Creating a corporate culture

Last week’s announcement that Monsignor Philip Egan, Vicar General of Shrewsbury diocese, is to replace Crispian Hollis as bishop of Portsmouth has met with widespread approval. William Oddie, writing in the Catholic Herald, described it as the first appointment to the English hierarchy made on the advice of the new Papal nuncio, Archbishop Antonio Mennini. “It is,” said Oddie, “a cracker.”

The new bishop Egan shan’t have an easy task in Portsmouth, a large diocese of 96 parishes spread across Hampshire, Berkshire, part of Dorset, the Isle of White, and even the Channel Islands. Among the most immediate of his problems shall be a messy and potentially very important legal case which may yet go to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

A 47-year-old lady, referred to as ‘JGE’ in court, claims that she was abused when she was between six and eight years old by the late Father Wilfred Baldwin. JGE was at the time in a children’s home run by the Sisters of Charity in the Hampshire town of Waterlooville. She says that Baldwin, who as the local parish priest was regularly invited to visit the children’s home, raped and otherwise abused her, and that the sisters witnessed this and did nothing, having also disregarded previous claims that Baldwin had abused two boys.

The diocese rejects JGE’s allegations against Baldwin, who died shortly after they were first made in 2006, not least because Baldwin did not become parish priest of Waterlooville until September 1972, several months after JGE had returned to her mother’s care. At the time of the alleged abuse, Baldwin was acting as Portsmouth’s diocesan Vocations Director in Reading, some 40 miles north of Waterlooville.

In March 2011, the Court ordered that before considering the substantive issues of the case, it would be necessary to address the question of whether or not a bishop could be held responsible for the actions of diocesan clergy, just as employers can be deemed vicariously liable for the actions of their employees.

Employment

In November 2011, a High Court judge, Mr Justice MacDuff, found that bishops were indeed automatically liable for the actions of priests in the diocese by virtue of the fact that they ordain and appoint them. Accepting that priests were not employees of their bishops, MacDuff nonetheless found that their position as office-holders was nonetheless closer to employment than to self-employment, and that as such bishops could be held vicariously liable for any crimes committed by priests.

Believing this decision deeply flawed and liable to have serious consequences for religious bodies and the voluntary sector in general, the diocese appealed. Insisting that the original decision fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between bishops and priests, it argued that abusive priests acted in ways wholly contrary to everything the Church represents, and that it is unjust to hold a bishop liable for actions of which he would have been unaware and thus unable to prevent.

The diocese has stressed that this should not be seen as an evasion of responsibility; it fully accepts that where a bishop had been in a position to prevent a priest from committing harm but had failed to do so, then the diocese would indeed be legally liable, and should pay compensation.

Unconvincing

The Court of Appeal heard the diocese’s appeal in May, and on 12 July upheld the original decision although two of the three judges took issue with MacDuff’s claim that bishops endowed priests with “immense power” and rejected his implication that there was something inherently risky about ordaining somebody to the priesthood. All three judges commented on the difficulty of reaching a decision, and both of those who rejected the appeal nonetheless recognised the force of the diocese’s arguments.

Lord Justice Tomlinson, the only one of the three judges who believed the original decision should have been overturned, found the original decision’s reasoning “contrived and unconvincing” in its attempt to transpose commercial concepts of enterprise and benefit into the context of ecclesiastical relationships. Vicarious liability applies to businesses which exist to make a profit, such that compensation can be demanded from companies when harm is caused by one of their employees, but while priests are expected to act in accord with the aims of their bishops, they can hardly be said to act for their benefit.

“If Father Baldwin can properly be regarded as undertaking his ministry for the benefit of anyone,” Tomlinson found, “I should have thought that it was for the benefit of the souls in his parish.”

Lord Justice Ward, whose judgement made up the greater part of last week’s decision, applied a variety of tests to the question, including considering the Church as an organisation. Citing the Code of Canon Law’s description of a diocese as “a portion of the people of God […] entrusted to a bishop to be nurtured by him, with the close co-operation of the presbyterium,” he translated this into secular language as follows:

“There is an organisation called the Roman Catholic Church with the Pope in the head office, with its ‘regional offices’ with their appointed bishops and with ‘local branches’, the parishes with their appointed priests. This looks like a business and operates like a business.”

This ‘translation’ seems to owe more to popular myth than to any real understanding of the Church, and it is difficult to see how a judgment that recognises that priests are not delegates of their bishops, just as bishops are not delegates of the Pope, can have characterised priests as branch managers and the Pope as a kind of ecclesiastical CEO.

Legal advice

The Church’s sacramental unity is not reflected in its administrative structure, as Ian Elliott, the Protestant head of the Irish Church’s National Board for Child Protection observed in October 2009. Having previously thought of the Church as “one large but single body”, he had learned that even the Church in Ireland should not be understood that way: “Although it is described as a single Church, it is more easily understood as a single communion with close to two hundred different constituent elements.”

Things are scarcely different in England, where the Catholic Church is not recognised as a legal entity in its own right. Even individual dioceses lack legal personality, such that diocesan trusts are necessary for dioceses to own property and manage their financial affairs.

The Court of Appeal has refused the diocese permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, but the diocese is taking legal advice on this matter. By extending the concept of vicarious liability beyond well-established situations of employment, the High Court and Court of Appeal decisions have potentially transformed the relationship between bishops and priests, and threatened the voluntary sector in general, raising serious questions about the extent and nature of institutional liability.

These questions remain to be answered. At the very least, the Church is entitled to clarity.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 19 July 2012

The physical presence of faith

Some years ago in a church in northern France, a friend of mine had to smother her laughter on noticing a statue of a fine-featured elderly man with a high forehead and a mane of white hair. It had never occurred to her before that St John Vianney, the Curé d’Ars, had borne an uncanny resemblance to William Hartnell, the original Doctor Who.

Having had this pointed out to me, I’ve found it next to impossible to look at pictures of the patron saint of parish priests without thinking of Gallifrey’s finest son, such that when I heard that my bishop had arranged for the heart of St John Vianney to be brought to England, my initial response was to quip “Well, one of his hearts, anyway. His other one shall presumably remain at Ars.”

Any such irreverent thoughts were banished last Thursday evening, when I joined hundreds of other Catholics at the Church of St Anthony in Wythenshawe, by Manchester airport, to pray by the heart of that nineteenth-century saint whose very existence was, in the words of Pope Benedict, “a living catechesis”, and whose priestly ministry was geared to showing that the dry rationalism so prevalent in his day was ultimately incapable of satisfying our deepest human needs.

Since then thousands more Catholics have venerated the saint’s relic at several other churches in Shrewsbury diocese, as well as in Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King and at Oscott College in Birmingham.

Veneration

Profoundly counter-cultural nowadays, despite the tens of thousands who queued in 2009 to pray alongside relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the veneration of relics is an ancient Christian practice that has long seemed jarring to English sensibilities. Ever since the destruction of the shrines of such saints as Augustine of Canterbury and Thomas Becket during the Reformation, it’s been common in England to think of the cult of the saints – especially as manifested in so concrete a way – as something as neither Biblical nor English.

That it should ever have been seen as either idolatrous or alien seems deeply ironic.

The veneration of saints’ relics dates to the dawn of Christianity. Acts 9:11-12 describes how devout Corinthian Christians would take scraps of fabric that Paul had touched and carry them to the sick, healing them. The second-century Martyrdom of Polycarp relates how the followers of John’s martyred disciple gathered up his charred bones and treasured them, using them to call to mind his heroic example, and Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome, records how even before John wrote his gospel, Rome’s Christians gathered to worship at the tombs of St Peter and St Paul.

Pilgrim Routes

The early Christians were surely inspired to do this by stories of people being healed after merely touching the fringe of Jesus’ robe, and by the story at 2 Kings 13:20-21 of how a dead man had been restored to life after his corpse had touched the bones of the prophet Elisha. More profoundly, they realised through becoming flesh, God had specially sanctified the world; it made sense that he should work through the ordinary things of the world he had made and blessed.

For a thousand years, this gritty understanding of a sacramental world would mould the English landcape. Arguably the greatest single work of English literature purports to be a collection of tales told by pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury, and such place-names as St Albans and Bury St Edmunds testify to England’s first martyr and the king who was long honoured as her patron saint. As Shrewsbury’s Bishop Mark Davies has pointed out, explaining why he sought to bring St John Vianney’s heart to England, England has a distinct “spiritual geography”, criss-crossed with pilgrim routes and dotted with shrines and relics.

