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It is illegal now, but it may have happened to you. Even though you’re Catholic, or maybe especially because you are Catholic.
I refer to corporal punishment, banned in state schools from 1986 but which lingered on for a short while elsewhere after objections from various Christian schools.
Catholic education thrived on it. Jesuits and Christian Brothers armed with wooden bats, straps or the padded whalebone strip known as the ferula. Teaching sisters – especially if the title of their Order included the words “mercy” or “charity” thwacking the Gospel into generations of the young.
I well remember an incident in my primary education where there was a misdemeanour in class, and the teacher – the Headmaster, no less – ordered a pupil to go to his study and fetch his cane. He returned a few minutes later holding an impressively long object which turned out to be ... the Headmaster’s fishing rod.
No sooner was that sorted out than another pupil came in to announce in solemn voice that King George VI had just died. We were all marched off to the school assembly hall and I lost my only opportunity in life to witness a public flogging.
How British culture depended on it! Billy Bunter, Jimmy Edwards the Headmaster of “Chiselbury School for the sons of gentlefolk” which was fictional in name only; the cult revolt film “If” of 1968 in which
Malcolm McDowell responded to being beaten by the prefects by staging a mutiny on the school’s Open
Day. That was the beginning of the end.
And the most famous beater of all was the Victorian Doctor Keate. Once a group of pupils was sent to him to be beaten for bunking off from school to go to the races. Afterwards with tears in their eyes they explained there had been a terrible mistake: it was not them, they had come to him for a Confirmation class.
Whereupon he beat them all again for blasphemy.
And did it do any good? Probably not. Did it satisfy those who enjoy sadism? Probably.
But what have we now? Contracts and covenants between schools, parents and children. And not just schools. Only the other day I was talking to a couple whose sons are going to university and were having to sign a contract, with boxes marked “yes” and “no”. Will you commit yourself to completing all your assignments on time? Will you return to the Halls of Residence in a proper and fit condition? As if anybody is going to tick the “no” box! In any case we sign so many things these days that it is a debased currency, meaningless. If it is a Government plan to suggest that all is well and all will always be well, alas, somebody is deluding themselves.
The fact is you cannot achieve personal growth by violence or the signing of forms, and Jesus did neither.
He tells us today how to proceed. Firstly by persuasion, one to one; then in the context of a small group; then of a larger group. It is possible that at the end of the process somebody may have to be debarred,
“expelled”, but only at the end of the process.
Jesus shows us this practice in innumerable Gospel examples. Last week he rebuked Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” Then he turned to ALL the disciples and told them they must take up their cross in order to follow him. A rich young man asks Jesus about eternal life and is told to give up his wealth. Then Jesus tells ALL the disciples that riches make it difficult to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And often he turns, as a third stage, beyond his disciples to the whole crowd.

We start from the small and local, and then proceed. This is how real relationships are formed, in the
“community” – a much misused and overused word which here means the Church, the ecclesia.
Because the Church is so large, we do not always follow Jesus’ precept. It is possible to avoid the local and go straight to the top – for example with complaint letters to bishops or the Vatican. I have seen some of these, indeed some have been about me. Anonymous, and signed with imposing titles like “Infuriated
Catholic”, “Outraged Catholic”, “Staunch Catholic”. All impossible to answer, as there is no name. The most amusing one I have seen was when I helped at the shrine of Walsingham one summer and helped them put their archives in order. A furious parishioner had written in 1948 to the Bishop of Northampton, in whose diocese Walsingham then was:
“My Lord Bishop, I wish to complain most vigorously about the behaviour of our parish priest Father X.
Yesterday I observed him driving down Walsingham High Street in an open-topped car, with his housekeeper
... and she not wearing a hat”.
Conversely, if the top speaks to the bottom in the form of a directive or order without taking soundings from advisors about how the bottom thinks and behaves and why, there can be no meeting of hearts and no meeting of minds.
This is an extremely important psychological point. Lives which are only lived by remote control become highly distorted. It is possible for those at the top to strut about with authority at a distance – politicians can do it, so can clergy – yet lack close relationships. In fact using the broad sweep of authority is an excuse to avoid making close relationships. This creates a state of sad solitude. And sad solitude is the opposite of a healthy life in the church. We may be alone (in the sense of single), but if we are lonely, the Gospel is not working.
Now we cannot know everybody, obviously. But as the Gospel says today, where two or three gather, and recognise each other, Jesus is. Conversely where there is a large faceless crowd as a substitute for closer relationships, there may be an impressive body of numbers, but it is possible that Jesus is not there at all.