Talking of his mother, who had done what the church told her, even about contraception, which she found hard, and then:
I will never forget her rage and disgust when, in her late 70s and early 80s, she discovered that the same church she loved and obeyed had been covering up the sexual abuse of children for decades. She was revolted by those crimes, of course. But she also felt that the bishops had made a mockery of her faith. They made her feel gullible. Her belief that she and the people she looked up to were together in this thing, that they had shared a tough commitment and the pain it involved, had turned out to be a charade.
She was not alone. And there was no going back from this moment of betrayal. The authority of the church melted away in the heat of this anger. For while people forgive their leaders a great deal – often far too much – there is no forgiveness for that terrible moment when you realise that the anguish you have endured for the greater good was, to those in authority, just a mark of your credulousness and inferiority.
If Cummings were half as smart as he is supposed to be, he would have shown in his press conference some glimmer of understanding that this kind of betrayal is of a completely different order to the one he and Johnson engage in so routinely. The ordinary treachery of saying one thing and doing another – there will be £350m extra every week for the NHS; there will never be a border in the Irish Sea – is mother’s milk to them. Perhaps because it is so habitual or because they are so used to getting away with it, their sense of how it works has become dulled. They missed the crucial fact that this time it’s different. This time it’s personal.
The mundane duplicity that is Cummings’ and Johnson’s stock in trade comes with a knowing smirk: you didn’t really think we meant that literally, did you? It is part of an elaborate, highly performative, game. But the rules for collective survival in a pandemic are not ironic. They are intimate. They are embodied. They are the detailed texture of the lives we live every day. Like the rule that said Catholics must not use contraceptives, they inhabit people’s most private selves. You mock those selves at your peril.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/26/cummings-contempt-lockdown-rules-public-catholic-church-ireland
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