On applications of Amoris Laetitia, and dubious reporting about said...

It increasingly seems to me that there are few more poisonous elements in the modern Catholic Church than the nest of vipers that is churchmilitant.com – there are reasons, after all, while Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput has said it and another site are ‘destructive’, tending to ‘sow division wherever they tread’. Indeed, Archbishop Chaput’s diocesan office is said the site is ‘not interested in presenting information in any useful way’, its ‘sole desire’ being ‘to create division, confusion, and conflict within the Church’. 

Philadelphia’s observation that Church Militant’s ‘reports are not to be taken seriously’ sprang to mind this afternoon as I’ve seen people linking to an article on the site, declaring that, ‘Following a diocesan synod, Bp. Robert McElroy has ordered priests in his diocese to post invitations in parish bulletins welcoming divorced and remarried Catholics to “utilize the internal forum of conscience” when it comes to receiving the Eucharist.’

Supporting this claim, the article linked to one of the parish bulletins in question, and indeed if you read down the article you will at least see the relevant passage, which, in summarising the diocesan synod, says:

‘The delegates spoke movingly to the need for the Church to reach out to divorced men and women at every moment of their journey, to support them spiritually and pastorally, to help them move through the annulment process, and to assist those who are divorced and remarried and cannot receive an annulment to utilize the internal forum of conscience in order to discern if God is calling them to return to the Eucharist.’

The bulletin, in other words, describes how delegates at the synod said they believed the Church should help people to see if they are called to return to Communion. Granted, you might think this imprudent for various reasons, but even so, if you're honest you'll admit that the reality is not quite the same as the headline description. And yet, if you didn't bother to click through, you might think that initial claim was a fair.

It’s funny how people get things so wrong when it comes to San Diego’s current bishop. 

Only the other week, Ross Douthat was talking in the New York Times about what he calls ‘the teaching document recently produced by San Diego’s bishop, the Francis-appointed, beloved-of-progressives Robert McElroy, following a diocesan synod convened to discuss the implementation of Amoris’. 

He then proceeds to quote from – as he had linked to – Embracing the Joy of Love, a document Dr McElroy issued in May of this year, just a month after Amoris Laetitia had come out, as he makes clear in the opening line, and most certainly not after the diocesan synod that took place at the end of October.

There’d be a lot less craziness in online Catholicism if people only took the time to read things properly.

After Brexit, what now for the North?

I was troubled last night to read people expressing delight at the huge queues at polling booths across the UK. Such a massive turnout, seemingly, was a triumph for democracy. I wasn't so sure. There's far more to democracy than just casting votes, and those who act as though democracy is something that happens but on rare occasions and purely in the privacy of the polling booth do a disservice to democracy. 

If democracy is to mean anything -- if our votes are to mean anything -- we have to participate in an informed way. I was pretty sure that wasn't happening: how valuable are votes cast on the basis of a mythical £350m a week, or to ward off Turkish accession, or in the belief that EU laws are made by unelected bureaucrats, or that there's no way to remove the European Commission from office, or because of the belief that British fishing collapsed when it joined the EEC, or any of a host of other lies? 

The 'Leave' campaigners lied and lied egregiously throughout the Brexit referendum campaign, and did so tapping into decades of popular poison from the British press, and if lots of people who've long felt disenfranchised and ignored should have been willing to go along with this kind of stuff, well, maybe that should have been expected.

I've less sympathy for others, for those who take the pains to be informed of things they care about, but who on other issues prefer instead to listen simply to those whose political views conveniently tally with their own judgments and to shout down calls for them to inform themselves as mere elitism.

So for those who make much of their pro-life credentials, and who dismissed my concerns and those of others about the lives and livelihoods of those in Northern Ireland being actively endangered by a vote to quit the EU, here are just a handful of things they might look before they next put themselves forward to speak as Catholics or pro-lifers, or even just look in the mirror.

Not for nothing has The Irish Times said, "Of all the things that could happen to an Irish government short of the outbreak of war, this is pretty much up there with the worst of them."

