The Sunday Morning Soap Box

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2010-08-16T04:30:00.000-07:00

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Summer is icummin in

2010-08-16T02:44:00.000-07:00

No, I haven't died. And, no, I cannot explain that odd smell coming from the screen. It's not me anyway.

I've just been rather busy, finishing a big project, tending the sick and needy (I kid you not) and then doing a job interview - no news yet.

Still, this is summer, what are you reading blogs for? You should be outside in the fresh air, not mooching around in the house growing pale and wan. I myself intend to go sloping off soon enough.

Come to think of it, this isn't working, is it? I think it might be time to knock it on the head. Can you stand the loss? I dare say you can. Thank you, faithful readers. I shall be back in a week or two with a forwarding address.

Rejoicing and feasting

2010-07-24T01:26:00.000-07:00

After my post on Bishop Conry the other week, I really didn't think I would have anything kind to say about a bishop for quite some time. It's not that I'm a judgmental man, though I do make judgments; as Chesterton said, the only point of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it again on something solid. Still, since Bishop Conry seems only slightly worse than many of our mitred shepherds, I've taken to not looking too closely, a bit like a man who is expecting an accident from a certain direction.

Well, what do I read this week in the Catholic newspapers but that the bishops of England and Wales have requested and obtained permission for four new feasts commemorating St Gregory the Great on September 3, St Thomas Becket on December 29, the English Martyrs on May 4, and St Augustine of Canterbury on May 27. A long article in The Catholic Herald explains that the Congregation for Divine Worship has approved these feasts. Oh frabjous day, you say, callooh, callay, he chortled in his joy.

But hang on, hang on. There is something I don't quite understand here. Pardon me if I'm wrong but aren't these four saints already saints, and don't they already have feast days? So what exactly did the English bishops ask for and what exactly is the result of this decision by the CDW? As low as my opinion of most of these men has sunk, I cannot believe they are hoping for the merit of setting up these feasts, like some latter-day government claiming the merit of instituting democracy (although, when I think of it, that's practically what our last government did!), or like some kid standing next to a fancy car in the hope the passing girls think it's his.

So what is this about? Can some liturgist please enlighten me?

Special relationships

2010-07-20T00:02:00.001-07:00

While on holiday in the USA a few years ago, an English friend and I fell into conversation about the so-called 'special relationship' which is supposed to exist between the USA and Great Britain. Having kicked around the expression's meaning and history for a few minutes, he wondered whether this term 'special relationship' was one known among Americans, like it is known among Brits. Well, since we were in the USA, it was the perfect moment to find out.

We were at that very moment in some east-coast town, probably Baltimore. Surely, if anyone knew about the 'special relationship' between the USA and GB, it would be the Baltimorers. After all, Baltimore is the site of Fort McHenry where American soldiers fought so bravely during a nocturnal bombardment by the British in the War of 1812. The words of the US national anthem were inspired by that event, as Francis Scott Key, their author, witnessed the 'star spangled banner' emerge through the smoke and the mist the next morning.

So we asked. I think we asked in several places. Most memorably, we asked at a museum where artifacts from the War of Independence and the war of 1812 (and probably a few other wars too). And in each place, the answer came back: 'The special WHAAT?' Hmmm, well those who listen to the vox populi get what they deserve.

That was an illustrative experience for a couple of proud Brits abroad, I can tell you. Just when we had studied the British part in America's rise, we were exposed to that cruellest of cultural encounters: they have all the uniformed mannequins and narratives of liberating conflict you can ask for, but scratch away at the surface and America has moved on. I felt like a Norman touring the southern counties of England a century or two after 1066 and hearing from the natives that they had never heard of Bayeaux.

At this point a certain kind of non-American critic likes to scorn the American thing. It's an easy and common emotion for a conservative-minded Brit, but it is one I strongly disapprove of. In any case, on reflection I'm sure the inhabitants of Hastings hardly dwelt at all on their own relationship with Normandy. Why should the Baltimorers know anything about the special relationship anyway, especially since it was invented by Winston Churchill to help lever the Yanks into WWII? I'm reminded of the importance that Britain takes on for certain ex-colonies and colonials who sometimes look to this country with a piety and fervour that is hardly reflected in the complete popular indifference, not to say ignorance, which Britain shows towards its former empire. I dare say the natives of Tuvalu feel a pulsating fidelity to the civilisation brought to their country by the British lo those many years ago, but do we know who they are? I think not. Ask the average Brit what Tuvalu is and they will probably think it is some kind of soya-based meat substitute.

So, there are several conclusions which we can draw here. One is that when David Cameron meets President Obama today we should not be surprised if Barack gives him an order for drinks ('since Prime Minister Cameron is about to arrive'). The second is that we cannot pretend to any greater importance in their lives than our neighbours are prepared to grant us. Some diplomatic relations are like an unrequited attempt at mutual respect.

And perhaps the last is that we cannot trust Churchill, except when he's telling a joke (Like 'some chicken ... some neck'). When he was deadly serious, on the other hand, the man could be a menace!

When boo words are best

2010-07-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

In one very interesting study of contemporary English a distinction is made between what the author calls 'boo words' and 'hurrah words'. His contention is that in the flow of vocabulary which constitutes our media-led public discourse certain words can be used in order to produce in listeners, readers or spectators instant approval (hurrah words) or disapproval (boo words).

And he's quite right of course. Introduce words like 'advanced', 'daring', 'latest' or 'taboo-breaking' and the public mind - I use the terms loosely - is supposed to give the old thumbs up. Use words like 'traditional', 'middle-class', and the like, and you''re bound to stimulate the contrary reaction. The responsibility of public communicators ought to be to avoid this kind of language, but we know they don't. After all it's not as if public debates are about truth; they are only about who wins. Who cares if you use a little loose language, like a used carpet salesman?

I think that's why I am so irritated by reports that Bishop Kieran Conry has labelled the new Pontifical Council for Evangelisation as unnecessary. I have tried to find the edition of BBC Radio 4's Sunday on which he made these remarks but it is no longer available online. Still, The Catholic Herald reports him saying that the Church had become 'simply irrelevant' for many people:

It's authoritative. It's intolerant. It's demanding. It's exclusive. I think the Church has got to re-present itself rather than simply blame everything on the ills of society.

Begging his Lordship's pardon, but he must be fantasising about some Church I have yet to come across.

In the first place I object to the use of the word 'authoritative'. I assume he means 'authoritarian', but that is not the same thing. Then again, is the Church authoritarian today? And if so, is there cause to be a little authoritarian? I would have thought any bishop reading the newspapers this year must be well aware that if there is one thing the world acuses the Church of, it's of not being authoritarian enough, especially over the sins of its own clergy.

But what about the rest of this quotation? Intolerant? Now there is a 'boo' word which is heavily coded. After all, ask Bishop Kieran if he is happy to be intolerant of racism, and you can bet he would say yes. So, intolerance isn't the issue. Indeed, it's only the issue if you are using boo-speak. As for a demanding and exclusive Church, well, I certainly hope the Church is demanding and exclusive. It couldn't be true to its Master if it were not. What, after all, is undemanding about being told to take up your cross and love Christ more than anything else? What is more exclusive than saying nobody goes to the Father except through Christ?

Well, as I say, we cannot hear everything Bishop Kieran says in his interview, and one wouldn't like to pass any definitive judgments on this material. We can all be suspectible of misrepresentation. One can almost expect it from the media.

But, please, somebody, explain to me why Bishop Conry sounds more like an editorial writer from The Independent than a Catholic bishop. Or rather, don't bother. I understand why. What I don't understand is why, even if not every bishop maintains this line, we almost never hear the contrary line. That the problem with the Church is not that it is authoritarian, intolerant, demanding and exclusive, but that it has at times in recent years been lax, fuzzy, indulgent and bland. The choice isn't between being a murderer or a milksop. So why is it those who accuse the Church of murder sound more like milksops than anything else?

I pray for Bishop Kieran. But I would despair of being understood by him. I assume that's because I'm authoritarian, intolerant, demanding and exclusive.

Three years on

2010-07-08T12:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the papal Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum which recognised that the Tridentine Liturgy had never been abrogated.

Over at St Mary Magdalen, Brighton, the same day Fr Ray received an email from some diocesan coordinator for the papal visit with the following information:

The Park [Hyde Park] will open from 2pm and liturgical entertainment will be running through the afternoon - dance acts, videos etc (it promises to be an enjoyable event). The Pope will arrive to conclude the prayer vigil and benediction and the whole event will be finished by 9.00pm. I am told that the Pope will be there for the latter half of the event.

I'm struggling to contain my feelings about what on earth 'liturgical entertainment' might involve. I'm afraid I feel very strongly these days that until the powers-that-be want to change the landscape, we might as well all sit in the corner making bleebling noises to ourselves. Really, I'm sure if I made an effort I might imagine that 'liturgical entertainment' is loose language aimed at labelling something designed to engage the youth of today in something religious. It's what comes under the label of entertainment that alarms me. I hope to God it isn't something like the recent Western Mass in the diocese of Cardinal Schoenborn.

Le diable de mon coeur s'appelle à quoi bon? wrote Georges Bernanos. The demon of my heart is called 'what's the use?' If it wasn't for prayer, so would mine. Only I hate to admit to praying in case the people who organise liturgical entertainments try to co-opt it.

Every age has its vices; our appears to be a propensity to daub our ugly image on anything vaguely transcendent as a way of participating in it.

Back again - or rereturning

2010-07-06T01:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry to have been out of touch in the last couple of weeks. In that period I have managed to move house, travel to the other end of the country for an ordination, interview unsuccessfully for a university post (I didn't get it because my course proposal was not eclectic enough, my teaching manner was perceived to be too magisterial, and my approach to the subject too intellectual, possibly to the detriment of weaker students ...) and land back in my home town for a two month stint of inter-contractual support (gratefully received). 'Eeep', I believe, is the only appropriate noise to be made at this juncture. If there is anybody out there still reading this nonsense, just rattle your chains a bit. I suppose I'm lucky I don't have squatters by now.

As usual, I'm here to tell thee naught for thy comfort. At least nothing that will make your wallets feel better. Are you feeling yours? Mine's got an awful pinch. It wasn't helped by listening to the radio during my morning ablutions and hearing some twerp from the defeated Old Knuckleheaded Party ( Pat Ronisethepur) tell someone from the recently elected New Knuckleheaded Party (Hiram Ripemoff) that spending cuts would take money out of the economy. I might not be an economist, but it seems to me that for every pound the taxman leaves in the punters' pockets, that is not a pound taken out of the economy but a pound left in the economy (unless it's in the pocket of a man who leaves the economy).

We were then treated to the spectacle - or should that be oracle, since this is radio? - of a representative of the Unison trade union reminding Hiram Ripemoff of the New Knuckleheaded Party that cuts affect human beings. It was a point well made and one I felt myself concurring with wholeheartedly. But it seemed, however, to fall on stoney ground. And no wonder. After all, what is a human being, as my academic colleagues would ask (with all the confidence of hostages to fad-makers, struck down with Stockholm Syndrome)? Talk of human beings in the current climate is a bit like talk of goal lines: the boundaries are where the referee says they are. We are not human beings in this country. We are tax payers. Let us get that straight at least.

Still, Mr Unison's talk of human beings is not quite kosher. Scratch our humanist, who is laudably defending human dignity in a climate of spending cuts, and we'll probably find a man whose model of human behaviour embraces freedom of abortion, civil partnerships and all the panoply of liberal culture. And just how human is that?

I'm reminded of Chesterton's gargoyles Hugde and Grudge from What's Wrong with the World? Those in favour of freedom of capital tell us they know best. Those in favour of State provision tell us they know best. Both argue that the average punter will suffer if the opposing side's policies are followed. And, ultimately, the average punter is left in the middle wondering which way is up.

But of course neither way is up. Both ways are down. The pursuit of security through economic recovery or the provision of security through State provision (even when diluted with the benefits of champagne socialism) are both ideological substitutes for the sane, human and Christian relationship to wealth, wealth creation, education, and all the other services which charity compels us to perform for our fellow human beings.

But who is telling that tale in these times? And how will Pope Benedict's visit in a couple of months affect this monochrome picture, even with the coloured chalk of Newman, the Fathers and hermeneutics of continuity?

We have fished all night, Lord, and have caught nothing. But on your command we will let down the nets.

Budgeting for the future

2010-06-20T01:35:00.000-07:00

With the full horror of Tuesday's budget not yet upon us, there is a last opportunity to wish that things were other than what they currently are. Let us try a little idealist analgesia before we have to swallow the bitter pill.

For a start I always welcome anything which reduces the size of the State. I confess it and do not repent it! Big states are the answer to big markets, not to big countries. And big markets are the fruit of a philosophy that declares goodness to be the fruit of 'bigger' or 'more'. That's the problem with any lie: it always has a good dose of truth in it. For bigger and more are sometimes 'good'; it's just that they do not exhaust the category.

So, I'm filled with glee at the prospect of any measure which sets about cutting the State down to size ... And yet, now that we're in this situation, I wonder what misery will result from these measures. And here, I speak not idealistically but with the clarity of a flee resting on a part of the body politic which is about to be scratched. I have always worked in the public sector. I work in education. I've been helping to drag up the yoof of this country for over ten years now. And, in my current sector of education, I and hundreds like me already cannot find jobs. So, what the heck are we going to do now? I speak merely for my constituency; I could speak for many others in the same place.

Well, of course one could take the Blarite view that all knowledge which falls short of a tangible measure of social and economic impact is necessarily icing on the cake. But is it? Here we go again: not the philosophy of better and more but the philosophy of the useful. I remember that wing-eared butter ball Charles Clarke asking a few years ago what the point of studying Medieval History was. A lot of people replied by asking what the point of Charles Clarke was. Others replied by declaring that the study of a corrupt poilitical landscape was an act of rebellion in an age of chronic spin.

But they were all wrong. The point of studying Medieval History is for itself and for the moral benefits that the study of history produces generally. Historia magister vitae. We should spend money on 'useless' things; because they remind us that humanity is for something more than wealth-producing, leisure-getting activity. They remind us that the optimum condition under which the country operates is not one in which the economy depends for its meat and drink on our work-a-day stress and our drink-sodden weekends.

Hmm, I'm off my point, to some extent, but the essence of it is this: 'bigger' (and the concomitantly profitable 'smaller', and 'more and more', and 'the useful' are concepts that will be at the heart of this Tuesday's budget.

And I take it we're all going to pay ... well, nearly all!

It's never about what it's about

2010-06-16T00:55:00.000-07:00

I know the readership here includes very few football fans. It includes very few of anybody! But bear with me, non-football lover, just for a moment. Something very illustrative about our public discourse has just happened in the football world and it's worth a few moments of consideration.

Frank Beckenbauer, former captain and obergruppenfuhrer of the German football team, has attacked the tactics practised by the England of Fabio 'Fab' Capello. According to the old Kraut, the England team has gone back to what is called 'kick and rush' football. I understand that to the non-initiated, calling any football 'kick and rush' might seem somewhat redundant; rather like calling boxing 'hit and duck'. But Becksie's point was that England under Capello have achieved the nadir of footballing tactics, abandoned the beautiful game and are lurking in the very worst darkness of schoolboy strategy. The press and the media in general are always eager for any stick to beat an England manager, and were anxious on Monday for an explanation of why England couldn't beat the USA last Saturday. Thus, they seized on these remarks and rolled them around their collective mouth, like an old tramp supping a bottle of meths. Indeed, this was mother's milk to a story-hungry press. Even Henry Winter in the Telegraph got confused and used FB's remarks to reflect on how badly English footballers are served by a foreigner-player driven Premier League.

All of which missed the point, which I note is slowly sinking in in some quarters ... that Beckenbauer's comments weren't about England; they were an assault intended to undermine England's confidence in the highly competitive context of the most important footballing competition in the world. In other words, the last thing we should do is ask whether this is true; the first thing we should do is ask why FB said it! It's not about what it's about.

Personally I find this a very useful rule of thumb. And a rule of thumb it is, since sometimes it is indeed about what it's about. But it's very often not. Human beings generate myths almost as easily as they exhale carbon dioxide. Of course we can and should distinguish conscious and unconscious myth making. The latter always makes me marvel at how much someone can come to believe their own spin. But it happens. Daily. Hourly for some.

I find it comforting in a media age to have to hand the kind of analytic tool we can use to scrutinize what our self-appointed guardians are doing for us. Ask first not whether what they say is true but why they have said it. The good ship Bull Shit can only set sail on a sea of caca.

Look before you leap in

2010-06-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

In the last week or so there have been some reports alleging that the plans for the papal visit to England and Scotland in September are in chaos. Venues have not been booked and no clear system of allocating tickets for events exists. Damian Thompson suggests this is the fault of a clerical cabal who, in any case, are close to a Blairite model of Catholicism, and hostile to Benedict XVI. New elements in some kind of culture war have been suggested by the removal of three Oratorians from the Birmingham Oratory. James Preece (with whose conclusions I do not universally agree) reports that these men have been sent away on indefinite spiritual leave, the implication being that they need to be kept out of the way during the run up to the papal visit.

Personally, I'm convinced by neither of these theses. The older I get the less I am inclined to accept the precipitous conspiracy theory. Thompson has something of record in suggestive reporting in this regard. His explanation of why Liverpool diocese blocked the assigning of a church to the Extraordinary Form was wide of the mark for those who knew what was really at stake. I'm not saying his article about the Pope's visit was without virtue, but it remains to be seen what actually happens in September. Lobby in private and let's leave the condemnations for later.

The same applies really with regard to the Birmingham men. Again experience has taught me to be very circumspect about jumping to conclusions, especially where clerical behaviour is under scrutiny. I have no idea why these men have been sent away; neither, please take note, am I opening discussion on the matter. I'm simply saying that the public narratives are often lacking vital facts which cannot be disclosed for very sound moral reasons. I don't think we help the situation by speculation.

