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.

Biafra and All That

One of those incidents that seems to have survived only on Wikipedia (and, I suppose, on its various imitators and copycats) is the strange affair of the “Harry letters”. This was one of Mad Polly Toynbee’s early claims to fame. Whilst she was working for Amnesty International she coughed up what she intended to be a scandal about the Hard-Left Wilson Government's supporting Amnesty International by giving them public money.

So far, so dodgy, one might think. And yet of course Mad Polly, who has never been one not to ignore real wrongdoings when imaginary ones will do, got completely the wrong end of the stick. She complained that Wilson’s people were actually bribing Amnesty to ignore “politically sensitive” parts of the world such as Nigeria and, er, Southern Rhodesia.

The problem with this particular conspiracy theory alas was simply cui bono? Yes, Wilson’s government was one of the most notoriously corrupt in British history. (Quite how corrupt we only really found out with his Resignation Honours.) And yes, one can easily imagine they’d have wanted to divert attention from their support for Nigeria's military dictatorship, not to mention (later on) their illegal interventions in the Biafran civil war. But Rhodesia? Really?

Where the conspiracy theory breaks down is the thought that there might have been a ha'penny worth of difference between Amnesty International and Harold Wilson’s administration about anything at all ever. Biafra was fighting for independence from Nigeria and supported by Rhodesia, as well as by Israel, France, and what by then was left of the Catholic Church. Britain supported Nigeria because duh!

And the idea that Harold Wilson or Amnesty International could ever have supported Rhodesia can only even have been the most paranoid of paranoiac fantasies. (No, in fifty years the British Far Left really hasn't changed much.)

The St Gallen Mafia

No, sorry, I just don't believe in the "St Gallen Mafia" conspiracy theory. They failed to get Martini elected in 2005, when Martini himself told them to support Ratzinger in order to stop Bergoglio. Austen Ivereigh of course claims that they then had a change of heart, and that the three of them who were left (three out of 115!) conspired to get Bergoglio elected in 2013. But how likely is this really?

Indeed is there any real evidence for this outside of the tittle-tattle collected by Ivereigh and Bergoglio's other liberal boomer boosters? Alas, not really! Ivereigh claimed in the first edition of his silly book that just before the 2013 conclave the three of them got Bergoglio's consent to campaign for him, but he was then forced to retract this allegation for the second edition. And is there any real reason even to think it, given that no one (apart from the St Gallen group, supposedly!) even thought of Bergoglio as a "liberal" before he became Pope? Certainly he was not considered liberal by his fellow Jesuits in Argentina, with whom he was deeply unpopular. At a time when "liberation theology" was booming in South America, Bergoglio was seen as something of a "conservative" JPII sycophant.

And for what it's worth I don't believe in the "British coup" theory either. (Again, would we really do such a thing? Did some just think it would be funny to have an Argie as Pope? "Haw-haw! That'll annoy The Sun.") On the face of it, yes, one can easily imagine Pope Bergoglio being elected as Dave and Nick's puppet as much as Obama's. After all, Britain is at best Washington's poodle and at worst Mini-Me to Uncle Sam's Dr Evil, so there's a certain thematic logic to it. In one sense the ultimate success of the "liberal" proddy British Establishment would be to have a Pope elected who was a liberal protestant in all but name.

And yet! And yet! For one thing, once again, the source! This is Ma Pepinster, the elderly schoolgirl who for no readily apparent reason is still writing for Britain's most oleaginously pro-Establishment "Catholic" periodical. And secondly, once again... just think about it. These are the same British Establishment lickspittles who are diehards for the EU on the grounds that internationally Britain is now a post-imperial pipsqueak. They're the sorts of Catholics who would despise the Commonwealth of Nations as an embarrassing relic of a bygone age (even though in practice they would approve of much that it does). Surely the idea that our own James Bond helped to get Pope Francis elected is one sycophantic conspiracy fantasy too far even for them?

In fact easily the best summing up of the "political" situation in the Church I've read in some time comes courtesy of someone called Shane Schaetzel on his blog here. The Catholic Church is "split" (although not technically, and for crude financial reasons it probably isn't going to be any time soon either) between American neocons and German liberals. The former are trying to keep the JPII "conservative" vision of Vatican II alive. The latter are basically in hoc to the German secular state thanks to its "church tax". What's more, they don't really believe in anything anyway and they don't see why anyone else should either. (And more to the point they don't want them to!) The way the whole "Pope Francis" phenomenon fits into it is so straightforward there just isn't space for conspiracy theories about Jesuits, conspiracy theories about the St Gallen mafia, conspiracy theories about the British Embassy in Rome, or even conspiracy theories about Communists, Freemasons and Jews, etc.

Because the simple truth is that when Ratzinger resigned the papacy he was seen as being old and weak. He'd wanted it for himself, for his vision, for his "reform of the Reform" and his "hermeneutic of continuity". And he'd failed. The Cardinals wanted another JPII. The American neocons at any rate remembered "their" Pope as a tough guy who used to stand up to one sort of son-of-a-bitch (i.e. the "atheistic" Commies) and pal around with the other sort (i.e. Galtieri*, Tudjman, Saddam, etc.). They wanted a strong man, they thought Bergoglio would be it, and even if Ratzinger wasn't seen as an old, weak has-been (and I suspect he was), the remorseless logic of the conclave was simply that Bergoglio was next in line. Besides, he was Sodano's golden boy, Sodano had been Galtieri's golden boy, and so as far as JPII's groupies were concerned Bergoglio could do no wrong. (See George Weigel, especially!) And so once again it was the Yanks wot won it - led of course by American Establishment Cardinal par excellence (see here and here) the Archbishop of New York (where else?) Cardinal Dolan.

Buyer's remorse has of course since set in fast, but the simple and obvious truth remains. When future church historians finally start to write up the fate of the glorious new Americanised Catholic Church that emerged after Vatican II, the answer will simply be that they did it to themselves.

*We now know exactly whose side he was on.