with the bishops, even if a bishop wouldn't discipline priests who attacked it or even refused to speak in its favour, you wouldn't get them coming out criticising traditional moral standards. But I've just been reading of one American bishop, Archbishop Casey of Denver, who said that his chief concern in the area of sexual morality is not to put an unnecessary guilt load on people. I don't think the media consensus would find much to disagree with.


MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I think they'd say Alleluia to that. MICHAEL . DAVIES: I Imagine that even you would be surprised at the extent to which this consensus now permeates Catholic teaching, particularly in the USA. I don't know if you've heard of the American historian, Professor James Hitch- cock . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I've heard of him. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . he's written some very, very good books on the contemporary situation. Well here's a quote from his most recent book which came out this year, 1983. I'm sure many, many Catholics would find this completely unbe-lievable, but he said, "Dissent in American Catholicism is no longer the province of courageous outsiders but is itself established. It challenges the Church, not from the margins, but through the Church's own central organs. Indeed, it is the official institutions of the Church which are now used to propagate dissent and, often enough, to repress orthodoxy. Almost unnoticed, a quiet revolution has occurred. Like all revolutions, it began simply with a demand for tolerance. Like most revolutions, it ended up in a new orthodoxy which enforces a conformity even more rigid than the old." MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: Exactly. MICHAEL DAVIES: I have a very interesting quote here from a sermon by Newman which you probably know, on the religion of the day, commenting on the prevailing state of affairs at his time, which I think is very relevant, if I can just read it to you. MALCOLM MUGGER1DGE: Please. MICHAEL DAVIES: He said: "Here is an existing teaching, only partly


evangelical, built upon world principle, yet pretending to be the Gospel, dropping one whole side of the Gospel, its austere character, and considering it enough to be benevo-lent, courteous, candid, correct in conduct, delicate, though it includes no true fear of God, no fervent zeal for His honour, no deep hatred of sin, no horror at the sight of sinners, no indignation and compassion at the blas-phemies of heretics, no jealous adherence to doctrinal truth, no especial sensitiveness about the particular means of gaining ends, providing the ends be good, no loyalty to the Holy, Apostolic Church, of which the Creed speaks, no sense of the authority of religion as external to the mind, in a word, no seriousness, and therefore is neither hot nor cold, but, in Scripture language 'lukewarm." And the Cardinal goes on to say he attributes all this—I'll read you his words—"Why? Because we have not acted from a love of truth but from the influence of the age." And I don't know if you've noted the extent to which this con-sensus seems to have been adopted by, shall we say, the Establishment Church in Western countries since the Sec-ond Vatican Council, which, as you weren't a Catholic at the time, you probably didn't notice. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, I followed it a bit, but I didn't follow it with extreme care. MICHAEL DAVIES: But it was a very, very strange Council. In fact, in the long term, from the long term point of view, in history, I think it will be known as the media Council, because it was very largely a media event. A French priest, Fr. Louis Bouyer, who is one of the few French intellectual priests who go against the consensus, claimed that during the Council, many of the bishops, and I quote him: "sur-rendered themselves to the dictatorship of the journalists," and what he meant by this was that the views they put for-ward in the Council were conditioned by the likely response

of the media. And, as almost all the star reporters covering the Council were liberals, the bishops of the Council tended to put forward liberal views, probably to get a good press. And the result is that much of the teaching of the Council didn't deal with dogma concerning faith and morals, but with attitudes to the world today. And this tended to be an attitude of rather facile optimism, replacing confronta-tion with the world by dialogue, even with Communism. And men of good will were to work together to build up a just and humane society. I remember that Pope John XXIII castigated as prophets of doom people who said what would happen as a result of this. But they seem to have been correct. And I think you probably agree that this at-mosphere now of dialogue and good will to all men really dominates all the Christian denominations. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Certainly. Actually, I was there for a time be-cause we were making a programme on Cardinal Heenan, so that I saw something of it. We were allowed to film in the Council itself. Somebody there from the Vatican told me, confidentially, "Of course, Pope John had absolutely no idea that he was starting a thing like this. He thought that there'd just be a gathering of all the leaders and there'd be a sort of love-feast and it would last for perhaps a week or two and then they'd all go home again," and he'd no notion whatever that it would open up all these issues and all these dangerous assumptions. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, Cardinal Heenan said the same thing in his autobiography and Cardinal Heenan, of course, was the Primate of English Catholics. He was looked upon as one of the baddies in the Council, because very, very soon, the media divided everyone at the Council into goodies and baddies. The arch-baddy was a Cardinal, Cardinal Otta-viani—and the very liberal prelates got a terrific buildup and there is now within the Catholic Church what one

