Violence and Islam

The brutal murder on 22 May of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich by two young Muslim men has shaken Britain. One of the murderers, blood still on his hands, promptly addressed a cellphone camera held up by a witness to declare: “I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land, women have to witness the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments, they don’t care about you. … Tell them to bring your troops back and you can all live in peace”.

As the tattooed hordes of the English Defence League sought to hijack popular disquiet by taking to the streets,  it was all too easy to forget how two years ago, when gangs of teenagers rioted and ransacked England’s cities, Britain’s Muslims were models of the virtues the English see as distinctively their own. Muslims took to the streets to protect communities and businesses from the rioters, and when three Muslims were killed in Birmingham, it was the Muslim community, led by the bereaved father of one of the slain, who appealed for calm.

Aggressive

This seems a distant memory now, with too many seeming willing to accept the constant refrain that Islam is an inherently aggressive religion. Some of these will concede, echoing the lazy clichés of the new atheists, there are plenty of peaceful Muslims, but this is only because they’re not doing it right. To their mind, it is hardly surprising that Islam, as Samuel Huntingdon put it in 2000’s The Clash of Civilizations, “has bloody borders.”

Such claims, however, betray an ignorance of Islam symptomatic of that religious illiteracy which Christians so rightly castigate when displayed by atheists, and which the 2012 parliamentary report Clearing the Ground identified as a serious challenge for public discourse in modern Britain.

It would be absurd to deny that the Qur’an is replete with martial passages – notably the eighth and ninth suras – calling for acts of warfare and violence against those who defy Allah. It would, however, be equally absurd to assume that such passages must necessarily be read in so brutally literal a way.

Over the centuries, Muslim scholars have often historicized the more violent parts of the Qur’an, seeing them as primarily relevant to the martial age in which they were composed, and arguing that passages about slavery, the rights of women, and jihad against non-believers represented stages in a process of liberation.

Spiritual Warfare

Spiritual and symbolic readings of the Qur’an’s more difficult passages have been even more common, with difficult passages being regarded as models of internal spiritual warfare. Sufi Muslims especially embraced such interpretations over what they saw as the naïve literalism of those who believed the Qur’an advocated real

warfare.

Radicalism and violent fundamentalism may blight parts of the Muslim world now, but this is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Fundamentalism is an act of violence against tradition, with fundamentalists reading religious texts as modern atheists often do; they read them directly and literally, heedless of history and context, as though their meanings are self-evident.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that religious literalism is conspicuously popular among university students of engineering, medicine, and the sciences, where poetic and multi-layered writing is frowned upon and where binary thinking is all too common.

Coping Strategy

Although fundamentalism is a coping strategy for those who would barricade themselves against the complexities and challenges of modern life, it’s ineffective and sometimes degenerates into a violent fanaticism. This fanaticism draws on models of terrorism as pioneered by the European anarchists of a century ago, nationalist groups such as the Stern Gang and the IRA, and especially Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers. Islamic terrorism, far from being a medieval throwback or something intrinsic to Islam, is a child of globalised modernity.

What’s striking about much modern smugness towards Islam is that it disregards how our Christian and Jewish scriptures can themselves be mined to justify all kinds of violence. The description of Samson’s death in Judges seems tailor-made to justify suicide attacks, after all, while the 1994 slaughter of twenty-nine Muslims in a Hebron mosque by New York-born Baruch Goldstein was explicitly identified as a response to the biblical injunction to make war throughout time on the Amalekites.

Of course, Catholics aren't meant to read the Bible in this fashion; the violent passages of the Old Testament, calling for bloody warfare and even the absolute extermination of Israel’s enemies, have been read from antiquity in a spiritual sense.

Christians such as Origen of Alexandria followed in Jewish footsteps by developing the idea of the four senses of Scripture, drawing on the example of Jesus who taught the disciples on the way to Emmaus how the Jewish scriptures constantly spoke of him.

Biblical passages were understood as having a basic literal meaning, which needed to be understood in light of the literary genre and historical context of the text – history wasn’t the discipline it now is when the Bible was written, such that it’s naïve to treat it as historical in a modern sense – but they could also have as many as three spiritual senses: the moral; the allegorical, which usually points to Jesus; and the anagogical, referring to our eternal destiny.

The effect of such nuanced readings of scripture was such that over the course of the Middle Ages scholars and theologians developed humane doctrines limiting the legitimate grounds for wars and controlling to some degree the way wars were fought, especially with an eye to how non-combatants should be respected. Unfortunately, these gains were cast aside following the invention of printing as widespread access to the Bible for those unfamiliar with nuanced ways of reading it ushered in one of the most violent ages Europe has ever known.

Justify

During the wars of religion, it was all too easy to justify the extermination of one’s foes on the basis that they were the Amalekites of the day; the butchery of women and children could easily be justified on the simple basis that “nits breed lice”.

The Biblical conquest narratives cast a long shadow. In his second inaugural address, for example, Thomas Jefferson explicitly appealed to God as having led his people to a promised land. Ideas such as these naturally led to the subsequent Manifest Destiny theory that America had been given to the European settlers, and that those already there could legitimately be swept away.

Such readings abuse the Bible, which should be read within the Church in light of reason and traditional understandings.  Crude literal readings are alien to Catholicism and relatively rare among other Christians; we should refrain from assuming that our Muslim brothers and sisters are incapable of similarly avoiding a brutal and dangerous fundamentalism.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 20 June 2013.

Falling at the First Hurdle

“The Catholic Church, aka the western church of the Latin rite,” Diarmaid MacCulloch begins an astonishingly dodgy piece in today’s Irish Times, “trades on tradition.”

It takes real effort for a respected historian to start an article with such an egregious factual error, but MacCulloch manages it, and then parades out a litany of dodgy statements that will no doubt be nodded along to by almost all the Irish Times’ declining readership, with hardly anyone bothering to check the claims of an esteemed Oxford academic, especially one they might have seen on the telly.

This isn’t the first time that MacCulloch’s described the Catholic Church in this clunky and inadequate way; in his 2009 book A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years he deployed this description as being, in his view, more neutral than descriptions which emphasise the papacy, as it acknowledges what MacCulloch deems “the equal historic status of the various Churches of Orthodoxy in eastern Europe and the Middle East [...] not to mention the various Churches of Asia and Africa which decided after the fifth century to ignore or repudiate the Chalcedonian Definition of the nature of Jesus Christ.”

Now.

Here’s the thing. Anybody who paid attention when John Paul died and Benedict became pope may have noticed a few lads knocking around at the funeral and investiture while wearing hats that, well, weren’t your typical common-or-garden bishops’ mitres. Like so:

These guys are the patriarchs and metropolitans of the Eastern Catholic Churches. The Catholic Church, contrary to Professor MacCulloch’s claims, is by no means simply “the western church of the Latin rite”; rather, it’s a network of dozens of churches, all unified by their association with the Pope, who acts as a physical and indeed personal point of unity for the Church. The simplest working definition of a Catholic is a Christian who is in communion with the bishop of Rome.

