lol

I've been progressing slowly through "The Making of the English Working Class," by the English "New Left" historian E.P. Thompson.  It's a highly admired book, written back in the days when lots of academics like Thompson went around airily claiming that, although they were not Stalinists, they were nevertheless highly committed Marxists.   The jacket blurb from Michael Foot, the far left Labour Party leader accused of having been a Soviet spy, which describes the work as a "masterpiece" probably goes too far, as jacket blurbs often do.  Still, there's a reason Foot liked the book, and shared political sympathies have a lot to do with it.

On page 439, in the midst of a discussion on the effect the arrival of migrating Irish peasants had upon English working class conditions, I found this howler:

In the most squalid cellars there might still be found some of the hocus-pocus of Romanism, the candlesticks, the crucifix, and the "showy-coloured prints of saints and martyrs"...

I'm not sure whether it's funny because Thompson's hatred for "Romanism" was so powerful he was blind to it, or couldn't control it, even in the pages of an academic text, or because his editors, sharing Thompson's views so completely, didn't notice his departure from cool academic discourse, and let it stand, or because it was Thompson himself, the guy claiming we could have all the good things Marxism offers in theory with none of the bad things which accompany Marxism in practice, who was actually engaged in "hocus-pocus."

Update:  Pope Benedict fleshes out the point somewhat more fully.