Then there was The Guardian a couple of days back, observing that, "Great Britain may be able to weather a Brexit, but Northern Ireland simply cannot."

Lucinda Creighton may not be everyone's cup of tea, but she had a point when she said the other day that, "Brexit poses the greatest threat to the Northern Irish Peace Process since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998."  

For a more cautious take, unsurprisingly from a pro-Brexit paper, The Telegraph warned, "The scenario of the UK leaving the European Union, when a majority of the population of Northern Ireland have opted to remain (and especially if there has been a decisive vote in favour among the nationalist community), may exacerbate tensions, fuel demands for a border poll on Irish unification and challenge the durability of the peace process."  

Then we have from the Centre on Constitutional Change the observation that "a British exit from the EU risks undermining the very self-determination and national sovereignty that its adherents believe it will bring about", continuing, "This is because it risks shattering the fragile balance and stability of the UK by threatening the peace settlement in Northern Ireland ".  

Onetime MEP Brendan Donnelly wrote from the London School of Economics, meanwhile, that "it is clear that much potential exists for the destabilisation of Northern Ireland through a vote to leave the EU on 23 June", continuing, "The Good Friday agreement is under more strain from a currently low level of sectarian violence than is sometimes appreciated".  

At the Euractiv site, Paul Brannan hammers this home when he says, "with politics in Northern Ireland already on the brink of breakdown and the Good Friday Agreement in jeopardy, a UK EU exit threatens a total collapse of the peace process".

And for those who think Britain can keep the show on the road, as though it's taken seriously as an honest broker and was never known as 'perfidious Albion', The New Statesman points out: "Funnily enough, the same people who don't trust Britain to administer the peace process would also be unhappy with the EU leaving that process."

I could say more, but that'll do for now. Words seem unlikely to do any good now the die is cast.

Final Week Brexit Thoughts II - The Threat to Northern Ireland

About a week or so back Catholic Voices hosted a debate in London in which two speakers gave impressive speeches on why the UK should remain in the European Union and two argued in similarly impressive fashion to the effect that the UK should leave the Union. 

Better-humoured, more honest, more thoughtful and broader-minded than almost all engagements I've read or witnessed on the topic, the debate on the motion "This house believes that Catholic values are best served by remaining in the European Union" was nonetheless striking for a complete absence of references to the single most Catholic part of the UK, that being Northern Ireland.

According to 2011 figures, 40.8% of the Northern Irish population is Catholic. This stands in stark contrast to England and Wales, for instance, where, if Steven Bullivant is right, just 13.7% of the population say they were raised Catholic, with a mere 8.3% of the population holding to the Faith now.

I appreciate the Brexit debate is really an 'Exit' debate in that the discussion is primarily driven by English concerns and will be decided by English votes, with the lesser partners in the UK at best hoping to tip the scales if an English vote is finely balanced, but I think that English voters should at least give some thought to how their votes are likely to affect things beyond England.

Northern Ireland's bishops have, of course, warned of the dangers of a Brexit to the North, and their concerns seem shared by Northern Ireland's Catholics. A Millward Brown poll in early June found that 70% of Northern Catholics were in favour of the UK remaining in the EU, with a mere 12% advocating that the UK quit the Union. A more recent Ipsos Mori poll has shown just 56% of Catholics in favour of remaining in the Union, though again a mere 12% seem to back a Brexit. 

Dividing countries the hard way

Such low support for withdrawal from the Union is understandable in a region where the UK's only land border is to be found, and where there has never really been a traditional border: for centuries, after all, Ireland was united under one form or other of British rule, and even after the Irish War of Independence it was possible for people to cross back and forth without a passport. Under the UK's 1949 Ireland Act Irish people are not considered aliens in British law, and the soft and porous nature of the border has been vital for the North's economy. It's not really surprising that people in the border counties especially might not be looking forward to this ending.