This is not a counsel of the blind eye; it's just a counsel of circumspection, which, after all, literally means 'looking around'. The last time I remember Thompson firing from the hip at Bishop Hollis of Portsmouth (concerning Paul Inwood's ludicrous 2007 email about Summorum Pontificum), the story from inside the Portsmouth curia was somewhat more nuanced. The narrative of 'modernist bishop blocks SP' didn't apply since Inwood's email on the topic was done on his own initiative. I'm not saying Hollis is a completely innocent party; his agreeing to blocking Communion on the tongue during the swine flu crisis (the one that killed millions last year ... didn't it?) was a bad case of invertebrate leadership collapsing in the face of middle management (or middle mis-management). But labelling him as an SP opponent is silly. The FSSP is strongest after all in his diocese.

My point being: never underestimate the complexity of clerical rows, whether at Eccleston Square or the Birmingham Oratory. It pays to look before you leap in.

In which Innocent returns

2010-06-03T22:44:00.000-07:00

There was a flood of one get well message from readers in my recent illness, so thanks for that ;-) I'm feeling a lot better, which is a relief for me at the very least, though I'm still awaiting some tests.

Meanwhile, what a week of astonishing events on the public stage. It's difficult to know where to start really. Probably my favourite story was about the Duchess of York flogging introductions to her husband to an undercover reporter from the News of the World. As Gilbert and Sullivan wrote:

The work is light, and, I may add,

It's most remunerative.

In The Gondoliers the Duke and Duchess of Plaza Toro provide the essential comic turn; not so much mutton dressed as lamb, as wideboys dressed as nobility. In other words, aristos selling favours is hardly a recent innovation. It's just a while since we had it so magnificently unveiled (thank you, gutter press).

I rather like the line from the same song in the Gondoliers:

I present any lady,

Whose conduct is shady,

Or smacking of doubtful propriety;

When virtue would quash her,

I take and whitewash her,

And launch her in first-rate society.

Er, well, yes, thanks Fergie.

Bizarrely, when Fergie then appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to explain her conduct, she spoke about herself in the third person singular (she, her, etc). No airs and graces she, this appeared to be an attempt to portray herself as a victim of the situation and to elicit compassion.

The kudos of the victim has been one of the more unusual manifestations of our culture over the last few years. It was memorably the cloak under which Diana, Princess of Wales, operated in the latter part of her own tale. The assumption is that it is a sign of our sentimentality, or indeed a sort of dessicated compassion, akin to the 'charity' which drives Britons to raise money so Africans can have free condoms. There is undoubtedly something in that. I'm currently working on another explanation, namely, that only a society with our latent commitment to the pleasures of hatred could have the passion both to vilify and exonerate our chosen scapegoats. The point is though that scapegoats shouldn't do their own exoneration, which is why Fergie got it so badly wrong. Must be hard being a Duchess. Somebody give that woman a salary.

****************

If you want genuine victims you only need turn to the other major story of the last few days. The victims of Derrick Bird will long live in the memory, like those of Thomas Hamilton and Michael Ryan. May they all rest in peace.

Why do such men do such things? We barely have an explanation in the pretexts of family feuds or what have you. Mass-killers on a shooting spree commit suicide without exception, putting what they might have revealed about their actions beyond the reach of analysis. Some people think this has something to do with our gun laws. That may be so, at least insofar as they create the opportunity. But the opportunity is available much more readily in the inner cities where, at least thus far, such massacres have not occurred.

What we can sensibly glean from only three cases is hardly compelling. Does it say something about lone lower-middle class men in contemporary Britain? Are these three killers as random as passing meteorites? Or are they like cracks in the hardened magma crust of a society in which charity has cooled and congealed over a lake of fallen passions? I sympathize greatly with the drive to ensure 'such things never happen again', but I think it is impossible. There is something wrong in the hardwiring of the human being.

******************

Well, that's probably quite enough from me. The weekend beckons with promise of jolly weather and jollier company. In media mortis, summus in vitae. It's a lesson worth remembering at times like this.

The Elusive Rome

2010-05-25T13:57:00.000-07:00

I don't mean to grumble but I cannot help reflecting on the elusiveness of Rome. Not for others, but for me. Last year I should have been out there for an ordination, but at the last minute, for reasons it is unnecessary to rehearse here, I didn't go.

So, I was looking forward to climbing aboard the Easyjet flight tomorrow from Gatwick to Fiumicino. I was due in Rome to give a paper at the Dietrich Von Hildebrand conference at the Holy Cross Seminary. I have indeed sent off my paper so it can at least be read in my absence. But I won't be going. Ho hum.

I won't describe the problem, but it is very painful. My mother and grandmother have had it too. I'm sure I need the penance. And I'm not going to turn up my nose at the £300 I have saved on accommodation and conference fee. Still, elusive Rome again ...

As I may, mustn't grumble. But I really hope one of these days to make it. It's little consolation Rome is coming here in September.

******************

I say it's little consolation. I've been noticing over the last few days the debate concerning limits on numbers at Pope Benedict's public functions in Scotland and England. The official line is that health and safety demand some restrictions, and that people can always watch on TV at home. Hmm, well, of course they can watch the Pope on TV at home. But they can do that now while they AND the Pope stay home for the occasion. They only need to tune in to EWTN via satellite or the internet. It's anybody's guess how TV coverage of the papal visit is consolation for anybody but the infirm and the elderly.

On the other hand, the older I get the less I am impressed or attracted by the kind of mass gatherings which the papal visit will undoubtedly give rise to. Of course we could treat them as a pilgrimage, or as penance of some kind. I personally will have to (if indeed I am in the country and choose to attend). For me, it will feel like going to a Catholic version of the Boxing Day sales.

*******************

So, maybe what I should try to do is plan my trip to Rome while the Pope is visiting England. I will still get a pilgrimage in the bag, but instead of queuing on a London street or standing for hours without toilet or water in Coventry Airport, I will be able to watch the Pope on TV from the comfort of my Italian hotel before trotting down to the Gesu to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of the Strada.

Is this the soft option? Well, it might be. But be gentle. I'm really feeling quite poorly. And quite disappointed. Rome, the elusive...

Spring is here, spring is here

2010-05-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

It was quite tropical this evening on the way home from work. I say tropical. Maybe that's an exaggeration. It's so long since we saw the sun in any meaningful quantity. I hope he reads this. Perhaps he will be shamed into appearing more often.

Truly, though, a late-spring evening, like the one we have tonight, is just full of promise. Absolutely full of promise. And all the more meaningful in the current climate. Let's face it, there are few things to feel particularly positive about at the moment, at least for poor little England.

But that's the odd thing: the seemingly infinite variety of experience, of modes of impression, such that one can live in the same space and time as those up yonder, and hardly know the other side of the moor (as we northerners say). Somewhere in England tonight, the hearts are light, the minds are free, and there can be caught on the scent of the evening's air all the promise that God has instilled in life. At the same time, worried hearts go to bed, tired and numbed by trial, oblivious to the weather, in the cell of their own problems. None but a Saviour who has laughed and wept will do for such folk.

How does God keep track of it all? But He does, in some infinitely mysterious way which, in itself, calls on our hearts to open to His largesse and look with universal charity on those who are cheery and those who mourn.

Lord knows where all that came from, but it came from somewhere. Maybe it's the prospect of another weekend away (I know! The extravagance!). I'll be back to the blog on Sunday or Monday with a fair wind. Never seem to stop running these days.

And while we're in the mood for spring, what about a little Tom Lehrer? Go on!

A bitter pill to swallow

2010-05-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

Mary Kenny has a piece in this week's Catholic Herald (print version) which I cannot find online. In it Miss Kenny notes the 50th anniversary of the licensing of the Pill in the USA. The 50-year anniversary in Britain falls next year (can't wait, can you?). She remarks that in the 1960s she had hoped Pope Paul would go with the majority advice from his theological commission and allow Catholics the freedom to use the Pill. Nowadays she says she wishes the Pill was allowed to Catholics but only because young couples struggling to space their children should be supported and helped. And yet she notes in her conclusion that the Pill has had mixed results, failing to reduce school-girl pregnancies or bring down abortion and divorce rates. She avoids making any indication of whether people should actually follow the Church's teaching on the issue. For charity's sake I must take it that she thinks they should follow it, even with a heavy heart.

That such an article can appear in the Catholic Herald is surely yet another indicator of conditions among the Catholic elites. Is this the best we can do in this country? Parade our longings to embrace the boons of the pill, while we acknowledge the unfortunate rise in teenage pregnancies, divorce and abortion? Of course, I was forgetting, I am in England where it is much more important for readers to be familiar with their journalists than for journalists to have something constructive to say. I am in England where it is much more important to acknowledge the pragmatist's point of view than to state your own principle. For The Catholic Herald Mary Kenny probably draws in the confortably-padded, late middle-aged reader of whom there are still quite a few in the Catholic Church in England; they might even be the best represented constituency...

But as I kick over this article there is much that is so evidently wrong in it. Kenny observes that while Jewish theologians objected to contraceptive devices - since they interposed a barrier between husband and wife - the Pill changed the state of the question because no such device was involved. Well, yes and no. True, the Pill does its work chemically rather than mechanically, but the 'barrier' it introduces into the system are the manufactured hormones that make the female body behave chemically as if pregnant. Thinking that the Pill is not a barrier between man and wife is a bit like saying poison isn't dangerous because it's not a heavy, blunt object.

Kenny observes - I think with some acuity - that one of the most influential works on this subject, at least among those who bother to read, was David Lodge's The British Museum is Falling Down. This novel dramatizes the plight of a young Catholic family who are rather poor, and desperate to avoid a fourth pregnancy by practising what was then jocularly called 'Vatican roulette'. But, you know, what strikes me in all these discussions is the unshakeable assumption that poverty and virtue are incompatible. I'm told that these days NFP is far more reliable than the so-called Rhythm Method, but that isn't the point. The point is that the discourse that prevails is one in which poverty is an unremitting evil: not one of the evangelical counsels. This isn't Christianity, it is meliorism. Ought we not at least to say that if our convictions carry us into uncomfortable spots, so be it? And in the Catholic ban on contraception was there not a principle of life to defend, a principle which has been trampled over by all those who wrung their hands over poverty but hardly over the damage to marriage which contraception facilitated? I'm not underestimating the stomach-churning anxiety poverty can cause; I'm just saying it is sometimes as urgent a moral risk as daring not to be a racist or a capitalist.

Kenny finishes off her article with a nod at the negative results of contraception. But then nobody could approve of the rise in school girl pregnancies, divorces and abortions, which were supposed to decline in the Pill's wake. This is where I find Kenny's article at its most reckless. We all know fine well that the Pill was a major plank of sexual liberation in this country and in the West in general. Many of us know that it was precisely the attitudes that the Pill helped engender that led to the rise in abortions, and most likely to the rise in divorce too. And, those who thought about the issues in the 1960s - including, incidentally, Paul VI - knew that the most significant thing about contraception in the Sexual Revolution was its capacity to sever procreation and sex, leaving practically nothing but taboo to block the way to homosexuality. And where do we find ourselves today? Ahem.

People I know could raise a dozen other objections to the Pill, starting with the merry hell hormonal interference can cause in relations between the sexes. One explanation for the calamitous developments in female fashion of recent years is that many women are now chemically pregnant a lot of the time, with the result that they have to work harder to attract the men because their bodies do not emit partner-attracting pheromones.

But the cultural legacy ought to be proof enough for Kenny's generation that they made a colossally stupid mistake in siding with liberal opinion against the Church. Indeed, where are their children now? Very few have stayed. In fact, what's the point of staying if you are not going to listen?

Still, Kenny has a front row seat among the Catholic opinion formers of this country. The mind boggles.

AWOL

2010-05-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

Very sorry, dear readers - all three of you - it's been a helluva week chez Innocent. Last weekend took me to a far-flung corner of the country. Lovely place, happy company, all-round excellent trip. But this week has come down on me like a ton of bricks. It is the examination period and my profession is kept rather busy at this time of the year. Then, I also have a paper to prepare for a conference in Rome in two weeks. This is what Sir Alex Ferguson calls 'squeaky-bum time.' Hmm, says it all really. Innocent is also threatened with unemployment pretty soon too, so if you have a spare prayer going, I could use it.

Meanwhile, the country is reeling to news of the 'new politics'. Or at least that is what we have been assured of by the politicians forming a coalition government of Conservative and Liberal Democratic sentiment. How does one tell them to pull the other one? If you believe that, you'll believe anything. Sure, they will all be friendly to start with, but just wait for human nature to click in. And we'll be back to the old politics, which in fact we will never have left! Dontcha just love the 'société du spectacle', as that old French alcoholic Guy Debord called it?

Meanwhile, the truer things of life, the seasons, the spring, the morning chorus, seem to go on in spite of it all. Even old Gordi Brown acknowledged, as he was leaving Downing Street, that being PM was only the second most important job he could do in life. His young children waved at the photographers in ignorant and wild abandon. And there was a moment of humility, the afternote of a premiership of hubris. I might wish us all such moments.

So, it's back to the grindstone. Never mind the taxes, feel the pinch. If, like me, you're a public sector worker, well, make sure that vegetable patch is dug. I would, were it not for the fact I leave my digs at the end of June. Who knows where, who knows wither? As I say, all spare prayers are most welcome.

Hung Parliament

2010-05-07T03:18:00.000-07:00

So it looks like a hung parliament scenario, with the strong possibility of a Con-LibDem coalition. There will be no word from David Cameron until 2.30pm, by which time I will be sailing up the M1 on a weekend break (yes, another one, it's shocking!). More comment when I return. It's always possible that Nick Clegg will tease us and then join hands with Labour. We must wait and see.

In the short term, we can observe that some awful people have been voted out, most notably Dr Evan Harris who was MP for Oxford West. Harris was known as Dr Death for his support for the anti-Life agenda and for the way he worked the lobbies during the vote on the Human Embryology Bill. Whether his successor, Nicola Blackwood, proves to have a better voting record on Life remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, here's a thought from a friend. 'A hung parliament? Okay, which one should we hang first?'

Deus, exaudi nos!

Fighting talk

2010-05-06T01:34:00.000-07:00

After my post of yesterday about l'entre-deux-guerres, I read Fr Finigan's blog post about meeting Cardinal Pell at St Peter's some time ago. Cardinal Pell is rumoured to be the new Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, an appointment which has all the tantalizing potential of a yickity old, crime-ridden frontier town hiring Wyatt Earp as the sheriff. I approve. The relevant portion of Fr Finigan's post is as follows:

On one occasion I happened across Cardinal Pell at St Peter's. I was flattered that he remembered me and said: "Tim - remember my advice. Keep your guard up and keep moving round the ring."

[Innocent rubs his hands]. Never mind entre-deux-guerres! Why not à la guerre comme à la guerre!

L'Entre-deux-guerres: Back in the wars

2010-05-05T12:49:00.000-07:00

One of the funniest albeit most offensive French writers I know is Léon Daudet. Readers might have heard of Alphonse Daudet, author of Lettres de mon moulin and one of the founders of the myth of the sun-kissed, olive-groved, lavender-scented Provence. Alphonse himself hardly had clean hands; he was a fincancial supporter of Edouard Drumont, France's most notorious nineteenth-century anti-Semite, and died from complications caused by syphilis. Léon, his son, became famous as the journalist editor workhorse of the Action française movement. He was a fearsome bon viveur, quaffing sometimes as many as six bottles of wine in a day, and he was also a feared duellist. You'd be amazed at how popular duelling remained in the late nineteenth century in France; Georges Clémenceau himself was a crack shot with a pistol. Anyway, I digress.

Well, Daudet it was who gave French journal literature the concept of l'entre-deux-guerres. This is not the same as peacetime. Rather, any period that followed a war could legitimately be seen as a period of l'entre-deux-guerres: between two wars. Perhaps this was an especially French way of looking at the issue. Daudet was born in the 1860s in a France which was usually between two wars, not to mention two governments, at least until 1958. I don't remember all the nuances now, but the entre-deux-guerres mentality is not hard to fathom. It is a warning about optimism; it is a monitory note sounded while the John Lennons of this world drivel on about no possessions. Don't get comfortable, war isn't that far away, dixit Daudet. It's a useful lesson.

Well, please don't believe that I'm revelling in the idea, but I couldn't help coming to that conclusion during my short break last weekend. There are few benefits to the wave of prejudice and anger aimed at Pope Benedict XVI in the last few months, and at the Catholic Church in general. But one of them is that it has popped the myth that had sprung up around the 'men of good will'. Of course we greet all men as honest and upright; of course we take them where they are. But that discourse has for the last few decades promoted a kind of irenic pacifism, an unrealistic expectation concerning the benignity of the world at large. The problem with trying always to see the other man's point of view - like Trollope's Septimus Harding - is that sometimes we actually miss his point. The trouble is that sometimes the other man's point of view is not the sign of a benign attachment to what he thinks is truth, but the tool with which he is setting out to beat us. The trouble with trying always to see his point of view is that we fail to do him the honour of thinking him capable of ill will. The trouble is we forget we are in a war. Or at the very least between two wars.

I'm not complaining about that of course. I don't mind a bit of a fight. I suppose what I struggle with are the loitering Munich agreement makers. Them and the advance party of collaborationists. You know who they are! That said, all is not fair in love and war; Christ's victory is one of love, not force. Still, it's about time we stopped interpreting love as niceness. After all, niceness doesn't stop the l'entre-deux-guerres ending in another conflict. It only disarms the battle weary and makes them think that peacetime has come at last.

Now, where is my helmet of salvation? Perhaps I should be wearing it already. Is it any wonder I am thinking of this old socialist melody? As a colleague once said of Léon Daudet, sometimes the devil has the best tunes.

Good intentions

2010-05-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

Yes, well, that's what comes of good intentions. It is of no comfort to you, reader dear, that I spent the morning examing my students (yawn), most of the afternoon in the dentists (ouch), and most of the evening on the phone (yeah! but not blogging material).

But what can one say at the end of an election campaign in which so much ink has been split by so many for so little? As I write, rather late in the day, Bird, Bremner and Fortune are on the TV trying to convince us all that the golden age of satire has not entirely passed away. But we know it has. You cannot enjoy satire unless you believe in something, and what do we believe in now? I speak corporatively, of course!

