 The Return of the Popular Catholic Novel? by ROBERT O'BRIEN 
THERE CAN BE no doubt that the Catholic Church is a thing. It is, we might venture to say, a fine thing, an old thing, a glorious thing, and even a funny thing. Mr. Stephen Oliver is a funny thing who has produced a fine novel. I will not call him an old thing. But having read his novel, I am quite sure of his being a glorious thing. A traditionalist’s holiday book, a thrilling yarn of priestly adventure, a fable of good and evil, a morality tale of the evil inflicted by progressives (they have had their day) - Smoke in the Sanctuary is all of the above. Mr. Oliver has given us a satire of the typical Catholic parish of today, infested with ‘lay involvement’ in all its worst manifestations. It’s all here: the Liturgy Planning Group, the Sisters of Servitude (dancing nuns) at the ’eleven, with the accompaniment of Greg Tonks’ band, the Nurdles. Brace yourself for the Teddy Bear Mass (don’t forget yours on Sunday), oecumenical claptrap, we’re all effing one together, and so on. The hymns are worth a close look, for Mr. Oliver has provided us with some useful samples. Hymns, of course, are the progressives’ first means of indoctrination. They get us young, and then they’ve got us - they hope - for the rest of our lives. From five or younger we are mindlessly singing their vague and watery sentiments, usually songs with very little to do with the Faith, or, worse, unorthodox renderings of it (‘I am with you in this bread and wine’ is my favourite heresy). Hands up if you’ve ever sung ‘We will break bread together on our knees’ to the tune of ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain’. Apart from the sheer banality of modern hymnody, if there’s one thing that’s likely to make me turn and violently attack my neighbour, it’s having them sing hymns like that at me. Let’s bring papal triumphalism back to the primary schools, the triple tiara back to Rome, grandeur back to the liturgy, beauty back to our imaginations, and boot out Hymns Old and New whilst we’re at it. One wonders why the Vatican shows so little interest in these islands. Is it any surprise? Only a couple of weeks ago I saw a bishop. In order to protect the guilt, I’ll not name him. Let’s just say he looked as though he had just rolled out of the pub and was on his way to the bookies. The reason, so I’m told, that the successors to the Apostles dress down nowadays is to make us laity feel less inferior (the same reason our priests don’t like to wear their collars too often). But it’s not the pillock who’s wearing the episcopal ring that we care about, but his office, his episcopal consecration. St. Thomas a Becket wore a hair-shirt under his vestments; the scratchy hair-shirt for himself and the sumptuous vestments for the people. But as well as giving us reasons to despair, Mr. Oliver’s novel depicts the traditionalist backlash. As well as the We Are Right! (WAR!) liberal campaign for the re-ordering of the church with full-emersion baptismal pool - somewhere to drown oneself in a moment of liturgical despair, perhaps - there is the Campaign for Real Catholicism (CRC), which fights for the right to worship as our forefathers did for centuries, against the sly machinations of Monsignor Sloane and the lay activist Sandra Buller (‘one of those energetic, forward thinking pensioners now so rife in the Church, whose ultimate aim is to wrest power from the clergy and generally make a nuisance of themselves’) and her husband, the famous liturgist Dr. Bernie Buller. When our hero Fr. James Page holds an evening lecture on the sacred liturgy, the liberals are intellectually smashed by the impressive Petroc Tomkinson (perhaps Mr. Oliver’s most skillfully drawn character) and the traditionalist party. It is a moment to savour. Debut novels are often thinly - veiled autobiography, and it is worth considering whether such is the case here. One particular incident suggests the possibility. When the hapless Spooner charges into the beautiful Julia’s room in only his underpants, the scene is so well drawn that I wonder whether Mr. Oliver, currently studying for an MLitt here at St Andrews, is drawing on firsthand experience. Only Mr. Oliver can say. But perhaps we ought to let the novelist’s imagination wander a little more freely than that. I look forward to the sequel, when perhaps Fr. James Page will be appointed papal nuncio to Britain, and begin the whole-scale removal of the current hierarchy - END  Mr. Stephen Oliver To purchase 'Smoke in the Sanctuary':
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