November 2025
In reading the book which inspired the letter for last month, The Bookseller of Hay, and reflecting upon how it spoke of place, I was prompted to rewatch the television production of another book. This is The Casual Vacancy by J.K Rowling, which I first watched during an unsettled period in my life. The acting, visual production and soundtrack to The Casual Vacancy is fantastic. Against the backdrop of an idyllic stone village there is strife and skulduggery around the fate of a run-down building in the picture postcard part of the village which is mainly used by the residents of the deprived housing estate. It centres around the unexpected death of one of the parish councillors. I shouldn’t say more as that would discourage some from watching it.
It is a shame that it is not as well-known as J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Part of me did wonder if this is to do with her expressing thoughts on gender and identity which are not popular in metropolitan circles. In effect being ‘cancelled’ because her views do not conform to the accepted creed. When looking into this, it transpired that she spoke on transgender a couple of years after The Casual Vacancy was written.
To be ‘cancelled’, in relation to ‘cancel culture’, is not a modern phenomenon as some would have it be believed. Sure, it can be said that to say someone has been cancelled in relation to a view or belief is recent. However, the cancelling of someone for speaking against the prevailing or fashionable orthodoxy has been going for time immemorial. In 1949, George Orwell wrote the well-known novel 1984, central to which is freedom of thought and expression. Some suggest that the public criticism of Thomas Hardy’s novels, such that some booksellers would only sell certain of his works in brown paper bags, led him to stop writing fiction.
The Church cannot claim to have been immune to this. The treatment of Galileo has been mentioned to me by more than one person in conversation. A patchy record does not stop the Church from being an example now. I do not agree, along with a number in our congregations, with the views and campaigns of some of those that are on the Hay Winter Festival programme. Yet we are not seeking to cancel them, be that by representation or through directing the festival to cancel a conversation or talk held in S. Mary’s.
Pope Benedict XVI initiated the ‘Courtyard of the Gentiles’ project during his pontificate. The name is inspired by the open-air atrium of the Temple in Jerusalem, which was called the Courtyard of the Gentiles and was there during the time of Our Lord,. It was, ‘a space in which everyone could enter, Jews and non-Jews, …[to engage] in a respectful and compassionate exchange.… a space that everyone could traverse and could remain in, regardless of culture, language or religious profession. It was a place of meeting and of diversity.’ His desire was to bring together those whose concern was for the defence of humanity and life against utilitarianism. In relation to this initiative, speaking via video to a gathering of young people in Paris, he said: ‘Our first step, the first thing we can do together, is to respect, help and love each and every human being, because he or she is a creature of God and in some way the road that leads to God.’
This brings me back to The Casual Vacancy, for I think it to be in the vein of the social commentary fiction of Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli, to name but two. One can see some of the themes present in every town and village across our nation. It should not be cancelled. When it comes to the Faith, we should not be afraid of challenge and other ideas for that which is true will stand well. Indeed, it has done so through the generations and to this very day with heresies, to use an unfashionable term, falling by the wayside. Likewise, we are fallible beings and will be incorrect on something, be that a minor matter or something of great importance, and if we (humanity) were better able to acknowledge that, this world would be a better place. We must offer respectful and compassionate exchange, reading nuances and sensing emotion, and it is up to our brother or sister to respond likewise.
Please God, let it be that the Blessed Saints, most particularly Our Lady, continue to pray for us!