Since the Reformation such sacred places have multiplied, of course, in association with such martyrs as St John Fisher, the only one of Henry VIII’s bishops who refused to accept his breach with Rome, and St Margaret Clitheroe, crushed to death beneath a door laden with rocks for refusing to plead when charged with having concealed a priest.

“Without the priest,” as St John Vianney said, “we could not access the passion and death of our Lord… of what use would be a house filled with gold, if there were no one to open its door?… leave a parish for twenty years without a priest and people will end up worshipping beasts.”

The latest of our forerunners to have been recognised as among the cloud of witnesses cheering us on is the blessed John Henry Newman, who was beatified by Pope Benedict in September 2010. While it may still be too early to say whether Pope Benedict’s visit has had a transformative effect on English Catholicism, it’s difficult to deny that things have changed over the last two years.

Papal visit

At a Mass in Manchester shortly after the Papal visit, held to celebrate the reception of one of Newman’s few relics, it was observed that English Catholicism had dropped the ball after Pope John Paul II’s 1982 visit, but that there was no excuse for doing so this time. Unlike our predecessors in the 1980s, we have a clear Catechism, the new Code of Canon Law, the Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching, and a host of books, pamphlets, and online resources to help us.

One of the most striking changes during Benedict’s papacy has been a serious rise in the number of men studying for the priesthood in England and Wales. 20 priests were ordained in 2011, but 38 are on course to be ordained next year, while the Archdiocese of Southwark, for example, which had 10 seminarians in 2005 currently has 26. The establishment of discernment groups across the country has been a clear factor in this phenomenon, which has coincided with co-a ordinated campaign of prayer for vocations. In April the National Office for Vocations announced an ambitious three-year vocations drive inspired by the question Pope Benedict asked a gathering of some 4,000 children and teenagers from across Britain in September 2010: “what sort of person would you like to be?”

The centrepiece of the current English vocation project is Invocation, the national vocations festival held at Oscott College in Birmingham. About 250 young people attended Invocation 2011, with roughly 400 attending this year’s festival.

Fittingly, the visit of the relic of St John Vianney was timed to coincide with Invocation 2012, and so on Saturday night and Sunday morning hundreds of young English people were given the unique opportunity to pray in the physical presence of one who defined the priesthood as “the love of the heart of Jesus.”

It shall be interesting to see how many take up the challenge to love as he did.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 12 July 2012.

Reading into the Faith

“It is not bigotry to be certain we are right,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in his 1926 book The Catholic Church and Conversion, “but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.”

The recent announcement by prominent atheist blogger Leah Libresco that she has decided to become a Catholic has inspired a cavalcade of commentators expressing indignation and astonishment that any supposedly reasonable person could have come to subscribe to such gibberish. As one said, “as we see no good reason for someone who presumably understands and endorses our usual views on epistemology and ethics to turn around and start believing in patently fictitious and morally dubious nonsense, it is a little baffling to see one of us become a Roman Catholic.”

Some, predictably, have argued that she was never a real atheist, others have attributed her conversion to mental deterioration, and still others have dismissed her decision as easily explained given that she had had a Catholic boyfriend.

“Oh yeah. Duh,” sneered one, writing how his initial confusion on hearing of Leah’s decision had been dispelled once he’d been reminded of Leah’s former boyfriend: “Thing is, there’s a lot of evidence that religious conversions are mainly driven by people’s personal relationships.”

Truth

There’s some truth to that, of course, but this cuts both ways. If we’re to argue that a cradle atheist can become an active Massgoer who attends RCIA classes and prays the Office and the St Patrick’s Breastplate simply because they went out with a Catholic for a couple of years, we need to recognise that people are even more likely to slip from religious practice and belief if they mainly associate with atheists, just as spending most of one’s time with sedentary people who eat unhealthy food is liable to make one fat.

Reducing Leah’s decision to a matter of herd mentality really doesn’t work, anyway: by her own account, she was raised atheist and attended a high school alongside many people who were culturally Jewish, without really believing in their ancestral faith; she broke up with her Catholic boyfriend six months ago, and the four people closest to her now are respectively atheist, secular Jewish, Catholic, and Russian Orthodox.

Before starting college, Leah hardly knew any Christians, such that she thought the typical one was a Young Earth creationist. At Yale, however, where she studied political science and wrote for the Yale Daily News as well as for the Huffington Post, she befriended intelligent, informed, articulate Christians who challenged her assumptions. She still thought they were wrong, but realised that she’d been deeply mistaken as to what they believed and why.

Just as importantly, she began to see her own position’s flaws. When a friend turned one of her questions around and asked what would convince her that Christianity was true, she had no answer. She simply hadn’t considered that possibility; she couldn’t imagine that she was wrong.

She started going out with a Catholic, joining him at Mass, just as he’d join her for ballroom dancing; they debated religion constantly, and recommended books to each other. She read books he recommended by Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, and read more widely too, building an apologetics bookshelf including works by such modern Catholic philosophers as Edward Feser and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Starting her ‘Unequally Yoked’ blog in order to crowd-source and test her arguments, she experimented last summer with an ideological Turing test, repeating the experiment this year. Alan Turing had famously asked in 1950 whether a machine could mimic a person well enough in a written conversation to be indistinguishable from human. Leah’s tests asked Christians to write as though they were atheists and atheists to write as though they were Christians, and subjected their statements to polls to see whether readers were convinced by the impersonators.

Along the way, she found herself in sympathy with Chesterton’s description of historical orthodox Christianity as “a truth-telling thing”. Chesterton, she realised, “was converted not by a single metaphysical proof, but by his conviction that Christianity was in accord with his most essential beliefs about the world, and that, when he and the Church diverged, he usually came around to the other side after investigation. The beliefs he was absolutely sure of pointed him towards the theology.”

Leah largely agreed, but the fact remained that she didn’t believe in God. She longed for an atheist author in whom she felt as much kinship as she did for C.S. Lewis, and in this seemed to echo Lewis himself, who in Surprised by Joy described how, while still an atheist, he came to the view that “Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together, bating, of course, his Christianity.”

Eventually, the night before Palm Sunday, Leah had a discussion with a friend about morality. Leah was convinced that morality existed in and of itself, rather than something that had merely evolved or developed. As she put it in a recent CNN interview, she was really sure that “morality is objective, human-independent, something we uncover like archaeologists, not something we build like architects.”

Morality

Explanations of moral law that attempted to justify it as naturally embedded in us tended, she found, to display a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution, moral philosophy, or both. Her friend pushed her as to where she thought moral law came from, and eventually admitting her ignorance she said: “I don’t know. I’ve got nothing. I guess Morality just loves me or something.”

Realising what she had said, she froze and asked for a moment while she considered whether she believed that. She did: “I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth. And there was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth. I asked my friend what he suggest we do now, and we prayed the night office of the Liturgy of the Hours together.”

Many of those who’ve been notionally willing to accept as reasonable Leah’s conviction that morality is a person have been scathing about her decision to become a Catholic, seeing this as arbitrary or even perverse. It’s not that mysterious, really: convinced of the existence of an morality to which we owe a duty, she’s read widely in the Christian tradition which most interested her and become familiar with both the philosophical and the historical plausibility of the Faith.

It’s still early days, of course, and Leah admits she has some difficulties with some aspects of Catholic teaching, but she seems to have embraced its heart with joy, saying on CNN that “It’s exciting to be able to participate in the Mass and thinking that it’s actually the Eucharist.”

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 5 July 2012.

Is Scientology Evil?

The news that actress and baptised Catholic Katie Holmes is seeking a divorce from Tom Cruise, supposedly because of concerns about her daughter being raised within Cruise’s beloved Church of Scientology, has brought Scientology into the media spotlight in a way not seen since a 2005 episode of South Park ridiculed the organisation’s most esoteric beliefs.

As reports spread that Holmes feared she was being monitored by private investigators hired by Scientologists, something the Church of Scientology has denied, even Rupert Murdoch weighed in. “Scientology back in news,” he said on Twitter, ‘Very weird cult, but big, big money involved with Tom Cruise either number two or three in hiearchy.’ He later added, ‘Watch Katie Holmes and Scientology story develop. Something creepy, maybe even evil, about these people.’

Scientology was the brainchild of science-fiction author L.Ron Hubbard, who in 1950 reinvented himself as a self-help guru by publishing Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Hubbard claimed that people could be cured of fears and illnesses through a process called ‘auditing’, which would make them ‘Clear’ by erasing traumatic memories from what Hubbard called the ‘reactive mind’.