Instead, we are like the proletariat, bourgoisie and industrialists of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, hardly caring who comes to power, so long as they line our pockets. Economics is king. Roll out the bank balance. A necessity of course, but why must our necessities always become our virtues?

Hmm, well, perhaps I have said something of what I intended to say tonight, but the time is lacking, and so I promise again to return tomorrow. A busy one, but not so busy that I cannot divulge my own thoughts before the fateful day of the election finally dawns.

Still, none of us know the hour ...

Hiatus over

2010-05-03T14:28:00.000-07:00

Just back from a bank holiday hiatus so I will blog on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, if, like me, you are public sector worker on a contract, let me advise you to make sure your garage is stocked with tinned food and your new CV is written up neatly before Friday.

On the optimistic side, there are large numbers of roadsweeper jobs in Iceland, so I understand.

Deus exaudi nos!

Let's get rational

2010-04-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

Gary McFarlane, a marriage guidance counsellor, was sacked because he refused to provide his services to homosexual couples. An employment tribunal backed this action in 2008 and McFarlane was in court today seeking leave to appeal. Lord Justice Law (no pun intended), however, found against McFarlane and, in his ruling, stated the following:

"We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.

"The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments. The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law, but the state, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself."

We do not quite know on what grounds McFarlane's lawyers tried to argue the case, but we do know that Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, intervened on McFarlane's behalf and found his argumentation criticized in Lord Justice Law's ruling.

What I find interesting about this is how much it reveals the deeply unwise strategy of ecumenical associations of common witness. There are several reasons for my saying this. The first is that theologically speaking it has blurred the difference between ecclesial faith (as transmitted by the Church) and privatized faith (the individual conviction of this person or group). That is not to say the latter is unimportant, but that common witness can involve a veiling of the difference. Bad mistake.

The second reason I make this point is that the fostering of a 'faith' ticket has been a great facilitator of ecumenical friendliness, especially now we are surrounded by a secular society, but it seems to have been achieved at the expense of a cogent, persuasive and well-argued Christian rationality. Seeking out a richer scriptural basis for doctrinal understanding is all very well as an ecclesial exercise ad intra, or as a way of convincing Bible Christians that the Church is no stranger to Scripture, but if you want to win an argument in the public square, you have to base your position on principles recognized in the public square. Claiming a special status for Christian sensibilities is just not going to work in the current climate.

Could McFarlane's job have been saved with a more rationally grounded argument? I'm not a lawyer and frankly I don't know. But I do know that since conscientious objections are recognized elsewhere in the law, there must surely be some grounds for a legal argument. The most worrying thing is that in Law's ruling, and its ilk, a hardening secular reason marches on almost without any opposition, and the religions intervening in the debate are sounding increasingly shrill by looking for a special 'faith' status.

Defend this ground on the basis of natural law, or you'll not have a shred of religion left in this country which can function in the public domain. The paradox is in this regard that we have to be faithless in order to be faithful.

Preece bites back

2010-04-27T02:45:00.000-07:00

James Preece has now given his account of the Catholic Voices incident. Ivereigh knew about his blog and Preece was still welcome until the last minute ...

Now, that is odd.

An apology to Balliol Men

2010-04-27T00:42:00.000-07:00

I said some sarcastic things about Oxbridge yesterday. My irritation is not with Oxbridge people themselves. As Sir Humphrey might have said, some of my best friends are Oxbridge graduates! My problem is with the public perception of this class. It is an irritation which goes back to when I was a teacher and a senior colleague blocked a frank report I had written about the school's most aggressively insular student on the grounds that she was destined for Cambridge (not what he said, but that was the truth of it). All I had said was that she had to learn to listen to other people and dialogue with their ideas, instead of treating everyone who disagreed with her as a lower species. I resented enormously the assumption that attendance at a swanky university was more important than her development as a human being. I hope she has since developed.

Anyway, I was thus quite unsurprised by todays's news that Anjoum Noorani, the senior civil servant really responsible for the papal visit memo scandal, also studied at Oxford (like Steven Mulvain who took the flak yesterday for circulating it). I'm perfectly sure I wouldn't have lasted five minutes in either place, but I cannot stand the kind of British snobbery that laments the fall of Oxbridge graduates as if it were as tragic as the fall of Satan.

That said, the fact these two specimens attended Balliol College touched my heart, and made me think warmer thoughts. And my mind went back to Hilaire Belloc's ode to Balliol Men, which I post here as an apology to my Oxbridge readers.

TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN AFRICA

YEARS ago when I was at Balliol,
Balliol men and I was one
Swam together in winter rivers,
Wrestled together under the sun.

And still in the heart of us, Balliol, Balliol,
Loved already, but hardly known,
Welded us each of us into the others :
Called a levy and chose her own.

Here is a House that armours a man
With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger,
And a laughing way in the teeth of the world
And a holy hunger and thirst for danger :

Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,
Whatever I had she gave me again :
And the best of Balliol loved and led me.
God be with you, Balliol men.

I have said it before, and I say it again,
There was treason done, and a false wordspoken,
And England under the dregs of men,
And bribes about, and a treaty broken:

But angry, lonely, hating it still,
I wished to be there in spite of the wrong.
My heart was heavy for Cumnor Hill
And the hammer of galloping all day long.

Galloping outward into the weather,
Hands a-ready and battle in all:
Words together and wine together
And song together in Balliol Hall.

Rare and single ! Noble and few ! . . .
Oh ! they have wasted you over the sea !
The only brothers ever I knew,
The men that laughed and quarrelled with me.

Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,
Whatever I had she gave me again;
And the best of Balliol loved and led me,
God be with you, Balliol men.

James Preece and Catholic Voices: Updated

2010-04-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

James Preece runs a blog called Catholic and Loving It. He is well known in Catholic blogging circles, and has made several appearances in the media, notably on the BBC's Sunday morning discussion programe The Big Questions. He was, so I understand, recently to take part in a training session for Catholic Voices, an organization headed up by Austen Ivereigh and Jack Valero and founded to create a new breed of Catholic media commentator who could more convincingly put the Church's line out there in the media age. According to Mulier Fortis (authored by Mac), Preece, who lives in the North East, planned specially to be in London for this meeting, but was contacted shortly beforehand and unceremoniously blocked from coming by Ivereigh on the grounds that "+Vincent" (Archbishop Nichols to you and me) would be present.

Now, to Ivereigh's consternation, Mac published this story on her blog, and when Ivereigh then aimed a pointed comment at Mac's private vows, accusing her of publishing only part of his message to Preece, she riposted by publishing a screen shot of Ivereigh's correspondence which showed she had published it pretty much as it was written. As one would expect. (Update: Please see Ivereigh's apology to Mac at the foot of this post).

Several things spring to mind here about this whole incident. First, Ivereigh has behaved rather badly from start to finish. If Preece was not welcome as a member of Catholic Voices - and we'll come to that question - then Ivereigh should have been more selective from the start. Secondly, Ivereigh is a savvy media operator, and his whining about Mac's publication of his email is just guff. Proof of that is his meretricious accusation that Mac had deformed his message, when she had not. Further proof of Ivereigh guff is that he then took a swipe at Mac's private vows (asking if they did not include charity). Guff, Ivereigh. Guff, man. Just admit it. Mac did little wrong, and printed correspondence which showed up the operation of a public body to be privately shabby. You can question its wisdom - for, while true, does it really reflect well on the Catholic Church at this time? - but don't question its justice. Catholic Voices took a dump on Preece, and if they thought they wouldn't get bitten back, then they're not quite as sharp as they will have to be in the media cauldron.

Which leads us to the question of Preece. I must say I do not know the man. I read his blog from time to time and find lots to admire in it. Preece is an intelligent and articulate writer, and he has a sharp nose for what we might call humbug. He only recently had an interview with Bishop Drainey published in The Catholic Herald, if memory serves.

But with it all comes a sometimes unbridled approach to Church polemics. Preece has been pretty merciless in the pursuit of Vincent Nichols in the last twelve months or so. He went after him for Birmingham Archdiocese's sex education programme, photoshopping pictures of male genitalia (from the programme, I think) over VN's head. He went after him for VN's failure to chastize Terry Prendergast publicly, after Prendergast, the chairman of the Church-funded Marriage Care, backed the idea of gay adoption.

Now, I'm sure these are not the only grounds on which Preece has gone for VN. But for anyone who knows anything about Preece's career as a blogger, they are fairly well known, which leads me to certain queries. If Catholic Voices did their research properly, then surely they should have known about Preece. Why was he finally admitted to Catholic Voices (after some struggle apparently) only to be dropped at the last minute? As for Preece, how could he have thought that after his public hounding of VN he would be allowed to be a part of such a Catholic-establishment operation like Catholic Voices? And why, finally, should Ivereigh resent having his actions revealed in public if, as one supposes, there was a perfectly logical and reasonable explanation for them: that nobody would expect VN to agree to Preece being a 'Catholic Voice'.

I'm not going into the rights and wrongs of Preece's blogging. Putting aside its vulgarity which I prefer to see as prophetic rather than polemical - and which in the end has proven to be more damaging to Preece than to VN - its main strength is that it is not part of 'the club'. But why then would Preece even want to have a platform provided by 'the club'? Of course, one might say that Preece's blogging suffers from not being part of 'the club', i.e. not having the kind of card-carrying credentials which could get his well-crafted and intelligent articulation of Catholic principles onto a wider stage. But if that stage is being marshalled by Ivereigh, does Preece really want that anyway?

*********************

Well, no doubt almost everyone could have behaved more charitably. Catholic Voices could have been more competent. Ivereigh has been paid back by having his insinuations spiked. And Preece has been paid back for the excesses of his anti-VN campaign by being inconvenienced. None of that is particularly satisfying though.

As for Mac, I say 'well done', though you have exposed once more - in a week when we needed little extra proof - the sadly befuddled and self indulgent ways our Catholic establishment elite can behave.

Thank God He is perfect; His servants most certainly are not.

*************

UPDATE:

Austen Ivereigh publishes this comment on Mac's blog:

Having been rebuked -- rightly -- by Fr Ray Blake for being uncharitable, I'd like to apologise to Mulier Fortis for the unnecessary jibe about vows. I was furious at having been used in this way, and didn't check my anger. Sorry. [IS: Probably, Ivereigh, not as furious as someone who was dropped unceremoniously from a Catholic Voices training session, but we'll let that pass].

But I was right to object to a gross breach of trust [IS: no you weren't, Ivereigh]-- and that, I assure you, was the only nerve that was struck.

As for the rest of the mob: pacem pro vobis.

Greetings, visitors

2010-04-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Fr Ray at St Mary Magdalen's Brighton has linked to me again. Thanks, Father, you're a gentleman and a scholar.

It's a small following here on The Sunday Morning Soap Box. Yesterday's metre reading showed a whopping twenty-five visitors, though our average is between six and eleven.

Still, I like to think of it as a select group, a chosen band. Not for us perhaps the heights of Mulier Fortis or Fr Tim Finigan's blog, but no matter. You don't reach many ears from a soapbox, just the ones who care to listen.

So, welcome all. Glad you're here. I'd look pretty silly without you!

The anti-Pope memo: the REAL scandal

2010-04-25T00:47:00.000-07:00

It should come as no surprise that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been echoing to howls of laughter coming from the readers of a witty little memo about Pope Benedict's visit in September. A junior offical indulged in what they are calling 'blue-sky' thinking - update: now, it appears, with the help of a senior civil servant called Anjoum Noorani - about possible activities for the Roman Pontiff to undertake while in the UK. You can see a copy of the proposals here, but they include:

* launching a 'Benedict condom'
* blessing a civil partnership
* opening an abortion ward

Oh dear, how very funny, and yet, how very offensive for Catholic sensibilities. So the FCO had to do the British thing and apologize quick. In fact all the newspapers report this. Their angle on the story is not the presence of purblind and juvenile anti-Catholic bile among civil servants but rather that the FCO has already 'apologized' - apologized while most of us were still in bed, as if they expected the Vatican to get up and read the British newspapers before going to chapel (well, don't they? no? what a very odd religion). A slap on the wrist for the young official involved has been administered and he was sent to bed without any supper for a week, the naughty boy. If a civil servant had written a memo suggesting that a visiting Israeli president open a pork-pie factory or that President Obama be asked to chair the next BNP convention, I take it he would have been dealt with with equal leniency. We're all equal now, you know.

Now, while it is the "offended-sensibilities" reading of this memo which strikes one the hardest - in fact, this is the angle that all the journalists are taking this morning - the oddest thing about this memo are the other suggestions. I happen to know someone who went through a selection process for the FCO, and it is not easy to get in there. You have to speak at least one slightly exotic language for a start (my acquaintance spoke Czech). Moreover, it has been reported that the official responsible for this memo was an Oxbridge graduate, though to what end I can only speculate. Perhaps because he's one of the country's finest - for we accept as a cornerstone of our civilization that not only does Oxbridge give the country nothing but the finest, but that the finest are to be found nowhere else but Oxbridge - we must be more lenient with him, as the judge was with Sebastian Flyte: 'Young Marquis unused to drink', or rather, 'Young Oxbridge graduate unused to power'. Give him a ten bob fine, wag a monitory finger at him, and give him 'other duties'. Anyway, coming to my point, what struck me about the other suggestions was that only an ignoramus could call them the fruit of 'blue-sky' thinking. There was nothing azure, celestial or thoughtful about them at all. Have a look at the suggestions (my comments in brackets):

* give a speech on equality (the Pope often does)

* training course for all bishops on child abuse allegations (the English clergy have been doing this for years)

* Vatican sponsorship for network of AIDS clinics (the Church is one of, if not the greatest, provider of care for AIDS suffers)

* announce whistle blowing system for child abuse cases (that is what Cardinal Ratzinger did)

* debate on abortion (the Pope is a professional academic and likes few things more than debate)

* speech on democracy (he often speaks on democracy)

* Vatican and CofE funded committee on dialogue (this has been going on for decades)

********************

So, there you have it, staring out at you from the page. The real scandal about this memo, the thing the FCO ought really to be apologizing for is not that its officials have been caught in flagrante delicto of anti-Catholic prejudice - we expect as much - but that in this case their deep prejudice has led to the exposure of profound ignorance about what the Catholic Church does on a daily basis. The scandal is not the anti-Catholic prejudice (though that is bad enough); the scandal is what this incident could be symptomatic of in terms of diplomacy. What this young man really needs - a[art from a good spiritual advisor - is a serious lecture about the obligations of an FCO official to study and understand 'foreigners'. If he cannot love his enemy, the very least he can do is to learn to know his enemy, and not make the necessity of despising Catholicism - surely, one of the growing number of important reflexes in those who wish to get ahead in Britain - into a virtue.

If he must be nasty, must he have done it so stupidly? Really! Stupid boy.

The egregious CES and the Pope's conversion

2010-04-24T01:33:00.000-07:00

Sir Humphrey (reading from a newspaper): 'The egregious Jim Hacker ...'

Jim: 'Eh? What does egregious mean? Outstanding?.

Sir Humphrey: 'Yes, sort of outstanding.'

I returned home very late on Thursday evening to the kind of news that makes one think one has fallen down the Rabbit Hole and is staring at a Mad Hatter's tea party. The Catholic Education Service of England and Wales (the CES) whose episcopal chairman, Malcolm McMahon OP, was telling us recently that it was unproductive to fight a government with an overwhelming majority - while three of his episcopal brethren were defeating the provisions of the same government's Equality legislation in the High Court - has appointed Greg Pope as its deputy director.

Well, let us not be mean spirited. Congratulations to Mr Pope. One has to think that any job is a move upwards from the increasingly perverse institutions housed at the palace of Westminster. And yet there is a problem. The problem is that Greg Pope has apparently spent large amounts of his time in the legislature voting for laws which represent the very best in anti-Catholic, secular practice. John Smeaton has analysed Pope's record in Parliament in great detail here. And it includes voting for laws or supporting parliamentary motions facilitating some of the following:

* praise for a condom manufacturer for helping schools host “National Condom Week”
* the defeat of an amendment which would have required doctors to provide pregnant mothers with certain information and an offer of counselling before any abortion of an unborn child on grounds of disability
* “Contraceptive Awareness Week”
* the reduction of the homosexual age of consent to 16 (to equalise it with the heterosexual age of consent)
* the defeat of amendments which sought to retain the requirement for doctors to consider the child’s need for a father or male role model before a woman is given fertility treatment.

You can find the dreadful details here. It makes for fascinating reading.

************

So why might the CES have hired a man like Pope? Well, of course the CES has to lobby on behalf of the Catholic Church in this country with regard to Catholic education. Someone with Pope's experience and contacts would be handy to have, n'est-ce pas? He has been in Parliament for thirteen years after all. I'm glad the CES have recognised their need for such a skilled advocate, since their recent quasi-total aquiescence in the face of proposed government legislation for sex education was proof positive of their incompetence. They came close in fact to collaborating in the pillage of parents' rights by supporting the most weasley ammendment dreamt up by a human jelly fish. And then they attempted to spin this into a victory while the rest of us looked on weeping: we hear almost every other week about yet another Catholic school which prefers to use Channel 4's guide to bonking in its sex-ed classes anyway.

But then isn't that the problem? What the CES needed right now was not a deputy director who could facilitate this kind of suppine resignation to the suppposedly inevitable, but rather one who could pose a genuine, imaginative defence of the principles of Catholic education in the public square. What the CES needs right now is a deputy director so formed by Catholic principles and so adept at the machinery of parliament, that never again will the CES find itself climbing into bed with the most anti-Catholic and immoral legislature to disgrace our country.

Instead of which, we get Greg Pope who in 2007 voted AGAINST a bill would have required practitioners providing contraception or abortion services to a child under the age of 16 to inform his or her parent or guardian. Voted against, i.e., he thought that contraceptive and abortion services should be made available to under-16s without their parents' or guardians' knowledge. This isn't the Rabbit's Hole. It's the Brave New World.