The biggest church by far within the Catholic Church is indeed the western church of the Latin rite – leaving aside the little matter of there being more than one Latin rite – but there are plenty of other smaller churches all in union with Rome, the most prominent of which being the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, the Maronite Catholic Church, and the Melkite Catholic Church.

These churches are among those being most heavily persecuted in the Middle East, and their members are just as much members of the Catholic Church as I am; indeed, friends of mine in America were received into the Melkite Church some years back, and I’ve been to a Melkite Mass in Aleppo. 

This is one of the reasons why it's inaccurate to refer to the Church as the Roman Catholic Church; it's not just a Roman or Latin Church. It's just what it's said on the tin since before Ignatius of Antioch used the word in 107 or thereabouts: Catholic. 

And no, it won't do to say that MacCulloch was right to equate the Catholic Church with the "western church of the Latin rite" because the other churches in the Church are so small as to hardly count. Or, at any rate, it won't do unless you don't think Benedict should have appointed two Eastern patriarchs as cardinals in his last consistory, making sure they'd have a say in the selection of his successor, and basically don't think they matter.

Mind, if that is a common view it could explain why we've done so little in recent years to help the beleaguered Christians of  Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere.

MacCulloch’s article begins by misrepresenting the Catholic Church. It doesn’t get better.

Beware the Idiots’ Lantern or They hide that information in books, you know

I’ll come back to MacCulloch’s dreadful article in a bit, but at this point it mightn’t be a bad idea to drag up an email I wrote a couple of years back when a devout and intelligent Anglican friend – a scientist rather than a historian – asked me what I’d thought of MacCulloch’s BBC series on Christianity’s history. It'll give you a sense of what where I'm coming from on this. When you approach a historian, listen to the bees buzzing in his bonnet before you listen to what he says, as E.H. Carr advised. That goes for me as much as for Diarmaid, of course.

“So, I got to pondering your question about Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity, and wondered whether I was being unfair. You looked a mite troubled when I said how poor I’d found it, and given that MacCulloch is a very highly respected scholar of the Reformation, I wondered whether my gut reaction had been wrong. With that in mind, and believing that you deserved a far better answer than I’d given you, I decided to give it another shot, so put my work aside last night and watched the first couple of episodes. Unfortunately, and I scrabbled down some notes as I watched just to keep a shape on my thoughts, I found it even worse than I’d remembered.

Obviously I’m coming at this from a different perspective than MacCulloch; he’s recognised as a brilliant scholar of the Reformation, and is an Anglican who was ordained as a deacon but declined -- or was declined -- priestly orders because of the Church of England’s stance on non-celibate homosexual clergy, him being openly gay himself. All of this affects his take on things, as far as I can see, giving his argument a serious bias. 

It could equally be argued that as a straight Catholic ancient historian, with some background in medieval studies, I have biases of my own, and this is true, but all I can really say on this is that it’s largely for historical reasons that I’m a Christian – and in particular a Catholic one – now, and I’d have been unlikely to have distorted and misinterpreted my evidence to give me the answer I wanted. I didn’t set out wanting to return to Catholicism, after all, and was an extremely reluctant revert!

There are things MacCulloch does very well. It’s admirable and important that he draws attention to highly ritualistic churches of the East, with their ancient roots, as we often forget them, though he glosses over how there are hardly any of them and how a large proportion of them have reunited with the Catholic Church over the past few hundred years. He’s elegantly concise in explaining the Arian and Nestorian controversies that the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon attempted to resolve, and I think is depressing on the ball in showing how the Church’s teaching on purgatory and indulgences became corrupted and turned into a scandalous industry in the late medieval period.

Other than that, though, I thought both programmes were very poor. I know from personal experience how television requires simplification, but there’s a point at which simplification – if carried out selectively enough – becomes falsification. And the programmes were blighted by such selectivity, with inconvenient evidence being ignored and details being cherrypicked to support a highly questionable thesis. Questionable? Yes, I’d say so, because I don’t think it works to present Christianity as a mere accident of history, which could very easily have been very different and far more Eastern in its appearance. 

That works perfectly well as a thesis if you assume God doesn’t exist or takes no interest in us, but I don’t think it works at all if you believe, as we do, that He does exist and loves us too. There’s a passage in C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves where he says that strictly speaking for a Christian there’s no such thing as chance. I wish I could find the quote, but having spent the past ten minutes flicking to no avail through my battered paperback edition, I’m coming up blank. Anyway, if Lewis is right, then it can’t be a mere fluke that the Church – in the broadest sense – takes the shape it has done through history.

One of the first things that bothered me about the programme was how little reference there was to the Bible in it, and how what references there were seemed skewed. This all struck me as seriously problematic, because I think it’s a very weird history of Christianity that doesn’t have the Bible in a fairly central place, not least because the Bible tells us how the Church began. I’d also argue that the story of how the Bible was written and slowly pulled together over the first Christian centuries is itself one of the most interesting and important parts of the Christian tale. 

That aside, though, it was only by leaving out a serious treatment of what the Bible is and says that he was able to launch into his main claim that Jerusalem was the natural centre of the Church and that it was only after the destruction of the Temple that the Church looked elsewhere for leadership, looking as much to east as to west until Constantine came along. As he sees it, nobody before the fourth century would have ever imagined that Rome could have become the headquarters of the Church.

This is poppycock by any definition. Well before the fall of the Temple the Church had looked west; look at Paul’s letters, and Peter’s presence in Rome, and at how Revelation features the Greek churches of Asia Minor. Were it not for the crowds at Pentecost, we’d have no Scriptural reason to ever believe there were any Christians in the east at all! Indeed, the fact that all the New Testament documents were written in Greek should be a clue as to which direction the Church was inclined to look! 

As for Rome itself, before 100AD a bishop of Rome wrote to the Corinthians to settle rows there, and just a few years later a bishop of Antioch who had been a disciple of John would write commandingly to numerous other eminent churches but say that he wouldn’t dare tell the church at Rome what to do. 

By the late second century the bishop of Lyons, formerly of Asia Minor, would write of how the Roman bishop stood in a direct line from Peter and Paul and should be regarded as a point of doctrinal unity for all Christians, and within twenty years of that the African Tertullian, having turned from the Church, sneered at the bishop of Rome as ‘the bishop of bishops’.  No, Rome’s position may have been copperfastened by Constantine in the early fourth century, but there’s no honest way of claiming that it wasn’t preeminent long before that. 

Against this he builds up a fantasy of what the Church might have been, inspired by the tiny relics that are the churches of the east. Glossing over what their ritualism might imply, and over their Eucharistic beliefs, he goes straight to what he sees as their core. These, he believes, are churches that have always listened, churches that have compromised with the societies in which they lived. Given his own personal history, I can see why he’d approve of churches that accommodate themselves to the values of the lands where they might be, but is this really what Christianity is about? 

