Reason and faith

Roy Hattersley would never have been born had it not been that his mother ran away with the parish priest who instructed her in the Catholic faith before her marriage to a collier — the priest conducted the wedding; a fortnight later they eloped. This deplorable episode had one happy consequence: the birth of Roy, who never knew the reason for his father’s ease with Latin until after he died.

So Roy is in a way a small part of his latest book, The Catholics, a history of the church and its people in Britain since the Reformation. He is an atheist but says, ‘Religion in general — belief in the
unbelievable — fascinates me.’ He’s well disposed towards his subject:

The history of the Catholic church… is an anthology of adventure stories…. Each one is a triumph of faith and a victory for the moral certainty that reasonable doubt cannot guarantee. Catholics survived the long years of persecution because…their faith allowed no compromise.