**********************

Now, is it possible that Greg Pope has actually had a Road-to-Damascus conversion in the last few months? Is it possible? Entirely possible of course, but that would have had to have been since February 2009 when he signed this early-day motion in favour of Contraceptive Awareness Week. Should we await Pope's conversion story? Or is it that his voting record on Life issues has been so bad, so utterly, mind-bogglingly egregious that he feels duty bound to work for the Catholic cause to repair some of the damage? That is always possible. If we have any incisive Catholic journalists left, perhaps they can put the question to him. And if this is the case, no doubt he will be more than happy to advertise his regret for the work of destruction in which he has so amply participated.

Well, call me a cynic, but I have this nagging feeling that even as we remain open in our judgment to Pope's potential reform, we would probably be safe betting money that never a word will be said to justify this appointment. How just how can such a man, with such a PUBLIC record of opposition to the Church be recruited to represent the interests of Catholic parents in the public square? And since these are all matters of public record, how will the CES defend the appointment of an individual whose practical lobbying skills are of nugatory importance in comparison with his understanding of, and adherence to, the teachings of the Church on Life?

All together now:

I see a clinic full of cynics
Who want to twist the peoples' wrist
They're watching every move we make
We're all included on the list

A Belated Saint George Wish

2010-04-24T01:28:00.000-07:00

Hmm, sorry, a day late, but on the other hand, 364 days early.

St George he was for England,

And before he killed the dragon

He drank a pint of English ale

Out of an English flagon.

For though he fast right readily

In hair-shirt or in mail,

It isn't safe to give him cakes

Unless you give him ale.

St George he was for England,

And right gallantly set free

The lady left for dragon's meat

And tied up to a tree;

But since he stood for England

And knew what England means,

Unless you give him bacon

You mustn't give him beans.

St George he is for England,

And shall wear the shield he wore

When we go out in armour

With battle-cross before.

But though he is jolly company

And very pleased to dine,

It isn't safe to give him nuts

Unless you give him wine.

G. K Chesterton.

Tomatoes when they are red

2010-04-12T13:14:00.000-07:00

Maybe I don't shop in the right places. Maybe the local suppliers are just a sorry bunch. But it is months now since I saw a real, half-decent selection of tomatoes for sale. Tomatoes, you say. He hasn't blogged for almost two weeks and he comes back to speak about tomatoes? Well, silence, pale prosamaniac! I will come to my weighty point in a little while. In any case, these are the essential things.

I know, of course, tomatoes are only in season from March to November, so no wonder I have not seen any for a while. But even in season we only find a mere handful of varieties in the average supermarket or even market stall. People think they're being exotic if they get 'vine ripened' Whoopy do! Cherry and plum tomatoes are somehow regarded as the latest in outré exoticism.

But what about the coeurs de boeufs? Or black tomatoes? What about simple yellow cherries? No, we in Great Britain feel we have been daring if we deploy one of those red, watery, salad pingpong balls, mixed in with the iceberg lettuce and cucumber rings. It makes me want to weep. It really does.

But herein is a grand metaphor of our current times, is there not? We have rationalized our national life, as we have rationalized our tomatoes; we have standardized our mediocrity, as we have standardized our salad ingredients; we have narrowed down our variety in a grand show of conformity that is both cultural and culinary. If only we had remained hobbits with a love of growing things.

Of course there is a drift back in the opposite direction - a direction not abandoned by some - but only a little. We take our varieties now in shop-made boxes; we reclaim our individualism in ready-made packages. Anything else would be too expensive. Have we have been priced out of originality? Out of authenticity?

Well, I suppose we have up to a point. Still, there is nothing to stop us doing our own thing in our own back gardens, at least for the time being, even if these things are always more easily advocated from the comfort of the sofa (or our blog) than in real life. Armchair quarter backs; armchair culture. How did we come to this?

That's a long way from tomatoes, but I think I'm onto something.

It's not for me to comment on government policy

2010-04-06T16:09:00.000-07:00

I cannot resist one last little passage from Sir Humphrey.

Good night.

Roll on 6th May

2010-04-06T15:53:00.001-07:00

And so it begins. I honestly cannot find a single reason to take an interest in the shennanigans which will pass for an electoral campaign in the weeks ahead. After all, they only want our vote, right? That and our taxes when they are elected.

I think that is why I much prefer in this season to begin watching my DVDs of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. Cynical and caricatural in many ways, and yet, true. And yet, ahead of their time in representing the self-interest and the manipulation at the heart of our spectacular political culture - I mean spectacular in its original sense of something to be spectated, watched.

They all think the same things. They all represent the same self-interested groups. There is barely a cigarette paper between them, not only because they have banned smoking in public spaces, but also because there is no other way in which vote fishing can be successful.

Who will be the least damaging? That is the question which is potentially tempting at this juncture. Still, I fear I will once again be spoiling my ballot paper. I see no other option. The trouble is that our politicians are such creatures of the system that spoilt ballots appear as no more than the work of cranks.

To be frank, however, I would be glad to be thought a crank by our current political class.

If only they were at least as charming as Sir Humphrey Appleby.

Another worthy petition

2010-04-01T05:11:00.001-07:00

If you are a UK citizen, whether resident or overseas, please consider signing this petition in favour of allowing Catholic Adoption Agencies to operate without prejudice under Equality legislation in the UK.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/AdoptionChoice/

Myths and science

2010-03-29T04:35:00.000-07:00

Philip Pullman has written his own take on the gospels in a new work entitled. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In it he reworks the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus Christ who becomes twins: Jesus, the charismatic talker, and Christ, the dark brother who infiltrates his own teaching into Jesus's teaching. Why such a story? Well, Pullman told The Times last year:

“For every man or woman who has been led to goodness by a church, and I know there have been many, there has been another who has been inspired by the same church to a rancid and fanatical bigotry for which the only fitting word is evil.”

In other words Jesus must have had some monstrous double, which explains why some Christians are nice and some nasty. The story makes sense of the confused picture. To Pullman at least.

There are several things which are really fascinating about this, but perhaps the central one is that Pullman is doing exactly what he accuses religion of doing: generating a myth to explain something that he does not understand. Something else myths do is to explain away hostility. Which is of course exactly what this Pullmanian myth does too. After all, he doesn't want to be angry with Jesus the Good Man; but Christ the Scoundrel can take a good hiding. It's okay to hate Christianity when it is separated from Jesusism (of whatever Jesus's religion without Christ could be callled).

This function of a myth also allows you not only to veil violence, it also has the benefit of making you appear virtuous. Those who drive out the scapegoat have an aura of benevolent power. It doesn't matter that Pullman's animus feeds on some mythical division of Christians into fifty-fifty bigots and saints. I've met a lot of mediocre Christians; they're the biggest proportion. What is all this fifty-fifty stuff doing? Well, mythically justifying Pullman's hostility, I suppose ...

I just read Pullman's response to Stephen Hawkings's 2006 Oxford lecture on the origins of the universe. Therein, he reduces all creation thinking to the same level as the myths of the Boshongo story whose god, Bumba, is said to have vomited the sun, moon, stars, world and humans from his own belly. What is interesting here is that Pullman gives himself away not as an enlightened man but as a scientific fundamentalist. Having assigned to all talk of creation the rank of metaphor or allegory, he says this odd thing:

The delight for me in the account Professor Hawking gave us tonight, and has given us in his marvellous book A Brief History of Time, is that we can both listen to it with wonder and take it literally.

Take it literally? Well, yes and no. This is the problem. Pullman looks benignly on englightened thought but places on it a heavier burden than it can bear. Scientific theories are not literal truths; they are working models or best-fit descriptions. Oddly enough, to confuse them with literal truth is arguably to fall into the same trap as thinking that the physical account of the universe found in the Bible must be true in the same way that Revelation about God is true. Pullman isn't free of fundamentalism; he has simply swapped one fundamentalism for another because it has better material credentials.

Pullman has said that if people don't like his new book, then they don't have to read it, or they can write their own book about it. Somewhere I hope there is a Christian with a sense of humour who writes a book entitled Isaac the Good Man and Newton the Scoundrel. Isaac will be known for his brilliant scientific mind and wise understanding of science's limits; he will always be aware of science's contingency, and will allow other disciplines to explain things in their own order. Newton, his evil twin, on the other hand will represent everything that is hubristic about scientism; he will lampoon any doubts about science as fundamentalism and will embrace the latest theories, even those that lead unwittingly towards genocide and mass destruction.

But then again, maybe not. Myth making is the stuff of human culture when it is sub-Christian. It took the cross to unveil the self-veiling violence of the human being; Pullman ought only to be met with that truth, and with a fully committed Christian rationality.

Thoughts on abuse

2010-03-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

I wrote this last year but in view of this week's news, and of the new allegations regarding the pope (the full history of which is yet to unfold), it seems right to publish it again.

Child abuse is one of those traumas so extraordinarily singular that it leaves one grasping not only for words but to find any entitlement to talk about it. Thank God, I never suffered it, though I know those who have. Sometimes they suffer the consequences all their lives, and in a handful of cases, they bring their lives to an end because of it. Compassion itself seems inadequate here, not by lack of empathy but because it is impossible to know the suffering - to passus cum - caused by such transgression of a human being, whose very world is wrecked often by those who have defined it for them. This is as near as anyone can get, if it were possible, to casting another freewill into mortal sin. No wonder Christ said it would be better that a millstone be tied around the necks of those who scandalize the little ones of God. Of course it is also true that abusers sometimes begin as the abused, in a colossal chain of unstinting misery known to God alone. How our own sufferings seem small in the lights of these scandals.

What leaves me, however, in a similar state of incomprehension are the strategies of those who have been, with the best of intentions, covering up child abuse by priests in the Dublin diocese for several decades. Complaints only started coming to light of course in the 1980s and 1990s, but whether we look at more recent incidents or those that were happening as long ago as the 1930s (cf the Ryan Report on child abuse published in May) - and Lord knows how long before that - it is not modernism which has brought this about (though it might have compounded it) but clericalism. By clericalism, I mean not only what the Irish State is now acccused of, in having deferred to the Catholic Church in Ireland in this matter. By clericalism, I mean also the type of churchmanship that serves lower moral considerations at the cost of higher ones. I mean especially the kind of churchmanship that can conceal the sins of the clergy but not, at the same time, punish them with severity. Of course, there is the issue of the private forum. We do not know what penances have been imposed under the seal of confession.

But how can that be enough? Did these people never realise that eventually cesspits have to be cleaned out? That you cannot keep shoving transgressions against immortal souls into the limited space of a nation's mortal psyche? Some spiritual plumber was needed, some moral sanitary engineer, who could have predicted the lamentable outcome. For eventually some blockage always forces the shit back up the pipe, and here we are today, knee deep in decades of foul-smelling, mind-numbing fecal matter, studded with the souls of children loved by God and wrecked by men.

Neither do I buy the line that we didn't really know what pederasty was truly like four or five decades ago. Scandal of the young is specifically and graphically described by Christ as a sin deserving of the worst punishment. What edition of the Bibile were they reading not to have understood that?

Perhaps one of these complacent clerics muttered the kinds of bourgeois reassurances which made Léon Bloy fulminate against the bourgeoisie so much: least said, soonest mended; let's draw a veil over that; it will all be forgotten in a little while. Or perhaps they said something like, 'Well, they were only Christ's words' ...

Like the priest who was preaching on the day John Berryman, the alcoholic American poet and life-long depressive, turned up at church, trembling with the DTs, anxious to put his life right after decades of chaos; he'd been going for a little while apparently. That day though, the priest was preaching about the constraints of celibacy. Citing the words of Christ that there are some who make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of God he railed against the faithful who put the clergy on such a pedestal. 'They were only Christ's words,' he said. Berryman, rising to his feet, clutching a rosary, sweating, and shaking in anger, shouted out, 'Only Christ words?' And stomped out the door ... later to throw himself off Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis.

Berryman's life was marked early on by the suicide of his father. I wonder if parental suicide doesn't have a similar effect to child abuse. For what is parental suicide, or indeed child abuse, if not the wrecking of a child's certainties about the goodness of the world? What is parental suicide or child abuse if not the destroying of what is, for the child, the most powerful symbol of God's providence, if not an initiation into an absurd world? Confession makes priests and bishops more insightful about human motives and tendencies than anyone can imagine. The Catholic Church invented psychology long before Freud or anyone else. But how did these Irish churchmen (not to mention those elsewhere) get child abuse so badly wrong? How did they fail so categorically when the stakes were so much higher than the reputation of the clergy? When the stakes were immortal souls made in the image and likeness of God? God save us all from the unintended consequences of our own complacency.

You cannot serve God until you've lost your reputation, said Saint Teresa of Avila. That is a lesson the Irish Church - and the rest of us by association - have to learn.

But the one thing that makes spring complete for me

2010-03-19T04:04:00.000-07:00

Alright, I know I'm a little bit ahead of the game but there is no doubt spring is here. Have you seen the weather this week? I ask almost in order to get some information out of you (all three of you). I have spent most of this week either in a chair or in bed suffering the effects of a late winter bug that took up residence last Thursday and seemed to be on some kind of busman's holiday until last night. Finally, finally, expectoration has begun ... okay too much info there. Moving right along.

But listen, I'm not the only blogger to be talking about spring. The puppy-kicking author of Orwell's Picnic has a delightful little piece anticipating spring which she published on Wednesday. If you live in the UK, you look at those pictures - the garden, the fruit, the flowers, the fishmarket (yes!) - and wonder again why on earth you are still living in this nasty little pimple of a country, encrusted with more nanny legislation than ever before, losing its Gulf Stream, practically bankrupt, and ruled by the mad, the bad, and the excessively well-funded.

But then - [Innocent tries to make the most of being penniless and prospect free] - what if being receptive to spring is the only way of revolting against this revolting mess? Look, I'm not out to chant 'every-day-in-every-way, etc'. I'm continuing my thought from Monday really. Sadness is of the devil. Joy is of God. Or at least we are most ourselves when we are joyful. The trick of course is to be joyful under current conditions; which I suppose means being joyful as a way of being subversive, as a way of revolting. Or perhaps there is also a place here for the nostalgic lament which comforts and consoles as it exorcises. How did we ever think we could call ourselves Christian and not expect to get our portion of trouble? But we did, didn't we?

I know. Believe me, I know. But then, who was it reminded us that in the Gospel the only recorded instance of Christ actually singing is after the Last Supper and before his agony on the garden? I don't know where I'm going with this thought, other than to welcome spring, to celebrate St Joseph (with whom I have a fraught and difficult relationship), and to try to get my own vision clear.

I tell you nought for your comfort,

Yea, nought for your desire.

Except of course I wish you a happy spring and a joyous ending to Lent.

Right, nausia over Back to the grind, you three!

Catholic Care and Catholic Courage

2010-03-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

In a recent post I highlighted a section of the pre-election guide published by the CBCEW Choosing the Common Good. The words of this section read something like this:

The virtue of courage ensures firmness, and the readiness to stand by what we believe in times of difficulty. It is the opposite of opportunism and of evasiveness (p. 12).

The opposite of opportunism and evasiveness. I like that formulation very much. 'Opportunism', the vice of short-termism and 'evasiveness' the vice of moderation.

So we can only applaud the news today that the High Court has approved the appeal made by Catholic Care, the Catholic adoption agency connected to the dioceses of Leeds, Middlesborough and Hexham and Newcastle. The Charity Commission has been ordered to reconsider Catholic Care's request to be made exempt from the 2006 anti-discrimination legislation which in the concrete meant Catholic agencies could no longer refuse to place children with homosexuals.

So what can we draw from this incident? Well, let's not be hasty. The Charity Commission has yet to reconsider the case of Catholic Care. But, it seems that insofar as these dioceses have shown 'firmness and the readiness to stand by what [they] believe in times of difficulty', they have not only been true to the principles of Choosing the Common Good; they have also shown that the nannying, secularist, anti-discrimination legislation passed by the current pond-dwellers in Parliament was not some inexorable and supreme edict which had to be be swallowed whole, but was rather emminently, pre-emminently contestable. Hang on folks, I feel a Shakespeare moment coming on. Yes, here we go:

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day (Henry V).

So bravo, Catholic Care, for reaching parts other Catholic adoption agencies have failed to reach ... as far as I am aware. Well, okay, many were under the control of trustees anyway, and of these a couple signed away their Catholic identity in order to preserve their work with children. Salford's Rescue Society - founded by the venerable and intrepid Cardinal Vaughan when he was bishop of that see - was dissolved. I'm not sure if any other dioceses have actually gone to court. Could these people have fought alongside Catholic Care? Could they have? I simply ask the question.

I note that elsewhere Catholic adoption agencies have even closed their doors, rather than comply with the imposition of legislation requiring them to place children with gays. Boston archdiocese took that option in 2006. Only last month the Archdiocese of Washington DC went the same way. Hang on, another Shakespeare moment dawns ...

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named.

Such actions are not always possible. Such actions are sometimes compromised by calculations the details of which we are hardly privy to. But doesn't Catholic Care prove something really important in the context of the UK?

Shouldn't there be now an examination of conscience here among those who have the responsibility for such matters, among those who apparently feel that there is nothing to be gained by conflict with the government? I read these lines of Bishop McMahon to another Catholic blogger concerning the position of the CES regarding the Children, Schools and Families Bill:

There is no question of the CES colluding with the Government.. I also believe that confrontation with the Government over this Bill would not achieve anything.

Maybe it wouldn't. Maybe it wouldn't achieve anything practical. I dare say confronting institutions more powerful than you rarely achieves anything tangible. But wouldn't it just be a sign, if nothing else, a sign in this case that this government is robbing parents of their rights, children of their innocence, and imposing relativism by diktat? And isn't it true that God asks us not to be victorious but only to be worthy of victory?

BUT, what if, WHAT IF confrontation did actually achieve something, my Lord? What if - as in Catholic Care's victory in the High Court - confronting the government made the agents of power crumble?

In sickness and in mirth

2010-03-15T00:35:00.000-07:00

A slow week last week on the blog, due in part to living a fast life, no doubt. The result: I'm struck down with a man cold. Death could be only hours away. I'm not sure I'm ready to go quite yet. Aching limbs, sore head and blocked air passages, not to mention a general lack of wellbeing. And the plastering man is coming soon so I cannot stay in bed. I think I want to trade this week in for next.