I don’t believe Jesus ever presented his teaching to his disciples as a religion of compromise. He assured his disciples that they would be at odds with the world, and that the world would hate them as it had hated him. If the apostles had compromised, would they have been martyred? It would have been very easy for the Christians of the west to compromise with their Roman persecutors: all they had to do was to sacrifice to the emperor; they didn’t do it, and were persecuted accordingly. It was this, and really only this, that marked them out a distinct from all the other eastern cults that came to Rome and melted away in Rome’s religious hotpot. By refusing the compromise, they weathered the many storms of persecutions and eventually came out on top, unlike the eastern churches which compromised with their overlords and who now number just a few million souls.

It's painfully obvious that MacCulloch’s no more of a medieval historian than he is an ancient one, as glaring errors mark his comments on why Rome’s main church of St Paul is where it is, on when and how Britain was reevangelised, on Charlemagne, and on the Crusades. Most striking, though, was what he had to say about the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, where the Church clarified its language for describing what happens at the Eucharist. 

For him this whole idea of the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ was a new invention, based on pagan philosophy, when it was nothing of the sort. The language was new, sure, but the language was an attempt to grapple with a long held belief, a belief we can see in John 6 and 1 Corinthians 11, a belief which is very clearly expressed by Christian writers from the generation taught by the apostles, and a belief which is shared by the Orthodox and the churches of the east, none of which would have been inclined to adopt a new Catholic doctrine in the thirteenth century.

I may give the later episodes a shot later, because surely he must be better when he moves into his own specialist field. And I am rather tempted to read his big book on Christianity, which being a massive tome must be less likely to leave out inconvenient truths. It’s had very high praise from people who know what they're talking about, so it probably is worth looking at. Not yet, though.”

On this email, yes, I know parts of it may cause eyebrows to raise, but it was addressed to someone who knows that when I spoke of a Biblical focus in early Christianity I was speaking purely in terms of it as a historical text rather than an inspired one, who realises that the persecutions the early Church faced tended to be sporadic, localised, and erratic in application, and who’s well aware of my view that historians of the early Church should start from an essentially agnostic position.

As ever, there's a basic rule of historical analysis which says that when considering what somebody says, you need to pay attention to their target audience. Mine was a dear friend who's smarter than most and who shares certain preconceptions with me so I didn't need to spell everything out; Diarmaid's were ordinary BBC viewers and now are Irish Times readers.

And yes, I’ve since read his book, and found it a mixed bag. I'd definitely recommend it as well worth a read, but it certainly shouldn’t be the only general survey of Christianity anyone tackles.

Anyway, what of today’s article? Well, some of the points in it are basically addressed in my email to my friend, but to take a few others:

Peter and Rome

Rome’s prestige, MacCulloch says, “derives from possessing the tomb of the Apostle Peter, who probably never visited the city. This Palestinian fisherman, who would have spoken a version of Aramaic, plus enough street-Greek to make himself understood in the forum, may have been illiterate in either language, but he is represented among the books of the Bible by two elegantly-penned Greek letters written by two different authors – he himself was neither of them.”

Now, I’m quite happy to buy that Peter authored neither letter traditionally attributed to him, that being a well-argued scholarly orthodoxy, but it’s worth noting a couple of points about 1 Peter in particular. 1 Peter was clearly known to several early second-century authors, such that it must have been written before the end of the first century, with scholars tending to date it around 80, and it ends with the farewell:

“She who is at Babylon, and is likewise chosen, sends you greetings; and so does my son Mark. Greet one another with the kiss of love. Peace to all of you that are in Christ.”

Nobody believes Peter actually wrote this from the distant backwater that was first-century Babylon; rather, modern scholars are almost unanimous in holding that, as in Revelation, ‘Babylon’ is here a codeword for Rome. The question then is why, within a generation of Peter’s death and the lifetimes of many people who knew him, anybody who would have written a letter associating Peter with Rome had he not even visited the city.

Indeed, why would Clement, a Roman bishop generally thought to have written around 97, have in his Letter to the Corinthians held up Peter and Paul as the martyrs to whom the Corinthian Christians should look for example, were they not especially cherished by the Roman Church? Why would they in particular have been so cherished? One might even wonder Rome’s last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate, claimed in the mid-fourth century that Rome’s Christians used to gather to worship at the tombs of Peter and Paul even within the lifetime of the last apostle.

MacCulloch accepts even in the article that Rome holds the tomb of Peter, speculating in his book that Peter’s shrine was built in the 160s to mark the centenary of Peter’s death, but this avoids pointers that Peter was especially venerated in Rome rather earlier than that, and also how early second-century texts indicate that Rome had a pre-eminence of some sort within the lifetimes of some of those who’d been taught by the apostles. Clement, for instance, sees it as his Roman duty to direct the Church at Corinth in how it should conduct its affairs, and writing around 107, Ignatius of Antioch balks at exhorting Rome in the way he exhorted other early churches, saying “I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you.”

But MacCulloch knows all of this, which is why not once in his book does he go further than to say that it is unclear whether Peter ever played the role of bishop in Rome, even if he did die there, about which he comments: “the suspicion does linger that the story of Peter’s martyrdom there was a fiction based retrospectively on the undoubted death of Paul in the city.”

Which, I think we can all agree, is far cry from claiming that Peter probably never even visited Rome.

An Italian Prince?

Until the French Revolution, MacCulloch proclaims, the Pope was just one Italian prince among others.

Well, there’s some truth in that: certainly, I think we’d all agree that for much of papal history, the fourteenth century obviously aside, popes tended to be Italian princes; it is, however, ludicrous to say that they were just that, on a par with other Italian princes.

There were not many Italian princes whose definition of the dual nature of Christ would have been accepted by the gathered bishops of the Church at Chalcedon in 451, after all, but Leo I’s definition was supposedly greeted there with the great cry “Peter has spoken thus through Leo!” It's safe to say that few Italian princes in 595 would have commissioned Augustine of Canterbury to evangelise the English, as Gregory I did.

It would have meant nothing for an Italian prince to crown Charlemagne as Emperor, but it meant a lot for Leo III to do so on Christmas day in 800, and I think there’s no need to ask whether any other Italian prince could have stood at Clermont in 1095 and successfully called, as Urban II did, for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem to liberate the city and its pilgrim routes and to help the beleaguered Byzantines.

Which Italian princes would have been capable of transforming Christian Europe – and the wider world – through formally establishing such orders as the Dominicans and the Franciscans, as Honorius III was to do in 1216 and 1223, or the Jesuits, as Paul III would do in 1540? No other Italian prince had his realm become for centuries the great prize of European politics, with France so controlling the fourteenth-century papacy that the Templars were suppressed by Clement V in 1312 at the behest of a French king, with the papacy being based in Avignon for almost eighty years.