Although scorned by the American Psychological Association, which pointed out that Hubbard’s claims were without scientific evidence, the book became an unexpected bestseller and Hubbard established several foundations to train people as ‘auditors’.

Despite initial success, Hubbard soon ran into serious financial trouble, and in 1952 he announced that he had discovered an entirely new science which transcended Dianetics. Claiming undeniable scientific evidence for the existence of the soul, Hubbard outlined ‘Scientology’ at a series of lectures in Phoenix, Arizona and in his book What to Audit.

Scientology’s central claim was that our true selves are immortal and omniscient beings called thetans, who inhabit countless bodies over trillions of years. Scientology aimed to perfect the soul by erasing traumas suffered in previous lives, thus raising individuals to their full potential, that of an ‘operating thetan’ or an ‘OT’.

Reportedly having often remarked that “if a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start a religion,” it was hardly surprising that Hubbard legally incorporated the Church of Scientology in 1953, the first local church being established the following year in California. Early tax exemptions did not last, however, and it was not until 1993, more than six years after Hubbard’s death, that the United States government recognised Scientology as a tax-exempt religion.

Scientology had by then grown into a lucrative but controversial international movement. In 1978 a French court had found Hubbard guilty of obtaining money under false pretences, while his wife and several other senior Scientologists were convicted of conspiracy against the American government.

Seemingly incapable of banishing the whiff of sulphur that has haunted it from its foundation, the Church of Scientology has had mixed success in securing international recognition. Countries such as Ireland, Germany, and Belgium have all refused to recognise it as a religion or to grant it tax-exempt status. A French government report in 2000 described it as a dangerous cult, and in 2009 a French court found it guilty of organised fraud.

It continues to face accusations that it indulges in brain-washing, urges members to ‘disconnect’ from unsupportive family members, harasses those – notably former Scientologists – who challenge the organisation, and ruthlessly milks its members of money, with the cost of becoming ‘Clear’ running to tens of thousands of Euros.

In a 1972 policy letter Hubbard had directed senior Scientologists to ‘Make money… make more money… make other people produce so as to make money.’ One can only imagine how much it cost Tom Cruise to become a ‘Class 4 OT7 Platinum Meritorious and IAS Freedom Medal of Valor Winner’.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 5 July 2012

The Eucharist in Church history

In a 1955 letter to her friend Betty Hester, the American writer Flannery O’Connor described a dinner party she had attended some years earlier.

Conversation had eventually turned to the Eucharist, which O’Connor’s host, who had left the Church in her teens, said that she had come to think of as a symbol, and a fairly good one at that. “Well,” said O’Connor in a shaky voice, breaking the silence that had marked her evening, “if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”


Unfortunately, if last week’s Ipsos MRBI survey for the Irish Times is to be believed, 62 pc of Irish Catholics share O’Connor’s host’s view that the Eucharist merely represents the body and blood of Christ.

Richard Dawkins’ branding of all such Catholics as dishonest should be recognised as the ignorant smear that it is, given that this is less likely to be the fruit of considered dissent than poor catechesis and human weakness, but the fact remains that in this respect it seems the majority of Irish Catholics are out of step with the Church throughout time.

The Eucharist, described by the Second Vatican Council as “the source and summit of Christian life”, has always been central to the Church’s existence.

Acts 2:46 describes how the early Jerusalem Church celebrated the Eucharist daily, meeting at the Temple for preaching and prayer, but breaking bread in their own homes rather than attending the Temple sacrifices.

Poor translations sometimes make it seem as though the phrase “breaking bread” is just another way of saying that the early Christians ate together, but the original Greek text is unambiguous in its distinction between liturgy and lunch.

Early Church
The first Christians’ devotion to the Eucharist shouldn’t surprise us. Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24-5 record how at the Last Supper Jesus commanded them to celebrate the Eucharist in remembrance of him, while at John 6 Jesus repeatedly describes himself as the bread of life, clearly stating “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.”

It might be tempting to interpret this passage in a symbolic or spiritual way, but the Greek text simply doesn’t allow this.

The passage describes the listening crowd being horrified at Jesus’ words, and asking him to clarify them; he did so by making his language more graphic, emphasising the reality of what he was asking his followers to do by replacing the word phagein – to eat – with the rather more tactile word trogein – to munch, or gnaw, or chew.

Significantly too, the word the passage uses for “flesh” – sarx – is used on six other occasions in John, each time as something emblematic of the physical rather than the spiritual world, beginning with the declaration that “the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us”.

Intolerable teaching
Many disciples left after this, finding Jesus’ teaching intolerable, while those who remained did so in apparent confusion.

It wasn’t until after the Last Supper that the meaning of Jesus’ words became clear and the Eucharist was embraced as a real participation in the body and blood of Christ, such that, as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 10:27, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”

The disciples’ own disciples took this to heart, and it seems clear from the writings of St Ignatius of Antioch – a pupil of John, and bishop of the city where Christians first bore that name – that an acceptance of the Eucharist as Christ’s body and blood was the hallmark of orthodox Christianity before the end of the first Christian century.

On his way under armed guard to Rome, where he was to be martyred, he wrote a series of letters to churches including one in which he said that those Gnostics who believed that Jesus’ body was but an illusion were easily identifiable:

“They even absent themselves from the Eucharist and the public prayers, because they will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in his goodness raised up again.”

Worship
St Justin Martyr, writing a few decades later in the middle of the second century, gives us the earliest detailed description of Christian worship: the main Christian ceremony took place on Sundays and had two parts: a liturgy of the word with readings from the scriptures and a sermon, and then a liturgy of the Eucharist, in which bread and wine were offered up, blessed, and distributed.

Explaining mainstream Christianity to the Roman emperor, he describes the Eucharist as follows:

“For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these... the food which is blessed by the power of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”

The Eucharist was so central to early Christianity that it was common for the Church’s Roman persecutors, who scorned that which they couldn’t understand, to describe Christians as cannibals – as well as incestuous atheists!

The early Church was so convinced of the reality of the Eucharist, that it wasn’t even deemed necessary to refer to the Eucharist in the Nicene creed; it simply went without saying that during Mass the Eucharistic elements would become the body and blood of Christ.

Of course, it was obvious that they didn’t appear to change, but the Church was unanimous that Christ’s word was to be trusted.

Metaphorical?
It was not until the ninth century that speculation began about how this change took place.

These debates attracted little attention at the time, but almost two hundred years later n archdeacon named Berengar of Tours began to wonder whether the Eucharistic change was merely spiritual or even metaphorical.

Berengar’s theories were recognised as contrary to the historical teaching of the Church, and were condemned, but further speculation continued and so the Church gradually embraced the idea that “transubstantiation” was the best way of explaining the Eucharistic change.

The language of transubstantiation may have been a medieval innovation, but the idea behind it – that the bread and wine literally change to the body and blood of Christ – stretched back to the foundation of the Church.

If it is true that only a quarter of Irish Catholics really believe that this happens at the Mass, it would seem that the International Eucharistic Congress isn’t happening a moment too soon.

We need to be reminded of what unites us with our fellow Christians throughout the world and throughout time.


-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 14 June 2012.

Queen and Country

On Tuesday 15 May, the Norwegian Parliament voted to introduce a constitutional amendment to disestablish the Lutheran state church of Norway. Those besotted with outdated ideas of historical “progress” might cheer such a development, but on the same day in England the BBC published the result of a ComRes poll which found that 79 per cent of people believe Queen Elizabeth II has an important faith role, with 73 per cent believing that she should remain Supreme Governor of the Church of England and retain her title of “Defender of the Faith”.

The monarchy’s not lacked good publicity of late. After sixty years on the throne, the Queen’s more than earned her place with Alan Bennett and Judi Dench as a “national treasure”, and last year’s trip to Ireland won over many of her more sceptical Irish subjects. Prince William’s April 2011 wedding, at which Richard Chartres, the Anglican archbishop of London, preached a sermon that may have been heard by more people than any other in history, was an occasion for national celebration that seemed to go far beyond cynical opportunism at an extraordinary public holiday. And, of course, the public image of the monarchy could hardly have been better served than by 2010’s Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech.

One of the film’s most arresting scenes takes place in Westminster Abbey, when Colin Firth’s soon-to-be-crowned George VI demands that his speech therapist, Geoffrey Rush’s Lionel Logue, vacate the coronation throne, the seat of Saint Edmund the Confessor.

“Listen to me,” cries the king. “Listen to me!”

“Listen to you? By what right?”

“By divine right if you must. I am your king.”