We had a pretty imposing mid-Lent sermon yesterday for Laetare Sunday. 'How is the Army?' the padre asked ... And, like an army, I think we all shuffled our feet and mentally answered the same thing: we're dodging and ducking as best we can! Time to examine our Lenten irresolutions, me thinks. I don't suppose it would have done any good to plead the Fifth, especially since we're in the UK and (pace, dear American readers) the Fifth has no standing whatsoever in canonical or divine law. It actually looks like we might be forced to take the rest of Lent with a degree of seriousness. And we, but a band of Shakespearean Dogberries.

I tell you nought for your comfort,
Yea, nought for your desire.

It couldn't be worse actually, given that today is the Ides of March to boot. And we learn this morning that David Beckham has ruptured his achilles tendon and is off the catwalk for four months. Whose idea WAS the 15th March?

***************

Well, this won't do. I'm not going to inflict any enforced mirth on the proceedings. But as GKC says, it is easy to be serious; the really difficult thing, the thing that is worthwhile attempting, is to be frivolous. I wonder if this thought for GKC began with the philosophy of Mark Tapley, who befriends young Mr Martin Chuzzlewit when the latter is down on his uppers. Mark could have been happy in the idyll of the Green Dragon whose widowed landlady, Mrs Lupin, he wanted to marry. But instead, he decided to test his resolution to be jolly by setting out on his adventures. Jollines isn't jolliness, he argued, except when it is sustained under circumstances of great difficulty. Which he naturally achieves.

Well, the philosophy of jolliness is one thing; the practice of jolliness quite another. But I suppose if one is looking for jolliness in sanctity, you need look no further than St Philip Neri or St John Bosco. Where are their like today? I wonder if the logic holds here: it is easy to be a serious saint, but for a real trier, give me a jolly one instead. Who was it said, 'Lord save us from solemn saints?' St Teresa of Avila? Could it be that seriousness is a diguised form of self reliance? Or am I just finding a stick to beat my conscience prickers? The human heart! It should be called the myth generator.

Well, let's not take that too seriously. In fact let's not take it seriously at all. Another Chesterton thought: human life is unexpected just at the point where we think we've worked out the logic. So, if an alien visited earth, he might speculate: a man has two legs, two arms and two eyes, therefore, he will also have two noses and two mouths. Except that he doesn't.

Thus religion. Religion involves solemn mysteries, solemn liturgies and solemn responsibilities: therefore it should involve solemn moods ...? Arguably not. As I say, Neri and Bosco thought not. Avila didn't agree. And neither do I (though that's of no consequence to anyone but me).

One last step in this argument: why the mirth? All kinds of reasons, but how about this: because mirth is one of the conditions of self forgetfulness. GKC one more time:

There remains always this great boast, perhaps the greatest boast that is possible to human nature. I mean the great boast that the most unhappy part of our population is also the most hilarious part. The poor can forget that social problem which we (the moderately rich) ought never to forget. Blessed are the poor; for they alone have not the poor always with them. The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

And there you have it. Grace means self forgetting, and so, arguably, does religion. I'm reminded of the words of an old Abbot to a young monk who had just taken his vows:

Now, Joe, there are two things you need to remember. First, you have just taken vows in monastic life and you must take it very, very seriously. Second, don't take it too seriously.

That would make a Puritan scream hypocrisy, and might make a few serious Catholics wince. But it has the sense of the saints.

Choosing the Common Good

2010-03-12T07:13:00.000-08:00

I have been skimming the latest pamphlet by the Bishops of England and Wales Choosing the Common Good which came out last week, I think. I haven't had time to read and digest everything yet but I was heartened to read one section about virtue, p. 11ff. It has long been a trope of mine that a society which thinks it can organize itself on the basis of legislation is already a corrupt body. Order must come not only from outside but also from inside. Multiplicatio legorum corrutio republicae, as some Latin geezer once put it. The multiplication of laws is the corruption of the Republic, or at least a sign of it, a sign that only enforced conformity can guarantee order. When I last looked that was also part of the definition of slavery.

So, bravo the bishops. I was particularly struck by this part:

The virtue of courage ensures firmness, and the readiness to stand by what we believe in times of difficulty. It is the opposite of opportunism and of evasiveness. It is the practice
of fortitude in the face of difficulty and produces heroism in every field. (p. 12).

Funny they should say that. Now, my Lords, about the SRE bill ...

Complete nutters

2010-03-09T02:32:00.000-08:00

Do stop by this report in the Torygraph about squirrels who feed off coconuts and end up wearing the things on their heads.

Edible hats ... now there's a thought, Edison.

Fresh starts

2010-03-08T00:48:00.001-08:00

I have been so busy this weekend, I hardly even know what the news is. World War III could have broken out (can we please, please, please fight against the French this time?) and I just wouldn't know.

But if I didn't blog, it was only because I've been walking about a million miles in my head for various reasons. Not a million miles ON my head, you understand. I think even I, gymnast that I am (ahem *blink*), would struggle with that. And not with my feet either. Am I being cryptic? I hope you're annoyed.

One thing that did emerge from my long-distance travels was the urgency of getting back to playing my guitar. I have hardly touched the beast over the last few years, mostly through boredom. There was a time, however, when I played around four hours a day. Well, I'm not going back there, but I do feel the need for a little creativity. Rubbing numb limbs is the ight way to bring back a bit of circulation, and it is amazing what inactivity can bring upon a soul.

Don't worry, I won't be breaking the instrument out in church, unless it is to charge at some charismatic and burst his balloons with my plectrum. But in the privacy of my own house of course.

There is only one thing more beautiful than the sound of one guitar, and that is the sound of two - so said Chopin. And he knew a thing or too about music, even if he was overly fond of the waltz.

Onwards and upwards, dear readers. Laetare Sunday is in sight. And if you strain your eyes a little, Passiontide is just on the horizon.

Abortion in Poland

2010-03-03T02:47:00.000-08:00

A Polish anti-abortion group has caused a rumpus in Poland by its advertising campaign which points out that Nazi Germany introduced abortion into Poland on 9 March 1943. You can see the story and the poster here.

What amazed me about the story was the journalistic gloss on this event. Here is the relevant passage:

But the use of Hitler, along with the torn foetus pictures, has already incurred the wrath of critics. Nazi Germany inflicted horrific levels of death and destruction on Poland, so any perceived attempt to hijack that suffering for the sake of a political or ethical agenda can be viewed with distaste.

I'm interested to know what ethical agenda the Polish anti-abortionists have which cannot be associated with the original Nazi abortion law. All abortion involves the suppression of the personhood of the conceived child in utero, a personhood which is emotionally and unconsciously affirmed by those who WANT their conceived child, and often by those who do not. Now, what was the original abortion law if not an attack on the personhood of the Poles? At least that law was based on spuriously objective grounds. The pro-abortion lobby want abortion dependent on the free choice of the woman - a condition which conceals its aggressive potency under the veil of liberty.

This poster doesn't hijack wartime suffering; it merely underlines the point that any political caste can be guilty of suppressing personhood just by shifting the goalposts. Well done, Fundacja Pro, for unveiling the myth that bourgeois accommodation with the destruction of human life is so morally superior to Nazi destruction of human life.

Food and love

2010-03-02T14:09:00.001-08:00

Crikey, it's Tuesday night already, and I barely noticed the start of the week. Ever have days like that? You turn around and you've lost about half a week.

And what a week, I cannot be the only one struggling with Lent. 'Lent' is presumably something 'on loan' from the devil, which is why he spends his time trying to drag it from our fingers. I'm not saying what my faults are; that would just be exhibitionism, but I cannot be the only one to realise just how disfunctional a human being I am when the chips are down (or not on the plate, as the case may be). Hey ho. On we struggle eh? Only another five weeks or exposure to our real selves. Then we will pull the warm blanket of myth up over our heads again and go back to a condition of self congratulation. Oops, did I say that out loud? The older I get, the more that seems to be happening.

Fortunately, food is also about love, isn't it? Or at least that is what I feel about the stuff. What an odd thing that our relationship to food is now dictated by forces other than the human, whereas if we still thought of it in terms of love, there are lots of things we would avoid. There's more chance of becoming a glutton in front of a TV dinner than at a feast where you have plenty of other distractions. And if you pour love into your cooking, nourishment becomes nurture, in one of those subtle transformations which show the proximity of spirit and flesh.

If you think I'm babbling tonight, you'd be right. It was the busiest day of the week so far, and I had a pile of correspondence to field this evening. Fortunately, I ate well, albeit alone. But I tried to do it with love. Love and appetite are as different as chewing slowly and gulping like a gannet. How odd we have to wait for Lent to come around to be reminded of the fact.

Petition on SRE

2010-02-28T10:44:00.000-08:00

The indefatigable Mrs Amanda Lewin has organized an online petition to the bishops in the following terms:

To: Bishops of England and Wales

We, the undersigned, call upon the Bishops of England and Wales and the Catholic Education Service to fulfil their duty as guardians of our Catholic Faith and unequivocally reject recent Government measures forcing Catholic schools to teach what is explicitly condemned by the Church, viz: presenting active homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle, and providing information on the nature - and provision - of contraception and abortion services. Compliance on the part of the Bishops and the CES in such measures would effectively render our schools no longer Catholic in any meaningful sense, and would place the faith and moral life of our children in jeopardy. As Catholic parents, teachers and pastors, we earnestly beg of you, our Shepherds in Christ, that you do not allow this to happen.

You can sign the petition here.

Heart sinks

2010-02-28T02:10:00.000-08:00

As I dash out to Mass, I note Christina Odone is on the TV, voicing a believer's view of the sex and relationship education ...

[shakes head and raises eyes to heaven].

Qui tacit consentire

2010-02-28T01:44:00.000-08:00

Several people have quoted the famous qui tacit consentire principle in the last few days. Who is silent gives consent. I never understood the grammar of that until it was explained to me that the expression should actually be qui tacit consentire videtur: who is silent is seen to give consent. It is of course an important nuance. One might be silent for all kinds of reasons. Being present and being silent are not together the only conditions of an illicit silence.

But it has been illustrative these last few days to see a mist of quiet descend upon us. Hardly a murmur from the quarters one would hope and expect to hear from. Are they saving their powder? Are they in fact in perfect agreement with what has occurred? Are there other factors which are simply not in the public eye? Have they calculated the capacity of their troops for resistance and realised that a counter-offensive is useless?

In a media age I'm sure we make all kinds of assumptions about the possibilties of action. We feel we are informed and can speak our minds. We are confident our education makes us fit for intervention. And we find our suspicions confirmed by every action which does not meet the standards we establish.

And yet, those we expected to speak have only led us to this point. We have been told about the age of the laity for so long. We have been invited to speak in so many other ways. And such dynamics impose necessities of their own on any community in which debate is welcomed. If leadership wishes support, it must be convincing leadership. If unity is required, we must be given a better reason than mere loyalty, especially in areas in which the laity are not only competent but prime shareholders.

But this week? Answer came there none. At least not yet. And two possibilities lie before us: either we can expect things to kick off this week when the bishops publish their pre-election statement - in which case the present lull and the previous spat will soon be forgotten. Or, we will find we were not in a lull of conflict, but in a fog of fear which imposes either a strategy of tippy-toe self-effacement, or one of inaction and confusion.

In the latter case, of course, we might feel all the more strongly that such silence is an act of complicity.

Tis folly to be wise

2010-02-27T01:19:00.000-08:00

I cannot be the only person to scratch my head in wonder at this week's catastrophic concatenation of events. On Tuesday the Commons voted in favour of a bill which will enforce sex and relationship education in schools, impose mandatory initiation in the use of contraception, and make it obligatory to provide children with information about abortion services. The message is: 'They're doing it anyway, so let's make sure they have all the panoply of bourgeois safety nets which will allow them to treat themselves and their sexual partners like everything else in the bourgeois world: a commodity hedged about with health and safety measures.' Oh, of course, it's not just sex education; it is relationship education too. But all that means is they should ensure the commodification of their partners is reciprocal. And then it doesn't matter if their partner is a man, a woman, or - give it a couple of decades - an animal of some kind.

A couple of days later a Home Office report authored by Linda Papadopoulos has criticized the sexualisation of children, especially through the media, fashion, advertizing, and the whole gamut of our information age. I don't happen to think Papadopoulos's review is quite as benign or useful as it at first appears. It wants to put up barriers to these forces which have been unleashed, but only in accord with the best consensualist mentality. Her recommendations include:

*more gender quality
*compulsory sex and relationship education
*the teaching of media literacy (how not to be conned by the media)
*more youth workers
*positive role models for children (ugly people can be admired as well)
*support for abused children
*tackling teenage-relationship abuse
*media campaigns to promote diverse and aspiration models for the young
*a working group of high-profile women in the media to tackle degrading image of women
*labels indicating where images have been airbrushed
*information on self-esteem and body image
*no sexy music videos before the watershed
*filters on computers, games, etc.
*voluntary codes for clothes retailers and mandatory codes separating lads mags from children's material
*no adult entertainment jobs in the Job Centre
*money for various kinds of research, notably research into the impact of sexualisation on black and minority ethnic groups, gay and lesbian groups and disabled populations

Some of these are of course to be welcomed, but look at the philosophy that underpins them. Consent isn't enough of course in this form of morality. It has to be an egocentric consent which is still aware of body image, gender stereotyping, etc. In other words, she can see there is a problem. She just wants to apply the wrong remedy.

***********************

And it is the wrong remedy, as we know, as is the imposition of sex and relationship education which, bewilderingly, is seen as part of the solution! Human cultures develop taboos for a reason, though we have been taught in our post-Freudian world to see taboo as an inescapably bad thing. Now, I'm not saying they are entirely benign. In certain circumstances they can be harmful. But one thing taboos are is humble. They are a self-effacing. They are a concrete confession that the control of human desire needs something more effective than a course in good body image and labels to tell me that an image has been altered. Remove those taboos and you unleash the forces of desire which together create the atmosphere of predatory commodification which now shapes so many of our economic and social relations. It is no accident that sexual liberation has altered our moral climate and steered our civilization into this tornado of self-consumming filth. Papadolpoulos's report only participates in the grand lie that all we need to do is make sure people have the right information and then they will make the right decisions. That isn't wildly optimistic; it is demonstrable folly.

In the natural order St Thomas says order comes from two places: on the outside law, and on the inside virtue. And that's it. If he had been born in the era of cultural studies, I'm sure he would have seen taboos as some sort of mid-way point between the two, emotional or cultural reservations about things reason knows to be wrong, even if the inconsistent thing that is human nature desires them. Still, you cannot replace what is on the inside by the ersatz virtues of good body image, self respect and mutual consent, no more than you can keep ordeer through dessicated taboos now unconnected to their moral roots. Or maybe an individual can keep himself out of immediate trouble on that basis, but a society, composed of myriad lines of agency, cannot.

News from Brighton

2010-02-27T00:45:00.001-08:00

No, this isn't about the Conservatives who are gathering in Brighton this very morning for their spring conference. Rather, I was myself in Brighton yesterday, possibly for the first time, possibly not. I am certainly no regular visitor. I had planned to go for business, and wanted to call in on famous priest blogger Fr Ray Blake of St Mary Magdalen, but when my function was cancelled I decided to go anyway.

And very glad I was to have done so. Father Ray received me with great friendliness and courtesy, and we had a leisurely stroll around the town. I even got to see the sea, a rare treat for an inland dweller like me. One of the grand consolations of the internet is that it is creating networks which one could never have expected to become part of. He has since linked to my piece earlier in the week on Centripetalism, arbitration and prophecy, which was most kind of him.

Father Ray is very modest about his church, though it is in fact more attractive than most Catholic churches one sees these days. A recent renovation of the sanctuary has restored most of the proportions of the original. The polished wooden floor adds a warm touch, and in spite of the gray paint which Father Ray appears to hate and is in the process of removing, I thought the whole thing was a wonderful locus of recollection in a city too notorious for its own good. As I say, the Conservatives arrive today...

So all hail Arundel, Brighton and Fr Ray. The only blight on the day was in catching the wrong train home and ending up in Clapham!

He probably thinks this blog is about him

2010-02-26T00:37:00.000-08:00

Well, after a frantic week - my first trying to blog almost every day - I think we need a little change of pace here on The Sunday Morning Soapbox. One story I note with interest this morning is that Carly Simon has, after thirty-eight years, revealed the name of the lover whose vanity is mocked in her classic track You're So Vain (seen here in a wonderful, live, beach-side performance).

Putting personal matters aside - when do we not have to with artistes? - Simon is not only a clever musician, she's a poet of quality. The very chorus - You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you - is chock-full of irony. And the chic poignancy and resignation of these lines -

You gave away the things you love
And one of them was me
I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee

- have always done it for me.

The name of the person she wrote the song about has always remained secret, but in a new acoustic recording of the song, Simon is heard to whisper, 'David' during a musical interlude. She has since admitted that David was indeed the name of her beau. I assume he did know the song was about him, but will we ever know? It probably doesn't matter.

The one annoying thing about this revelation is that I will now lose my bet on his name being 'Ashley' or 'Cashley'. Hey ho.

Centripetalism, arbitration and prophecy

2010-02-25T06:51:00.000-08:00

In his very interesting article on the secular city, William T. Cavanaugh writes that the secular state began to assume one of two forms from the early-modern period. One model is the centralising State, sometimes called 'Jacobin'. In this dispensation individual freedoms have been handed to the State in a 'social contract' and the State doles them out again according to the common good. France of course approximates to this model, and the typical question Frenchmen are likely to ask is, 'Is it allowed?' Action depends always on this State concession. Assume you have no right unless it has been conferred on you. The French capacity for insurgency is but the inverted corollary of their obeissance to the State. I generalize of course, but there you have it. It is the kind of thinking which underpins the Napoleonic conquests of Europe in the early nineteeth century. It was the same mentality that kicked thousands of priests and religious out of France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The State came bringing freedom, and if the people didn't want it, they could have it shoved down their throats for them.