82 A Fireside Chat

might call a consensus opinion of the Council, most of it having no relevance at all to what was actually said or done. There was a lot of very vacuous thinking expressed there, and even a lot of the documents are rather verbose. So really, there's very, very little that doesn't conform with the traditional Catholic outlook. It was built up into a great media . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: A great media fiesta. Absolutely. I entirely see that. MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . in which the Church is supposed to have come of age. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, of course, to an outsider, which I very much was then, apart from this friendship with Cardinal Heenan and, you know, talking to him about it for the proposed programme, that really Pope John, who's built up as a sort of saintly and perfect Pope, the good man of our time, whether consciously or unconsciously did more damage to the Church than possibly any other individual man had done in the whole of its history. Would you agree with that? MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. I think what he did was, what in America they call, opened a can of worms. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Yes, he certainly did. MICHAEL DAVIES: And I think the effect of the Council is far less in what was actually said or done or what was contained in its official decrees, which very few people ever seem to read, as in the atmosphere which it generated in the Church, and particularly in the U.S.A. A lot of bishops who'd gone there as very conservative men came back as almost rabid liberals, determined to preach the new Gospel of openness and dialogue, and they succeeded in transforming the entire American Church within about


ten years. Until now, attitudes on all the fundamental moral questions among American Catholics differ very, very little from those, shall we say, of secularists. MALCOLM MUGGEIUDGE: The whole thing, to an outsider, was very, very strange and awfully difficult to understand how it could be. The most appalling thing, again to me as an outsider, was the immediate destruction of religious orders. Almost overnight, when the Vatican Council was on, the whole thing disintegrated. MICHAEL DAVIES: And in America, a lot of the women still professing to be nuns are among the most militant exponents of the worst aspects of the women's liberation movement in the entire U.S.A. I think probably the idea of the religious life as lived by Catholic nuns is perhaps the most inimical you could have to the entire spirit of our age, sacrificing your-self, living a celibate life devoted to prayer and good works; from the point of our society, it was almost an anachron-ism. And if you're going to bring the Church to terms with contemporary society, there's no room, is there, for . . .

a LCOLM l‘JGGERIDGE: Well, that's what happened, isn't it? And there-

fore they lost, as it were, their shock troops just at a time when they most needed them. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. es. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: It seemed almost as though Pope John was op-erating on behalf of the devil, without being in any way conscious of it, bearing out something that's often struck me in this part of, this aspect of life, that mere benevolence can be used by the devil to a very considerable degree. It's something that's very advantageous to him. The word that would convey what I'm talking about, and which has become a rather fashionable word, is the word "compassion" . . .


MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . that you find a prelate will say, well, you know we, of course, it's quite right, I agree with Humancie Vitae, but we must be compassionate. . . MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. es. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . and being compassionate means not ob-serving the encyclical. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes and you have to be compassionate to homosexuals . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Homosexuals, absolutely. And in that sense this word opens up the whole, sort of devil's world to in-corporation in, not just tolerance, but incorporation in the Catholic Church. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, I think one of Pope John's biggest practical mistakes was his idea of improving relations with Commu-nists. He made a distinction between Communism, which he said is wrong, and Communists, who are people with whom you can probably reach an understanding. I remem-ber he had Krushchev's son-in-law along to see him and they're supposed to have got on very, very well together, whereas in that interview which you had with Solzhenit-syn earlier this week, he says the entire Soviet system must be based on violence . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Of course, of course . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . and . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Therefore there can be no bridge . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . no, there can be no bridge . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: . . . I don't suppose you ever saw it, but I did