Of course, it's far from obvious that a hard border will be imposed between Ireland and the UK within the island of Ireland. Given the realities of Irish roads, about 200 of which cross the border, and how farms and fields straddle the boundary, it's hard to see how any border within Ireland, even one policed by border guards and soldiers, could bar from the UK anyone really intent on crossing over. And given that immigration fears are utterly central to Britain's EU debate, this is a question that needs pondering.

Cameron engaged with this in the Commons last week, when he answered a question from the SDLP's Alasdair McDonnell by saying that following Brexit there would have to be a hard border. "Therefore," he said, "you can only have new border controls between the Republic and Northern Ireland or, which I would regret hugely, you would have to have some sort of checks on people as they left Belfast or other parts of Northern Ireland to come to the rest of the United Kingdom."

I suspect that in practical terms a functional EU/non-EU border would have to be not in Ireland but between Britain and Northern Ireland, thus splitting the UK and making the Northern Irish second-class citizens, as the alternative would be bringing in checkpoints on dozens of Irish roads with soldiers patrolling the lands and minor roads between them, all of which would be likely to require the kind of security apparatus likely to fire up the republicans again, inviting a return to the kind of protracted low-intensity civil war that previous blighted the North.

Impoverishing the Six Counties

Even aside from the technical issue of the border, there's a high chance that a Brexit vote would impoverish Northern Ireland. Farm subsidies are regional expenditures, and it's striking that Northern Ireland's farmers receive four times the amount of EU subsidies than do England's ones. 80% of Northern dairy produce is exported, and when pondering this people need to remember that no part of the UK exports a higher proportion of its exports to other parts of the EU than does Northern Ireland. Any kind of border would hurt that, as would any imposition of tariffs and any hindering of the currently free trading arrangements. Tariffs on dairy imports to the EU, it's worth pointing out, average 36%.

The EU has played an absolutely crucial role in the Northern Irish peace process, of course, with John Hume detailing in his 1998 Nobel Prize acceptance speech how he had been hugely inspired in his work for peace by his European experience.

"I always tell this story," he said, "and I do so because it is so simple yet so profound and so applicable to conflict resolution anywhere in the world. On my first visit to Strasbourg in 1979 as a member of the European Parliament. I went for a walk across the bridge from Strasbourg to Kehl. Strasbourg is in France. Kehl is in Germany. They are very close. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and I meditated. There is Germany. There is France. If I had stood on this bridge 30 years ago after the end of the Second World War when 25 million people lay dead across our continent for the second time in this century and if I had said: 'Don't worry. In 30 years' time we will all be together in a new Europe, our conflicts and wars will be ended and we will be working together in our common interests', I would have been sent to a psychiatrist."  

"But it has happened," he continued, "and it is now clear that European Union is the best example in the history of the world of conflict resolution and it is the duty of everyone, particularly those who live in areas of conflict to study how it was done and to apply its principles to their own conflict resolution." 

"All conflict is about difference, whether the difference is race, religion or nationality," he said, continuing, "The European visionaries decided that difference is not a threat, difference is natural. Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace - respect for diversity."

"The peoples of Europe then created institutions which respected their diversity - a Council of Ministers, the European Commission and the European Parliament - but allowed them to work together in their common and substantial economic interest. They spilt their sweat and not their blood and by doing so broke down the barriers of distrust of centuries and the new Europe has evolved and is still evolving, based on agreement and respect for difference," he said, before declaring, "That is precisely what we are now committed to doing in Northern Ireland."

Fine words? Sure, but accurate ones too, and not merely has the European project, with its dedication through most of its history to peace-building through calling people of different communities to work together, inspired peace in the North, but it has underpinned it too. 

As the Ulster Unionist MEP Jim Nicholson wrote the other day, "I will always remember when, in October 1994, just as the loyalist ceasefire was announced, Ian Paisley, John Hume and I met with then European Commission president Jacques Delors. He shared our optimism that Northern Ireland would move to a new beginning away from violence and pledged EU financial support. And he was true to his word -- weeks later, £240m of European funding for peace-building in Northern Ireland was approved. By 2020, Northern Ireland and the border region of the Republic will have received more than €2bn in PEACE funding alone.

