The Pope and the Diplomats

Rumour, it’s said, can be halfway round the world before Truth has got its boots on. Rarely does that adage seem more apt than in the world of religious journalism. 

Yesterday morning the Pope gave his annual ‘State of the World’ address to diplomats accredited to the Vatican; the speech was remarkably broad, taking in such issues as the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, the situation in Iraq, the family as the basic social unit, recent European decisions on human life in its early stages, the importance of education, the right to religious freedom and the duty to resist religiously-motivated violence, humanitarian crises in Africa, and how we must respect the world in which we live.

Despite the wide range of issues covered in the address, it’s a tightly woven piece of work, unified by the idea that we must recognise ‘the inalienable dignity of each human person and of his or her fundamental human rights’. As the American Declaration of Independence recognised, our fundamental rights are inalienable precisely because they are given us by our Creator, and in exploring this central idea the Pope followed the logic of this by locating our dignity and rights within the context of our place in creation:

‘Truly the world is dark wherever men and women no longer acknowledge their bond with the Creator and thereby endanger their relation to other creatures and to creation itself.’

In other words, we have been created not merely with fundamental rights but with fundamental duties, duties that require us to live rightly in relation to God, to each other, and to the world. We are our brothers’ keepers, and we’re called to till and keep the world not just for ourselves but for each other and for our children and their children.


Oh, Ambassador, you're spoiling us...

The diplomats who were present understood what the Pope was saying. The Canadian ambassador, for instance, summed up the core of the Pope’s address as being:

‘It boils down to a respect for the dignity of the human being is really the key to resolving the financial and economic crisis, and to give hope to millions of youth who find themselves a bit in a desperate situation in many countries. It is very interesting that the pope started from that point, the situation of youth in many countries, to go to North Africa, the Middle East where he talked about specific situations.’

The Australian ambassador likewise homed in on Benedict’s focus on youth, describing the speech as sober and commendable, saying:

‘What I picked up most from the Pope’s speech was his return to the theme of education. Education for young people, education as part of religious freedom and cultural progress in the Middle East and around the world.'

 Discussing the speech at some length, the British ambassador noted the global role of the Holy See, and took the opportunity to stress how important the Holy See is as a diplomatic partner for Britain, especially in connection with environmental matters, peace negotiations, and the war on global poverty, with particular reference to the Millennium Development Goals. He said that although the speech was sombre, it was far from pessimistic, reminding the gathered diplomats that we should not allow the crises of today to deter us from pursuing our long term aims:

‘His Holiness was very clear that we should not despair in this moment of crisis but that we need to look forward with new commitment, new dialogue, new creativity for ourselves and for the younger generations. And he flagged up several specific areas including the Middle East, Europe and the European crisis, and strengthening of religious freedom around the world.’

Ah, Churnalism...

Given the wide-ranging yet unified nature of the address, it was a bit disappointing that insofar as the global media has reported the story, it’s done so through a tediously predictable and utterly misleading filter. ‘Gay marriage a threat to humanity’s future: Pope,’ declared Reuters, in a hastily dashed-off piece which claimed that the Pope had made some of his strongest comments against gay marriage in a speech that ‘touched on some economic and social issues’. 

More than 95 per cent of the address was dismissed with one simple phrase -- ‘touched on some economic and social issues’ -- so that the Reuters article could exaggerate one small point. And unfortunately, that one Reuters piece set the ball rolling...

I read a shockingly poor piece – since somewhat amended – about the address on the Digital Journal site last night, seemingly relying on little more than the original Reuters piece, a few tweets, and a couple of old and discredited news reports, and then today I saw that the Daily Mail had tweaked the original Reuters piece to make it look like their own work, churning it out under the headline, ‘Gay marriage is a threat to humanity, claims Pope’.

It's not surprising that people all too often think the Church is obsessed with sex, when all too often that's the only thing that's often reported about the Church. Still, the issue of marriage was mentioned in the Pope's address, so it's worth looking at how it's dealt with. The first thing that's worth noting is that the key passage that's been quoted takes up maybe two per cent of the speech. Whatever way you try to spin this, this wasn't the focus of the address.


Uniquely stable, uniquely balanced, uniquely valuable
The address runs to 2,772 words when translated into English, of which I’d say a grand total of fifty, buried in the middle of the speech, could be understood as an implicit attack on the idea of gay marriage, though even then the key passage is best understood as a passage praising marriage and encouraging us to work to protect it. The Pope spoke of how education should take place in proper settings, and that,

‘Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.’

The Pope wasn’t speaking specifically of Christian marriage here, but of marriage in a more general sense: theology aside, the Church sees marriage as an institutional reflection of a biological reality. We are, after all, a sexual species, reproducing sexually, with every single one of us being the product of a mother and a father; marriage reflects that reality and provides a setting in which we can be nurtured, protected, and raised with complementary male and female role models. 

The Church recognises that the basic structure of marriage as the bond that holds families together is deeply rooted in our nature, and that marriage makes an invaluable contribution to the common good of society, providing a uniquely stable and balanced setting in which children can be born and raised. Given the uniquely valuable role that marriage plays in human society, it’s hardly surprising that the Pope should argue that it should be uniquely supported and promoted.

Of course, it goes without saying that we can only preserve the status of marriage as the gold standard for family life if we also acknowledge that other forms of relationship, regardless of how good we might regard them as being in themselves, do not play so important a role in our society and are not equally deserving of protection and promotion. We cannot prize something as 'best' unless we take the view that all other comparable things, no matter how good, are less than that 'best'. To claim that other forms of relationships are identical to marriage or are as good as marriage, is to deny that marriage is uniquely special and uniquely worthy of protection; such denials undermine an institution that is fundamental to human society. And when we undermine the foundations of our society, no matter how noble our intentions might be, we undermine our society.

Addressing the gathered diplomats, and as just one small part of a much longer speech, Benedict warned that policies that undermine the family and that rationalise the destruction of human life in its earliest and most vulnerable stages threaten the future of humanity; instead, he said, we should be working to build a sense of universal fraternity, corresponding to the ‘lofty grandeur of our human calling’.


Even then people weren't listening...
Way back in his uneven first book, Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith, John Allen recognised that Benedict is a thinker with whom people need to engage, and generally fail to do so; instead, he said, people tended to react in a kneejerk way, either dismissing him out of hand, or cheering his proclamations without thinking seriously about what he'd said. I don't think that we can realistically expect Reuters to issue lengthy reports, or expect the Mail to offer reasoned comment, but what we can do, whenever stories like this hit the presses, the internet, and the airwaves, is to reserve judgement, find out exactly what Benedict said, and think about why he might have said it.

The 'State of the World' address isn't that long. It's worth engaging with. Read it and think.

Behind the Curtain

Or, a very long post attempting to explain how I wrestled through a complex issue; apologies if it seems rather stream-of-consciousness, not to mention long, but you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to...

Perched at the top of my Amazon wishlist, as it's been for some time, is Ian Ker's recent biography of G.K. Chesterton. To anyone who knows me, of course, this'll hardly be a surprise, given that my shelves are buoyed up with eighty or so books by the great man and more than a dozen books about him.

I've not always been a Chesterton fan; my first encounter with Kensington's greatest son was an unpromising taste of 'The Queer Feet' when I was fourteen or thereabouts, but when I was twenty-one, prompted by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, I drank deeply from The Complete Father Brown, had my mind prized open and my horizons expanded by The Man Who Was Thursday, and fell in love with the man described so ably in Joseph Pearce's Wisdom and Innocence. Whatever appearances may have suggested, I'd fallen far from the Catholic tree in my teenage years, but it was Gilbert who brought me back to the faith; his impact on me hasn't paled as the years have passed.

His combination of goodness and good sense is something that I've long loved, and I've taken to heart the radical difference between Chesterton and his good friend Hilaire Belloc; if Belloc roared like a vengeful bull, Chesterton smiled in charity and seems never to have lost a friend. Pearce's book says quite a bit on the subject, quoting the two writers' contemporary Frank Swinnerton to good effect:

'One reason for the love of Chesterton was that while he fought he sang lays of chivalry and in spite of all his seriousness warred against wickedness rather than a fleshly opponent, while Belloc sang only after the battle and warred against men as well as ideas.'