write in The Times once a story of how the Worshipful Company of Butchers and the Vegetarian Society met to-gether to settle their differences, see each other's point of view, and draw together, not perhaps absolutely joining up with each other, but seeing each other's point of view, and it worked out perfectly. It was exactly the same sort of thing: that the vegetarians had to accept the fact that meat was not necessarily a good item of diet. I mean to say, that was the agreement that they made. This is a mania of our time. You sit down at a table and talk, and then you'll find out your common agreement, but you can only find that common agreement if you both betray what you're stand-ing for. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. I find it very, very hard to understand how people who aren't Communists can be so naive about Communism. I think, would you agree, it's probably true that before the war, a lot of people in this country didn't realise how bad the Nazi system was . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Certainly. MICHAEL

but everybody now knows the Communist system, you've had Hungary, Czechoslovakia, there's Af-ghanistan, there's Poland and Solzhenitsyn, he's told peo-ple time and time again, and yet Western leaders, and par-ticularly Western Churchmen simply don't want to know it, do they? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Absolutely not. It's been the great puzzle of my life, in the early thirties, seeing the elite, the intellectual elite of the whole Western world and America coming over to Moscow and not just approving of, but adulating the most appalling dictator in an age of dictators, namely Stalin; and the most ruthless, authoritarian state that's ever existed, the most ruthless censorship of every kind of written word, spoken word, everything in which men

86 A Fireside Chat

could ever express their thoughts, and finding in that the hope of the world and the hope of the future. And you can name the names one after the other, the Huxleys and the Webbs and Lasky and all these people who afterwards be-came the pundits. If in eternity I'm asked whether there's any particular question I should like to see elucidated, that is the question that I should raise. How can this happen? MICHAEL DAVIES: And it's even more inexcusable for Churchmen be-cause the basis of Communism is atheism, isn't it?

NALCOLM UGGERIDGE: Not only that, but that the Church must be

destroyed. The first task is that any sort of transcendental view of life is the enemy of the proletariat and of their dic-tatorship, and therefore must be ruthlessly destroyed. And that's what they did. And yet you could see when I was there, it has everything, it has its comic side, clergymen go-ing with great interest and pleasure through the anti-God museums which were then in full swing. In the Red Square, there's a huge baroque cathedral which was trans-lated into an anti-God museum with an enormous thing swinging to and fro, demonstrating the force of gravity as proving there's no such thing as God. I don't know exactly why, but that was the idea of it. And you saw these people walking through this thing with wonder and joy. I have never understood this to this day. I can't understand how a person who, at home, was an ardent supporter of free speech and ardently against any sort of interference with people's beliefs or interference with their personal lives, seeing this completely ruthless absolutist dictatorship in full swing finding it his answer to everything. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, and today the principal dogma that Catholics are supposed to believe is in human rights. Well in prac-tice, in America, even more than over here, what they mean by human rights is being opposed to certain regimes


in South America, and Catholic missionaries are in the forefront there of active revolution. The Pope was very widely attacked, even in the official Catholic media, when he was there this year because he wouldn't endorse the revolution, and said that it isn't the task of priests . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: He knew, he knew, that's the wonder of this present Pope. He knows about it all. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: But I shall never forget Bernard Shaw, all these people, traipsing through this place showing a gullibility which passed belief. . . MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes.