Roles

The idea of kings ruling by divine right may have a rather seventeenth-century air about it, but even now the idea that there is something holy about the monarchy underpins the British constitutional settlement. “The monarchy by its religious sanction now confirms all our political order,” wrote Walter Bagehot in his 1867 classic The English Constitution, still widely regarded as the most insightful book ever written about the structures of the British State.

Bagehot’s book is one of two treated almost as training manuals by young members of the royal family; the other is Elizabeth R: The Role of the Monarchy Today, written in 1992 by Anthony Jay, best known for his work on television’s Yes, Minister. Jay recognised, and the royal family have clearly embraced his explanation, that the monarchy has two roles: the Queen is called upon formally to be “Head of State” and informally “Head of Nation”.

It’s surely in the latter sense that she’s understood her role as “Defender of the Faith” as having developed over the decades. When she was crowned in 1953 she swore to the utmost of her power to maintain the laws of God, the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law, and the settlement of the Church of England.

It seems, though, that she does not regard her role as a narrowly sectarian one; on the contrary, she sees the Church of England as having a role in fostering pluralism. Earlier this year she explained that, “Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”

There’s a lot to be said for having a public figure or institution whose role is to stand as a permanent reminder of what religious faith does and has done for the country, especially at a time when, according to a recent parliamentary enquiry, religion is being marginalised in public life.

The report Clearing the Ground found that although Christians are not being victimised in Britain, religious illiteracy has created situations where religious belief is misunderstood and restricted; court decisions have established a hierarchy of rights with the freedom to manifest religious belief and act in accord with one’s conscience being deemed less important than other rights.

Of course, it’s impossible for a Catholic to discuss Britain’s monarchy without acknowledging the fact that, in a sense, Catholics are second-class citizens in Britain, the only people explicitly barred by law from marrying into the line of succession; any royal who wishes to marry a Catholic must abdicate their position in the line. Recognising that this is discrimination, David Cameron has made noises about changing this, in order to make the monarchy more modern, and the Archbishop of Westminster has welcomed this.

I’m not so sure. I think we all know that in a meaningful sense, British Catholics have the same rights as all other British citizens, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to start pulling threads out of Britain’s constitutional tapestry in order to achieve what would be but the tiniest and most cosmetic of symbolic gains.

Besides, Zara Phillips is off the market.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 31 May 2012.

Seal of confession and playing to the anti-clerical gallery

There’s something rather disingenuous about Alan Shatter claiming that the legality of the Confessional Seal is a “side issue”, “a diversion”, and “an entirely bogus issue” in the debate about mandatory reporting of abuse and other serious crimes.


To hear the Minister for Justice talk, you’d almost think that he’d never raised the prospect of the Seal being threatened and that Catholics are kicking up a fuss over nothing. All that’s necessary to refute that is a quick glance at what he said on the very day the Cloyne Report was published.

Announcing that he would be introducing a bill to make the withholding of information about child abuse an offence, Minister Shatter claimed that there would be no “legal grey areas” when it came to the implementation of this legislation. He specifically stated that the laws would also apply to the priests, even where this information is revealed in the confessional.

The crude one-size-fits-all nature of such legislation, as proposed, alarmed me, not least because the last coalition of Fine Gael and Labour considered and decided against introducing mandatory reporting, recognising that such legislation would be impractical and probably counter-productive.

Troubled by this, I took the – for me – unprecedented step of writing about my concerns to the Taoiseach, whose office forwarded it to the Ministers for Justice and Children for their attention. Nine months later, I have yet to receive a substantive reply from Frances Fitzgerald’s office, despite one being promised, but Minister Shatter’s office promptly sent me an interesting email.

Citing section 7(2) of the Criminal Law Act 1997 and section 9 of the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act 1998, the Minister’s office explained that all citizens already have a duty to report certain serious offences unless they have “reasonable excuse” for not doing so. It would be the purpose of the proposed legislation to extend this principle to cover the withholding of information concerning serious sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults.

It’s worth noting that the government has already extended this principle once; the Criminal Justice Act 2011, as Michael McDowell has pointed out, makes it a criminal offence to fail to report even trivial cases of shop-lifting.

“It must be borne in mind, however,” the letter concluded, “that in regard to the interpretation of the phrase ‘reasonable excuse’ it is a matter for the courts to determine whether any particular circumstances constitute a reasonable excuse. The proposed Bill does not propose any change in that position.”

Now that it’s been published, the Criminal Justice (Withholding of Information of Offences Against Children and Vulnerable Persons) Bill 2012 makes for fascinating reading, not least because it represents an impressive – and I think prudent – backtracking on the part of the government in terms of the exemptions it grants.

Under the terms of the bill, huge numbers of people are exempted from the legislation, notably – the legislation not having a retroactive aspect – everybody who currently has information of abuse having happened. There are vast numbers of such people.

The 2002 SAVI Study found that 27pc of the adult Irish population had experienced some form of sexual abuse in their childhood, most of this committed by people in the broad family circle, including neighbours and family friends. Almost half of Ireland’s abuse survivors – more than 350,000 people – had confided only in family, friends, or trusted professionals, without reporting their abuse to the Gardaí.

It is, I think, a relief that the government has decided against criminalising the tens or even hundreds of thousands of people who have committed no worse crime than listening to abuse survivors tell their stories.

This leaves the specific issue of the Seal of Confession. The reality is that regardless of what Ministers Shatter and Fitzgerald may say in order to look tough and decisive, nobody knows whether the Seal is under threat.

There’s no mention of the Confessional Seal in the bill, but this is hardly surprising: a law directly attacking such a manifestation of religious belief would almost certainly be unconstitutional and wholly contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees a right to manifest one’s religious beliefs save when it is both lawful and necessary to limit that right.

If neither the IRA’s conspiring with the Nazis during the Second World War nor Republican terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s had provided sufficient grounds to introduce such uniquely repressive legislation, it is difficult to imagine how its introduction now could be legally justified on the basis of “necessity”.

Is it, then, indirectly threatened?

At the heart of the new law is the principle that a person commits an offence if three conditions are met: he or she must know or believe that a sexual offence has been committed by another person against a child or vulnerable adult; he or she must have information which he or she knows or believes might be of material assistance in securing the apprehension, prosecution or conviction of that other person for that offence; and he or she must fail without reasonable excuse to disclose that information as soon as it is practicable to do so to a member of the Garda Síochána.

The obvious problem with construing this as an implicit legal ban on the Seal is that it would be completely unenforceable. Priests are not obliged to accede to requests for face-to-face confession, and given the anonymity which the confessional box exists to protect, why would priests believe themselves to have materially useful information that should be given to the Gardaí?

Even if a priest had known a particular penitent’s identity, how could it be proven in court that said penitent had informed a priest of anything? There would have been no independent witnesses to the conversation, and priests could only respond to interrogation by refusing to comment, barred as they would be from either confirming or denying any questions on the subject.

In practical terms, it seems that this law could only ever to be used to challenge the Confessional Seal if spurious “confessions” would be recorded in cases of entrapment.

More fundamentally, “reasonable excuse” is not defined in law, and the new legislation expressly states that it does not remove any rule of law entitling a person to refuse to disclose information. As such, the existing common law and constitutional recognitions of priest-penitent privilege would almost certainly preclude the courts against interpreting the seal as anything other than a reasonable excuse.

I don’t believe the Seal is threatened in any meaningful way, and if it is, it’s been threatened for fifteen years, with priests breaking the law for the last one if they’ve not reported penitents who’ve confessed to shop-lifting.

The reality, surely, is that the government is simply bluffing in yet another transparent attempt at playing to the anti-clerical gallery.

  -- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 3 May 2012.

Future for Faith in Schools

The recent proposals from the Advisory Group to the Forum on Patronage and Plurality in the Private Sector make for depressing reading.

While I’m glad that Ruairí Quinn’s dream of half of Ireland’s primary schools being divested from religious patronage looks to have been given short shrift, I take no solace from the recommendation to abolish the requirement that schools should seek to inculcate Christian values, with each faith-based school henceforth being obliged to display images reflecting all the school’s students’ religious traditions

There can be no doubt that the increasing diversity of Ireland’s population and the large number of small schools across the country jointly pose serious challenges for our education system, but the Advisory Group’s suggested solutions seem unimaginative and shallow. They give no sign of a serious attempt to grapple with the real needs of the majority of Irish families or to place Ireland’s changing needs in a meaningful European context.