Belloc, curiously -- and I think wrongly -- felt that Chesterton's gentleness would do little for his legacy as a writer, but recognised that mere longetivity on the page matters nothing compared to the eternal reward that could be won through the preservation of his soul from the cancer of hatred.

Whatever about that, he's certainly had an enormous impact on this blog. My tagline here is adapted from one of his finest epigrams, my description in the sidebar draws from four others, and I'm pretty sure that were you to trawl through the archives here you'd find them echoing loudly with his words and ideas, perhaps most frequently his astute observation that 'it is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.' That my words should echo his is hardly surprising, really, given how much of his work I've absorbed over the years, such that I've internalised huge amounts of it, perhaps most profoundly his deeply counter-intuitive recognition that 'if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly'.

One of the most recent -- and most interesting -- books I've read about Chesterton is William Oddie's fascinating 2008 study, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908; very much an intellectual biography, it charts Chesterton's own philosophical growth and the development of his religious and other ideas, taking him from his youth through the superficially ephemeral but truly timeless Heretics to 1908, the year of Orthodoxy and its fictional alter-ego, The Man Who Was Thursday. Oddie's book is, frankly, a masterpiece in its own right, and is one I think I'll treasure for a long time; I'm looking forward to Oddie following Gilbert's inky fingerprints as he writes his way into the Catholic Church, and have been glad to see him making a case for Gilbert being recognised among the saints of the Church.

(I'm convinced Chesterton's among them already, and like to think of the signed book by him I acquired some years back, resting beside me as I type, as a second-class relic of the man who brought me back to the Faith.)


Enter the Controversy
Oddie, who edited the Catholic Herald for several years and regularly contributes to it even now, is a journalist who I've long respected; I don't always agree with him, by any means, but I do think he's worth listening to. As such, I was startled a few weeks back to read a piece by him on the Catholic Herald website in which he took issue with recent comments by Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, in support of civil partnerships. Arguing that Nichols's comments appeared to be at odds with Rome and with the English bishops' previously-stated position, Oddie wondered whether Nichols was also in favour of adoption by same-sex couples, and if so, why the Catholic adoption agencies had been forced to close down, rather than be obliged to facilitate such adoptions. The ultimate question in this matter, he concluded, was ‘what does he believe? Just what is he saying, on behalf of his brother bishops and presumably the rest of us?’

Clearly these were serious questions, and though Nichols twice attempted to clarify his position, his explanations didn't convince Oddie, who nonetheless has since dropped the matter, aghast at the hornets' nest he'd stirred up and the sheer venom being expressed about bishops such as Nichols. 

I tried to follow the story as best I could at the time, chatting to friends about it and thinking pretty carefully about what Rome and the bishops of England and Wales had said back in 2003. As I put my thoughts in an email to a friend a couple of weeks back:

'... I've been trying to figure it out. In the main it all seems very clear, but there is one issue that does trouble me a bit.

I've just read the bishops' own 2004 [sic] submission where they opposed civil partnerships, something I'd not been aware they'd done, and how the submission had cited the 2003 CDF document. It seems to me that the current stance is a complete about turn. As it happens, the current stance doesn't bother me; I believe it's coherent, clear, and fully in line with the CDF document once one looks at how the Civil Partnership Act has been phrased. I also think that it's better to change one's mind so that one becomes right rather than to remain obstinately wrong.

That said, I'm having trouble figuring out whether that's been what exactly has happened. Presumably the 2004 submission was in response to a draft of the act, rather than the act itself, so was the final version different enough that we could accept it, on reflection? Or were we, straightforwardly, wrong? And if we were wrong, wouldn't it be better, if need be, to admit that?'

Such were my tentative thoughts a couple of weeks back, before I was forced to think about things rather more carefully...


Catholic Voices
Like a lot of people a couple of years back, it was with horror that I watched the October 2009 Intelligence Squared debate on the topic 'The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world'. I'd read about it before seeing it online, but even then I wasn't prepared: I ought to have been, given that it was obvious that the combined forces of Anne Widdecombe and the Nigerian Archbishop John Onaiyekan were never going to have been a match for a crowdpleasing power of a Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry double-act, and given how I'd read of how comprehensively the crowd rejected the motion, but even so, it was painful viewing. And yet it oughtn't to have been: Hitchens and Fry's predictable arguments were riddled with errors and couched in sophistry; they could have been countered at almost every point.

Describing the debate to a friend of mine who is a priest, I looked downcast as I related just how inevitable it all seemed, and how it ought not to have been. My friend nodded, and said that while Anne Widdecombe does valiant work in putting forward the Catholic case, and deserves our gratitude for that, he often feels she doesn’t help things very much. I agreed, but we were both at a loss to think of anybody else who would have taken her place. The Telegraph's Andrew M. Brown evidently had taken a similar view, ending his piece on the debate with a desperate appeal:

'It was a gripping evening’s entertainment but a little discouraging for those of us who are Catholics. I found myself wishing, one, that the Catholic debaters would for once not content themselves with offering pettifogging excuses but instead actually own up to some of the charges, and, two, I wished that there still existed a great Catholic apologist like Chesterton or Belloc, someone who was not only brave and prepared to square up to the Hitch, but was his intellectual equal. Surely there is someone today who could do that?'

I'm glad to say that not every Catholic who watched the debate simply contented themselves with wishing, as the group called Catholic Voices grew out of that debacle, in anticipation of the Pope's then impending visit to the UK. Jack Valero and Austen Ivereigh's idea was a straightforward one, that being, simply, that a team of young -- or youngish! -- Catholics could be given some basic media training, so that they could articulate the case for the Church on television or radio. I liked the idea, and had I been based in London last year I'd probably have applied to join, though given the rather peculiar directions my life took in 2010, it might well be for the best that I didn't do so. Anyway, they did a good job during the Papal visit, and played their part in ensuring that that visit turned out to be far more successful than anyone had expected.

And no, despite the shriekings of the likes of Terry Sanderson, they weren't Vatican-trained propagandists, taught to obscure, distort, and contradict arguments; they were simply ordinary Catholics, informed of the issues and confident in their faith, able to explain complicated issues in simple language. I thought this was a good thing, and if they weren't always quite as good as people might have wished, or if they made some missteps in the organisation phase, well, if a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing badly, as the man said. The point is, this was worth doing.

I suspect Terry was upset mainly because the whole Papal visit left him looking rather foolish, with his hysterical claims that the visit would cost the taxpayer £100 million pounds, rather than less than a fifth of that, being soundly refuted by common sense, not to mention evidence.


And then there's me...
Well, a few months ago I received an email from my aforementioned priestly friend, informing me that Catholic Voices were looking to train a second batch of people, and asking whether I'd been interested. I said I'd been interested the previous year, and so happily applied on -- as it so happened -- the very day that a letter from me appeared in the Irish Times challenging the Taoiseach for having made false statements to the Dáil about the Vatican.

Eventually, after thinking I'd not been selected at all -- something about which I was rather put out, though I still wished the project well as I thought it important -- I was called to come for an interview, and I was interviewed, and a couple of days later was told I'd been chosen; within a fortnight or so of that I met up with the others for our first weekend together in Yorkshire, bumping into one of the others on the train there.

I'm not going to go into how the weekends went, since this sort of thing can only work if we can speak and act in confidence -- one of my closest friends, to whom I've described them in rather more detail than I'll go into here, has said that they sound to her to be akin to retreats in certain ways, and I think she's right.

Still, what I can say is that the weekends have been profoundly transformative affairs: each weekend was an ordeal in its own right, and collectively they've affected me in ways that I'm still trying to grapple with; indeed, there were moments of almost transcendent clarity in Mass last Sunday and the Saturday of the previous weekend, moments which left me lost for words and that unsettle me even now. It's been a privilege and a joy to get to know the other trainees, all of whom have dazzled me with their intelligence, their integrity, their independence, and their fidelity.