Yes, the Renaissance popes embroiled themselves as deeply as could be in the power politics of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, but again we have to ask ourselves whether they were simply Italian princes or whether they were something more than that. Again, all we have to do is look to Paul III, who for all his personal failings nonetheless convened the Council of Trent in 1545, after nine years of trying; in organising Trent and supporting the Jesuits, Paul III launched the Catholic Reformation and shaped Catholicism for the next four hundred years. I cannot see how a capable or honest historian could ever dismiss him as a mere Italian prince.

Whatever one might think of the actions of the popes prior to the French Revolution, I cannot see how any historian could dismiss said popes as mere Italian princes. They may have been that, but they certainly weren't just that. They had a reach, for good or ill, that no other Italian prince could even have dreamed of.

As for the Revolution?

MacCulloch claims that the French Revolution transformed the papacy by sweeping aside innumerable Catholic monarchs, prince-bishops, and other fiercely independent local jurisdictions in cathedrals and the like, leaving the papacy as the last piece on the board, enabling it to remodel the Church across the world, to eliminate local independence in Church government, initiative, and scholarship.

Yet again, there’s some truth to this, but MacCulloch’s description of a monarchical papacy owes rather more to the deep-seated Protestant paranoia that even now is latent among so many English – and, sadly, an increasing number of ill-informed Irish – than it does basic reason or cold historical fact.

Regardless of the fantasies of the ultramontanists, the papacy has never been monarchical in the way MacCulloch imagines; indeed, it could not have been. How, in an age before telecommunications and flight, could the papacy really have controlled matters in the local churches of Ireland, Paraguay, California, and the Philippines? 

Even now Rome’s power is profoundly limited in this respect: scarcely more than 2,000 people are employed in the Vatican – of whom only about half work, quipped John XXIII – and the budget of the Holy See is roughly half that of UCD or a decent-sized English university. The Catholic Church is, and has always been, profoundly decentralised.

It could hardly have been otherwise.

Bits and Pieces

The tail end of MacCulloch’s article is no better than the body of it.

The variety of Catholicism that predominated in Ireland until recently he sees simply as the creation of the Vatican; not for him the possibility that it might have been tainted by French Jansenism during the penal years, let alone that it was shaped above all by the Victorian values that marked the era in which it rose to dominate Irish public life; there is something to be said, after all, for Vincent Twomey's contention, in The End of Irish Catholicism?, that Irish Catholicism was rather out of step with the varities of Catholicism found on mainland Europe.

Benedict he describes as an arch-traditionalist, which really only suggests that he’s neither encountered any traditional Catholics nor engaged with any of Benedict’s writings. Did Benedict really say this week that nothing much happened in the Second Vatican Council? No, Diarmaid, he didn’t. He said something rather different and a damn sight more profound than that. Even our earliest account of his talk with Rome’s clergy made that clear.

It looks to me as though MacCulloch’s strolled into the trap John Allen so prudently warned of in the one very good section in his otherwise rather ropey 2000 book Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of the Faith:

“Because Ratzinger is a polarising figure, reaction to him is often uncritical, driven more by emotion and instinct than sober reflection. Progressives do not read his books, they disregard his public statements, and they assume every position he takes is based on power politics; conservatives revere most of what he says as holy writ, often spouting it mindlessly without penetrating to the principle or value he sees at stake. Neither response takes Ratzinger seriously.”

MacCulloch talks of a need for a multi-polar Catholicism, unaware of how that is, in so many ways, a reality already. John Allen puts it well, pointing out that the Church may be “top down on doctrine”, but is “bottom up on everything else”. Administration, finances, personal, and management are all run locally, bishops are basically popes in their own dioceses for most purposes, and among the most dynamic aspects of modern Catholicism are such new lay movements as the Focolares, Communion and Liberation, the Neocatechumenate, and L’Arche, all of which are basically grassroots phenomena.

Having displayed a shocking incomprehension of historical and modern Catholicism and the person and outlook of the current pope, MacCulloch wraps up with an ode to historians.

“But history has rich resources to offer: showing how they did things in the past, so Catholics can find sensible solutions for what to do next. In the middle of what any fool can see is a deep crisis in Catholic Church authority, let historians ride to the rescue.”

There’ll not be much point in our riding to the rescue unless we’re on the right kind of horses, wielding the right kind of weapons, carrying the right kind of ammunition, and clued in on the nature of our allies and our opponents.

Know yourself and know your enemy, and all that.

Trains, and using your energy wisely...

We got a great game a gift from my eldest sister, the Christmas before last at home. Called Ticket to Ride: Europe, it was kind of a hybrid between Risk and card games like Poker. The basic idea is that you’ve a map of Europe with train routes marked on it, and that you’ve to build tracks along routes, connecting cities and facilitating journeys as you go.

You keep a running score through the game, based on the tracks you’ve built between individual cities, but your running score may not reflect your eventual score in any meaningful way, as you gain bonus points for journeys you’ve facilitated across the map, and nobody else knows what journeys you’ve been tasked with fulfilling.

It might not sound like fun, but it really is; I can’t think of a game we’ve played as a family that we’ve all enjoyed quite so much. It can be instructive too.

It’s a bit like the cheese, but that’s another story...

The last game we played over the Christmas just gone had a very different pattern to previous ones. Hitherto, along with building tracks and trying to develop our own secret journeys, we also tried to work out what our opponents’ objectives were, and sought to frustrate them, to some degree anyway. But in our final game, we all took a fresh approach, not worrying about what everyone was doing and just concentrating on what our own special jobs were.

My younger sister won by a huge amount, comfortably getting the highest score we’d ever managed. I came second, some way behind her but still, I think, with the second-highest score we’d seen in our games. Those behind me had achieved what would have been winning scores in plenty of other games.

And it left me thinking, reminding me of other things, and the more it’s sat with me, the less inclined I’ve been to get involved with spats online or elsewhere. Why bother arguing with people when they’re wrong? People so rarely change their minds, after all; time and again I’ve argued with people on issues of politics or religion or whatever and produced solid facts that refuted what they were saying only to see them days or weeks later spilling out the same old nonsense. And, to be fair, I probably do the same myself.

Better, surely, at least with people who don’t engage honestly, and who aren’t willing to listen, just to shake the dust off your feet and do something more productive. To build your own train tracks, regardless of their nonsense. And sometimes, in building those train tracks, you’ll refute the nonsense anyway. It’s a matter of just sticking to your job, and not fretting about other people’s.

I’m getting better at this, but have a long way to go. I still cut in too often, and respond to readily, and the other night, cranky from tiredness and a lack of tea, I was pretty snide with someone when I started off; and, of course, predictably, when I cut in this way I change nobody’s mind. Better to listen, and to write my blogs, and to build my train tracks.

The Irish Times isn’t the only paper that doesn’t refuse ink

Sometimes, though, it’s hard. Last night, for instance, I saw an article by the Irish columnist Colette Browne that left me rolling my eyes back so far I almost sprained them. A litany of ill-informed clichés entitled ‘It’ll be a miracle if a new pope ushers in real change in a decaying Church,’ I sent links to a couple of friends, asking what they thought.