Irish education is regularly discussed in terms of a narrative that states that we are a diverse country, and as such should have an educational system that reflects that diversity. This narrative, which is repeated ad nauseam by the likes of Ruairí Quinn and Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, doesn’t really follow, not least because modern Ireland isn’t nearly as diverse as we’d sometimes like to think it is.

Diversity

In 1961, according to the census figures from that year, almost 95pc of people living in Ireland self-identified as Catholic; by 2011 the proportion of the Irish population self-identifying as Catholics had dropped to just below 85 per cent.

Catholics may make up a smaller proportion of the Irish population now than half a century ago, but a nation that identifies itself as 85pc Catholic is not a religiously diverse nation. Ireland in fact stands – in name if nothing else – with the likes of Italy, Poland, and Portugal as one of Europe’s most overwhelmingly Catholic countries.

This relative homogeneity makes all the more baffling the Advisory Group’s choice to look for inspiration to Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Northern Ireland in order to consider how religious education takes place within the primary education systems of a number of other European jurisdictions.

One might wonder why the Advisory Group considered only educational systems in historically Protestant countries, with Catholics being miniscule minorities in some of them. Granted, the Scandinavian countries – with high levels of notional affiliation to national Protestant churches – provide superficial parallels to Ireland’s situation, but none of these jurisdictions are really comparable to Ireland, where the education system has long been rooted in a specifically Catholic idea of education.

Aside from the Advisory Group’s curious disregard for how historically and still largely Catholic countries have handled the challenges posed by increasing religious diversity, I cannot fathom why they didn’t consider how England and Wales – a genuinely diverse jurisdiction – approaches such issues. They may offer answers less simplistic than those proposed by Ruairí Quinn and the Advisory Group.

Two months ago, Baroness Warsi, the Muslim co-chairperson of Britain’s Conservative Party, gave a speech in the Vatican where she spoke of how she had chosen to send her daughter to a convent school:

“Many might think it is unusual for a Muslim mother to send her daughter to a Christian school. But I knew she would be free to follow her faith there... that she would not be looked down on because she believed. And as I had hoped, she found it strengthened her faith, allowing her to define her Muslim identity, allowing her to reflect Christianity within that, adopting the Lord’s Prayer as her own by simply substituting the word ‘Amen’ with ‘Ameen’.”

Pupils

About 10pc of the schools in England and Wales are Catholic, with almost as many schools again being run in combination with other churches. Catholic schools were established in the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century to educate the children of Irish and other immigrants, and historically were set up by the Catholic communities themselves.

Originally founded primarily to serve immigrants and the poor, such schools persevere in this mission even today, being one of the most powerful instruments of social cohesion in modern Britain. Whereas 22.5pc of the pupils in a typical English school are members of ethnic minorities, 27.5pc of those in English Catholic schools are from such backgrounds, and typically about 30pc of pupils in English and Welsh Catholic schools are not from Catholic families.

Social commentators in Britain typically look to the numbers of pupils in care or in receipt of free school meals when evaluating the extent to which schools cater for the poor, and Catholic schools appear to be broadly in line with the national average in this regard, but it may be the case that these metrics are inadequate for measuring deprivation in schools, not least because there can be a stigma attached to claiming school meals.

Mike Craven, chairman of the board of governors at the illustrious Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in west London wrote in The Tablet last month to point out that the Vaughan has over twice the national average proportion of pupils with special educational needs with a deprivation indicator well above the national average. He points out that Catholic schools, as a rule, tend to have a much higher proportion of students from the most deprived areas than other schools do and a smaller proportion of students from less deprived areas.

Quality

Heeding the words of Gravissimum Educationis, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on education, Britain’s Catholic schools “spare no sacrifice... in caring for the needs of those who are poor in the goods of this world.”

The quality of these schools is enviable. National inspections show that Catholic primary and secondary schools are more likely to be “good” or “outstanding” than British schools in general, with pupils in Catholic schools tending to show impressively high levels of learning achievement and personal development. Perhaps most strikingly, given the Irish debate, pupils in Catholic schools have been found to do better in terms of willingness to engage with those from other cultures.

Of course, from a Catholic point of view, this isn’t enough, and there’s a danger that parents could neglect their children’s religious education, leaving it in the hands of the schools so that it stops at the schoolyard gate. As Bunreacht Na hÉireann recognises, the family is “the primary and natural educator of the child,” and this applies as much to religion as anything else.

As Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said on Would You Believe? last December, if we want our children to be members of the Church we need to have maturity and start facing up to our responsibilities. We need to remember that the State is there to help us raise our children, not to do our job for us.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 26 April 2012.

The historical Easter

Gore Vidal tells a story of how he once met the late Sir Moses Finley, one of the twentieth century’s leading ancient historians, and asked him whether a colleague of Finley’s was reliable.

“The best in his field,” replied Finley, his great dentures shifting slightly in his mouth, “Of course he makes most of it up, like the rest of us.”

Finley wasn’t being entirely facetious: much modern analysis of ancient history is necessarily speculative, deductive, and tentative. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and a puzzle with most of the pieces missing. Sometimes we have a corner piece and can confidently build outwards, but more often than not our picture is patchy and fragmented.

It always astonishes me when modern historians follow the consensus established in the late eighteenth century and assume that the Gospels were written between 65 and 95 AD. That this is unproven should go without saying, but what’s striking is that this consensus has profoundly ahistorical foundations.

The theory has three important elements: the ancients knew that John was written after the three synoptic gospels; textual analysis suggests that both Matthew and Luke are heavily dependent on Mark; and Mark 13 records Jesus as saying of the Temple that “there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down,” in an apparent reference to the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 AD.

Modern writers tend to hold that Mark wrote in the aftermath of the Temple’s destruction and anachronistically attributed these words to Jesus, because it would have been impossible for Jesus to have so predicted the fall of the Temple.

Impossible? Yes, as it’s become customary for New Testament historians to approach their texts from an implicitly materialistic or atheistic stance, such that miracles, prophecies, and all intimations of divinity must be discounted as pious or superstitious elaborations.

Fantasies

Even Christian scholars tend all too often to begin their studies from the prejudiced position that their principle sources are fundamentally unreliable in their most important respects.

This doesn’t happen with other branches of ancient history. Thucydides, widely regarded as the greatest of ancient historians, predicted that had they but a few disparate ruins to go by, future historians might be inclined to doubt that Sparta had ever been one of the mightiest Greek powers. Scholars of fifth-century Greece don’t approach Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War by observing that the modern ruins of ancient Sparta are indeed sparse and unspectacular, casting aspersions on Thucydides’ prediction, and dismissing out of hand all accounts of Spartan force projection as Thucydidean fantasies.

If we approach the New Testament from an honestly agnostic position, we have to concede the possibility that perhaps – just perhaps – Jesus could have predicted the destruction of the Temple. Remove this keystone from the modern consensus and the entire hypothesis collapses, forcing us to look at the facts afresh. In particular, it’s worth considering how Acts ends.

Luke and Acts are, to all intents and purposes, two halves of the same document, and the inconclusive ending of Acts, with Paul teaching freely while under house arrest in Rome, strongly suggests that Acts was written before 64 AD. How better can we explain Luke’s failure to mention the outcome of Paul’s trial, the Great Fire of Rome, the Neronian Persecution, or the Jewish Revolt and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem? And if Luke wrote in the mid-sixties, drawing by his own account upon earlier narratives, then does it not seem likely that Mark and perhaps an early version of Matthew must have existed before 60 AD?

Scholars differ on the date of the Crucifixion, but generally date it between 30 and 36 AD. If Mark was written in the mid-50s, as seems likely, then we can’t dismiss this as an unreliable account, written long after the events it describes. It would be no different from somebody today writing about life-changing events in 1990.

Even Luke is no further removed from the events he describes than we are from the Hunger Strikes, the Falklands War, and the wedding of Charles and Diana, but we put the cart before the horse if we assume that Christianity began with the Gospels or is based upon the Bible. It’s not. It’s based upon the reality of Christ, as experienced and witnessed to by the Church, and as reflected in the Gospels and other New Testament writings.

Reality

Popular critics of Christianity tend to forget that the Pauline letters are widely recognised as predating the Gospels, with 1 Thessalonians dating to around 50 AD. Widely regarded as the earliest extant Christian document, it’s a remarkable testimony for Christian belief within two decades of the Resurrection.

Paul describes Jesus as the Son of God who has risen from the dead and will return from Heaven, but he doesn’t describe Jesus’ teaching, or explain how the Crucifixion and Resurrection were the fulfilment of the Old Testament. He doesn’t need to. Paul’s letters were, in the main, designed to fill gaps and clarify points: the main lines of Christian teaching were already present and accepted in the churches he and others had founded.