That honest harmony of independence and fidelity, I think, is probably essential if we're to be able to speak with any kind of authority on these issues; it'd be utterly wrong for us to say things which we didn't believe, just as it'd be wrong for us to speak as Catholics while saying things that the Church doesn't teach. We're not drones, sent out there to push a line; on the contrary, we're trusted to do our own thing, but that trust is largely rooted in the belief that we're faithful Catholics.

The first weekend focused on just one issue, which we explored in depth as a group in order to help us understand how we can approach these things, and the second saw us looking at two topics, but dealing with them individually in studio situations. For what it's worth, I was terrible on the radio -- almost certainly the weakest of us all -- but that didn't bother me too much. I expected there to be a learning curve. If I was going to be perfect from the offing, I wouldn't need training. And, as it happens, I was far better in the television interview later that day -- it was clear that feedback from the morning and the guidance of the co-ordinators had made a real difference.

Indeed, the training was excellent, and it was fascinating to listening to a couple of the others, after just those first two weekends, taking to the airwaves at short notice to discuss the recent Benetton campaign or the recent BPAS campaign to supply the morning-after pill for free after phone interviews; learning in public can be frightening, but they accredited themselves very well.


Preparing for the Third Weekend
For the third weekend, we were all asked to prepare presentations on various topics that had hit nerves in recent weeks or months; what we said on them was wholly up to us, the idea being that we'd give presentations on issues and the others would grill us on the subjects. Topics were generally well-matched to speakers: a doctor speaking on end-of-life issues, a barrister on employment law, or a female counsellor on Catholic women in public life, say.

My topic seemed a very odd fit, as I was asked to speak about the controversy over Archbishop Nichols's comments. This was a tricky one, partly because the topic was extremely complicated, and partly because insofar as Nichols's support for civil partnerships hits a nerve it does so far more within the Church than it does without. I can only think that I was asked to handle this because, as a historian, I'm trained to winnow through things with a view to figuring out what has happened, and to do so in a diagnostic rather than in an advocatory way. The only guidance I was given was to stay close to the bit of the controversy itself, as Caroline Farrow would be dealing with civil partnerships in a broader sense.

Deep down I'm an analogue sort of fella, the kind of man who thinks a fountain pen is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age, so I printed off Nichols's original comments and his subsequent clarifications, Oddie's articles, the original CDF guidance, and the bishops' 2003 statement so I could work through them all in silent solitude, pencil in hand. I also read the 2004 Civil Partnerships Act online, and read as widely as I could to try to figure out what different lawyers thought of civil partnerships, and how the issue had been discussed in parliament at the time.


Adoption, to start with
One of the first things I was able to figure out was that Oddie's concerns about children being adopted by same-sex couples were wholly misplaced; that issue, about which the Church has expressed serious concerns, was incidental to the civil partnerships debate, having been legislated for in 2002. Although I understand and fully share his distress at the Catholic adoption agencies having been forced to shut down in the face of the new legislation, I honestly can't see why Oddie thought this relevant to the issue of civil partnerships. I'm baffled that people are still conflating these two very separate issues.

(And, for what it's worth, I don't think the Catholic adoption agencies should have shut down; I think they'd have had a very strong case had they taken matters to Strasbourg, since the European Convention on Human Rights, with which the Human Rights Act requires all UK legislation to comply, guarantees freedom of religion and conscience save when the limitation of said freedom is not merely legal, but necessary. Given how many adoption agencies were already facilitating the adoption of children by same-sex couples, it was clear that there was no need for the Catholic ones to do so too. And, of course, since they’ve closed the number of children being adopted each year has fallen further. But that's by the by.)

That left the substantive matter of the civil partnership scheme.

Nichols's statements on the subject were entirely clear, when read in the context of how he was explaining the need to defend marriage as a unique institution, but the key questions related to consistency. Were Nichols's comments consistent with what the bishops had said eight years ago, and were they consistent with the CDF?


What did Rome say?
This forced me to read the CDF's 2003 statement very carefully, such that my copy of it soon developed rather busy margins, illuminated with arrows, circles, and annotations. Entitled Considerations regarding Proposals to give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons, it's an interestingly wide-ranging document, addressed not merely to Catholic bishops, say, but to all those -- Christian or otherwise -- who are committed to promoting and defending the common good of society.

At its heart is a tension between on the one hand the need to explain and defend the basic idea of marriage, and on the other the need to give true respect to people who are homosexual. This respect, it must be stressed, isn't a matter of charity in the modern sense that can seem so patronising, but of charity in the truest sense, that being love; it is also a simple matter of justice.

The CDF distinguished between three ways in which states could deal with homosexual unions: tolerance, legal recognition, and the bestowal of legal status equivalent to marriage. It has a bit to say on how we should deal with the first situation, and regarding the other situations it says:

'In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.'

It goes on to explain why such opposition should be necessary, but says very little on what such opposition should entail, and almost as little on what exactly would constitute a 'homosexual union', save to identify homosexual unions as grounded in 'homosexual behaviour'. This, I think, can't be glossed over; the CDF doesn't give a straightforward definition, really only nearing one when it says:

'In this area, one needs first to reflect on the difference between homosexual behaviour as a private phenomenon and the same behaviour as a relationship in society, foreseen and approved by the law, to the point where it becomes one of the institutions in the legal structure. '

This point is taken up again when the CDF document says:

'It is one thing to maintain that individual citizens may freely engage in those activities that interest them and that this falls within the common civil right to freedom; it is something quite different to hold that activities which do not represent a significant or positive contribution to the development of the human person in society can receive specific and categorical legal recognition by the State.'

It was clear that central to the CDF's argument was its understanding of a 'union' as something analogous to marriage, which as an institution is intrinsically sexual and uniquely valuable; as such, it seemed to me that it was exhorting people to oppose the specific and categorical legal recognition of unions that are rooted in homosexual behaviour; it was not exhorting people to oppose legal arrangements between homosexual persons, save where those arrangements included the legal status and rights belonging to marriage.

Somewhat unhelpfully, the CDF didn't outline what it believed the legal status and rights belonging to marriage to be. I realised that this almost inevitable: such rights must differ from country to country, after all, and the CDF document was not addressed specifically to the minority Catholic Church in the UK, say, but rather to the entire world.

I spent a bit of time wrestling with this, and came to the conclusion that if certain rights belong to marriage, then whatever rights these are they must transcend individual states and legal systems. As such, it hardly threatens marriage for rights which states merely happen to have been bestowed upon marriages to be likewise bestowed upon other legal arrangements, provided that these are not the more fundamental status and rights that belong to marriage alone and that are not the property of the state.

And so, with all these thoughts buzzing in my head, I turned to the bishops' 2003 submission...



What did the Bishops say then?
In June 2003, the Department of Trade and Industry published a consultation paper entitled Civil Partnerships: a framework for the legal recognition of same-sex couples, setting out proposals for what has become the civil partnership scheme. I couldn’t help but think the DTI seemed an unlikely department to be handling the subject, for what it’s worth, given the DTI’s remit, since it gave the impression that civil partnerships were basically business arrangements, but I’m sure there was a good reason for it at the time.

The Bishops’ Conference submitted its response in September 2003, drawing on the CDF's guidelines in making their case and stressing the simultaneous need for the State to defend both the institution of marriage and the fundamental human rights of every person.

They expressed concerns that the proposed scheme would elevate homosexual relationships to a legal status virtually equivalent to civil marriage, thereby giving a signal to society that the two states are equally deserving of public protection. Their central point, in this regard, was as follows:

'Marriage would be undermined because it would no longer hold a privileged place.  The signal the law would send to rising generations is that marriage as husband and wife, and a same sex relationship, are equally valid options, and an equally valid context for the upbringing of children.   By publicly elevating same-sex relationships to a legal status virtually equivalent to civil marriage, the signal given to society would be that these two states of life are equally deserving of public protection and respect, when in fact they are not.'

The bishops further argued that the proposed scheme was largely unnecessary given recent legal developments, that it was a distraction from the real problems undermining family life in modern Britain, and that in some respects the proposed scheme was inadequate in that it created anomalies with regard to other long-term loving relationships which were not sexual in nature. In this regard the bishops cited the example of two sisters who might have shared property over many years, but they could as easily have made the same point by citing disabled people and their carers, or simply two lifelong friends.

