Tolkien’s response to clerical errors

At Offerimus Tibi Domine, Fr Simon Henry examined the question of Church “scandals” in the light of a letter by JRR Tolkien. Tolkien wrote to his son Michael in 1963, saying that he had “suffered grievously in my life from stupid, tired … and even bad priests”. But he would not “leave the Church (which for me would mean leaving the allegiance of Our Lord) for any such reasons: I should leave because I did not believe”.

For Tolkien, the betrayal of Judas, the cowardice of St Peter, the vanity of St James’s mother, were constants. “If He is a fraud and the Gospels fraudulent – that is: garbled accounts of a demented megalomaniac (which is the only alternative), then of course the spectacle exhibited by the Church (in the sense of clergy) in history and today is simply evidence of a gigantic fraud.” But if the Gospels were true, one would still expect to find scandals.