tit 1-GCGC'ELII G E : . . . and to this day I don't understand it, except that it is perhaps a way of demonstrating the complete emptiness of a culture based on the sort of good fortune of human beings in human terms. That this is, from God's point of view, the most terrible thing that can happen, and therefore it is self-destructive, it wants to destroy itself and it kneels down before Stalin and it says, "please shut my trap," "please stop me writing." MICHAEL DAVIES: Well, that is virtually what the American bishops are doing today with their attitude to nuclear weapons . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: That's right. MICHAEL DAVIES: .. . and they are actually coming out and saying it's better to be red than dead. And yet Solzhenitsyn, in your interview with him, thinks there's no possibility at all of nuclear conflict. MALCOLM MLIGGERIDGE: No. He says that the only danger in the world is the unutterable—and of course, I agree with him utterly —is the unutterable weakness and yielding and betrayal of

88 A Fireside Chat

their own, by the leaders of the Western countries which, to someone like Solzhenitsyn, is incomprehensible. Think for instance, just of one moment, think of the moment in history in the Second World War when the Wehrmacht, the German Army, was finally beaten. There was only one single thing that all the people in the countries that it had occupied wanted, the only one thing they wanted, to be able to surrender to the Anglo-American forces and not to the Red Army. And what happened? The Anglo-American forces were held back and the Red Army went in and the Red Army's there still. What would anybody ever make of that? What conceivable sense can be made of it? It baffles me. MICHAEL DAVIES: In this country at least, people tend to say that the handing over of all these people to the Russians, particu-larly, say, of countries like Poland, was more the work of Roosevelt than anyone. But do you think Churchill . . .? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Churchill. Of course, he was a party to it . . . MICHAEL DAVIES: . . . he was just as much a party to it? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Of course he was, because if he'd stood out, even if he'd been overruled—because Stalin and Roosevelt were a bigger combination than Churchill—even then it would have made an enormous difference to the outcome of things, if he'd insisted that all the various resolutions that they'd reached at the Yalta Conference were being broken, being abrogated, but he didn't. And he was as feeble, and in some ways more feeble than many of the others. MICHAEL DAVIES: And when you see the situation in Poland today, it really is a tragic irony, isn't it, that we went to war on behalf of the Poles . . . MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, the whole thing is a tragic irony, that we


went to war to defend, as you say, human rights, to defend the notion of liberty, to defend the idea of democracy, and all we've done is to hand over a very large slice of the world now. Remember that between East Berlin and the China Seas there's not one single anti-Communist coun-try, except for a few little places like Thailand which are meaningless. All that world is in the other camp. MICHAEL DAVIES: So that the predominant motivation of the West- ern countries was clearly self-interest at the end of the war.

NALCOLM UGGERIDGE: Self-destruction, I think, self-destruction.

MICHAEL DAVIES: Talking about the results of the Yalta Conference and the Second World War and the respective responsibil-ities for the handing over to the Russians of countries like Poland, of Churchill and Roosevelt—I believe you actually had a conversation with Churchill? MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: Well, very casually, it was a very minor conver-sation, what happened was simply, I was in the chair at the Daily Telegraph, we were serialising Churchill's memoirs and I was summoned down to Chartwell and I was received there in a very friendly way and so on and then I found myself alone with Mr. Churchill and I simply said to him: "There's one thing I've always wanted to do, to under-stand how possibly you could have supported the position in the Yalta Conference, could have accepted that posi-tion?" But I couldn't really get any sense out of him. But he made a statement so extraordinary. He said that if he were to tell the world what really happened there, it would bring down the Truman Government. Well, first of all, you can't bring down an American Government because the Constitution's quite different, but also, what in God's name did he mean by that? But I was quite unable to find it. I think that he was really deliberately forgetting what he'd assented to, and what he'd assented to was handing


over a large slice of the world to the Communists. As a friend of mine put it very effectively, Hitler won the war in the person of Stalin. That to me sums up the thing ex-tremely well. MICHAEL DAVIES: And yet, as we were saying, to most of the leaders of the Christian denominations today, Communism seems to be the least of their worries.