PEACE funding only makes up one part of the money the North draws down from Europe, Nicholson continued, and the truth is that the EU has largely rebuilt Northern Ireland since the ceasefires began. Northern Irish prosperity, and Northern Irish peace, in no small part depend on the EU.

(Of course, the EU has done a huge amount in general to support those parts of the UK furthest from London; whether London lets them languish and runs the UK for the benefit of the English South-east you can mull over for yourselves.)

Explicitly undermining the Good Friday Agreement

Those who might doubt that a vote for Brexit is a vote to destabilise Northern Ireland should look too at the Good Friday Agreement, which explicitly rests on the fact of the UK and Ireland being "partners in the European Union".

The North-South Ministerial Council envisages the Northern and Republican governments working together -- at a local level, for those who doubt that subsidiarity matters to the modern EU -- on a range of such necessarily EU-related matters as agriculture, the environment, tourism, transport, and the management and oversight of EU programmes through Ireland's National Development Plan and Northern Ireland's Structural Funds Plan.

It's hard to see how this strand of the agreement can work if Northern Ireland is no longer in the EU, and since the Northern Assembly is explicitly described in the agreement as "mutually interdependent" with the Council, it looks as though withdrawal from the EU could endanger the entire Northern settlement.

And that's not even getting into how under the agreement everyone in Northern Ireland is entitled simultaneously to be citizens of the UK and Ireland, such that following a Brexit they could -- on the face of it -- both be citizens of the EU and non-citizens of the EU. I'm not sure how how much thought's been given in the Brexit camp to Schroedinger's Ulstermen.

Overall, a Brexit vote is a vote to risk instability, poverty, and civil war in Northern Ireland. It's not really surprising that the Northern bishops and the vast majority of Northern Catholics are opposed to it. It baffles me how many in England seem not to care in the least about this. 

Charlie: It's Not All About Us

It's been very strange watching some Irish responses online to the week's horrific events in Paris.

 

Following the murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and subsequent hostage-taking and killings elsewhere, far too many people have seen this as a suitable time to demand that Ireland's 'blasphemy laws' should be repealed, and to scorn as hypocritical the Irish Times' criticism of the murderers' attempts to silence debate, given how our self-proclaimed 'paper of reference' once removed a cartoon from its archives.

 

Now, you might just think this kind of behaviour is just cynical opportunism, or is typical of that clueless parochial narcissism that so often blights our national discourse, and you might well be right, but it's worth looking at both issues separately for a moment.

 

 

Comparing Like with Loike, Totally

Just to take one example, Ed Moloney, one of the finest analysts of the Northern Irish Troubles and Peace Process, for instance, tweeted last night, 'When Will The Irish Times Remember The Cartoon It Censored At The Behest Of Religious Fanatics?'

 

Writing about this on his blog, where after some reflection he changed his headline from one identical to the tweet to one saying, 'Irish Times Leads Nation’s Protest Over "Charlie" But Forgets About Cartoon It Censored At Behest Of The Bishops,' he quotes the Irish Times's comment that 'The right to offend must be defended with courage and vigour', before saying that it would have been more 'uplifting' if the Irish Times editorial had expressed regret for how it had removed from its archives a Martin Turner cartoon because, he said, it had offended senior members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy.

 

'It seems,' he concludes, 'that sauce for the Catholic goose is not sauce for the Islamic gander.'

 

Now. Moloney's a smart man, and on the face of it you might think he's making a fair point. It's worth taking a look at the cartoon, though, which we can easily do because, well, it's not 1904, and things tend to end up online about two minutes after newspapers remove them. 

 

(For instance, do you remember in October 2004 when the Guardian removed from its archives a Charlie Brooker 'Screen Burn' column that ended by lamenting the probability of George W. Bush being reelected president, and said 'John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald,  John Hinckley Jr -- where are you now that we need you?' No?