‘I’d love to know how many errors, misconceptions, and falsehoods you could count in Colette Browne’s piece today,’ I said to one.

‘I ran out of fingers,’ he replied a few minutes later. And he trained as an actuary.

The headline’s the first problem, of course, as the Church is far from decaying: numbers of Catholics of all sorts are growing globally, with numbers of priests and seminarians keeping pace. It’s only here, in the western bit of the Northern Hemisphere, among people who Jonathan Haidt calls WEIRD, that the Church is in decline. Still, Colette can hardly be blamed for the headline, although she does point to it when she talks of the “increasing marginalisation of religion in society” and speaks of the Church as “decaying institution”.

It’s true to say that religion is being increasingly marginalised here in the west, but it’s profoundly untrue to suggest that it’s being marginalised globally; that distinction really matters, unless by ‘society’ what Colette means is ‘the bit of the world that I think counts’.

Still, Colette raises an important when she describes as incomprehensible the behaviour of “à la carte Catholics determined to remain part of an organisation with core teachings many find offensive or, frankly, ridiculous.” She’s not alone in that view, though I think she misses how it’s long been a staple of sociology and anthropology that religion is less about what we believe that what we do, who we are, and how we see ourselves in our society. We rarely reject our families, for instance, even when we disagree with our parents. And often, as we grow up, we realise how often our parents were right.

It shouldn’t really be that surprising that the sceptical, the disaffected, and the apathetic nonetheless believe themselves to be, in some sense, Catholic, and will tell people they are such. Doubt and difficulty are a normal aspect of faith, in any case; the then Father Joseph Ratzinger said something rather memorable to that effect in his 1968 Introduction to Christianity, and Timothy Radcliffe had it spot on in last year’s Take the Plunge, writing:

“Christianity will flourish in the twenty-first century if we grasp that the Church is above all the community of the baptized... the baptized are members of the Church, even if they keep far away. Even if we are filled with doubts and hesitations, we share dimly in the faith of the Church so long as we do not explicitly reject it. The doubters, the questioners, even the lapsed, belong in the spacious household of faith.”

Trope Central

Onward Colette blunders, brandishing the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1986 letter On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons as evidence of the Church’s deep antipathy towards gay people, but without showing a shred of understanding of who the document was for – something utterly necessary even for beginning to understand it. Michael Merrick, a blogger rather more thoughtful than most, nailed the media’s perverse and clueless fascination with this letter in a post he wrote the other day:

“The comment of the Pope on an ‘intrinsic moral evil’ comes from a single letter, written in 1986, immediately after re-affirming that the inclination is not a sin. To be properly understood the terms used, ‘evil’ and ‘disorder’, must be grasped in their theological context, not accessed simply through colloquial understandings of those terms – as anybody who has ever tried to teach the privatio boni argument to children will understand.”

The letter, as Michael points out, was written for bishops in the language of bishops and presumed the advanced theological knowledge – and indeed the teleological worldview – that ought to be typical of the Church’s local leadership. Their job – and I'm not saying they did it well – would have been to apply and explain that letter in everyday pastoral language. It’s at best foolish and at worst downright disingenuous to quote from it as though its meaning is clear in an everyday context.

And, of course, not a word is said about how gay people must be accepted with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity”, just as must everyone else: we are all made in God’s image, after all, and called towards union with him. No, instead we get another quote out of context and then this bizarre pseudo-paraphrase, which Colette casts as a choice between abstinence and damnation: “In short, you can spend your life as a self-hating homosexual, tormented with the knowledge that God instilled in you such disgusting urges as a sort of bizarre penance, or you can simply ignore all of that guff and get on with your life.”

This is merely how Colette reads Church teaching; it bears no resemblance to what the Church teaches, not least because the Church does not teach that God installs homosexual passions in people. He may well play a part in this – most sensible people think sexuality is due to a combination of nature and nurture – but we just don’t know, and the Catechism is clear that “its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained”.

So we can forget the notion that same-sex attraction is installed in gay people as a “bizarre penance”, so, and about the Church wanting gay people to be “self-hating homosexuals”. Rot. If the Church says that gay people – like everyone else – are called to chastity, it does so not as an imposition, but as an invitation to choose for themselves how they want to live, and to what ends. Suffice to say that the motivation for this – at least nowadays, in the modern Church – s not fear or hatred or self-loathing; it’s love, hope, and faith, and the acceptance of such an invitation is made in a spirit of profound freedom. You won't find many adults nowadays who are forced to say they're Catholic. People don't have to believe unless they want to.

A Battery of Balderdash

“The stark choice between abstinence and damnation is something of a recurring theme when it comes to much Church teaching,” Colette says, except it’s not, and is only ever believed to be by people who don’t understand what the Church teaches about salvation and damnation.

“Couples wishing to plan their families were told to roll the dice and rely on the rhythm method,” she says, talking about Humanae Vitae, except they’re told nothing of the sort.

The only softening on the Church’s line on contraception, Colette claims, was “an admission by Pope Benedict, two years ago, that the use of contraceptives was acceptable ‘in certain cases’, for example by gay prostitutes to reduce the risk of HIV.”

And this, as you’ll have guessed, wasn’t true either, as all he’d said – in a personal capacity – was that it was conceivable that there could be circumstances where the use of condoms might represent a step in the right direction for somebody. He never said they would be acceptable, or anything of the sort; just a possible indication of a moral awakening. It was never the big deal people made it out to be.

The statement that “it goes without saying that those unmarried people living in sin — with contraceptives or without — are hopeless cases whose eternal reward will likely be a fiery affair,” is yet another of those tropes typical among us generations of Irish Catholics who were deprived a proper religious education in our teenage years; when I was younger and thicker I too assumed this was the Church’s line. The reality is rather more nuanced, as you’d expect from a Church where a cardinal could not long ago have drily observed that we’re obliged to believe that Hell exists; we’re not obliged to believe there’s anybody there. All else aside, it takes real effort to sin mortally.

“The Church is happy to see women barefoot and pregnant” Colette goes on, which is an odd statement to make of an organisation that runs more than 135,000 schools around the world, thus almost certainly empowering more women than any organisation has ever done in history. They’re nearly all free, and they cater to the poorest of the poor all across the world.

People on the ground in places like Africa and south-east Asia will testify to how the Church is transforming women’s lives for the better across the world. It’s the second-largest relief agency and the second-largest development agency in the world, and helps improve women’s lives everywhere – and does it on their terms, operating in accord with local knowledge and local culture, rather than imposing things upon them with a “Europe knows best” attitude. But maybe they don't matter.

What did Bill Hicks say about women priests?

And then we have a wonderful section on women priests where Colette declares that in the eyes of the Church, “a penis is the most important qualification when becoming a priest”, before recognising, in however cock-eyed a way, that the reason the Church believes only men can be priests is a mystery rooted in Christ and his selection of the apostles.