In 1 Corinthians, written a few years later, Paul declares the importance of accepting the historical reality of the Resurrection:

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve... Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.”

Paul was taught this and more when being catechised in the nascent Church, the Church we see in Acts as having been born in the jaws of persecution.

Beyond Acts, the Jewish historian Josephus mentions the stoning to death in Jerusalem of James the “brother of the Lord”, and the Romans Tacitus and Suetonius testify to how – scarcely three decades after the Resurrection – huge numbers of Christians went to their deaths in Rome as a witness to the truths they held, being crucified, torn apart by animals, or set alight to serve as human streetlamps.

These were the first generation of Christians, including such eyewitnesses as Stephen and Peter who gave up everything to serve Jesus. It makes no sense to claim they willingly died for something they knew to be false.

People miss the point when they question the likelihood of the Resurrection.

They should instead ask how, if we deny the Resurrection, we can explain the Church.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 5 April 2012.

Britain's 'muddled' document on proposed gay marriage

It’s increasingly difficult to avoid the same-sex marriage debate in the British media, now that the government’s consultation on the redefinition of marriage has been launched.

A muddled document, to say the least, the consultation confuses marriage with marriage ceremonies, treats civil and religious marriages as though they’re legally distinct institutions rather than being exactly the same thing, avoids the question of how marriage is currently defined in law, and openly admits that the practical consequences of redefinition should be left up to the courts.

The very concept of such a consultation is itself highly irregular; parliamentary practice normally involves the drafting of a green paper to explore the possibility of changing the law, followed by a white paper putting forward government policy and inviting further comment, eventually leading – perhaps – to legislation.

In contrast to the usual process, the government seems to be trying to railroad through parliament a policy spectacularly absent from the electoral manifestos of both governing parties. The consultation really only addresses how this policy could be implemented, effectively disregarding the question of whether such a radical change in law and custom is desirable, practicable, or wise.

The consultation’s first two questions, asking whether marriage should be opened up to same-sex couples, are evidently intended merely to provide a veneer of legitimacy. The document stresses that those questions are asked only out of interest, and Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat equalities minister, has given a “cast-iron guarantee” that marriage will be legally redefined by 2015, regardless of popular opinion.

Popular opinion seems to be divided on the topic, to judge by the widely differing results of three recent polls, with one firm – ComRes – having found that 70 per cent of people believe that marriage should continue to be defined as the union of a man and a woman. There’s certainly no great enthusiasm for the proposed change.

It is notable that ICM, which found the highest support for legalising same-sex marriage, also found that the vast majority of people – 78 per cent – believed the issue should most definitely not be a parliamentary priority. ICM also observed a widespread unwillingness for schools to be allowed teach that same-sex marriage is identical to marriage between a man and a woman.

Divisive

So divisive a debate has naturally become almost ubiquitous in the media; I’ve discussed the matter on the radio myself, the first time with the feminist and lesbian journalist Julie Bindel, the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, and the LGBT activist Marc Delacour.

Part of the challenge in such discussions, I’ve learned, is to resist the urge to focus so much on “winning” that we fail to listen and truly engage with what others say. Julie Bindel, in particular, said something upon which I’ve since reflected quite deeply, given how acrimonious and polarised the general debate has become.

“Civil partnership provides what every single couple in the world is looking for in terms of legal protection and the right of next-of-kin, and I would extend that to brother-sister, two sisters, two best friends. I signed a civil partnership agreement with my partner ... we didn’t do it because we needed anyone to see that we have a good, stable, happy relationship.”

She argues that the State should abandon the marriage business altogether, because while it should protect committed couples – something it can do through a modified version of the civil partnership scheme – it has no business approving or withholding approval of people’s private relationships; if committed couples wish to have their unions religiously solemnized, that is their own business and no concern of the State.

Essentially a variant on the French system, it’s a similar argument to ones I’ve heard put forward by libertarian friends.

France

In France, religious marriages have no legal standing whatsoever; only civil marriages are recognised in law. People get married by a civil authority such as a mayor, and then – if they so wish – have their legal marriage solemnized afterwards in a religious ceremony.

The obvious advantage of Julie Bindel’s proposed system is that it would establish an indisputable legal equivalence between same-sex couples and unions of men and women, whilst also preserving long-recognised rights to freedom of religion and conscience by restricting the term ‘marriage’ to religious institutions; nobody would be obliged to recognise same-sex civil partnerships as marriages as the law would not recognise them as such, and clerics would not be obliged to celebrate same-sex marriages as marriages would be exclusively religious affairs.

It’s a tempting idea, and one I think I might subscribe to, were it not for one crucial problem, leaving aside how those already wed in civil ceremonies might be unhappy with no longer being able to call themselves married!

Just as the redefinition of marriage is not a “gay issue”, neither is it a “religious” one. Marriage is a social good, the one institution we have that exists to promote the idea that children should grow up with the love of a mother and a father. I’m not convinced that it should only be for religious bodies to make that case.

Of course, in practice the abolition of marriage is on the cards in England anyway. Since the seventeenth century, parliament has recognised marriage as the union of a man and a woman, primarily for the purpose of bearing and rearing children; marriage differs from civil partnerships also by requiring vows and sexual consummation.

The government’s consultation proposes that marriage should henceforth be recognised as the union of any two consenting adults, makes no mention of children, says that vows should no longer be absolutely necessary, and effectively abolishes the need for consummation as always understood.

In other words, if marriage to be opened up to everybody, every distinctive feature of the institution would need to be changed, such that marriage, as currently understood, would no longer exist, being replaced by a new institution called “marriage” but functionally indistinguishable from civil partnership.

Like the baby brought before Solomon, it seems marriage cannot be shared without being torn apart.

 

 

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 29 March 2012.

Flame

More than 8,000 young Catholics from across England and Wales filled London’s Wembley Arena on Saturday for the Flame Youth Congress, Britain’s largest-ever Catholic youth event and largest gathering of Catholics since 2010’s Papal visit.


After prayer, music, and a series of presentations, Father Timothy Radcliffe gave a keynote speech on the theme of “respect”. Paralympic runner Stephanie Reid, Olympic rower Debbie Flood, and the former Olympic speed-skater Sister Catherine Holum CFR spoke of the role of faith in their lives, and Barry and Margaret Mizen, whose son Jimmy was murdered in 2008, spoke of forgiveness and peace.

In his homily before Eucharistic adoration, Archbishop Vincent Nichols called on those present to share their gifts with the world to the glory of God, and to “embody the joy and happiness which comes with loving generously.”

Jack Regan, from CatholicYouthWork.com, said “I think that Flame shows us a number of things: It shows us what Catholic youth ministry can achieve when we really set our minds to it; it shows us how many young people there are out there who will respond generously to the Gospel, and it shows us that the faith in this country is still strong and vibrant.”

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 29 March 2012

Cameron's radical social experiment on gay marriage

Scotland’s Cardinal Keith O’Brien made headlines last week when he wrote a Telegraph article describing government proposals to introduce same-sex marriage into UK law as “madness” and “a grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right”. The substance of his article was lost in the fury that erupted over his language, and hardly anyone seems to have noticed – or cared – that his argument wasn’t remotely faith-based.

Under the civil partnership scheme, he said, same-sex couples already have the same civil rights as married ones, such that redefining marriage would give them no tangible benefits; in no real sense, therefore, should this be seen as a debate over equality or about gay rights. This is a debate about the nature and value of marriage.

While its form may have varied across cultures, marriage – whether Christian or otherwise – has always and everywhere been understood as existing, in the Cardinal’s words, “in order to bring men and women together so that the children born of those unions will have a mother and a father.”

This timeless and universal conception of marriage has children at its heart; we cannot redefine marriage as “committed loving relationships between adults” unless we jettison its primary purpose, that being to provide a safe, stable, and balanced environment within which children can be born and reared.

Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat junior minister with responsibility for equality, has accepted that neither the State nor the Church “owns” marriage; in response, Cardinal O’Brien pointed out that “No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.”

The Government certainly has no electoral mandate for such a radical change; proposals to redefine marriage were conspicuously absent from the manifestos of both Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in the 2010 election, and were accordingly absent from the agreed programme for government.

Betrayed

Such silence was hardly surprising. The 2004 Civil Partnership Act, giving committed same-sex couples the same rights the State had long given to married couples, had satisfied all reasonable demands for civil equality. If neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg campaigned for same-sex marriage in 2010, this was because there was no popular demand for such a thing.