 

Well, perhaps you remember how in August 2013, the Irish Times ran a front page piece about a twin pregnancy being terminated at the National Maternity Hospital as the first termination conducted under the terms of the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act? Remember? You should: it was such an impressively detailed report that Peter Boylan, who was reportedly involved in the termination, spluttered about how the patient's confidentiality had been breached, and yet it was utterly revoked and wiped from the paper's archives a week later, with a small and inappropriately discreet page seven apology pointing out that the law was not yet in force, and claiming that 'The hospital has pointed out that the case described in the article did not happen.'

 

If you don't remember either of these peculiar episodes, well, don't worry, because this is 2015, and so I've kindly given you links to the missing stories. And then, if you really have an issue with censorship, go and write to the said papers to complain about their willingness to bow to, I dunno, angry politicians and embarrassing obstetricians. Or something.)

 

So, anyway, here's the Turner cartoon, the removal of which so irks Mr Moloney, because, of course, an Irish publication freely deciding to withdraw a cartoon while retaining the services of its cartoonist is comparable to a load of cartoonists and other magazine staff being butchered.

It is, we should start by conceding, not a very good cartoon. It's a leaden thing, where three priests, all rather surprisingly wearing what I presume are meant to be cassocks*, and one stepping out of a confessional box rather perplexingly wearing an alb as well as his stole, sing 'I would do anything for children (but I won't do that)'.

 

Presumably this is to the tune of Meatloaf's seminal return hit, 'I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)'**, though if you can get the priests' line to scan to the original tune you're a better man than I am.

 

In case you're too thick to realise that this was intended as a comment on Catholic opposition to one element in the child protection laws being introduced at the time, one of the priests -- presumably singing with his mouth closed -- is scowling down at a newspaper running the headline 'Children First Bill: Mandatory Reporting'. As an English friend pointed out the other day in a more general context, if you feel the need to include newspaper headlines to spell out what your cartoon is about, you've probably not done a very good cartoon.

And, of course, if you don't see the significance of Catholics taking issue with a particular proposal that might limit freedom of religion in return for nothing that would actually protect children, and if you're not willing to concede that the Church in Ireland has -- so, so, belatedly -- been pretty much the leader in Irish child protection over the last decade or so, and if you don't have a problem with government ministers crowing about this proposal while actual experts in child protection point out that the planned legislation wouldn't help anyone and was being conducted in tandem with policies that would endanger children, well, then you're probably not very bright, not very well informed, or just not really interested in protecting children at all.

 

The day after the cartoon appeared, there were two letters in the paper, both from priests, one describing the cartoon as 'bigoted, nasty and downright disgraceful', pointing out that given the Church has more stringent child protection guidelines than any other body in Ireland, it was a cheap shot and a betrayal of anti-Catholic bigotry to 'use the sins of the past as a stick to continue to beat the church of the present', while the other describe it as 'offensive in the extreme to every priest in the country', and required an editorial apology unless the paper was of the view that it was 'open season on priests'.

The following day there were four letters about the cartoon, one of which said the cartoon was below the belt, but that as a satirical cartoonist it was Turner's job to be offensive. The other three were less understanding. One described the cartoon as 'a new low in Irish journalism', reminiscent of the sectarian cartoons of the nineteenth-century American Thomas Nast. Another, from a long-time fan of Turner, said the cartoon was 'bigoted', 'nasty', and 'spectacularly unfunny', revealing a potent double standard where the paper's general 'zeal for anti-religious comment' was not being 'applied to critical analysis of current government scandals'. A third, from a reader of the 55 years, described the cartoon's publication as 'an error of judgement' that warranted an apology to Ireland's priests and the paper's readers.

 

That same day, speaking in Dublin's pro-Cathedral, Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, said 'I am a strong believer in freedom of speech and of the vital role of satire in social criticism, but I object to anything that would unjustly tarnish all good priests with the unpardonable actions of some.'
 