So far so goodish, but then she goes on to say that in 2010 the Vatican decreed the ordination of women to be a crime on a par with child abuse, except – as you’ll by now expect – it didn’t really say that at all. For a more intelligent, more informed, and flat-out fairer take on this you might look at Andrew Brown’s observation in the Guardian that, although the new 2010 norms were a PR disaster, it’s easy to see why they were published as they were:

“Obviously, if what you are trying to do is to maintain a functioning priesthood, then ritual or sacramental crimes are just as capable of destroying it as moral ones. So from that perspective it is makes perfect sense to have a list which combines the two, and I don’t think (though I may be wrong) that any official Catholic would maintain that assisting at the ordination service of a woman is morally comparable to child abuse. It’s just that both are absolutely incompatible with the Catholic priesthood.”

A bit of a backtrack then to Christ only having appointed men as apostles, in order to issue this howler: “Strangely, the fact that there were no female apostles is reason enough to debar women from ever being ordained, but the fact that the same apostles were married is not seen as convincing evidence that priests should also be allowed to marry.”

Now, you’d think to write anything on the Church with any pretense at authority you’d want to be able to distinguish between doctrine and discipline, but evidently not. Here’s the thing: priests can marry. Or, rather, priests can be married, and the Church has always recognised this: that’s why Anglican priests can become Catholic ones, even if they’re married, and why Orthodox priests, even if married, are always recognised as full priests. And I think the priests of the Catholic churches of the east are often married too. That Latin rite priests can’t marry is a mere matter of discipline – discipline with serious scriptural and traditional foundations, but discipline for all that. The Church could allow all priests to marry tomorrow.

Experts found no evidence? Of course they didn’t, Colette, of course they didn't...

And then, as though it weren’t bad enough, Colette comes out with this:

“Meanwhile, a recent discovery by a Harvard professor, who has found a scrap of 4th-century papyrus that indicates early Christians believed that Jesus was married and his wife was an apostle, could prove most inconvenient for the Church.

While the scrap of papyrus is still undergoing tests to prove its authenticity, a number of preliminary examinations by experts have found no evidence of any forgery — a minor detail that has not stopped the Vatican from claiming that it is a dud in order to avoid any awkward questions.”

Now, as a certain former newspaperman used to say, “comment is free, but facts are sacred”. It really wouldn’t have been hard for Colette to have checked this. The so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife was one of those Dan Brown moments, where a Harvard scholar got excited by a papyrus of unknown provenance and arranged for her findings to be published in the January issue of the Harvard Theological Review, before the publication was shelved to allow for further study.

Several academics had taken issue with it – and the dubious manner of its being publicised – but the crucial factor in its shelved seems to have been its demolition by Durham’s Frances Watson, who showed that the so-called Gospel was stitched together from phrases in the extant Gospel of Thomas, with one word in particular showing a distinctive tell-tale line break. How on earth could Colette have missed this dismantling of the inconvenient text? It’s not as if it wasn’t reported in the mainstream media, after all.

And then, nicely, Colette wraps up by talking about the inexorable decline of the Church in the west; when it comes to admitting that that’s all you’ve been interested in, better late than never, I suppose.

Thing is, I could do this sort of thing dozens of times a day. Does it do any good? I doubt it. Better just to stick to find out the facts, be honest, and trust that the truth will out eventually.

Time to start building more train tracks.

Remembering Again

“Such was their burial of Hektor, breaker of horses.”

So, after the description of the funeral games in honour of Troy's greatest son, ends the Iliad, which began by reflecting on the carnage wrought by the wrath of the Greek forces' mightiest hero:

“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which puts pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.”

If the Iliad still speaks to us after almost three thousand years it does so not merely because it is beautiful, and not merely because life is -- among other things -- a battle in which how we conduct ourselves in the short time we have here matters profoundly; rather, it centres on our deep and abiding need to make sense of war.

The first step in doing so, as a rule, lies in commemorating our dead, which is probably why it felt so cathartic last year when Britain's Queen Elizabeth II stood in silence in Ireland’s Garden of Remembrance, recognising all those who died fighting against Britain in the cause of Irish freedom, be that in 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, 1916, or the War of Independence. 

Here lie the dead of Marathon, as commemorated by the 192 horsemen of the Parthenon frieze.

As long as we've fought we have commemorated our dead, often giving our warrior dead special honours in death. Stephen Pinker argues that the high proportion of prehistoric skeletons showing evidence of violent trauma shows that we've become less violent over the millennia, but he glosses over how those who've died in battle are often specially honoured in death, such that their graves are more easily found than those of people who've died in more mundane ways. If anything, I suspect we've become far more violent over the centuries. 

It's not less violent to kill someone with guided drones than with a knife; it's just tidier. For us. 

As a war historian, and an Irishman who happens to be half-English and has lived in England for most of the last decade, I've long found Remembrance Sunday deeply problematic. Indeed, the first couple of weeks of November are always tricky for me. All Saints and All Souls are feasts of remembrance to which I unambiguously ally myself, but I dislike Guy Fawkes Night, and I'm always uncomfortable about Remembrance Sunday, though I think it important that Britain's war dead be properly honoured and that her veterans be properly supported; even now far too many of Britain's homeless are people who once served their country in arms.

I've had no shortage of family members who've fought in Britain's wars, whether in the Chitral Expedition, the Boer War, the Great War, World War II, or even Northern Ireland, but it wasn't until 2006 that I first wore a poppy, pinned onto my coat by a then recent ex-girlfriend one windy day in Liverpool as she managed the trick of firmly murmuring "I feel you should wear this". 

The first challenge is how to honour the dead without glorifying the wars in which they fought. We have to be honest and admit that plenty of Britain's wars have been far from honourable. The aforementioned Boer War, for instance, was a shameless land grab, and is hardly unique among Britain's wars in meriting such a description. I think most of us feel uncomfortable about the many wars Britain fought to deny people their independence, wherever they might be. And then, of course, there's the little matter of the invasion of Iraq nine years ago, justified at the time by the transparent fiction that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which he was refusing to surrender. 

The German cemetery at Langemarck. Because thousands of German children marched to war in 1914 too.

We can't deny this. An honest patriot cannot celebrate his countrymen’s heroism unless he also recognises their sins. "My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case," as G.K. Chesterton put it, "It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"

Of course, I don’t think we can or should blame soldiers for having fought in bad wars. War is often the continuation of political intercourse with the intermixing of other means, and as Kevin O’Higgins put it when putting down the Irish army mutiny in 1924, “those who take the pay and wear the uniform of the state, be they soldiers or police, must be non-political servants of the state.”

This has a correlative, however; if we’re not to shame soldiers for having had the misfortune to serve in bad wars, neither should we laud them for having been lucky enough to serve in good ones. We need to be careful too when indulging in the rhetoric of the ‘greatest generations’, not least because even the noblest of wars almost invariably encompass a multitude of sins. 