The second model Cavanaugh identifies is that of the arbitrating State. In these conditions, the State does not act as the creator of unity, nor as the donor of liberties. Rather it is the arbitrator that acts to prevent the clash of liberties which individuals already possess. That arbitration, moreover, is not the first court of appeal but the last. Meanwhile, individuals or groups have to try to get on with each other. There is space here for communities to be auto-directional. Their own native powers and roles are not constantly being sucked up into the State's apparatus. We have, until the twentieth century, tended to associate this model with the British State. The Brit is more likely to ask not whether something is allowed, but to consider that unless it is specifically banned, then he is free to do it. We can of course question the principles of such an arrangement, but it no doubt provides the best circumstances for the Church in a minority situation. The Church's own arrangement with the State over Catholic schools' voluntary-aided status corresponds to this thinking. Moreover, as Chesterton says somewhere, there are some things a man must do for himself, and these include blowing his own nose and contributing to the governance of his own community. They also, I may add, include being his children's principal educator.

Now, there is no doubt that as we drag ourselves on through the twenty-first century, our politics - henceforth heavily shaped by European political cultures and by an ever more entrenched political class who know no other profession - is increasingly centripetal rather than arbitrating. The European model is increasingly imprinting itself on our legislature. That is not even to reckon with the native forces which have desired, celebrated and embraced the transformation of our public representatives into our cultural nannies.

And, so, one has to believe that any resistance to the appalling Children, Schools and Families Bill can place itself not only on the grounds of Christian rationality, not only on the grounds of parental rights; but also on the grounds of the importance of the diffusion of power. For what does democracy mean, what can it mean, if power is not effectively diffused? And what is the removal of parents' rights to have their children educated according to their own beliefs except a State-sponsored grab for those rights? The tragedy of course is that the services which the State has assumed in a providentialist manner - health, education, etc. - have provided the context in which a centripetal political culture can grow. If you eat from the hand that extends towards you, you can hardly be surprised when it snatches your collar and leads you where you would not go. And a choke chain - the equivalent of the fudged ammendment - is no less a dog lead than any other.

There is only one question the bishops need ask themselves about this bill. Would they back it, and any fudged ammendment, if it was a bill enforcing racism, Jewish segregation, forced repatriation of immigrants, or anything which remains instantly identifiable as a moral evil in our quasi-conscienceless society?

We could of course put it another way. Will they stand up as defenders of the truth and fulfil the prophetic function they were ordained for?

And another thing

2010-02-25T03:03:00.001-08:00

And in any case, this rotten plank of an ammendment does nothing to restore, protect or revalorize the rights of parents which this bill violates with all the self-justification of a Jacobin State.

So who is going to speak up for the parents? After all, it isn't the bad parents who withdraw their children from SRE; it is the good parents who don't want their children to be reprogrammed by the secular State.

For crying out loud! What is up with these people?

Resignation

2010-02-25T02:51:00.000-08:00

In light of the Children, Schools and Families Bill, my old pal Ttony at The Muniment Room has resigned all his diocesan posts. He writes:

The act, not the gift.

I have resigned from every post I hold by virtue of my being a Catholic: diocesan this, parish that, school the other. I offered to remain in post to help break the law, assuming the Bill being debated today becomes law, but my generous offer has been politely declined.

Is this what Henry's time felt like?

This is a lamentable state of affairs. I agree with Ttony that the only possible response to this bill, if indeed it becomes law - and there is still a theoretical possiblity of it being blocked in the Lords - is to disobey it with regard to its relativisitic principles. The government cannot impose moral relativism on Catholic schools on any moral question, let alone on the issues of abortion, contraception or homosexuality. The ammendment allowing faith schools to teach about these things 'in the context of Catholic teaching' is a total fudge. The only two contexts Catholic teaching provides for these things is

a) compassion for the sinner

b) unequivocal condemnation of the sin

Hands up if you think the ammendment really envisages that possiblity.

I cannot believe the CES or anybody thinks they have to accept this fascistic interference during the death rattle of New Labour.

Balls and the bishops: updated

2010-02-24T15:05:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the passing of the Children, Schools and Families Bill, a number of curious reactions have been seen. The secularists at large were genuinely scared by the possiblity of an ammendment which would mitigate the equality and diversity principle of the bill. I still suspect their anxiety was manipulated as a strawman of opposition, but their reaction was genuine ... and sinister of course. None of them have apparently reflected on what a bossy, dictatorial piece of legislation it is.

The CES has done an ostrich job, plunging its head firmly into the sand of soft reassurances, and kicking some of it up to obscure our vision. When you're looking for precision, don't count on the CES. When they say that, 'SRE in Catholic schools will be rooted in the Catholic Church’s teaching of the profound respect for the dignity of all human persons, what exactly does that mean? The framers of the bill are saying that it cannot mean teaching that the Catholic way is the only morally viable way. In other words, the framers of the bill are imposing relativism by dictat ... in a realisation of that famous dictatorship of relativism! Now, when I last looked, such a position cannot possibly be 'rooted in' the Catholic Church's teaching'. Call me picky, but there you have it.

And then there are the specially written Collect prayers circulating on the internet to pray for the hierarchy of England and Wales - so noticeable by its silence in recent days - to be replaced!! Feelings are strong, compromise is the last thing on people's minds, and there have been some able comparisons of the CES's policy of mute wiggling with the Catholic Church in Germany in the 1930s.

**************************

I think there is no doubt that the bishops cannot, must not, pussy foot around any longer. This bill is deeply perverse, even from a secular point of view. What would they have done if a bill had been passed which imposed on them the need to teach racism as a morally viable option in Cathoolic schools? And the thought that the CES goes along with it during this, the sordid twilight of New Labour, screams complicity.

That said, I think we must be careful. The CES might appear to go all goggle-eyed at Ed Balls, but we must not let that fact turn us into victimisers of the hierarchy. The law of charity comes first in any case. And, we must not behave towards them as if they are democraticaly elected representatives accountable to us for their least action. They are minsters of God, and that is a different thing; it is not only functional, it is sacramental. They sit, as it were, in the seat of Moses. Still, pragmatically speaking, victimising them will only create sympathy for the position which (if the CES are anything to go by) they are about to adopt. We simply need cold, calm analysis and full reporting to Rome if, over this coming weekend, they create the impression that this ammended bill is acceptable.

One can speculate whether they have done nothing because they know the bill will not become law under this government. We can ask ourselves if they have elected silence as their strategy, though why generals in the field would do that is quite beyond me. We can wonder if some of them would not like to see New Labour kicked while it is so very, very down. But let us wait. If they or their spokesmen back the Ballsian fudge, we will know the ad limina is already a dead memory. We will also be in a fine position to make this clear in the dicasteries of Rome.

What we actually want right now of course are bishops with no Balls. But, frankly, dumping Balls is going to take some guts.

My Lords, you are in our prayers. I hope to God you will not be in our correspondence, until, that is, we are able to tell you that your courage has made us strong.

It wasn't Brown's; it was Balls'

2010-02-23T06:48:00.000-08:00

More news on the BBC's way of telling half a story. Just as their TV news bulletin this morning totally failed to acknowledge that the DCSF last week rebuted accusations concerning Ed Balls' ammendment to the Children, School and Families Bill, so the Today programme on Radio 4 covered the story in the same way. At least we have editorial consistency. What we also have as well is an opportunity for the pro-government view to be repeated and repeated and repeated. After all, what safer way for a policy to innoculate itself than to be injected with a bit of John Humphreys' venom (a more honest man than many think but losing his precision and rigour here).

Listen here.

And if you are a Catholic parent consider this: soon the only liberty your Catholic school will retain is the liberty to mention the Catholic teaching on abortion, contraception and homosexuality. What, if I have understood Ed Balls correctly, it will not be able to do is:

1) teach that the Catholic view is the only valid view

2) fail to teach the moral viability of the options represented by abortion, contraception and homosexuality

******************

So, what I'm keen to know from the Catholic hierarchy is what they are going to do about this principled IMPOSITION of sub-pagan morality on the souls which have been committed into their care.

It is as impossible for Catholic schools to teach the moral viability of abortion, contraception and homosexuality as it is for them to teach the moral viability of racism.

Now, dear bishops, is your moment. Now is the moment to kick out this daft category of 'faith schools' and start pressing your arguments on the basis of Christian rationality which objects to these issues because of natural law.

Otherwise, you will be swept away with the rest.

The BBC and half a story

2010-02-23T00:29:00.000-08:00

The BBC 8am news bulletin covered the story about PSHE which I mentioned on Saturday. The BBC note the claims of the CESEW (12 February) that their lobbying led to the tabling of an ammendment allowing faith schools to teach PHSE in their context of their own principles. The BBC then note the objections to this ammendment.

What the BBC don't do is tell the end of the story, i.e. that the spokesman for the DCSF confirmed on 18 February that faith schools will not be able simply to turn this ammendment into another Section 28 by the back door (Section 28 for Local Authorities prevented teaching about homosexuality).

So, what is going on here? Well, it's possible the BBC aren't aware that the DSCF have already briefed against the CESEW's interpretation of the tabled ammendment. It is possible. But don't they read the website of the Department for Children, Schools and Families?

In the concrete, what not telling the end of this story allows, is for the government to be cast as the bad boy for letting those nasty faith schools to get their way. And the government doesn't like looking like the bad boy, especially not at the moment ... At the same time it allows for the BBC to drag up opponents of this ammendment - which government officials have already said doesn't mean what they fear it means - so they can say, once again and again and again, that faith groups should keep their preoccupations out of school.

That's what you call a zombie of a story, the living dead coming back to haunt us. Thanks, BBC for breathing life into it though. Top class journalism. Razor-sharp and cutting edge at one and the same time. It makes sure that opponents of the ammendment get to repeat and repeat and repeat their objections to faith schools - impartially of course - and it makes the government, who have already briefed against the CESEW, look like they favour faith schools ...

which is surely the best way to make sure they bloody well don't!

The sad neglect of atheism

2010-02-22T13:06:00.000-08:00

A friend recently told me that her mother had been accused of bigotry for suggesting in an archeology journal that knowledge of Christianity was a necessary prerequisite to the study of Latin and Greek texts in the centuries AD. I'm not quite sure of all the details; it seems like a spectacularly stupid accusation, even for an academic to make! But, as we were talking, what struck me was that without a knowledge of Christianity you cannot even understand what Christian atheists talk about.

I was lecturing last week on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the so-called 'Father of Anarchy', who claimed to be not merely a methodical atheist (i.e., let's behave as if God doesn't exist) but a contre-atheist (i.e., and let's battle against the God Squad). Now, Proudhon has a most ingenious way of formulating his pro-anarchism. For him, all European political structures are rooted in a model that comes from the Ten Commandments. Oddly enough, in this respect, Proudhon would completely agree with someone like Joseph de Maistre, who himself is often called the 'Father of the Counterrevolution'. But Proudhon's argument is that this formulation of law communicates the notion of an absolute God. Consequently, an absolute God in theology leads to an absolutist Church, an absolutist State, and the absolutist money system of capitalism. That at least is his argument. And since in the scientific age we have now understood that Christianity is wrong, then we must clear out its political and economic residue. Now, that reasoning is itself wrong in about a dozen ways, but the dangerous thing about Proudhon is that he sees the theological basis of these absolutisms (which he opposes naturally) as the result of centuries of development, from the dawn of Christianity to the nineteenth century. And that is where he makes one of his fundamental mistakes.

Of course God is absolute in his qualities, but if we understand that absoluteness as a voluntaristic thing - e.g. God's omnipotence means that if God says a circle is a square, then it's a square - then, whatever God we're thinking of, it's not the God of the Catholic tradition. That absolutist God is more like the God of Jean Calvin, damning and predestining with no regard for freewill, and collapsing for justification into circular argumentation: it must be just because God did it, who is entirely just.

As I explained these things to my students, a gleam of understanding came into their eyes. In their schools they've been given a multicultural, Lego-fied model of religion in which God just means a ragbag of distant and ineffable qualities. I'll grant you it takes a closer knowledge of history to realise that the God of Aquinas is not understood the same way as the God of Calvin. After all, Proudhon himself clearly missed the point.

But, coming to my own point, one of the silliest and saddest ironies of the national embarrassment which surrounds Christianity in this country is the ignorance that it necessarily induces about atheism in the west. John Grey has even argued that Richard Dawkins is a kind of Christian; his very atheism smacks of it, is shaped by it, because formulted in reaction to it. Do they not realise they are sawing off the very branch on which they are sitting?

To sum up, how can we understand Proudhon unless we know what God he is talking about? And how can we understand modernity, the modern State, and reaction to it unless we have the means of understanding somebody like Proudhon?

So, give me an atheist over a multiculturalist any day of the week.

While the Family burns ...

2010-02-20T23:51:00.000-08:00

Many other blogs across the ether, including Fr Finigan, Fr Blake and Mulier Fortis, are commenting on the embarrassing position in which the Catholic Education Service of England and Wales (CESEW) finds itself. Over a week ago, it ran a story claiming that its lobbying had helped lead to an ammendment of the Children, Schools and Families Bill. Whatever the truth of that claim, the ammendment, which states PSHE can be taught in a way which 'reflects the school's religious character', alarmed the 'Accord Coalition'. They were worried that this ammendment would allow a return of Section 28 by the back door.

On Thursday, however, their anxieties were soothed by the Department for Children, Schools and Families whose spokesman said:

Schools with a religious character will be free, as they are now, to express the views of their faith and reflect the ethos of their school, but what they cannot do is suggest that their views are the only ones.The bottom line is that all young people must by law receive accurate and balanced information so that they can make informed, positive choices.

By 'the only ones' I take it our spokesperson meant 'the only valid ones', since it would be absurd to suggest other views are not already mentioned in Catholic schools. So whither now the CESEW? We have yet to see.

****************

I wasn't even aware there was a Department for Children, Schools and Families, but as I reflect on this story and its implications, I'm not surprised the government have created one. Nothing must come between the great Leviathan of the State and the individuals who are incorporated in it. It might seem tendentious to say so, but I wonder if this department's name is revelatory

Children

are mentioned first, for they are the individuals in whom the State invests the rights which make them free.

Then, we have

Schools, legally-created collectivities where the children's rights can be propped up by government-approved wisdom and options guidance

And only then do we have

Families

that old fashioned institution which is, for the time being, a biological and psychological necessity, but whose edges are frayed with pressure from same-sex unions and adoption, and the promise which biotechnology seems to show.

Fr Finigan has entitled his post: 'Catholic Schools: have we reached the end game?'

Yes, Fr Finigan, we have, but, I would argue, not primarily because of the CESEW's bungling. We have reached the endgame for Catholic schools because Catholic schools cannot work without Catholic families. And we have reached the end of Catholic families - not in particular cases, but generally - because, in a time of monumental cultural upheaval, where the pressures of being Catholic are made all the worse by our immersion in a constant stream of unchristian belief and praxis, there seems to be no taste among the hierarchy to evangelize their people on issues which could cause a rumpus. When Portsmouth Diocese had their diocesan reorganization a couple of years ago and asked for the suggestions of the faithful, someone I know proposed that in addition to calling itself a 'Fairtrade Diocese', Portsmouth should call itself a 'Prolife Diocese', and shape its policies more consciously around the promotion of all the Catholic teachings regarding life (marriage and family life, contraception, abortion, bioethics). But why does such a thing have to be said in any case? Isn't it stark-ravingly obvious? In the event it was the waste of a good piece of paper.

But it isn't stark-ravingly obvious, because we are all of us tempted to think that if we get the 'system' right, all will be well. If the rails are straight, the train will run. This is displaced responsibility. I firmly believe that, if the CESEW is a shambles, it is in some ways our fault. If Catholic schools like St Thomas More in Bedford are dancing to the tune of the DCSF - and we have yet to see their response to the DCSF's claims - we're to blame. Of course, what we need is good leadership, but what do we find? A senior person associated with the CBCEW (that's the bishops' conference) told me recently that they thought the most serious problem faced by the bishops was the lack of fidelity among their people. Now, when the anxieties of leaders turn in on themselves, that is a sure sign of serious systemic disease; let's hope it was the apparatchik's anxiety speaking and not that of the bishops. It has left me wondering how the recent remarks of Pope Benedict about dissent will be read. The pope was talking about the doctrine of the faith, but what if his words were respun as a defence of the rules of the club?

There is good Catholic work going on everywhere in England and Wales to try to face these issues, but voices such as John Smeaton's, Eric Hester's and Fr Finigan's are apparently held more in fear than in respect. Frankly, as far as I can see, we're getting to the point where we need major surgery (and I'm thinking about a few 'caputectomies'). Otherwise in another fifty years, this whole limb of the English Church will be as lifeless as all the partes infidelium, and it will be little comfort then that, at the very least, our coffee has been ethically sourced.

Be ye as little children

2010-02-17T00:07:00.000-08:00

One of the things about the command to be as little children is that, at least from my perspective, I think I already am. I'm just not a child in the way Christ meant!

Nothing convinces me more of this that the arrival of Lent in the late winter. All I have to do is fast for two measly days, and the rest of the time, I can choose my own penance which might involve fasting, giving things up, doing extra stuff, praying more, or all of the above.

And yet what happens? What happens is that I usually behave like a child who has suddenly gone all floppy because he doesn't want to go where his parent is leading him. Yes, the knees become weak, the head goes back and a grimace alights upon the face. A sort of whinging sound begins, firstly because I have to do something I don't want to do, and then because I'm too naff to do the thing I'm supposed to do, and then something else distracts me ... something else other than what I should actually be focused on. Just like a child ...

I like to comfort myself with the thought that such capacity for standing on the outside of the process is indicative of my being able to master it, by God's grace and if only I make the effort. Perhaps. I was told recently it might also be a sign of burn out!!! Now, that is worrying. The old saying goes Omnis comparatio claudicat: all comparisons limp. In my case, we might say all comparisons go limp and refuse to cooperate. Be ye as little children ... but not like THOSE little children!