On balance, then, they felt the proposals would not promote the common good, and strongly opposed them.

There was more to their argument than this, of course, but what was clear was that they opposed the proposed Civil Partnership scheme and did so for several reasons, some of which drew on the CDF's own guidelines. Such was their opinion in 2003, before the Civil Partnership Act was debated and codified in Parliament, and before it was granted royal approval.

The 2003 submission was, in short, their opinion of what they feared might happen; it was not their opinion of what did happen.


So, looking at the law...
The Civil Partnerships Act came into law in November 2004, and was striking in a couple of major ways. Unlike civil marriages which require publicly-made promises in a civil ceremony, civil partnerships become legal solely through the signing of a civil partnership document. This isn't something that should be brushed aside as a mere technicality. If I can pluck Chesterton's The Superstition of Divorce from the shelf, we'll see that the great man saw the idea of promises as being essential to marriage:

'I shall therefore begin by asking, in an equally mystical manner, what in the name of God and the angels a man getting married supposes he is doing. I shall begin by asking what marriage is; and the mere question will probably reveal that the act itself, good or bad, wise or foolish, is of a certain kind; that it is not an inquiry or an experiment or an accident; it may probably dawn on us that it is a promise. It can be more fully defined by saying it is a vow.'

And onward he goes to explain that the act of marriage is a vow analogous with vows of chivalry, poverty, and celibacy, just as he had twelve years earlier in Orthodoxy or seven years before that in 'A Defence of Rash Vows'. Marriages, unlike civil partnerships, entail promises; they're covenants, not contracts, and we should never forget this.

Furthermore, whatever its political objectives, the Act was not phrased in such a way that same-sex partnerships should intrinsically be understood as homosexual unions. The law never mentions sexuality or sexual acts in any respect, and does not cite anything analogous to adultery as grounds for dissolution of civil partnerships; fidelity, whether romantic or sexual, is not even implicitly identified as an assumed feature of civil partnerships. In principle, therefore, the scheme can be entered into by any two people of the same sex, other than family members or those who are already married, without any expectations that the partnership contains a sexual or romantic component.

It's worth going back to the 2003 CDF document on this. The document recognised that homosexual unions are a fact, and that civil authorities adopt three broad appoaches in deal with this fact: some authorities simply tolerate them, some advocate legal recognition of such unions, and some favour giving them legal equivalence to marriage.

As I’ve said, the bishops were originally opposed to the scheme as first proposed, and drew on the 2003 CDF document in making a case largely based on the need to defend and promote the traditional understanding of marriage. They were worried that the law of the land would be altered in such a way as to signal that that marriage and same sex relationships were equally valid options and equally valid contexts for the raising of children. In short, they were worried that the

As codified, however, the 2004 law – while not without shortcomings, particularly with reference to its exclusion of siblings from the arrangement, say – did not strike me as sending such a signal; as far as I could tell, it did not undermine the unique position of marriage in British law as it did not presuppose that civil partners are engaged in a homosexual relationship.

As I read, I understood that some have argued that it's only for technical reasons that offenses analogous to adultery aren't cited in the Civil Partnership Act as grounds for the dissolution of partnerships, but I wasn't convinced by this; the law is a technical thing, and it would hardly have been beyond the wit of Parliament to devise technical solutions to whatever difficulties might have faced them in that regard. The fact that sexuality and sexual behaviour are wholly absent from the Act is striking; it's as though Parliament went to a great deal of trouble to omit them.

Wholly silent on the issue of sexual behaviour, treating sexuality as a private phenomenon, the Civil Partnership Act did not enshrine homosexual unions as institutions within the legal structure of the United Kingdom. The Act did not give homosexual activities specific and categorical legal recognition, and it neither foresaw nor approved on homosexual behaviour. Homosexual unions exist as a fact in British life, of course, and these certainly can subsist within civil partnerships, just as they can without them, but civil partnerships should not, in themselves, be understood as homosexual unions.



But But But -
In the main I thought this worked, and I slept on it and it still made sense to me, but it left me with a few little problems to think through.

The first was that whatever about what the law says, as legislated, the nature of the English common law system meant that it would be interpreted in the field, with the courts possibly treating civil partnerships as analagous to marriage, or as being essentially homosexual unions. In ways this has already happened to a significant degree, but I don't think this is something that the bishops can ever comment on in any legitimate sense; whatever input they might have into the making of laws, they can hardly interfere in the interpretation of it.

And yes, I realise that judges will sometimes speak of parliamentary intent when interpreting laws, but that's a dangerous game, which can hardly be second-guessed; given how many hundreds of people vote to enact laws, the judges can hardly speculate on the intentions of all of them.

It was obviously true that the range of people barred from entering into civil partnerships with each other was, as far as I could tell, identical to those barred from entering into marriages with each other. This is clearly the case, and it’s something that – as far as I can tell – the bishops have always objected to. They ‘two maiden aunts’ scenario in their 2003 submission implicitly made this point, and I gather that’s still the bishops’ line now: they believe the civil partnership scheme should be expanded so that it could be entered into by a wider range of people.

I wondered too about the fact that whatever the law may say, it's very clear that lots of civil partnerships are accompanied by ceremonies and vows, and appear to take the form -- in effect -- of civil marriages for people of the same sex, such that they appear to be 'gay marriages' and are widely thought of as such. This is all true, but it is, strictly speaking, unrelated to the civil partnership registration itself; it may provide a context in which the civil partnership document is signed, but it is, ultimately, window dressing, and in any case, the bishops can hardly be expected to comment on individual partnerships. Regardless of whatever common practice may involve or common perception may be, it is important to stress that the CDF's guidance related to questions of legal recognition; the fact remains that the law does not foresee or approve homosexual behaviour, and that it does not give specific and categorical legal recognition to homosexual activities.

I really didn’t know what to make of the peculiar detail in the Civil Partnership Act that said a partnership was voidable if at the time of its formation one of the partners was pregnant by someone other than the other partner. On the face of it, this challenged my belief that the law was devoid of sexual references, but after further thought I concluded that that challenge was a feeble one, not least because it's oddly phrased: it would be impossible for one civil partner to become pregnant by the other; by definition civil partners are of the same sex!

More pertinently, in a world of contraception, IVF, and turkey basters, we surely have to acknowledge that sex and pregnancy have been divorced from each other; we cannot ever assume that a pregnant woman has become pregnant as the result of sexual intercourse. What the law seems to say is that one partner can have a partnership declared void if the other partner had been pregnant at the time the partnership had been formed, even if her pregnancy had followed an agreement between the partners and a third party, possibly not involving a sexual act, or even if it had followed a rape. It’s striking that this relates only to female civil partners; there’s nothing that says a civil partnership should be declared void if either partner should be found, at the time of the partnership, to have caused somebody else to become pregnant. Whatever this detail was meant to signify, it certainly says nothing whatsoever about sexual fidelity.

This, of course, forced me to think hard about the situations faced by those registrars who were opposed to their registering civil partnerships as they felt that by doing so they'd be approving of things which were, in effect, homosexual unions. I've talked about this in the past, actually, when trying to get my thoughts sorted on the issue of gay marriage, and my thinking is that individual registrars could probably differ on this; some might be able to live with presiding over the signing of a document that says nothing about what people do in their private lives, while others might feel that by presiding over registrations of partnerships they were facilitating things they felt they couldn't agree with. In such situations, they surely ought to be able to object to their involvement in such registration, though I think we can imagine such cases making their way -- eventually -- to Strasbourg.

Curiously, I wasn’t able to find any indication that the English or Welsh bishops had ever spoken on this topic; if they had been opposed to civil partnership as they were instituted in law, they should surely have argued that Catholic registrars would be obliged, in conscience, to refrain from registering civil partnerships. Granted, my research may have been lacking, but this seemed to be one of those ‘dog that didn’t bark’ moments. It really did look as there’s no evidence whatsoever that the bishops of England and Wales have ever opposed the civil partnership scheme as it exists in law.



So...?
Having ploughed through heaps of data on the subject, I ultimately came to the conclusion that it’s entirely consistent with Church teaching for Archbishop Nichols to say he supports the civil partnership scheme as an existing and legitimate mechanism to help give stability to committed couples of the same sex, given that the law refrains from granting homosexual unions any sort of parliamentary imprimatur and thereby does not undermine the unique position of marriage in UK law.