I firmly believe that we should honour our dead, and mourn those lives so brutally lost, and support those who've come home physically maimed or mentally scarred; I also believe that in doing so we should not forget how many wars were driven by cynicism, greed, and pride, and how there has been no shortage of soldiers over the years who've shamed the uniforms they wore. 

Remembrance Sunday, like I said, is complicated.

The second big problem, of course, lies in the fact that as the soldiers of the Great War have died, and those of the Second World War have grown fewer and more frail by the year, that Remembrance Sunday’s purpose seems to have changed, such that it’s in danger of excusing and even glorifying the shoddier wars of yesterday, today, and even tomorrow.

Much of the popularity of Harry Patch, Britain’s last surviving veteran of the First World War, was down to his impatience with those who tended to romanticise wars, and his bitter recognition that war was nothing more than ‘organised murder’. 

For him, Remembrance Sunday was ‘just showbusiness’.

When the reality represented by the likes of Harry Patch no longer exists to remind us of  soldiers hurrying to safety past their screaming, moaning, dying comrades, it’s easy for people to exploit their legends. There’s a simple level at which Remembrance Sunday is about recruiting as much as anything else – I was shocked a couple of years back when the build-up to coverage included an interview with a young Salford teenager  who was saying that he felt it was his duty to serve and that he’d always wanted to be a soldier. 

Of course, it’s always been like this at some level. The 1915 McCrae poem about the poppies of Flanders fields ends with an exhortation to fight on, and to scorn negotiated peace as a betrayal of those who have fallen:

“Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”

People fought on for three more years, and millions more died in the most horrible and pointless of ways. It’s hardly surprising that Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, damns this final verse as a stupid and even vicious propaganda argument.

Would a negotiated peace in 1916, preventing the Somme, really have betrayed the dead of Gallipoli?

We honour the dead, but we use them too, enlisting them as recruiting officers, summoning our children to serve and die in emulation of them. There’s nothing new in this. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek historian Polybius described how Roman funerals were used in just this way:

“By this constant renewal of the good report of brave men, the name of those who have performed any noble deed is made immortal, and the renown of those who have served their country well becomes a matter of common knowledge and a heritage for posterity. But the most important consequence of the ceremony is that it inspires young men to endure the extremes of suffering for the common good in the hope of winning the glory that waits upon the brave.”

It’s not just Remembrance Sunday that stirs these confused feelings within me. Being a military historian invites all sorts of questions, not least because time and again I’ve had to explain to people that being interested in war doesn’t entail liking it, and I’ve wrestled with these issues while visiting military cemeteries in Ireland and Belgium, Turkey and Greece, and as I’ve walked battlefields as diverse as Marathon, Thermopylae, Trasimene, Cannae, Hastings, Ypres, and Gallipoli.

How do we honour the dead without glorifying the wars? How do we honour them without luring thousands more to early graves? How do we make sense of war at all?

I have no idea. The more I learn, the less I feel I know.

Choose Life. Choose Military History. Choose Counting.

A hundred or so years ago, the Prussian Hans Delbrück transformed military history when he sought to show how warfare and politics mirrored each other as social activities. Using his method of Sachkritik, he analysed historical battle narratives in the light of simple physical realities and what was known to have happened in other battles.

I used to enjoy explaining this to my students back in the day. Military history, as a lecturer on the American Civil War had pointed out to me once upon a time, doesn’t make much sense without maps, and as I said to my students, armies aren’t just dots on those maps. They take up space. People just tend not to realise how much space crowds can take up...

The figures of Herodotus, so-called father of history, had long been viewed askance by historians, but it took Delbrück to show just how ropey those figures were. Herodotus claimed that the Persian army that invaded Greece in 480 BC was made up of 2,641,610 soldiers, and an equal number of servants and camp followers. As an exercise, Delbrück imagined how much space such an army would have taken up had it followed the Prussian marching system:

“According to the German order of march, an army corps, that is 30,000 men, occupies about three miles, without the baggage trains. The marching column of the Persians would therefore have been 420 miles long and as the first troops were arriving before Thermopylae the last would have just marched out of Susa on the other side of the Tigris.”

These were German miles rather than the ones we know, and the Persians obviously didn’t march in the Prussian fashion, but still, Delbrück had made his point: Herodotus’ figures were ludicrous.

Delbrück didn’t stop at the soft target that was Herodotus, either; he went on to explain the impossibility of Atilla the Hun easily moving an army larger than the Prussian one of 1870 across an area that at that time lacked decent roads, and to show through issues of food supply how Julius Caesar’s figures for his Gallic opponents had been grotesquely inflated to superb propagandist effect.

When I was doing my master’s degree on Hannibal’s victory at Cannae, I spent an immense amount of time grinding numbers in a way that numbed the brains of my friends when I talked of them. Marching rates. Space per man. Unit depth. Legion width. Quantity of vegetation needed daily to feed an elephant. Close order formation. Open order formation. Manipular replacement. Javelin range. It went on.

All of this stuff may have sounded boring, but it was needed as the nuts and bolts of assembling a thesis on what exactly happened in the biggest and bloodiest battle the Romans ever fought and lost.

Who said this stuff isn't useful?

I’ve moved into a more conceptual area of ancient and military history now, but the whole battle reconstruction thing has given me some habits. On Saturday they came into play. There was a march in Dublin on Saturday, billed as a ‘March for Choice’, with an expected attendance, according to the organisers, of thousands from across the island of Ireland.

It turned out to be rather a damp squib, with a few hundred gathering on O’Connell Street, and accumulating numbers as they made their way over the Liffey towards Kildare Street and round to Merrion Square.

Shortly afterwards, under the headline declaring “Low turnout for pro-choice rally”, the Irish Times reported on the march as follows:

“Less than 1,000 people joined the ‘March for Choice’ in Dublin this afternoon in what had been billed as the first major mobilisation of pro-choice activists ahead of the publication of a major report examining how the Government should deal with the abortion issue.

Organisers had predicted that several thousand people would gather for the march which left the Spire in O’Connell Street at 2pm ahead of a gathering at Merrion Square.

Those behind the march claimed that between in excess of 2,000 people took part howver gardai at the Store St station said that closer to 500 people had showed up for the event.”

This report was at odds with what people associated with the march claimed; the Labour senator Ivana Bacik said on Twitter that 5,000 had attended, and one person who’d acted as a steward on the march wrote on Facebook that she had personally counted 3,200 people, with a Garda she spoke to having said that between 3,000 and 5,000 people had marched. Sinéad Redmond, one of the march organisers, rejoiced at how happy the 5- to 7,000 who she said had marched were.

Graham Linehan, ever the sentinel of the internet, declared on Twitter that “The Irish Times is a ****ing rag”, subsequently saying that Irish Times’ reporting was either prolife propaganda or sheer laziness; not for one moment does he appear to have entertained the possibility that it might have been right.

People connected with the march began appealing for pressure to be put on the Irish Times to change its story, and eventually it did so.

Why exactly did you change your story?