Same-sex marriage was effectively absent from Britain’s political radar until last September’s Liberal Democrat conference, when Lynne Featherstone announced plans to introduce it; David Cameron echoed her at October’s Conservative conference, declaring, “I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.”

I’ve no idea how the Prime Minister kept a straight face while claiming that redefining a timeless social institution is in any way conservative, but it’s easy to see what motivated this revolutionary proposal.

It’s common knowledge that the Liberal Democrats felt betrayed by the Conservatives in the aftermath of last year’s electoral reform referendum. Although the coalition agreement allowed for Conservatives to campaign either way in the election, the Liberals felt their centrally co-ordinated campaign to block the Liberal attempt to make parliament more accurately reflect the will of the British people to be wholly contrary to the spirit of the coalition agreement.

Since then the Liberals have become far more discriminating in their willingness to support Conservative policies, forcing the Conservatives in turn to appease their newly obstructive junior partners.

The Liberal Democrats must have proposed the introduction of same-sex marriage in the hope of being able to brandish such a change as a totemic victory to restore the faith of their many disillusioned voters. This proposal would have been a bitter pill for many Conservatives, but for others, close to the Prime Minister, it would have offered a way of helping banish their popular image as “the Nasty Party”.

Even allowing for internal dissent, this surely looked like an easy win, but the Government seems to have miscalculated popular feelings on such a radical social experiment.

Complexity

Already the Coalition for Marriage’s petition that the Government preserve the legal definition of marriage looks set to receive more signatures than any other petition since the modern e-petition system was established. What’s more, a Catholic Voices-commissioned ComRes poll published last week found that more than two thirds of British people continue to believe marriage, defined in the traditional way, should be promoted by the state.

UKIP, that lost tribe of Conservatism, now publicly oppose the redefinition of marriage, and though a tiny minority party they could easily do serious damage to the Conservatives’ prospects in the next election, given the winner-takes-all nature of the voting system the Conservatives fought so hard to retain last year.

In marginal constituencies, the loss of a few hundred votes on the right could easily lead to dozens of Conservative seats falling to the Liberals or Labour.

The Government also seems to have given no thought to the complexity of their proposal: redefining marriage would require the amendment on hundreds of pieces of legislation, not least – arcane though this may seem – the 1662 act licensing the Anglican prayer book.

People too easily forget that the Church of England is in many respects an arm of the British state, and it is Parliament that speaks when the 1662 prayer book identifies marriage as a union of man and woman, all marriages being unlawful unless in accord with what “God’s Law doth allow”.

Does the Conservative party really want to interfere in Anglican services, given how this could be a decisive step towards the disestablishment of the Church of England? But how could it avoid doing so, if doing otherwise would entail allowing the established Church to contradict the State?

Lynne Featherstone claims that religious bodies wouldn’t be compelled to celebrate same-sex marriages, but – mistaking weddings for marriages – this misses the point. The law would still require religious people to accept same-sex unions as marriages, and those who refused to accept such unions as marriages could be found guilty of hate speech.

In a recent Tablet column, Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Dominicans, wrote warmly of the blessings gay people bring the world, but began by saying, “The Catholic Church does not oppose gay marriage. It considers it to be impossible.” If marriage is redefined in order to institute same-sex marriage, such statements could be construed as section 5 public order offences.

Cardinal O’Brien’s language may have been inflammatory, but he made some important points, not least by asking what would happen, were marriage to be legally redefined, to those who hold and teach that marriage can only mean and has only ever meant the union of a man and a woman.

I don’t think David Cameron wants to define ordinary mainstream Christian teaching as hate speech or to criminalise ordinary teachers, priests, and parents. I suspect he’s not thought this through.

 

 

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 15 March 2012

Working with Holy See towards common goals

I found very peculiar Enda Kenny’s insistence last Wednesday that the government was not for turning with regard to its decision to shut Ireland’s embassy to the Holy See, merely conceding that its stance might change if Rome were to relax its rules regarding the housing of embassies.

It’s as though the government doesn’t understand that that the point of an embassy is not to flatter the state or body to which it’s accredited, but to serve the country it represents. If Ireland’s interests are best served by having an embassy to the Holy See, there is no justification for not furthering our national interests because we don’t like the Vatican’s house rules.

The Taoiseach’s comments seemed especially ironic given that they came within a day of Baroness Warsi, the Muslim co-Chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party, having led a delegation to the Vatican where she outlined the importance of the UK’s diplomatic relationship with the Holy See.

Hailing the Holy See’s vast global reach, she explained that it made perfect sense for London and Rome to work together “to promote democracy, to fight for human rights, to encourage fair and responsible trade, to tackle climate change, and to help build stable nations.”

It’s hardly surprising that Britain should seek to realise her interest in areas of such immense global importance by building on her relationship with the Holy See in order to benefit the whole world. Baroness Warsi said that it was Britain’s hope that other countries would be inspired to work with the Holy See in a similar way, acting together in areas of common interest so that the global reach of the Catholic Church could further serve the common good.

Amplifier

This is often forgotten in discussions about whether or not Ireland should have a specific embassy for the Holy See; we understand that Rome is a superb listening post, but too frequently ignore how it can be an even more powerful amplifier. Ireland is a small country, but Rome can give us a big voice; we should be glad that Britain is seeking to remind us of this.

The rest of Baroness Warsi’s speech, engaging with the Pope’s Westminster Hall speech of September 2010, has proven far more contentious.

Addressing a throng of dignitaries Benedict XVI had spoken of freedom of conscience, the relationship of faith and reason, the need for ethical foundations for economic activity, and the vital contribution religion makes to civil discourse. In particular he warned against the marginalisation of religion in public life, and noted how religious bodies need to be free to act in accord with their own principles if they are to be empowered to serve society at large.

Baroness Warsi said she’d heeded these words, and that in order to encourage social harmony and ensure faith had its proper space in the public sphere, people need to feel stronger and more confident in their religious identities. Arguing that nations should not deny their religious heritage, she proclaimed that “Europe needs to be more confident in its Christianity”.

This might seem a strange line from a Muslim, but it’s worth remembering that the Jewish Jonathan Sacks had said something very similar only two months ago. Speaking in Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks said: “When a civilisation loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children, and their children not yet born, we – Jews and Christians, side-by-side – must renew our faith and its prophetic voice. We must help Europe recover its soul.”

Explaining how she had chosen to send her own daughter to be educated in a Christian school, knowing that she would be free to follow her faith there, Baroness Warsi went on to comment on how religious faith drives and inspires good works throughout the world.

Confident

Citing the examples of Irish nuns teaching in Pakistani Muslim communities and the response of organisations such as Caritas International to such tragedies as the Haitian earthquake and the East African famine, she recognised such ultimate enactments of the common good as expressions of strong and confident religious faith.

Stressing that such confidence in who we are and what we believe is necessary to guarantee openness and acceptance of others, she warned that the confident affirmation of religion was under threat in a variety of ways, notably from well-intentioned liberals and from those she described as “anti-religionists” who use a language of “secularist intolerance” in an attempt to eradicate religion from culture and the public square.

Leaving aside how I think true secularism allows faith a valuable space in public debate, I don’t see that our confidence should really be shaken by faith-denying devotees of militant secularism, however intolerant.

Puritanical atheists may be loud of voice, but they are very few in number. On the same day as Baroness Warsi’s speech, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science published the results of a survey finding that only 6 per cent of people in the UK disbelieve in God. Britain’s National Secular Society has no more members than the British Sausage Appreciation Society. Fewer people have paid to join Atheist Ireland than worship in my home parish on a typical Sunday.

Grandstanding gadflies like John Colgan and Clive Bone may irritate, but in themselves they’re of little import. The DPP is bound to dismiss as vexatious Colgan’s complaint that a homily by Bishop Philip Boyce constituted incitement to hatred, while contrary to how the National Secular Society has spun the decision, the English High Court only supported on technical grounds Bone’s case against Bideford Town Council starting meetings with prayers.

With regard to Mr Bone’s substantive argument that his human rights were being compromised by having to sit through others’ prayers, Mr Justice Ouseley was dismissive: “I cannot see that his freedom of religion, thought or conscience is infringed by the degree of embarrassment he feels, which is no more than is inherent in the exercise by the others of their freedom to manifest their religious beliefs, and his freedom to stay without participating or to leave. It is their freedom which would be infringed were he right.”

-- From The Irish Catholic, 23 February 2012

Ireland's Grey Lady is long past her prime...