It would, of course, be a different matter if marriage itself were to be redefined; definitions are about limitations, after all, and things gain meaning from what they're not as much as from what they are. Nichols's main aim, as he's made clear on many occasions, is to defend marriage as it has always existed in British law.


The Weekend and the Blog
I pulled together my thoughts on the subject into a presentation of 1,400 words or so, and gave my presentation on Saturday afternoon; it went down rather better than I thought it would, given that I was arguing something rather counter-intuitive, which I hadn't believed myself only a few days earlier.  

There were precious few questions, though what there were homed in on the conflict between how the law existed in theory and worked out in practice. Afterwards a few of the others complimented me on the paper, saying there'd been so few questions because I'd explained the controversy so clearly, and later on -- indeed, it may well have been the next day -- I was asked whether I'd be willing to turn it into a post for the Catholic Voices blog.

I came home on Monday, and on Tuesday I finished streamlining my talk, losing a few hundred words so that it wouldn't be absurdly long and so that people could read it in one easy go to get a clear handle on the issue. Following a tiny bit of editorial tweaking, it was posted on the Catholic Voices site shortly afterwards.

There was nothing frantic about this. There was no rush to defend the bishops, whatever others might imagine. It just happened; I was asked to explore and explain an issue, and in the process of doing so, reached conclusions I hadn't expected to reach. Others agreed, and we thought it'd be helpful if we could shed some light on the issue.

I fully understand that others might disagree with the conclusions I've reached, and that my colleagues have come to share. That’s fine: this is a complicated issue, and I think we have to recognise that others might legitimately disagree with us. I've no plans to shout down those who disagree with me. Following Chesterton, I may be certain that I am right, but I’m not so bigoted that I’m unable to imagine how I might possibly be wrong.

L'esprit de l'escalier: Third Thoughts on Redefining Marriage

All of this, of course, still leaves us with one big question: even if marriage always has been understood in a certain way, and even if religious people continue to understand it in that way, what harm could it possibly do to change how we legally define it? After all, doing so would make some people feel happier about themselves, and it's not as if anybody's talking of forcing religious institutions to celebrate same-sex marriages...

'What harm could it do?' That's the big question here. Because if a symbolic change can be enacted without a practical price, surely it'd be churlish to obstruct it. But what if that legal redefinition, that symbolic change, indeed incurred a practical price? 

It seems to me that there are quite a few areas of concern on this, such that I think the price to be paid for such an insubstantial change is far too high.

Religious Wedding Ceremonies, or, when ability becomes obligation...

As we all know, laws don't mean what politicians say they mean; they mean what they say, and they mean what judges say that means, and judges do not interpret laws in isolation but as part of the law of the land taken as a whole. As such, any law that gave religious bodies the right to solemnise same-sex marriages, but that said religious bodies would have no duty to solemnise such commitments, would have to be read in light of the Human Rights Act and other equality legislation, notably the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations.

What does this mean? It means that once it's legally established that religious same-sex wedding ceremonies can happen, it's only a matter of time before the refusal of a religious body to solemnise same-sex wedding ceremonies is deemed illegal. Tolerance will not be enough; approval will be mandatory.

I don't think this will affect the Catholic Church too much, but I can see the Anglicans getting into real trouble on this one. You can see how it'll happen, of course; a couple of liberal vicars will disobey their bishops and celebrate same-sex weddings, legally registering them as they go, thus setting a precedent, and once that happens, some poor evangelical vicar will get it in the neck for refusing to do the same thing.

Serious amounts of 'damages' will wind up having to be paid as the price of acting in accordance with one's own conscience, the rules of one's institution, and the original intent of the law of the land. This isn't a 'slippery slope' argument. This is the way the law works, and is how we've seen equality legislation being interpreted thus far.


Civil Ceremonies, or barring people from jobs...
As we also know, there have already been difficulties in the UK with marital registrars who have refused to register civil partnerships; some have resigned, whereas others have faced disciplinary proceedings. One lady, Lillian Ladele, who'd worked as a registrar in Islington for years, was deemed to have committed gross misconduct for having swapped shifts so that she did not personally have to preside over civil partnerships; she was denied opportunities for promotion, disciplined, and threatened with dismissal. This wound its way through the courts, with the Court of Appeal finding that Islington Council had done nothing wrong, Lord Neuberger ruling:

'It appears to me that, however much sympathy one may have with someone such as Ms Ladele, who is faced with choosing between giving up a post she plainly appreciates or officiating at events which she considers to be contrary to her religious beliefs, the legislature has decided that the requirements of a modern liberal democracy, such as the United Kingdom, include outlawing discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on grounds of sexual orientation, subject only to very limited exceptions'

Note that she hadn't attempted to block civil partnerships from being registered; she had in fact arranged things so that that registration could take place, but without her involvement.

I have no doubt that there'll have been other registrars who've had difficulties with civil partnerships who nonetheless have continued in their jobs and presided over them in acceptance of the fact that civil partnerships were new things, officially-sanctioned social mechanisms to give same-sex couples the same rights as married couples, that were nonetheless never intended to be identical to marriages.

And I have no idea how they'll cope now, especially if there's no allowance to be made for disagreements in conscience. There'll be a lot of people who'll think the government can call a dog a duck if it wants to, but it still won't be able to quack.

I'd expect that such people will have to choose between their jobs and their beliefs, and will be forced either to lose their jobs or to become hypocrites; what's more, I think that if the State henceforth is to require registrars to register same-sex unions as marriages, regardless of their personal beliefs, it will effectively be barring people from applying for such jobs.

It's worth looking at the second part of the ninth article of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK a signatory:

'Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.'

Look at that. Freedom to manifest one's beliefs should only be limited if it is necessary to do so. Not useful. Not desirable. Necessary. As I explained the other day, the Convention does not regard same-sex marriage as a right, so it's not something that's entitled to protection. I'm not sure the State should be seeking to redefine something, to a purely cosmetic end, if the cost of doing so is to force people to act against their consciences or to block people from having jobs.

Remember: civil-partnerships already have all the substantive rights of marriage. Frankly, I'm not sure anyone should be looking for the State to pat them on the head if the price of their feeling better is for somebody else to lose their job, and I'm not convinced the State should be indulging anyone who thinks their feelings are worth more than somebody else's livelihood.


More Problems for the Anglicans, or the question of establishment...
As I said the other day, given the fact that Parliament has licensed the traditional liturgy of the Church of England, there's a powerful sense in which Parliament speaks through the Church of England, indeed, there's a sense in which the Church of England is an arm of the State. As such, it's the State that speaks when the Church of England declares:

'... that so many as are coupled together otherwise than God's Word doth allow are not joined together by God; neither is their Matrimony lawful.'

I realise this might be seen as a technical issue rather than an issue of basic justice, but the established Church, as an arm of the State, can hardly announce on a regular basis that lots of bonds sanctioned by the State are in fact unlawful. Indeed, I don't see that any marriage could be lawfully redefined in England without Parliament formally changing the status of the Church of England, such that it would cease to be an expression of the State; and what that would do to the Queen, Defender of the Faith that she is, I really don't know. After all, back in 1953 she took a coronation oath in which she was asked:

'Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolable the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?'

To which she responded:

'All this I promise to do. The things which I have here before promised, I will perform, and keep. So help me God'

Given her oath, I'm not sure the Queen could sign into law any law that redefined marriage; as such, redefining marriage could well turn out to be a step towards disestablishment. Call me old-fashioned, but that seems an odd thing for a Conservative-led government to work towards.

Can you really imagine David Cameron declaring that he supports the disestablishment of the Church of England, 'not despite being a Conservative, but because I am a Conservative'?

Recognition of Marriages, or an Orwellian law that affects everyone...
There's a typically snide kind of response that is often thrown in the faces of people who have issues with same-sex marriages, which tends to take the form of 'Well, if you don't approve of gay marriages, don't have one! Nobody's forcing you to!'

