Is James Bond a secret gay Catholic?

Answer: Probably not, but here goes...

Back in 2012 there were the usual snorts and guffaws by the bigot English press about L'Osservatore Romano's glowing review(s) of Skyfall. (And, to be fair, for a supposedly Catholic journal to be apparently promoting such a morally questionable character as James Bond is de facto scandalous.) But then that was only to be expected, given quite how utterly bigoted thick intellectually idle English journalists always are when reporting anything to do with the Catholic Church. In reality, of course, the Catholic Church has no opinion on James Bond, or Harry Potter, or who should win this year's Yankee lying competition US Presidential Election. And you'd have to be barmy to imagine that a billion Catholics around the world even could have just one opinion about any of these things. But don't try explaining that to your average hack on The Hate Daily Mail. Life's too short, and he or she wouldn't be interested anyway.

(And besides, L'Osservatore Romano is little more than the neo-Marxist in-house wank-rag of the Vatican's spiritually etiolated secularist Establishment. It is not and never has been an organ of the Magisterium. But don't try telling them that either.)

The strangest thing about L'Osservatore Romano's apparently new-found Bond mania though is that they seem to have missed that Bond is himself a Catholic. Or at any rate he comes from an old recusant Catholic family. The Bond family in real life were Catholic recusants, and Ian Fleming almost certainly imagined Bond as being one of them. Fleming would have known of the family (as the blogger Tribunus argues in an unusually sober post - by his standards - here) and he even gave his fictional Bond their real-life coat of arms (as seen in On Her Majesty's Secret Service) and motto ('Orbis non sufficit The world is not enough').

As for all the gay stuff in Skyfall, it's worth bearing in mind that Daniel Craig's stock has until now been at least as high amongst gays (thanks to the trunks bit in Casino Royale and his playing Derek Jacobi's sadistic lover, complete with a todger shot, in Love is the Devil) as it has been (or should have been) amongst Catholics (see his remarkably straight-bat approach to Catholicism in Moll Flanders and Sword of Honour). So the smutty and silly (but still funny) bit with Javier Bardem teasing him (and vice versa) in Skyfall was certainly aimed at an already extant section of the audience (who have, presumably, ignore that Bardem's character is just as much of a homophobic stereotype as Mr Wint and Mr Kidd were in Diamonds are Forever, but never mind).

In much the same way, we learn at the end of the film (without giving too much away) that the Bond ancestral home has (or had) a priest hole in it. OK, this particular crumbling pile is (or was) in Scotland, the filmmakers thus keeping a firm grip on Bond's (fictional) Scots roots rather than on the Bonds' (real-life) roots in Dorset. But there can't have been many non-Catholic, non-Jacobite Scots whose Reformation-era castles harboured massing priests, even in the Bond universe.

So on the one hand Skyfall was infested with silly solecisms. My favourite has to be 'This was your father's hunting rifle', when it wasn't a rifle it was a shotgun and anyway in the UK we use guns for shooting (or possibly stalking, but certainly not hunting, which is done with hounds).* And also there's no real plot (which, after all the delightfully convoluted plots in Bond films of yesteryear, was rather disappointing). And the script was fairly lacking in either polish or sparkle. And the baddy was almost totally one-dimensional. At the same time, however, there were all sorts of little things (the return of Q, complete with a fairly tokenistic gadget, and the return of the Walther PPK) and big things (the return of the Aston Martin, the return of Moneypenny, the return of the old office, etc.) that did end up making Bond's anniversary outing (and I use the word 'outing' advisedly) both enjoyable and satisfying.

*And whilst we're nitpicking, despite being a staunch monarchist Bond for some reason declined to bow to the Queen when he escorted her to the Olympics (even though even HM's own children do that), which rather suggests that Craig doesn't have quite the grip on his character that you'd have thought such a great "ac-tor" would have.