Here we are uncovering more of the profound meaning of today's gospel which invites us to wash our faces and not show that we are doing penance. This is not just a case of humility, or of not seeking human reward for what we do; it is also deep psychology. If we want to do some penance - as indeed we must - we'll do it more easily if we put on a brave face. Put a brave face on: the ancient wisdom is the best. And oddly enough, that's exactly the way to make a whinging child cooperate as well: if reason and a slap don't work, try amusing it. There is a capacity for cooperation buried in there somewhere.

A twelvemonth! well; befall what will befall,
I'll jest a twelvemonth in an hospital.

Well, perhaps not a twelve month but at least forty days ... with a few days off for good behaviour on a Sunday.

Thus, as a man shod in plimsols joins the road of Compostela, I enter Lent.

Misere mei, Domine, secumdum misericordiam tuam.

B*$%^& B@~:?:

2010-02-14T01:40:00.000-08:00

I just heard on The Andrew Marr Show that among the proposals for new laws suggested by their viewers one of the most interesting was that supermarkets be forced to shelve all their goods in alphabetical order. You can see the inspiration behind this. You walk into a supermarket you don't know, and where on earth do you start to shop? You have to go through every aisle - they quite possibly WANT you to go through every aisle - before you find what you're looking for. With the alphabetical system, however, you could dash along to the initial letter of your desired good, and, bingo, the shopping is done and dusted.

'Would you need any other letter than B though?' asked one of the guests on the AM show, and when everyone looked puzzled, he added, 'Beer and bread.' I must say I liked this idea. I know Lent is almost upon us but I couldn't resist playing with the letter 'B' to see exactly what necessities (what I define as necessities), I could come up with under that letter alone. At times, I have been a little bit loose in applying the 'B' rule, but this is my blog, and frankly, what are you going to do about it anyway?

The list is, I think, more than sufficient, to keep a man alive and vaguely happy.

Bacon
Back gammon
Baked Alaska
Balsamic vinegar
Basil
Basmati rice
Beans
Beef
Beer
Benedictine
Blue cheese
Borlotti beans
Bovril
Brandy
Bratwurst
Bread
Brie
Broccoli
Brownies
Brown sauce
Brussels (Sprouts)
Burgundy
Butter

Errr, that'll do. Takers for other letters?

Mirrors within mirrors of mirrors

2010-02-13T02:58:00.000-08:00

This Sunday evening I have no doubt millions will tune in to see Piers Morgan interviewing Gordon Brown. The BBC have been playing the killer clip of Brown choking up just ever so slightly as he describes the moment in which his baby girl, aged just ten days, died in his arms. Already debate is raging about whether this is a cynical stunt played by Brown's exhausted media team, an unwise disclosure of private feeling, or a genuine ouverture on Brown's part. I rather think it is hard to tell.

There is no chance on the one hand that the interview is just some kind of sideshow. Brown doesn't have time for that in his current set of predicaments. No doubt the interview will serve all kinds of tactical purposes, not the least of which is to remind us that Brown has suffered just as much as David Cameron in his private life. We mustn't be too mean to him in other words, especially not at the ballot box.

But where does this drive come from for self disclosure? In a media-driven age the prurient British - those visitors at the ballot box - undoubtedly feel they have a right to know these things; indeed, they respond to being fed them by thrashing the waters all the more and yelping delightedly like blubbery seals. We saw as much in the recent John Terry scandal. Public appetite, let us not forget, is one of the images that emerges like a shard of broken glass from this media portrayal of Brown's domestic tragedy.

Brown himself, however, is between the rock of media exposure and the hard place of authenticity. For media exposure, demanded by the consumers of news, demands the authenticity inscribed in unselfconscious conduct; we want to know that 'they' are not hiding anything, or declining to unveil their secrets out of some form of outdated condescension. At the same time, the consumers of news cry foul if that authenticity is not to be found in the suddenly selfconscious victim.

But why? Well, we tell ourselves such authenticity is a sign of sincerity, although we then go off and admire the actor's art at the cinema without a second thought. Perhaps, on the other hand, the demand for authenticity - the demand for the victim to be unselfconscious - also arises because the victim must not be a reminder that the news consumer is in some respects a Peeping Tom. Nobody likes to be shown themselves in the mirror, especially not a mirror provided by a politician we don't like in the first place.

There is the remote possiblity that Brown has sought this opportunity like some venal, self-exploiting twerp (an activity one feels sure will soon become known as 'doing a Jordan'). But I don't think so. He and his team are merely dancing through the hall of mirrors which the media provide - the original reality-TV dance show - in an age where appearance must supply for lack of substance, where impression must stand proxy for judgment, and where we expect our mirrors to show us only what we want to see.

When Brown chokes up on Piers Morgan's show tomorrow night, he will be showing Britain to itself. My advice, therefore, is: don't be distracted in the days to come by the conservative rage over his sincerity or his cynicism. Marvel rather at the collision of appetites - our appetite for prurience, his appetite for power - which splits reflected fame into a prism that dazzles to deceive.

Denn alles fleisch

2010-02-08T13:25:00.001-08:00

Have you heard any news about King's College London recently? KCL is one of the most prestigious universities in the country. Nay, it is one of the most distinguished universities in the world. Of all the British institutions that are known across the seas, KCL is high up there on the list.

So, you've heard no news? Me neither. Not, that is, from the mainstream media. The only thing is, last week KCL announced not only that they were making over two hundred redundancies, they compounded the matter by saying that all staff in the Arts and Humanities would have to reapply for their jobs. Everyone but everyone, from lowly teaching fellows, to world-class professors. 'Gizza job' is set to become the order of the day.

So, why haven't we heard a word about this in the mainstream media? I grant you academics are hardly cherished as national treasures. But, we're not all Curry Studies specialists teaching at Thames Valley University, nor are we all writing studies with names like, Gendering the Divide: Dividing the Gender. So why not a word?

I'm not sure I know. Perhaps it is a sign of how low these institutions have fallen in the nation's mind, which is overpowered by crucial issues such as the next Big Brother series or whether John Terry is a fit captain of the England football team. Perhaps it is a symptom of the age-old disrespect in which intellectual pursuits are held in this country, the embarrassment which dictates that English academics can sit in common rooms and be too gêné to talk about anything other than the weekend's sports results. I really cannot say for sure.

What I can say for sure is that university management teams across the country will be watching KCL like hawks to see if they get away with such a slash-and-burn policy. What happens next is anyone's guess.

I have many complaints about modern academia, its vile obeissance in this country to the ridiculous pressure of research assessment exercises, its readiness to swallow tosh, its feudal system which is stricken with favours and nepotistical tendencies.

But, most of the colleagues I work with are men and women of extraordinary ability who have undertaken a profession whose nature is set against the reduction to functionalism and market forces which dominate the rest of the nation's culture. Should these be mown down like grass? I hardly think so.

Denn alles fleisch ist die Gras of course. But while the bankers are making hay? Give me a break.

Losing my religion

2010-02-07T01:11:00.000-08:00

I hear this morning that there is a growing campaign to include Heavy Metal Music as a religion at the next census in 2011. Believe it or not - and I suggest you should believe it - some 400,000 people at the last census of 2001 wrote down 'Jedi' as their religion. I understand the statistic gives the Jedi religion some form of official recognition, even though this sudden rush for Jedism is a postmodern joke, rather than a form of spirituality. It is in the nature of statistics not to know the difference.

Or perhaps not. It is in the nature of certain people to consider the menu at McDonald's to be perfectly edible. But is it? Nothing is religious or irreligious but thinking makes it so, as Shakespeare might have written if he had been as clever as the chattering classes. But is it a religion? What is a religion exactly?

But what is more important here is what approval of Heavy Metalism as a religion means for the definition of religion: it means simply that whatever I broadly call my religion is my religion. Some religions demand moral codes, others dress codes, and others still suicide codes; religion, thus understood, is almost about as useful a label in these matters as 'thing'. What, on the other hand, if we class religion as one's most important belief, or the guiding light of one's life? I'm not sure that helps either. That isn't why Jedi was written on the census by nearly half a million people. Going to church doesn't help either, nor any particular belief in an afterlife that separates the good and the bad, nor indeed in any particular kind of God: Sugar-Daddy versus Angry-Lord.

So, what we are facing here is not actually an understanding of religion, but something much broader: a particular understanding of the individual. Religion is whatever I say it is, says the enlightened, autonomous, self-defining particle, or the buffered individual, as Charles Taylor calls him. This thinking has now gone viral within religious organizations themselves. I define what kind of Christian I am going to be, not only within Protestant Christianity where autonomy has always been a factor, but also within Catholicism. I can be anything from a member of Catholics for a Changing Church to a member of the Latin Mass Society. I can consider regular Sunday Mass attendance as fundamentalism, if I wish to.

*******************************

And this is one of the things the pope meant last week when he talked to the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales about 'mature debate' excluding dissent. What he meant was that it was about time people both inside and outside the Church stopped behaving like teenagers who want the world to revolve around them, their views, their expectations and definitions. It is about time they stopped behaving like buffered individuals or autonomous 'I's. He perhaps meant it was about time we became attentive to the life the Church initiates us into, if only we would allow it. If I'm not mistaken, he practically suggested we should grow up.

I cannot be categorical about this, but I think when we start losing 'our' religion, and embracing the Church, perhaps we will.

A Salter which has lost its savour

2010-02-05T03:13:00.000-08:00

A couple of friends sent me links for the the very silly article posted by Martin Salter, MP for Reading West, on his blog on 2 February. What a model democrat Salter is, opening his article with a joke about men in dresses. This could, one supposes, be applied equally to some Muslims, not to mention some rather butch Scotsmen, but these are constituencies I suspect Salter would not have the nerve to mock.

It would bore all three of us to list Salter's silliness in more than one or two details. I was struck though by his suggestion that the Pope's argument about the Equality Bill contravening natural law is 'code for saying “we want all the benefits of living in a society where religious freedoms are protected, just as long as we don’t have to afford those protections to others.”'. This is what happens when a world-respected, serious-minded scholar is analysed by a blundering philistine. If the pope's words were at all coded, it was in the sense of saying, 'You lot want the vocabulary of natural law but insist on using itas a platform for a Jacobin model of State-protected rights'. My gloss, my gloss.

Salter isn't really worthy of consideration but I must say I was highly amused by one of his arguments. I must quote it in full for all its delicious absurdity:

What the Bill seeks to ensure is that some 22-year-old applying for a job cleaning the windows of Our Lady of the Visitation Church will not automatically be rejected because he might be a fan of The Village People or, Heaven forefend, an out-and-out gay.

So that's what it's about! I hadn't noticed this but apparently Salter's government is moving to stop the oppression of gay window cleaners by homophobic Catholics. How did we not realise? We are all familiar with the recent case of the gay window cleaner drenched in his own water and run out of St Therese of the Little Flower, Little Bimpton. The shameful Poor Claire nuns who pushed a transvestite off those ladders in Throckmoreton just before Christmas have a lot to answer. And after that incident in January when a gay window cleaner was admitted to Nether Wallop Accident and Emergency with a soapy, wet leather stuffed down his left ear, we can understand why the government had to act.

If there is anything more depressing than the prospect of half the MPs in this country beind forced to cough up loot they had prised from the fingers of the tax payer for their Parliamentary Expenses, it is the sight of MPs, of whom Salter is but one example, totally unable to understand their own prejudices, the inner weaknesses of their justifications, and the silliness of their own emotional gut rot.

Done

2010-02-01T14:43:00.000-08:00

Right, folks. I'm back from my big deadline, and feeling temporarily dead, as it happens.

Still, the blog will now recommence, and probably more than on Sundays (promises, promises).

But, for tonight, I simply wish you a good evening. It was for me!

A time too short to make a world-without-end bargain

2010-01-24T00:45:00.000-08:00

I have three minutes, three minutes, to write something and then I have to get down to work. Got a big deadline for next Saturday. The biggest deadline yet, as a matter of fact. My book manuscript goes to the publishers on Monday 1st February.

Actually, what I'm most looking forward to when the job is done is the chance to be normal again ... Okay, well, at the very least the chance not to have to feel I need to work six days a week, with a few hours on a Sunday on the grounds that it isn't servile work.

Maybe at that time The Sunday Morning Soapbox can expand a bit, perhaps even go to a quasi-daily. I will need all the mental fresh air I can find. We'll see. The first priority is actually to get some real fresh air.

Grrr, I have now been typing for four minutes, so I shall slip away, possibly to return later with more news (grrrrrr, five minutes!).

What do you read, my Lord? Words, words, words

2010-01-17T00:03:00.000-08:00

I've been visited by a phantom book flogger who thought it a great idea to post an advert for his book. He said his were considered Catholic writings and that lots of clever people were saying nice things about him. He was also related to someone famous, which must be an incomparable advantage in convincing the punters to buy your books.

I welcome people's engagement on here, as I would welcome them to my dinner table - if only I could fit you all in - but when they come around doorstepping like a 1950s hoover salesman, it just brings out my inner bouncer. He can write to me if he thinks this is unfair.

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In other news, I've been thinking about The Sound of Music all week. Well, I've been going through a stressful time of late, and these things happen. Now, I know what some readers are thinking, and I forbid them to think it. Stop it, right now! His name will not be mentioned here, at the risk of bringing out once again my inner bouncer.

But the reason I've been thinking about it, is that watching it again after all these years has convinced me it is not so sweetie-pie nice after all. I know we all have this image of the so-clean-you-could-operate-in-her-apron nanny Maria, played in the film by Julie Andrews, but as I sat and watched it this time, what I kept on noticing was the portrayal of darkness.

No, not in her! Of course not. Well, I'll come back to that. But the main characters are surrounded by largely compromised, selfish individuals who are all guilty of one betrayal or another. I had not remembered how Max's open jokes about making money were not actually funny at all, but representative of the kind of unveiled cynicism which invades as it disarms. The countess to whom the Captain nearly gets spliced is not only unctuous to the point of needing a Tyrolean dancer's slap in the face; she's a wicked-witch figure who breaks Maria through subterfuge and deception. Hans, the baddy telegram boy, we're all familiar with of course. But he's more than a traitor to Liesl; he's the image of the boyish prig whose desire for recognition - a desire known to all boys, as well as to prigs - has, like a star-struck lover, fatally crossed with the political ascedency of first-class shits.

Oh, but the critics will say, this is simply the old fashioned device of baddies versus goodies. And of course the goodies win, as they stroll over the mountains to Switzerland. But this is to miss some of the most interesting psychological contours of the film. The Captain and Maria are both people who have been lying to themselves; lying perhaps out of a sense of self-defence - the Captain in his widowhood (or does a man have a widowerhood?) and Maria in her vocational idealism - but lying all the same. And, so the conquest of bad in the film is not merely contained in the escape theme; nor even in the obvious love theme; but rather in the discoveries which Captain and the Maria make about themselves:

Somewhere in my wicked, miserable past,
There must have been a moment of truth.

Okay, this is not Shakespeare, but who cares? Shakespeare wouldn't have cared for a start. But I find this an engaging thought, not only because of the light it casts on the relationship of insight and moral decision, but, probably more so, because of its corollaries; it is not the moments of truth in my life that I worry about - I'm grateful for them! - so much as the moments of falsehood. The moments of falsehood start us along paths at whose beginning we catch a delicate thread of ourselves and begin a slow, unravelling process. And then when the winter bites, we find our garments - our integrity, our authenticity - have gone.

In this song, the implication seems to be that finding love is a reward for doing good. But I think that is a moot point. Maria sings, 'Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.' Sound metaphysics, let it be noted. And, I think, classic moral sense. It is the moments of truth that somehow facilitate the subsequent possiblities of insight.

I wonder whether religious people are less likely to see this theme. There is a sound philosophical suspicion which contests the impossibilty of knowing the truth of things - the grand comfort blanket of the modern age - but this is too easy a formulation. Whatever the knowability of Truth, the truth about oneself is often buried in rubble, disguised by the myths we invent in self-defence, or else - to take up my earlier image - has been left back along the road where we snagged our honesty on a thorny convenience.

And that is why the moment of truth in the past - is this the moment of our childhood? Bernanos certainty thought so as he sought to remember 'le petit enfant que je fus' - is so important. You not only need a compass - the Truth - to navigate, you need a fixed point on the horizon. And that moment of truth, le petit enfant que je fus, might be the only fixed point in a world torn by earthquakes and terrors.

So, now, go and listen to the song, and no singing along!

A black and white case

2010-01-10T01:34:00.000-08:00

I am still struggling to decide whether all this snow in the UK is doing us any good or not. I have heard say that it's proof against the global warming theory, but I'm afraid that is rather short sighted. The fact is southern Europe is getting the mild winter we normally have and we are getting this icy stuff off Scandinavia (which is fast going down in my opinion).

On the one hand, the snow has brought out things which we were quite happy to have left in the closet. One example is the dreadful capacity we have for scaring ourselves senseless through the media. But that's not all. Think about this. The lack of grit for roads and the potential problems of gas supply show exactly what kind of a penny-pinching nation we have become ... not that it has done us any good in the long run either. We are a beanocracy, i.e. run by the beancounters who are as mean-spirited as Chesterton's Grocer:

God made the wicked Grocer
For a mystery and a sign,
That men might shun the awful shops
And go to inns to dine;
Where the bacon's on the rafter
And the wine is in the wood,
And God that made good laughter
Has seen that they are good.

All that said - and it is already quite a lot - the snow has definitely brought about something which you rarely witness in the suburbs where I live: people have started talking to one another ... cheerily ... as if they are mental patients - errr -normal, well-balanced and full of community spirit. Okay, a lot of the comments are about the weather, but that is what were famed for talking about. But this is fascinating really. Bad conditions force people to be attentive to others. Difficulties experienced by everyone tend to drive us out of our shell. Empathy becomes imaginable once more. There are connections made which our normally self-contained lives do not otherwise allow.

Of course, I speak as a suburbanite. These things have probably never been forgotten in some places. In others they probably shade quite easily into the vices of community life .... the gossip, the peer pressure, the long-term grudges. But how refreshing all the same. Is it better to have a grudge against someone rather than be practically ignorant of their existence, rather than being in a position to take any responsibility for them? Some would say a grudge is at least proof that you once cared!