What was the problem? Well, if you look down in the cartoon's bottom corner, in very small writing, you'll see an authorial aside saying, 'But there is little else you can do for them... except stay away from them, of course.'

 

Bear that in mind, when you read the Irish Times editorial that made clear why the cartoon was removed. The editorial states that the paper is bound by the Irish Times Trust's principles which require that the paper is meant to ensure that comment and opinion should be 'informed and responsible', with 'special consideration ... given to the reasonable representation of minority interests and divergent views, and that and it should uphold  'the promotion of peace and tolerance and opposition to all forms of violence and hatred, so that each man may live in harmony with his neighbour, considerate for his cultural, material and spiritual needs.'

 

No, really. No laughing at the back there.

 

'That means, however, that there is no carte blanche,' the editorial explained, 'and that there are ground rules which we try to adhere to, mostly with no argument from those contributors. Civilised debate, we accept, requires the eschewing of ad hominem argument, playing the ball, not the man, and avoiding crude stereotyping.'

Turner's cartoon was described as having flown under the editorial radar, the editorial explained, picking up on the authorial aside about how priests should keep away from children. 'In making a legitimate argument about the debate over priestly responsibility for reporting child abuse and the concerns for the seal of the confessional, Turner also took an unfortunate and unjustified sideswipe at all priests, suggesting that none of them can be trusted with children. This has, unsurprisingly, caused considerable offence and we regret and apologise for the hurt caused by the cartoon whose use in that form, we acknowledge, reflected a regrettable editorial lapse.'

 

The Turner thing was very simple. The Irish Times has its own guidelines, Turner breached them by irresponsibly and ignorantly casting all priests as dangers to children -- and if you think this is a fair comment on the phenomenon of abuse in Ireland, you really should read more --  and so the paper pulled it. To make out that this has broader implications would be as outrageous as me saying that because my school magazine was once pulled from distribution because of a story I had done in it, so nobody at that school should ever be allowed to take issue with cartoonists being murdered.

 

It really is that simple.

Blas for me! Blas for you! Blas for everybody in the room!

Then there's the blasphemy law thing. It's probably worth starting with the fact that I don't much care either way about the blasphemy law, such as it is: it doesn't bother me, and it wouldn't bother me if it were removed. I don't know any Catholics who are fans of it, to be honest. Some are opposed to it, and many wouldn't even bother shrugging if it were removed.

Now, the standard line about the blasphemy law over the last few years that it should be removed because it encourages Muslim countries to introduce similar blasphemy laws has been tweaked in the last week to the effect that 'Because of Ireland's blasphemy law, Charlie Hebdo wouldn't even be allowed in Ireland!' As such, so fools argue, we should remove the blasphemy law as a mark of respect and as a way of championing real free speech.

It's worth bearing in mind where the blasphemy law came from. A constitutional quirk basically requires the state to have some kind of blasphemy law, but Ireland's politicians sat on this legal oddity for ages, without people jumping up and down and claiming that they had to give legislative force to a constitutional imperative. Eventually, though, when tidying up issues of libel and slander and such in 2009's Defamation Act, the issue of other limitations on speech came up. The result was the so-called 'blasphemy law', better known to those who read as section 36 of the Defamation Act.

Section 36 says that those who publish or utter blasphemous matter can be subject to a fine of up to €25,000. Matter should be deemed blasphemous, if says, if a) it is "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion" AND b) if the causing of such outrage is intended.

That bit about intent is crucial, and not just because it is half the definition of blasphemy, such that in Irish law you cannot blaspheme unless you have deliberately caused large-scale outrage. The law goes on to say that it is a defence to allegations of blasphemy for a reasonable person to find 'genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates'.

In other words, the law has a three-part test: has the matter under investigation caused outrage among a significant number of people of a particular religious line, was it intended to cause such outrage, and is it bereft of literary, artistic, scientific, academic, or political merit?

