22 April 2015 A.D. UPSCALE WHINING: George Weigel on “`Wolf Hall’ and Upmarket Anti-Catholicism”
22 April 2015 A.D. UPSCALE WHINING: George Weigel on “`Wolf Hall’ and Upmarket Anti-Catholicism” Weigel, George. “`Wolf Hall and Upmarket Anti-Catholicism.” First Things. 22 Apr 2015. http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/04/wolf-hall-and-upmarket-anti-catholicism . Accessed 22 Apr 2015. W olf Hall , the BBC adaptation of Hillary Mantel’s novel about early Tudor England, began airing on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater” Easter Sunday night. It’s brilliant television. It’s also a serious distortion of history. And it proves, yet again, that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry in elite circles in the Anglosphere. The distortions and bias are not surprising, considering the source. Hillary Mantel is a very talented, very bitter ex-Catholic who’s said that the Church today is “not an institution for respectable people” (so much for the English hierarchy’s decades-long wheedling for social acceptance). As she freely concedes, Mantel’s aim in her novel was...