You can read the story of what happened elsewhere, but what’s significant is that after vocal public criticism of the paper, the Irish Times sought a different Garda source to that it had originally contacted and under the headline “Thousands attend pro-choice rally” declared:

“Several thousand people joined the ‘March for Choice’ in Dublin this afternoon in what was billed as the first major mobilisation of pro-choice activists ahead of the publication of a major report examining how the Government should deal with the abortion issue. Organisers had predicted that several thousand people would gather for the march which left the Spire in O’Connell Street at 2pm ahead of a gathering at Merrion Square. Several hundred people gathered for the start of the march, with their numbers swelling by the time it reached St Stephen’s Green.”

The final version of the story was much the same, save for apparently giving the lie to the headline:

“Their numbers swelled to several thousand by the time it reached St Stephen’s Green. The Garda Press Office, which earlier put the number of attendees at about 500, said this evening there ‘may have been in excess of 2,000 people involved’”.

So after repeated phone calls, the Guards shifted from saying that around 500 were involved to a claim that perhaps more than 2,000 participated, and after criticism from irate marchers and their sympathisers, the Irish Times went from reporting that fewer than 1,000 took part to claiming that several thousand marched.

The Journal reports that the Guards said about 2,500 were in the march. Even if true, this hardly merits the adjective ‘several’ the Irish Times is now talking of, it has to be said.

You see, it's all about the Personal Transferable Skills

Now, let’s think about numbers. I know, whether it’s right or not to end the life of another human being isn’t a numbers game, but we’re solely talking about reporting and how numbers can be used to propagandist effect.

As people argued on Saturday afternoon about the numbers attending, a common cry on the pro-choice side was to look at the video, as the video showed that there were thousands of people on the march, not just a few hundred.

It’s worth looking at the video, shot by Darragh Doyle just by the Shelbourne Hotel. It’s difficult to estimate numbers on it from a casual glance, as Darragh pans back and forth several times, giving the impression of a vast throng of people. The video lasts for just over two and a half minutes, and for the first minute and a half the marchers can be heard eagerly chanting – those bringing up the rear just amble along chatting to each other.

With some judicious use of the pause button, it’s easy enough to make a stab at numbers here, even with the extravagant camera movements. Easy, that is, unless you just stare and think “there are loads of people... there must be thousands!”

The marchers were marching in informal rows four, five, six, eight, maybe even ten across on the odd occasion. Most rows, for want of a better word, seem six or seven across. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the typical row is eight across, and then count the people who go by the camera, as though each is the end of a row. You won’t get an accurate figure, but you’ll get a ballpark one, something to give you a fairly decent feel for the size of the crowd. I tried it on Saturday, and made it about eighty rows, before what looked like an uncountable mass at the end. 640 marchers, plus maybe another 150, so. 790 people, allowing for error. How much error could I have made, though?  Could I have undercounted by more than one or two hundred?

I tried again earlier today with a different approach, thinking about how much space those marchers seemed to have covered, and bearing in mind how a friend on the march has said on Saturday that the marchers had been almost the full length of Kildare Street; he reckoned there’d been about 1,500 or so there.

Looking at Google Maps, it seems Kildare Street is about a thousand feet long, so let’s assume my friend was right – allowing for slight exaggeration – and that the march occupied more than three quarters of the street. 800 feet of marchers, so, on a street about 30 feet wide.  This would probably provide room for 960 Roman soldiers, give or take; more could have been fitted in, but only in a very packed formation. I could do the sums, but it’d take us off topic by some way.

The people in the march weren’t packed together. Their deployment, for want of a better word, was nothing like a Roman army in close formation. The rows, however wide, were fairly close together at the start, maybe three feet or so apart, but by the end the marchers – dawdlers in many cases – were well spaced out, some pushing buggies or even cycling! There was no comparison between the relatively close front rows, with their chanting and shouting, and the stragglers at the back, strolling along and having a natter. Given this disparity, it’d have been reckless to have counted, say, all the rows in the front hundred feet of the march and then multiplied it out, as is a fairly standard way of calculating the numbers involved in a march.

Now, in case you’re wondering, I was a teenage Commerce student, doing statistics and economics etc before changing subject and doing something more challenging the following academic year, so am reasonably clued in to how statistics work. I know that when moving crowds need to be counted, professional crowd counters use assigned counters to tally people passing points in given time periods and calculate upwards accordingly – indeed, I’ve had friends who’ve done this – but for a crowd this small that kind of thing is neither worthwhile nor necessary.

After all, during the two-and-a-half minutes’ filming, Darragh saw most of the march go past him; if he’d hung on for another minute, maybe 90 seconds, he’d have seen the last stragglers dawdle by. Four minutes. That’s not worth sampling.

It’s clear that there were no such counters present, in any case, and we don’t have high quality aerial footage of the march. We just have several foreshortened shots of the crowd, statements from marchers who – vested interests aside – were in the march and thus not really in a position to observe and count the marchers, widely differing guesses from the Guards, and a YouTube video that doesn’t even try to convey the march size in an accurate sense.

As such, flawed though it is, we can really only go by the YouTube video which shows that the marchers, even in the front ranks, were generally rather more than an arm’s width apart, and that towards the rear of the march the crowd density was a lot thinner than in the van. This wasn’t even a reasonably compact crowd.

Given how the spacing seemed to work, I couldn’t help but think the Roman figure gave a useful guideline for an educated guess. It looked about right, recognising just how spread out the march was. And it wasn’t that far off my first estimate. Again, it was only a ballpark figure, but it was one that suggested that the march probably wasn’t more than a thousand strong.

Or Counting. That’s good too. I learned that in primary school. 

Still, as discussion about this carried on today, I gritted my teeth and decided to count people in the video as best I could. Given the relatively small size of the crowd, this was going to be a manageable task, even if it was bound to be a tedious one.

I worked through the video, pausing and taking screenshots as I went, using banners and distinctive people in the crowd as markers for when I scrolled forward or to be returned to after Darragh had finished his latest bout of panning.

And then I worked through the shots, marking people with red spots. I decided to estimate upwards, such that anything I thought might possibly be a marcher would be counted as such. The handful of pedestrians walking past at a normal speed, rather faster than ‘marching’ pace, had to be discounted, of course.

I made it 850 marchers, more or less. 

Not a thousand. Not two thousand. Not five thousand, Ivana Bacik. Not seven thousand, Sinéad Redmond. Not a lazily non-specific several thousand, Irish Times.

Because even if I undercounted, and I suspect I'll have missed a few at the marker points each time, I didn’t undercount by that much. Don’t believe me? Well, why should you? Please try it yourself. It doesn’t take that long. We shouldn’t even need to have this discussion.

The rights and wrongs of abortion aren’t a matter of numbers, so I don’t see why those involved in Saturday's march have been so determined to exaggerate their numbers so egregiously. Still, if Saturday’s march tells us anything, at the very least it shows us that there’s no great democratic demand for abortion in Ireland.

850. The Irish Times was right the first time.