It seems Patsy McGarry’s up to his old tricks again. Hardly a column of his goes by without me staring in astonishment. I know I should be used to it by now, but I'm hope over experience personified; it means I spend a lot of my life in a state of profound disappointment.

Look at today’s, and start with the title.

‘Lack of Vatican Co-operation over Child Abuse led to Closure of Embassy’

Interesting, isn’t it? It seems Patsy has embraced the growing consensus that rejects the Irish Government’s claim that economic motives were behind the decision to shut the embassy to the Holy See.

Granted, I don’t think that’s quite what he says in the column, but he’s not far off it, and Patsy’s editor can be forgiven for thinking that was his point. After all, columnists rarely get to decide the titles that head their work; this would have been an editorial decision. Of course, that invites the question of whether the Irish Times editorial team thinks the Government are lying. 

Patsy, as you’d expect, isn’t happy that people aren’t pleased about this. Perhaps he doesn’t see the value in the State having a real diplomatic presence in one of the nodal points of global diplomacy. Perhaps he doesn’t think the State should be seeking to enlist the help of the Holy See and some of the world’s largest NGO’s in achieving our supposed foreign policy aims regarding development, debt relief, conflict resolution, justice, and the environment.  Perhaps he just doesn’t care. 

It’s nonsense for Patsy to wheel out Malta as an example of a country that doesn’t have a resident embassy to the Holy See; he might be right, but only if he thinks our ambitions shouldn’t exceed those of a country barely a third of the size of County Louth and with far fewer people than County Cork.

Criminality?

Undermining our global diplomatic aims is fully justified, Patsy seems to be saying, because the Holy See undermined two Irish national investigations into criminality in the Irish Church. 

He’s referring to the two Murphy reports, of course, into how allegations of clerical child abuse were handled by the institutions of the Church and the State in the Archdiocese of Dublin between 1975 and 2004 and in the diocese of Cloyne between 1996 and 2009.

If you’ve read the reports even half as thoroughly as me, you’re probably blinking in astonishment.  Was either the Dublin Report or the Cloyne Report an investigation of criminality? If so, why on earth haven’t there been any prosecutions of the various bishops, priests, policemen, or staff of the national health service who the reports described as mishandling abuse allegations*

Is Patsy saying that these were investigations into criminality, and that no evidence of criminality was found? Is that the Irish Times’ line on this? 

The Cloyne Report doesn’t even consider the question of whether the law of the land was broken. With reference to the Church, the Murphy Commission examined whether abuse allegations received by the diocese of Cloyne between 1996 and 2009 were handled in regard to the diocese’s own internal rules.  Internal rules, mind, not the law of the land. Criminality wasn’t under investigation into any sense.

If McGarry genuinely believes that it was, and if the Irish Times does likewise, then I think it’s time to acknowledge that the title ‘Ireland’s Newspaper of Record’ is up for grabs.

Myths about Rome...

Aside from falsely claiming that the Murphy investigations were investigations of criminality, McGarry goes on to repeat a couple of long-discredited canards. 

Firstly we hear of how the Holy See refused to cooperate with the Murphy Commission's Dublin inquiry. As has been established for some time, the Holy See did nothing of the sort. The Commission wrote to Rome asking for assistance, and Rome contacted the State asking for communications on this matter to go through the usual diplomatic channels.

Accepting that the Holy See was fully entitled to ask that this request be handled properly rather than in an ad hoc way, the State informed the Murphy Commission of Rome’s response, and the Commission decided not to pursue the matter. Rome subsequently asked the State whether its message had been passed on, and was told that it had been. 

Rome was quite willing to cooperate; it was the Murphy Commission that chose not to avail itself of whatever help Rome could offer. If Rome didn’t know that the Murphy Commission couldn’t use the normal channels because it was also investigating the State – a dubious assumption on the part of the Commission – this was because neither the Commission nor the State informed them of this. The fault, on this, lay entirely with us.

Then we hear of the Nunciature refusing to cooperate with the Cloyne inquiry. Nonsense again. Murphy wrote to the Nunciature asking for whatever documents it held on matters relating to abuse allegations in Cloyne. The Nunciature replied saying that it held no documents as it did not deal with such matters, but that the diocese would have all relevant data and was bound to comply with the law on this.

It’s completely true that the Nunciature doesn’t deal with abuse allegations, and thus couldn’t be of assistance in supplying documents. As for the diocese, the Cloyne Report acknowledges that unlike the HSE, it handed over everything, including legally privileged copies of documents that were sent to Rome.

That’s important to note, conspiracy theorists and paranoid anti-Catholics: Rome doesn’t have secret files on abuse cases; it has copies of files that are held in dioceses, and it only has them if the dioceses bother to send them to Rome. 

As the substance of both the Dublin and Murphy reports makes clear, for far too long, dioceses tended to avoid submitting anything in connection with abuse to Rome, preferring instead to handle or mishandle allegations at a local level. 

The Cloyne Report mentions only a handful of allegations ever being passed on to Rome, all bar one of those being submitted in the month before Bishop John Magee, after a quiet private discussion with then then Nuncio, ‘resigned’. The only report submitted to Rome before this – which happened to be in connection with the only Cloyne priest ever found guilty of any form of sexual abuse, for which he received a two-year suspended sentence – is dealt with comprehensively in the Report because the diocese cooperated fully, as the Nunciature had said it would.

How does McGarry characterise the actions of Rome in all this?

‘That was how the Holy See treated two inquiries set up by our government to investigate the gravest of abuses of thousands of Irish children by priests. It ignored them.’

Firstly, it didn’t ignore the investigations. Secondly, neither inquiry investigated even one case of abuse. The remit of the two investigations was, quite simply, to investigate how abuse allegations had been handled. It had no remit whatsoever to consider whether any abuse actually took place.

 

It did, obviously, and on a terrible scale in Dublin as shown by the Dublin report. But the abuse of thousands of children? No, Patsy, not even close. Hell, despite all the claims in the Cloyne Report, only two priests cited in it were ever charged in court. One pleaded guilty to acts committed with a teenage boy, and received a two-year suspended sentence; the other has been acquitted twice.

There’s no sense in which the Holy See can credibly be said to have obstructed the Murphy investigations, neither of which were into criminality. Things have got to a bad place when a still fairly well-regarded paper perpetuates such myths and does so with such determination.

And there's the subtitle...

And then, of course, there’s the most poisonous part of the whole article, with Patsy saying that now the furore over Cloyne has died down, craven defenders of the indefensible  are crawling out of the woodwork:

‘Then there are the usual suspects, lay voices who make a living from defending the institutional church when it is safe to do so, when outrage is settling after the Cloyne report.

It was the same after the Ferns, Ryan and Murphy reports. Their immediate reaction is practised horror. Then, with time, they’re back to their slithering ways, diluting truth, minimising the wreckage, playing it all down.’

Ironically, much the same thing could be alleged about Patsy, to judge by his comments at the time Father Kevin Reynolds' innocence was established, hanging his head on behalf of his too keen media colleagues, only for him but moments later to stick on the same scratched record he's been playing for years. Indeed, the line about lay Catholics making a living from defending the Church is a bit rich coming from an agnostic who paints himself as an expert on the Church and who as far as I can see makes a living out of attacking it  Perhaps most importantly, it’s also demonstrable nonsense. 

Who could he possibly mean? David Quinn? John Waters? Breda O’Brien, who he so shamefully defamed on national television a couple of months back, such that he should count himself lucky he wasn’t taken to court? The staff of the Irish Catholic?

Patsy’s surely not referring to these, all of whom were prominent in the media at the time of the Cloyne Report, condemning child abuse in Ireland while at the same time advising people to read the Cloyne Report to see what it actually said, because an injustice was being done to the Church as a whole because of the actions of John Magee and Denis O’Callaghan. 

But who, then? Who are these ‘usual suspects’? They allegedly have form for doing this. They’re people, clearly, whose names we should all know.

Why wouldn't he have named them? 

Could the Irish Times legal people have advised him against doing so, as for him to have done so would surely have constituted defamation?

Was he just rattling something off at speed, with nobody at all particularly in mind?

I honestly can't figure this one out.

You might have a better explanation. If you do, I’d be glad to hear it.


-- An edited version of this was subsequently published in The Irish Catholic, 1 March 2012

_______________________________________________________________

* I'm not disputing the reality of the vast majority of allegations detailed in the reports, of course; what happened was monstrous, and it was spectacularly mishandled in disastrous ways, ways that made matters so much worse in Dublin, if not in Cloyne. I'm just saying that the reports weren't into the abuse itself, solely into how allegations were handled.