This is problematic in a number of ways, but not the least of the issues with such a line is that it confuses weddings and marriages. A wedding is merely a ceremony in which a marriage is recognised; it lasts an hour, a day, or a week, depending on your culture and the type of wedding. A marriage, on the other hand, is a much more protracted affair, typically understood as lasting until one of the two partners dies.

If the State redefined marriage to include same-sex covenants it would effectively be demanding that everybody recognise those same-sex covenants as being marriages, irrespective of what people might privately believe. It shouldn't be hard to see how that could have an effect on religious people, of whatever faith, who simply believe that same-sex unions cannot be marriages.

Mainstream Christian teaching would be open to prosecution under section 5 of the Public Order Act. The law doesn't require there to be an intention to insult, after all. It just requires people to feel insulted, in a context where the insulting person could be expected to realise that there might be somebody around who'd feel insulted or demeaned by what's being said or written.

Ordinary priests, teachers, and parents would become open to hate speech legislation.

If any service, or facility, or anything at all is offered to married couples only, well, the State would now be explicitly saying that it must also be made available to same-sex couples, regardless of your own views on what marriage is.

This would be a profoundly illiberal development, establishing a precedent for the State to redefine any pre-existing and generally recognised concept and to demand that people accept its new definition. Does anybody want that? Does anybody want the State to have a coercive power to redefine the very words we use in order to drive any ideological agenda, however noble we might think that cause to be?

Because if you're tempted to say the State should to be able to redefine words to suit your agenda, you're giving it the right to redefine them to suit somebody else's...


And then there's Unknown Unknowns...
I was ahead of the curve in disliking Donald Rumsfeld, having read years back of how he'd basically ended Kissinger's career at the top of American politics because he believed Kissinger was a wimp. That said, I thought he was the subject of a lot of unfair criticism after he said, in February 2002, that:

'There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.'

I thought that was a perfectly clear, sensible, and systematic sentence. My main problem with him saying it was that he didn't seem capable to taking on board the implications of what he said, as had he done so, I'd imagine the Bush regime would have been rather less keen to lead the charge to invade Iraq. There are some things we simply cannot foresee in any sense, and we should keep this in mind when considering such a radical change to an institution that predates the State and has long been the foundation of British society. We have no idea what the consequences might be...

Much opposition to government same-sex marriage relates things directly to children and the fact that a same-sex marriage is, by definition, sterile: it cannot, in and of itself, ever produce a child. There's a level at which this opposition is, of course, redundant: thanks especially to changes in UK adoption law, there's a sense in which same-sex relationships are already recognised in UK law as environments in which children can be reared and nurtured*. That said, I don't think we can get away from the fact that seeking to redefine marriage in UK law is part of a general process over the last half-century which has seen marriage eroded almost out of existence. Only half as many Britons are getting married now as were getting married -- from a smaller population -- in the 1960s, and almost half of the marriages that now take place end in divorce. The idea of marriage as a stable bond that acts as the foundation of a balanced and secure family in which children can be born and raised has been undermined for decades.

Only a few weeks back Britain panicked as thousands of teenagers ran riot, plundering and ransacking her cities, terrifying ordinary people everywhere. For all the nuance we need to apply in thinking about this, it seems clear that the roots of these riots lay in two main phenomena.

I've talked already here about the economic strategy of the right -- and that includes Blair who largely followed Thatcher's line on this -- having rendered millions of less-able and ill-educated people surplus to Britain's economic requirements, leaving them hopeless and frustrated in deteriorating and soul-destroying sink estates. This is a reality that pundits on the right seem, in the main, unwilling to face.

The other issue, however, is one that should discomfort the left. There seems little denying that the riots were a symptom of a much broader social breakdown, and that well-intentioned social liberalism -- which dominates Britain's attitude to social policy -- must bear much of the responsibility for this. Dying to Belong, the Centre for Social Justice's 2009 study into gang culture, identified family breakdown as a key driver in gang culture, noting that experience of early divorce or separation massively increased the likelihood of crimes being committed in youth and early adulthood.

That's not to say, of course, that same-sex partnerships or 'marriages' will cause crimes; such a claim would be as absurd as it would be offensive. However, it's important to recognise that marriage, long recognised as the bedrock of British society, has been under attack for decades; it seems to me that if the Government seriously wants to address the problems of social breakdown in modern Britain, it should be trying to protect and support the traditional institutions of British society, rather than seeking to redefine them out of existence.


______________________________________________________________________________
*Whether this will prove a good thing is another matter: it might be absolutely fine -- for the sake of the children, I hope so -- or it might not. Though what tiny amount of evidence there is suggests that there's no harm done through children being raised in any environment in which they could never have naturally arisen, there is simply next to no real evidence on the subject.

Same-sex adoption was illegal everywhere prior to 1995, as far as I can tell, and it's really only been in the last decades that national legislatures have voted to legalise the practice: the fact is that hardly any children, raised in same-sex households, have grown up yet. They might well turn out to be the best people who've ever lived but we just can't say based on the scanty information we've got. There's a sense in which people passing opinions on this matter are passing them based on the earliest preliminary stages of a well-intentioned social experiment. It's not normal practice to adjudicate on experiments until the results are in, and it's especially bad form to do so when you've a strong vested income in a certain outcome...

L'esprit de l'escalier: Second Thoughts on Redefining Marriage

Christian views of marriage

It has to be said that Christians differ somewhat among themselves in their understandings of marriage, with some, such as Catholics, holding the institution in higher regard than others. Broadly speaking, though, all Christians agree that marriage is not a mere social construct but is, in fact, something made by God. In arguing this, they'll point to biology, anthropology, history, and philosophy, arguing on wholly natural and rational grounds for the existence of a natural law. They will, of course, also refer to the Bible and Christian tradition, and will point to a few key Biblical passages, notably Mark 10:6-9:

'But from the beginning of creation, "God made them male and female." "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.'

There are plenty of other passages too, of course, talking about marital relations and about how Christian marriage exists as living image of the relationship between Christ and his Church, but at the heart of all those passages is this one, which identifies a marriage as being a God-made covenant between a woman and a man, who are united into a new being.

While Catholics see Christian marriages as sacramental in a way that other marriages are not, the Church nonetheless does not in any way dispute the validity or legitimacy of non-Christian marriages. It sees them, rather, as entirely valid and real, so long as they meet the definition of marriage. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says of marriage in general that:

'The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring...

"The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws. . . . God himself is the author of marriage." The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes. These differences should not cause us to forget its common and permanent characteristics. Although the dignity of this institution is not transparent everywhere with the same clarity, some sense of the greatness of the matrimonial union exists in all cultures. "The well-being of the individual person and of both human and Christian society is closely bound up with the healthy state of conjugal and family life."'

I do not believe it would be possible for the Catholic Church to recognise same-sex unions as being marriages, leaving aside how it clearly could not sanction or celebrate such same-sex unions. And when I speak of the Church in this sense, I'm not thinking just of the hierarchy or the priesthood -- those that are sometimes and disingenuously referred to as the 'the institutional Church'. I'm thinking of all believers. I do not see how any Catholic with a properly formed conscience could accept same-sex unions as being marriages.

And I'm pretty sure it's not only Catholics that would find that an impossible hurdle.

Again, remember that this isn't about love, or about whether gay people can be committed to each other as deeply as a straight couple, or about whether the State or Society accepts that a relationship is loving or committed. And it's not about whether a civil partnership is a civil partnership.*

It's about the nature of marriage.

Shouldn't religious views be kept out of politics?

I mentioned the other day that while I do believe in the separation of State and Church, I don't think it is desirable, fair, or even possible to separate politics and religion.

Most people who tend to advocate such a separation argue based on the assumptions -- whether explicit or implicit -- that a lack of religious belief is normative, that religious belief is inherently irrational, and that one's beliefs can be divorced from one's conscience and identity. All three of these assumptions are, at the very least, questionable; I would take the view that they are, in fact, deeply wrong.

What's more, there tends to be a double standard at work in these matters; those who oppose people acting politically because of their religious views tend not to object when religious people support causes they support, even if their motives are rooted in their religious beliefs. Think about it...