UALCOLM UGGEIUDGE: In fact, I think that they think that it is really

on the whole something that's going to happen and it'll make difficulties for them, but that really that will be a great step forward, and they generally say something like, "Well, of course, the early Christians lived as Communists because they divided up their wealth," as if there's the slightest comparison between a Christian community at the beginning of Christendom helping one another eco-nomically, with handing over to absolute servitude, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. MICHAEL DAVIES: So we have now an apparent paradox where it appears that the West might possibly collapse through its own internal decadence, so that the Soviets wouldn't need military power or nuclear weapons, because they do have an ideology, and I think people with an ideology always have an advantage over people who don't. Whereas the Soviet Union itself might carry the seed of its own destruc-tion in this renewing of Christianity.

ttLCOLM iGGERIDGE: I think more than might. Has, does, does carry

within itself—and that is why they're so frightened of it, and yet they can do nothing about it. And I think myself (and I think Solzhenitsyn would agree with me) that more, much more than might be supposed, the Christian spirit has infiltrated the apparat itself. That there are people in-side the machine who have been captivated by this view of life and who are keeping very quiet. But they're there. One

notices small things that bear that out. I did the commen-tary for two programmes in the USSR, one on Tolstoy and one on Dostoevsky, and we had the usual sort of bear lead-ers with us, but I had enormously strongly the feeling that they were much more on my side in this appraisal of what Tolstoy was talking about and what Dostoevsky was talk-ing about. MICHAEL DAVIES: And you asked Solzhenitsyn whether he thought he would ever go back to Russia and he said he was absolutely convinced that he will. He had an internal conviction. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: He said "I have no evidence to offer. There's no reason on earth why this should be so and yet I feel sure of it." And I somehow share his being sure because after all he hasn't been the kind of professional dissident. He is a dissident because of his faith, he doesn't say, "Well, if only you could have one man-one vote," or, "If only you could have a proper legal system," or anything like that. He bases all his hopes for the future on the Christian faith. MICHAEL DAVIES: Yes, and not in democracy.

tranGE: Not at all, not at all. He has to hide a smile if you talk of "One man-one vote." MICHAEL DAVIES: To try and perhaps go on to a more positive note, as you've often remarked, Christianity is a religion of hope. Well, obviously the hope that it gives us is not that we can all look forwad to an increasingly higher standard of living but one, obviously, of eternal salvation. Would you like to say something about your vision of the Chris-tian hope. In a way one could put it perhaps to try and compete with the ideals of the media for being happier and happier.

tliktcalitaE: Well, of course, it doesn't compete because the

92 A Fireside Chat

other one is all in terms of, as we've agreed, of material ad-vancement, of more money to spend, and more possibili-ties of exercising our passions and so on. But there is the hope, which is the most marvellous hope of all, and not only a hope but it's a certainty because it's a hope that is combined with faith, that the God who is responsible for us and our creation is a God of love, and a God of creativ-ity, and that therefore, the working out of His purposes cannot but lead to the fulfilment of all that's greatest and best and most beautiful in human life and in human be-ings. The precise process whereby that happens is some-thing that can only very imperfectly be understood; we shall realise that our thoughts on it were, well, you know, like the scribble of children before they know their letters, really. But the hope is there, it's built on that hope, and with faith to support it. And that alone can make human beings happy. That alone can make human life worth liv-ing. All the other things are fantasies. MICHAEL DAVIES: Of course, it is a very still, small voice . . .

NALCOLM UGGERIDGE: Yes, it's a still, small voice. But then, small

voices speaking the truth ultimately tell more than thunderous voices telling lies. And the media are thunderous voices telling lies. MICHAEL „ DAVIES: but when one has a society that's so influenced by the media, it is very hard to get them to listen to this. MALCOLM MUGGEIUDGE: Hard to get them to listen, and therefore possi-bly the consequences of the media will be very terrible, and the consequences of this complete misunderstanding of what human life's about will be very terrible. But nothing can alter the fact that the outcome of it all will be the outcome in terms of God's purpose for His creation and therefore that outcome can be nothing but joyful and wonderful.

a fireside chat with malcolm muggeridge-michael davies 1984

Documents

sir charles curran

united nations charter

malcolm muggeridgemichael davies

speaking priest required

catholic church today

soviet union

bernard shaw

western civilisation