Add all that to the possibility of a few days extra away from the office, and I think you'll agree we should welcome these vile conditions with open arms. God bless global warming if this is what it means. Perhaps Hippoyte Taine was right to some extent: our geography and weather have a remarkable capacity to shape us, not because we're determined like sugar and vitriol - pace Taine - but because it gives us other choices to make. And who is to say that Britain is not in need of other choices than the ones served up by our godforsaken, consummerist beanocracy?

Bless the weather that brought you to me, as the drunk with an untuned guitar once sang.

As through a glass darkly

2010-01-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

I have pretty much missed Christmas this year. A day at my brother's for Christmas, and the rest has been work, work, work. I'm looking ostensibly fatter, not through over indulgence but as a result of my sedentary profession which keeps me chained to desk, computer and library shelf for many hours at a time. My one consolation has been ploughing through the first season of The A Team which I picked up for a song at HMV (and, no, I've never been asked to sing before in a shop. Very odd). Somehow it's not as good as it was twenty-five years ago.

I'm not complaining. There are much worse ways to spend your Christmas after all. At least I didn't spend mine in a stable. And whilst nobody gave me gold, frankincense or myrrh, the pressies weren't half bad either (John Martyn and Martha Wainwright CDs, fine whisky, some wine).

Still, I'm always struck by that image from Eliot's The Wasteland about laying out 'food in tins'. If he'd have written it another seventy years later, I wonder if Eliot would have expressed the same sense of dislocation through the image of frosted double glazing. I know I am not alone in feeling that everything surrounding Christmas these days drowns out the carols, makes it difficult to catch the sense of wonder and drama that hides within the nativity, leaves one feeling as removed from the mystery as one is from the cold snow on the window ledge outside. I'm sure that is why I resent New Year so much, and why I would rather go to bed before midnight. No Scrooge I. No killjoy neither. But what on earth does New Year mean without Christmas? It is 2010 of what exactly? Of what exactly ... if you think Christianity is a myth? And so I, a believer, baulk at the implicit hypocrisy of it all. To the public mind, it's about as significant as May becoming June (a moment we know to be thick with meaning, but that is for another post).

Of course on the other hand it is precisely the inconsistency of the human being, our ridiculous inability to remember ourselves from one end of the week to the other, that excuse these omissions. Of all the images of Christmas the one I feel closest too at this stage in my life is the straw. And in all the vulgarity of the Xmas season, in all the Crimbo-tinsely-sparkling empty chinging of the tills, and the silly countdown to another calendar year, the amazing thing is that there is still the chance to press one's nose against the frosted double glazing and watch and glimpse the truth beyond the pane.

On queues and stillness

2009-12-20T14:47:00.000-08:00

I haven't forgotten you lot. I've just been extremely busy away from the interwebertron thingy. One has to be, just now and again. I've been remembering what it feels like to hold a book in my grubby little hands for more than the few milliseconds required to note down important things to quote from it. Keep going at this rate and I might even pass for mildly educated. My packed case is full of heavy tomes and I leave tomorrow for Christmas with the family. Today was spent in the company of even more family (whose company will be lacking for said Christmas festivities). I can only hope the transport system holds out until tomorrow afternoon.

As I arrived back in the home town this evening - or what for now is my home town - I leapt in a taxi only to find myself within a matter of minutes in a stinking traffic jam. At 5.30pm on a Sunday evening if you please. The taxi driver said the motorists had all been about town, getting and spending ... or words to that effect. Much they miss in nature that is theirs, I thought to myself. And nature, in its snow-capped glory, was especially handsome today; well, in a greying-at-the-temples kind of a way. What is all that money going on, I wondered. Where is all that money coming from, I wondered again.

Feeling Christmas-y, as I am wont to do in this period of the year, I am currently ploughing through Paul Claudel's wonderful play L'Annonce faite à Marie. The plot is easily summarized. Young girl in love with father's favoured suitor discovers she has leoprosy, and retires from field, allowing jealous sister to inherit suitor with whom she has a child. Blinded but sanctified by her leperous sufferings, young girl is asked by jealous sister to raise the now dead child to life. Child is resurrected, but sister pushes young girl in a sand pit in an attempt to murder her (out of continued jealousy), but sister is saved only to die later. All reflect on their eternal salvation. Hmm, maybe not so easy to summarize.

But the Christmas theme therein is fascinating. Christmas was fundamental to Claudel. He was converted suddenly during Christmas Vespers at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris in ( I think ) 1886. Christmas thus appears to be for him a special time of grace. For example, another play, La Nuit de Noël 1914, is a meditation on the fate of France in WWI and on the salvation of the French who require the prayers of the saints. In L'Annonce faite à Marie, the miracle of the raising of the child takes place on Christmas Eve, just as the bells are ringing for Midnight Mass, and as the young girl (Violaine) and her jealous sister (Mara) are praying the Office of Matins, perhaps one of the most beautiful in the liturgical year. Then, as The Child is born, so Mara's child is brought back to life ... Claudel's symbol for the regeneration of humanity by grace.

These things, I think, make Christmas worthwhile. It's not the taking part that matters, in spite of what a thousand motorists in a traffic jam outside the town centre might have thought this evening; it's the sitting and pondering, and reflecting on the extraordinary mystery of the Incarnation, which is the heart of it all. I'm sure that's why it snows for us at this time of the year (at least we godless Europeans and Americans).

Because we need reminding of the stillness ...

Service interrrompu

2009-12-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

Lurgified and terribly busy, but hope to blog Monday.

In sickness and in health

2009-12-07T04:12:00.000-08:00

Yeah, well, I've been sick with a lurgy, and unable to think clearly (hmm, maybe shouldn't blame that on the lurgy). Anyway, I'm now back in harness but running to catch up with myself.

There were a ton of stories in the press last week which I thought merited our attention, but none more than the horse plaiters of West Dorset.

Yes, a mysterious series of incidents in West Dorset has seen horses across the county being found with their manes plaited overnight by unidentified persons. I kid you not.

Several theories are emerging as to the cause of this spate of 'attacks'. One is that horse thieves create the plaits during the day so when they return at night they can identify which horses to steal. Hmm. That sounds like a PC Plod hypothesis to me.

Another theory is that these plaits are part of a white magic ritual to accompany the casting of a spell. There is a sort of Castleford-Ladies'-Magical-Circle logic to this, and of course anything is possible in a place like West Dorset. But who can tell?

The most endearing theory has been voiced by Harriet Laurie of Bidport who claims that the plaiting is the result of strong winds. I think she means southwesterlies rather than anything of a digestive origin.

Personally, I would like to think this is being done by bored West Dorset folk who are breaking out of their early twenty-first century topor induced by TV dinner and soap operas, and embracing something freely, gratuitously and purposelessly creative. Is this not proof that man is still alive in West Dorset?

The mane plaiters of West Dorset; whatever next? The dustbin painters of East Sussex? The traffic warden decorators of Berkshire? The Rottweiler permers of Old London Town?

We can but live in hope.

Abusus non tollit usum

2009-11-29T01:29:00.000-08:00

Child abuse is one of those traumas so extraordinarily singular that it leaves one grasping not only for words but to find any entitlement to talk about it. Thank God, I never suffered it, though I know those who have. Sometimes they suffer the consequences all their lives, and in a handful of cases, they bring their lives to an end because of it. Compassion itself seems inadequate here, not by lack of empathy but because it is impossible to know the suffering - to passus cum - caused by such transgression of a human being, whose very world is wrecked often by those who have defined it for them. This is as near as anyone can get, if it were possible, to casting another freewill into mortal sin. No wonder Christ said it would be better that a millstone be tied around the necks of those who scandalize the little ones of God. Of course it is also true that abusers sometimes begin as the abused, in a colossal chain of unstinting misery known to God alone. How our own sufferings seem small in the lights of these scandals.

What leaves me, however, in a similar state of incomprehension are the strategies of those who have been, with the best of intentions, covering up child abuse by priests in the Dublin diocese for several decades. Complaints only started coming to light of course in the 1980s and 1990s, but whether we look at more recent incidents or those that were happening as long ago as the 1930s (cf the Ryan Report on child abuse published in May) - and Lord knows how long before that - it is not modernism which has brought this about but clericalism. By clericalism, I mean not only what the Irish State is now acccused of, in having deferred to the Catholic Church in Ireland in this matter. By clericalism, I mean also the type of churchmanship that serves lower moral considerations at the cost of higher ones. I mean especially the kind of churchmanship that can conceal the sins of the clergy but not, at the same time, punish them with severity. Of course, there is the issue of the private forum. We do not know what penances have been imposed under the seal of confession.

But how can that be enough? Did these people never realise that eventually cesspits have to be cleaned out? That you cannot keep shoving transgressions against immortal souls into the limited space of a nation's mortal psyche? Some spiritual plumber was needed, some moral sanitary engineer, who could have predicted the lamentable outcome. For eventually some blockage always forces the shit back up the pipe, and here we are today, knee deep in decades of foul-smelling, mind-numbing fecal matter, studded with the souls of children loved by God and wrecked by men.

Neither do I buy the line that we didn't really know what pederasty was truly like four or five decades ago. Scandal of the young is specifically and graphically described by Christ as a sin deserving of the worst punishment. What edition of the Bibile were they reading not to have understood that?

Perhaps one of these complacent clerics muttered the kinds of bourgeois reassurances which made Léon Bloy fulminate against the bourgeoisie so much: least said, soonest mended; let's draw a veil over that; it will all be forgotten in a little while. Or perhaps they said something like, 'Well, they were only Christ's words' ...

Like the priest who was preaching on the day John Berryman, the alcoholic American poet and life-long depressive, turned up at church, trembling with the DTs, anxious to put his life right after decades of chaos; he'd been going for a little while apparently. That day though, the priest was preaching about the constraints of celibacy. Citing the words of Christ that there are some who make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of God he railed against the faithful who put the clergy on such a pedestal. 'They were only Christ's words,' he said. Berryman, rising to his feet, clutching a rosary, sweating, and shaking in anger, shouted out, 'Only Christ words?' And stomped out the door ... later to throw himself off Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis.

Berryman's life was marked early on by the suicide of his father. I wonder if parental suicide doesn't have a similar effect to child abuse. For what is parental suicide, or indeed child abuse, if not the wrecking of a child's certainties about the goodness of the world? What is parental suicide or child abuse if not the destroying of what is, for the child, the most powerful symbol of God's providence, if not an initiation into an absurd world? Confession makes priests and bishops more insightful about human motives and tendencies than anyone can imagine. The Catholic Church invented psychology long before Freud or anyone else. But how did these Irish churchmen (not to mention those elsewhere) get child abuse so badly wrong? How did they fail so categorically when the stakes were so much higher than the reputation of the clergy? When the stakes were immortal souls made in the image and likeness of God? God save us all from the unintended consequences of our own complacency.

You cannot serve God until you've lost your reputation, said Saint Teresa of Avila. That is a lesson the Irish Church - and the rest of us by association - have to learn.

End-of-the-year thoughts

2009-11-22T09:34:00.000-08:00

Today's sermon was about redeeming the time before we die. It's a line of scripture which always makes me think of the T.S. Eliot poem Ash Wednesday:

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

Well, of course, redeem the time we must. They are dying thus around us every day, as Mr John Jarndyce says in Bleak House. But my thoughts today are also lingering on the unread vision in the higher dream.

The unread vision. I suppose there are periods in everyone's life when they feel that the vision is unread, or indeed unreadable. There is lead in the shoes. The mental and affective spine has frozen as if to protect itself from further injury. But must it be this way? Is it excusable on our part?

I don't think this is just about keeping our eyes on a fixed end or goal beyond this life. That of course we must do. But I'm curious about what makes us stop reading the vision in the higher dream. By the dream I mean that which assures us of the larger vistas that lie beyond our stifled confines; I mean awareness of, or sensitivity to, something more enriching that the TV-dinner of commercial society; something therapeutic after the unredeemed quotidian has finished abusing our souls; something restorative after the wicked have pillaged our hearts' reserves and left us for dead. By the dream, I mean the realities that bring both mind and appetite into tune with truth, goodness and beauty.

Does it become obscure because of our circumstances? Do we obscure it by our own distractions? How do we end up moving through solid air? To me it's like losing the taste for food. Something happens to the palette, something in the central gustatory system goes wrong, and the faculty of taste, or in this case the faculty of reading the vision in the higher dream, becomes confused, unable to tell salt from sweet. But why do we flee the conditions of creativity? Why do we live in miserly fashion rather than generously? Why do we retreat from the challenge of the ludic, to a false repose in static inertia? What has poisoned the system so badly that paralysis has become the only safe option? Why are we counting out life in cans? Cause or consequence of ceasing to read the dream?

But, at that point, have we not simply arrived at the point where T.S. Eliot sat down ninety years ago and wrote:

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

And have we caught up with him?

**************************

So here I am at the end of the year, resolved to collect fragments. What else can one do? Stravinsky said rules were the condition of creativity in music. I wonder if it isn't the same with all action which is meant to make the mind blossom when it only feels like wilting. Collect fragments, examine them by candlelight, find the cool melodies to sooth the torrid tension, and hope for a better place in the months ahead. Hope for the dream.

I go into the new year - the new liturgical year - with spiritual goals reaffirmed. But I will fail unless I find somehow, somewhere the renewed desire to read the dream.

Redeeming the time and reading the dream might well be inseparable. For fragments are not so very far from fragile bodies and lost souls.

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

Good intentions

2009-11-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

Yeah, well, what do you expect? I'm busy. I've also been distracted today, keeping my eye on a slow-cooking hand of ham. 3 kilos at 120C for 8 hours and, bingo, fantastic ham. You have to shove up the temperature as high as it will go just for the last bit to crisp up the skin.

If that was a side issue, the main business of the day was ploughing through Paul Claudel's La Nuit de Noël, 1914. What an extraordinary piece of theatre! Jean and Jacques, a seminarian and a secular school teacher, are killed by the same bullet as Jacques tries to rescue Jean from no-man's land. They appear in an antechamber of the afterlife, which resembles a propsect of Rheims cathedral, and discuss life, death and salvation with the dead children of the War and with a murdered priest. With the approach of midnight, the curé leads them all in prayer, as the German canons boom out twelve times, ostensibly to destroy the cathedral, but ironically marking the advent of Christ. That has to be symbolist theatre at its best.

Well, to bed now. I have much to do this week. This has hardly been soapbox piece, except for the boredom quota. That you can always rest assured of ;-)

When rights do not apply

2009-11-08T01:50:00.000-08:00

On Thursday the Catholic Education Service responded to the government's proposals for Sex and Relationship Education. Notably they were responding to the proposal that Sex and Relationship Education be obligatory after the age of 15. In this respect they were disappointed 'that legal encumbrances mean that a blanket right of withdrawal can no longer apply', yet they welcomed the fact that the government was going to respect the rights of parents to withdraw their children from these classes up to the age of fifteen.

Did I miss something there? Is it the case that if the government honours your rights, that is all well and good, but if it dishonours them, it can be blamed on 'legal encumbrances'? What is a legal encumbrance anyway? A piece of fruit? A lawyer slumbering in the corridors of the Old Bailey perhaps?

And here is another thing. If parents are the primary educators, then unless they are proven abusers, their rights over their children cannot reach a point of inapplicability. When a right like that no longer applies in some political dispensation, then we should call such inapplicability what it is: a violation of rights.

Still, if that wasn't bad enough, consider this. Who - just who - exercises the right to withdraw their children from Sex and Relationship Education? It isn't the kind of parents whose children run amuck, share generously their STDs and keep the abortion services in work in these difficult times. It isn't, in other words, the kinds of parents whose failures as educators might spur any government into trying to make up for their lacunae. It is the kind of parents who object in principle to the morally relativistic or indifferentist dynamics of government-provided Sex and Relationship Education. It is those who object to the medicalization of abortion, as if it were not a moral issue. It is those who do not go doey-eyed over government proposals or proclaim the creed of 'attending to nurse' ('for fear of finding something worse').

So if the Catholic Education Service is not there to protect the position of such people, what is it there to do? The only Catholic thing about this response to the SRE proposals is the wafts of incense it seems to be sending in the direction of government pieties.

Bonfire of the vanities

2009-11-05T06:48:00.000-08:00

While the rest of us are quietly ignoring Bonfire Night, the puppy-kicking author of Orwell's Picnic has devised another method to commemorate the Reformation.

Step forward and be heard Miss White.

Remember, remember ...

2009-11-05T00:30:00.000-08:00

Do look at the Matt cartoon today.

My sentiments exactly!

Causa honorabilis

2009-11-04T14:31:00.000-08:00

You know what drove me to the soap box? It was Stephen Fry.

He's never off our screens these days, and he has been in the news again this week when he said was going to give up Twitter because one of his many thousands of followers said he was a 'bit boring'. I've tried Twitter, and a 'bit boring' is something of an understatement. Still Fry's reaction - teddy slung from cot, threats of stopping Twittering, hurt feelings - just defy belief. He's a manic depressive of course and has our complete sympathy. But threatening to stop Twittering because someone thinks he's a 'bit boring' is getting beyond the realms of preciousness.

Any sympathy I feel for Fry evaporated though when I read last week about his remarks to a Nigerian archbishop during the Intelligence Squared debate.

'What are you for?' he growled at the poor cleric.

And on reading that, I thought it was about time I joined the melee.

Ahem, ladies and gentlemen ...

2009-11-04T12:16:00.000-08:00

The odd thing about starting a blog is knowing that, for a while at least, nobody will read the thing. Not even the author! Still, since we cannot but start at the beginning, all I can say is that I am here to blog. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, I have to use a soap box to do it ;-)

I'm not going to define what this blog is about. Any reader with half an ounce of sense will know. And any reader without half an ounce of sense is invited to shut up and take notes.

And if that little bit of cheek makes you feel like criticizing, let me offer you this piece of advice from Victor Borge:

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. Then, when you criticize him, you'll be one mile away, and you'll have his shoes.

Back in a mo.

Innocent.