• How many people maintain that the American Declaration of Independence's claims about the human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness being inalienable should be disregarded, as the Declaration explicitly identifies their inalienable character as being derived from their Divine origin?
• How many people argue that the Quaker Anthony Benezet, the Methodist John Wesley, or the Anglicans John Newton and William Wilberforce were wrong to have argued and struggled against slavery because they saw it as being against Christian teaching?
• How many people say that the opposition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie and Hans Scholl to the Nazi state was inappropriate, given its roots in their Lutheran faith?
• How many people hold that Oscar Romero should not have invoked the Catholic faith of the Salvadorean soldiers when calling on them to disobey their brutal and repressive orders?
• How many people believe that Jerzy Popiełuszko should have kept his Catholic views to himself and withheld his criticisms of Poland's communist government?
• How many people claim that Christians ought to have been barred from marching against the invasion of Iraq or protesting against the executions of both Troy Davis and Lawrence Brewer if their views were founded on their faith?

Faith has consequences. It's not just a matter of belief; it's a matter of belief in action, or dynamic belief, if you like. Belief should be manifested in practice. We do what we do because of who we are, and who are, in large part, depends on what we believe.

In practice, those who claim that religion should be kept out of politics are usually quite happy to accept religious people as allies, regardless of their motives; they only ever invoke the supposed principle that religion and politics should be kept apart when religious people disagree on religious grounds with their pet issues.

I'll wrap this up tomorrow.

______________________________________________________________________
* It is.

L'esprit de l'escalier: First Thoughts on Redefining Marriage

Earlier today, for reasons I'm not going to get into here, I needed to talk about same-sex marriage. I don't think I did a very good job of it, and rather wish I'd held my fire for a few days.

It's not been a subject I've been hugely inclined to get bothered about, which is one of the reasons I'd not responded when someone asked me on Monday when I was going to talk about the redefinition of marriage.

(The other was that I forgot: I had meant to say I'd no plans to talk about it, and then it slipped my mind.)

Intuitively, I've been rather conflicted on the topic, which is hardly surprising for someone who has a fair number of gay friends.

Instinctively...

Part of me has been opposed to it on, effectively, semantic grounds: marriage has always* meant the union of a man and a woman with the intention, in principle, of enabling the birth and rearing of children; indeed the word matrimony derives from the Latin word for 'mother' and recognises that marriage does not exist for the marrying couple, but for the sake of any children they might have.

I don't like language being changed. I realise that semantic change happens all the time, but it's normally an organic process. It shouldn't simply be the case of a State announcing that a word no longer means what it used to.

After all, the Government could announce that henceforth all housecats were to be renamed, in law, as Bengal tigers, thereby officially raising the number of Bengal tigers from little more than 3,000 worldwide to about eight million in Britain alone.  I think we'd all agree that such a change would be a charade; it would in no way alter the fact that tigers are an endangered species.

On the other hand, I tend to take a 'live and let live' attitude. I have gay friends who support the idea of the State redefining marriage for the sake of equality, and I can understand what they say about the symbolic value of such a change. If it makes gay people happy to call their state-sanctioned pair-bonds marriages, well, what harm will it do? After all, does it really make sense to say that this devalues marriage, as I've heard people claiming? I commented on this on Twitter about a week back, feeling that the horse had long bolted from Society's marital stable, and grimly observing of marriage that 'I doubt there are many things that could devalue it more than the massive divorce rate.'

And I wasn't surprised to see other Christians sharing my relative nonchalance about the subject.

And yet...

Something came up during the week, which has driven me to ponder this more seriously since Thursday morning. I've done quite a lot of reading on the subject, and spoken to a few friends -- including one of my closest confidantes, who is bisexual, politically active on LGBT issues, and living with a couple in a civil partnershop -- and have thought a lot more deeply on the matter than I'd ever done, considering angles I'd previously not even thought of.

And all my pondering's left me increasingly convinced that those objecting most loudly to the possibility of this may well be right.

That's not to say that we don't have bigger problems to deal with, just that you play the team in front of you, not the one you wish was there.

What's at issue here?

It seems to me that people recognise that, in real terms, civil partnership, as it now exists, legally bestows all the rights of marriage -- indeed, section 3(4) of the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007 make that very point:

'For the purposes of paragraphs (1) and (3), the fact that one of the persons (whether or not B) is a civil partner while the other is married shall not be treated as a material difference in the relevant circumstances.'

This lack of meaningful legal distinction underpinned the court decision last January to support a gay couple in a civil partnership who challenged the legal right of a couple who owned a B&B near Penzance to refuse to accommodate unmarried couples in double beds. In other words, despite how when civil partnership was introduced it was explicitly differentiated from marriage, and despite how in principle a civil partnership without any sexual component whatsoever could be established between two heterosexual friends, in British law a civil partnership is now functionally equivalent to marriage.

Indeed, it's clear that this is recognised by society at large; many people already refer to civil partnerships as 'gay marriages' and describe attending civil partnership ceremonies as 'going to weddings'. Gay marriage is already in many respects a social reality.

The push, and it's not a broadly-based one, for same-sex partnerships to be legally recognised as marriages can, therefore, have no practical purpose, as that practical purpose has already been achieved. The change is essentially about symbolism. It's about a cosmetic notion equality, whereby same-sex couples will be enabled to feel that the State formally approves of their relationships in the same way that it approves of marriages.

The Point of Marriage

Marriage, however, is not and has never been a socially-approved love-bond; indeed, throughout history it's been quite rare to think of love as essential to marriage. Desirable, sure, but not essential.  Why would the State care whether two individuals -- of whatever sexual orientation -- love each other or not? It's not the State's business to comment on our private relationships.

What marriage primarily is, and what it has always been, is a mechanism to enable the procreation and the rearing of children in a safe, stable, and balanced environment. This is, by definition, a public rather than a private relationship, and it is something that creates a public good.  It is for this reason, and essentially only for this reason, that the State recognises marriage as an institution.

Discussions about what's fair for adults miss the point. From the point of view of the State, marriage has always been viewed as an essentially child-centred institution. 

Marriage as the foundation of the family in Irish and British law...
The two states that exist in these islands have both legally recognised this fact. In the case of Ireland, this is expressly stated in article 41 of Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Irish Constitution, in which the State 'recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law,' guarantees to protect the family, 'as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State,' and 'pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded.'

Look at that. The Irish State sees marriage as something to be protected as the Family is founded on the institution of marriage, which is seen as necessary to social order and the welfare of the nation as a whole.

So what, you might think: the Irish State may see things that way, but the United Kingdom has a different view. Well I think you'd be surprised. In 1948, the United Kingdom signed up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 16 of which says:

'Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.'

This, essentially, makes the same points about marriage as are made in the Irish Constitution. The fact that the article says 'men and women' is important, as it recognises the balanced nature of marriage as a bond between people of different sexes; it would have been easy for the framers of the Declaration to have said that 'everyone of full age... has the right to marry and found a family'.

All other rights are expressed in a generic, gender-neutral way. Only the right to marriage recognises that men and women are different; this is a recognition of how sexual complementarity is essential to marriage.

Three years after the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Kingdom signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, which had been inspired by Winston Churchill and drafted under the guidance of the later Lord Chancellor Kilmuir. Following the pattern of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 12 of the Convention pointedly does not say that everyone has the right to marry:

'Men and women of marriageable age have the right to marry and to found a family, according to the national laws governing the exercise of this rights.'

As the European Court of Human Rights has recognised, this should not be interpreted as saying that people have a right to marry whoever they wish; the nature of marriage as a bond between people of opposite sexes for the purpose of founding a family is implicit in the article's wording.

The Court has also stressed that the Convention must be read as a whole, rather than with individual articles torn out of context, and that when read this way 'all other substantive Articles of the Convention grant rights and freedoms to "everyone”"or state that "no one" is to be subjected to certain types of prohibited treatment. The choice of wording in Article 12 must thus be regarded as deliberate.'

It is important too to understand that Britain has an established church, and though most opponents of this fact take issue with what they see as the Church of England's inappropriate influence on how the country is governed, the fact is that -- if anything -- the traffic of power goes the other way. Among other things, Parliament authorised the 1662 Anglican liturgy, and as such, in a legal sense, it speaks through the Church of England, or at least through its traditional prayers.

