TO TOM BURNS

It is no small task to interview an ironist. Typically, Greene was both defensive and provocative when he spoke with journalists. In an interview with John Cornwell that was published as ‘Why I am still a Catholic’ in The Tablet (23 September 1989), he debunked eucharistic doctrine and natural law, compared Gorbachev to John XXIII and the curia to the politburo, and he talked about the taste of Trappists for gossip. He also hinted that he only received the sacraments to make Father Durán happy.

25 October 1989

Dear Tom,

I rather rashly gave permission to The Tablet to syndicate the interview because I thought that Cornwell’s book on the death of John Paul I was excellent. I regretted it later when it all appeared again in The Times, Telegraph, Observer and Independent. Because of the silly personal paragraph Vogue have now asked for it from America but Wilkins³⁴I am glad to say is cutting out that paragraph. How could I possibly refer to somebody I have known for thirty years as a girlfriend? I think I must have thought the interview was over and we were talking vaguely but not as vaguely as that. There were other minor errors. I have two armchairs and not one and I have never drunk a vodka cocktail in my life. It would have been pure virgin vodka!

I am so glad that Wilkins is keeping The Tablet on the liberal lines which you instituted after your very conservative predecessor.³⁵It remains a monument to your work. I can’t help wondering whether Newman was not welcoming a compromise rather than welcoming the idea of infallibility at all. I don’t see why the church – a very vague term which includes you and I – can be any more infallible than the Pope. I disbelieve in infallibility anywhere in this world.

Love
Graham

At the First Vatican Council in 1870, John Henry Newman opposed the Ultramontane party which argued for a very strongly worded definition of papal infallibility, but he did accept the more moderate definition that was passed; still, he would have preferred to wait.³⁶

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 933