There was an attempt in the 1920s to change the official prayerbook, but Parliament blocked the proposals as being too Catholic in tone; since the Parliamentary refusals to sanction changes to the prayerbook, the Church of England has largely insisted on its right to choose its own prayers regardless of Parliament. As such, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer still stands as a Parliamentary expression.

And what does this say of marriage? It defines marriage as a holy estate, in which man and woman are joined together, for three reasons, the first of which is the procreation and rearing of children, and it says that marriage is not lawful if it is contrary to God's law or the law of the land. In other words, Parliament says that for marriage to be lawful it must follow the pattern of Christian marriage as laid out in the New Testament.

As for what that is, and why this matters, I'll get into it tomorrow...

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* Yes, I know about polygamy, but even then, there haven't been many societies in which polygamy has been very common, and scarcely any polygamous societies practice 'group marriage'. Instead, what tends to exist are situations where an individual can be in more than one pair-bond at any given time, such that a man can have two wives, but the wives are not wives to each other. The basic principle that a marriage is a bond between one man and one woman has been the basic universal norm throughout history.

Texts without Contexts

I mentioned yesterday how I have huge difficulty understanding Evangelical thinking, but how I've been given a few pointers that I think will help me in the long run.

Well, I want to get one of these pointers down here now, while it's fresh and relevant to something I've been reading.

In Essentials, John Stott comments on Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, noting how nuanced and ambiguous it is in terms of what it says about how those who do not know or for whatever reason cannot hear the Gospel may yet be saved. However, he observes, there's no such ambiguity to be seen in Redemptor Hominis, John Paul II's first Papal encyclical, in which he said:

'Man -- every man without any exception whatever -- has been redeemed by Christ, and ... with man -- with each man without any exception whatever -- Christ is in a way united, even when man is unaware of it'

That kind of unconditional universalism, says Stott, must, however, be firmly rejected by those who look to Scripture for authoritative guidance.

I blinked a bit when I read that. JPII a universalist? Really? This was news to me, so I went and had a read of Redemptor Hominis, and rather quickly came to the conclusion that John Paul had been talking about our redemption as distinct from our salvation. That is, he was saying we've all been redeemed; he was not saying we'll all be saved. Insofar as as he said we're all united in Christ he didn't say anything that was in any sense outside the Christian mainstream. We need only look to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, for instance, where the Lutheran martyr said:

'The death of Jesus is the manifestation of God's righteousness, it is the place where God has given gracious proof of his own righteousness, the place where alone the righteousness of God will dwell. By sharing in this death we too become partakers of that righteousness. For it was our flesh Christ took upon him, and our sins which he bore in his body on the tree (1 Peter 2:24). What happened there to him happened to us all.'

How could so eminent a Christian teacher as John Stott, someone famed for his erudition and charitable spirit, have so misrepresented John Paul II? He may not see any difference between redemption and salvation, but surely he must realise that Catholic teaching carefully distinguishes between the two. He couldn't just be prooftexting, could he? Mining Catholic writings to take passages out of context and misinterpreing them in line with his own preconceptions?

The thing is, I've seen this happen before, and again in the case of someone who's admired as an Evangelical academic and pastor, that being Don Carson, he who's so famous for declaring that 'a text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text'. I went to a talk he gave some months ago, and was far from impressed by it, for a few reasons, and a couple of Protestant friends of mine who were there too were even less taken with what he said than I'd been -- they've hardly been back to that church since -- and this left me wondering why people think so much of him. I glanced about online to try to find out more about him, and I came across an article he'd written about marriage, in which he said the following:

'But it is important to see that, strictly speaking, marriage (despite the Roman Catholic Church), is not a sacrament to be reserved for Christians. It is a creation ordinance — that is, it is part of the plan of creation itself, something that God has ordained for man/woman pairs everywhere, not something that flows out of the life of the church and that belongs only to Christians.'

This astounded me. Carson is quite highly regarded, and apparently very well-read, supposedly reading 500 books a year, although he admits many of them he barely skims. And despite all his learning, he thinks that the Church says that marriage is a sacrament and is reserved for Christians. The Church says nothing of the sort. Sure, it says Christian marriage is a sacrament, and that Christian marriage is reserved for Christians, but it doesn't dispute for a moment the reality, the validity, or the legitimacy of other marriages. It's not as if this is an obscure point, either. It's openly explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and indeed is pretty clear even in the first paragraph of the section on marriage.

This isn't his only mention of the Church in the article, though, as he later says that there's no need for a marriage to take place in a religious context or in the presence of a religious minister:

'There does not have to be a minister in order to be “done” properly. We have no interest in preserving the vestiges of medieval Catholic theology of marriage.'

Again, this is utter nonsense. I did an essay on medieval marriage when I was an undergraduate history student, and -- for what it's worth -- an atheist, and one thing I learned was that to be deemed sacramental or even valid, medieval marriages didn't need to be public affairs, conducted in the presence of a priest or any other religious minister. No, despite numerous attempts to regularise the situation -- attempts dating right back to Ignatius of Antioch around 107 AD -- so-called 'clandestine' marriages without what we might describe as priestly supervision were very common, as medieval annulment and divorce records make clear; indeed, they were only definitively abolished under the 1563 Tametsi decree of the Council of Trent. They were abolished for pragmatic and pastoral reasons, not theological ones. To this day the Church retains its ancient theology of marriage, remaining utterly adamant that in Christian marriage, it is the spouses who are the ministers of Christ's grace, mutually conferring upon each other the sacrament of matrimony. Again, it's in the Catechism, and it's not all that obscure a point either, as when I was talking about this over coffee after Mass the other week, several of the ladies there pointed out that this had been clearly explained to them decades ago by the nuns who had taught them at school.

So what's going on? How can people as highly regarded and apparently as decent and as competent as Don Carson and John Stott get the Catholic Church so egregiously wrong? I don't believe they're stupid, dishonest, or lazy, and I don't believe they don't care about truth, so what's behind this?

Time and time again over recent years I've been astounded to be told things about the Catholic Church by Protestant friends, things which I either knew to be false, or subsequently looked into and discovered to be false. That's not to say that there weren't elements of truth in what they'd said, but what truth there was in them was invariably misunderstood and distorted, mingled with outright falsehood and magnified to a point where I occasionally am tempted to wonder whether there's a Giant Bumper Book of Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church out there. I could reel off examples, but I'd be here all day, and, well, my lunch break is only so long.

Still, I think I was given a clue to this some weeks ago. I'd had a few chats, and exhanged a few emails, with one of my newer Evangelical friends, with us talking about the Reformation period in sixteenth-century England, and I'd contested some  myths about the period. In replying he admitted that he had a predisposition to prefer the reformers because of what he knew of them, and the Protestant narrative as a whole, because of what he knew of the Catholic Church -- apparently oblivious to the fact that what he's heard of the reformers and the Church he's heard within the Protestant tradition. He conceded that this wasn't an academically rigorous approach, but said that this could hardly be helped as he didn't have the time to study history to a high level.

I can understand that approach up to a point at my friend's level, though even then it leaves me uneasy -- my instinct is always to find out why the other guy thinks what he does, and to do so by asking him and listening to him, rather than by listening to his opponents -- but I wonder if this mindset is in play at higher levels too. 

Is it simply that the likes of Carson have long made up their minds about what the Catholic Church teaches, having been taught a simplistic and largely false version of it long ago by people they trust, so that nowadays they think it has nothing of value to say, nothing worth engaging with? Is it that they've read books written by people who believe these myths, and that they simply trust them, without going to the sources? Is it that they'll read the odd passage from Church documents of one sort or another, and -- without understanding their context in the document and in the broader Church tradition -- will reach conclusions about them that they simply couldn't reach if they actually engaged with them in a meaningful way?

I don't know if that is the case, but I'm having trouble coming up with a more charitable explanation for their spreading falsehoods about the Church. And if it is true, I rather wish they'd try reading some proper grown-up Catholic books, and reading them slowly, not to find fault, just to understand.  We live in a world full of caricatures, and sometimes we should stop and listen to people on their own terms.