To all intents and purposes it's a deliberately toothless law, designed to tidy up a constitutional glitch in such a way that nobody is ever troubled by it, and surely pretty much unnecessary given how the actual crime here seems to be substantively covered by 1989's Incitement to Hatred law.  You might take issue with its symbolism, or feel it's anachronistic, but one thing you can't really do is say that it does any actual harm. Our laws are often merely aspirational; this isn't even that.

Michael Nugent and his friends in Atheist Ireland disagree, of course, and regard it as a great betrayal that the government doesn't see its removal from the statute books asap as a massive priority. But then, of course, Atheist Ireland has never really understood the law. When the law was first instituted, they ran a list of 25 supposedly blasphemous quotations, daring the State to prosecute them. Of course, leaving aside now many of the quotations could be said to have had literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value, and that their publication in 2009 did not provoke large-scale outrage -- nobody cared -- the simple fact of the list having been published to make a political point about free speech meant it was clearly safe from prosecution.

Could Charlie be published in Ireland? Well, put it this way: was it intended to provoke anger among Muslims or Catholics or whoever or was it intended to make people think? To take a non-religious example***, is the accompanying cartoon a homophobic or racist piece designed to anger gay people or black people, or is its aim to get people to think about the socio-economic realities surrogacy can entail, with poor women, often from developing countries, being paid to serve as vessels for others' children?

'Surrogacy is two parents... and one slave.'

No, I think, Charlie certainly could be published in Ireland. Whether shops would want to stock it, or people would want to buy it... that's a different matter.

 

There's no getting away from the fact that the intentional provocation of large scale outrage is a central element in Ireland's blasphemy law; it's a law less about offending God, as in other blasphemy laws, as about deliberately angering people. This matters if we want to think about the trope that Muslim countries, especially Pakistan, like using Ireland's blasphemy law to justify their own similar laws.

Do they really do this?

 

Now, I might be wrong, I've only ever really heard of one instance of this happening, and even then it's a pretty dubious instance. At an October 2009 meeting of the UN's Human Rights Council, discussing discrimination, Pakistan entered a six-part proposal to oppose discrimination based on religion and belief. The first of these six propositions was clearly modelled on part of the Irish definition of legal blasphemy: 'State parties shall prohibit by law the uttering of matters that are grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents to that religion.'

So, yes, clearly based in part on the Irish one. And yet also spectacularly different from the toothless Irish law, because it utterly omits the role of intent in Ireland's law, that crucial point which means that you cannot blaspheme accidentally or inadvertently, that blasphemy must not merely be offensive, but must deliberately cause large-scale outrage, and that even should large-scale outrage deliberately be caused, there are a range of legitimate defences, including 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I was engaged in scholarly research and was telling the truth', and 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I did so in an aesthetically pleasing way', and 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I was making a point about free speech'.

The Pakistani proposal entailed using a truncated version of the Irish definition, and tried to promote that. It did not explicitly acknowledge the Irish law, and its proposal was crucially different from the Irish reality, except as misrepresented by, for instance, Atheist Ireland, which falsely states on its Blasphemy.ie website that 'The law defines blasphemy as publishing or saying something "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matter held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion."'

No it doesn't, you buffoons. Please learn to read.

It is disappointing that oafs and otherwise smart people like Ed Moloney have tried to draw links between a responsible editorial decision and brutal acts of murder, just as it is disappointing that others claim Pakistan uses Ireland's blasphemy law to push for blasphemy laws elsewhere and present part of Ireland's legal definition of blasphemy as though it's the whole definition.

 

But that's the thing about free speech: it allows people to say stupid things.

 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.

 

 

 

* It looks rather as though they're wearing mysterious black night-shirts over lighter-coloured shirts with clerical collars. It's almost as though Turner has never seen a cassock and doesn't actually know what one looks like. Whether such basic ignorance might somehow undermine his point I leave to you to decide.

** Yeah, I know that's not the actual video. Watch it anyway, though. It may prove an education.

*** Because I don't see much virtue in republishing things I know many people would be upset by for the sake of making a broader, if somewhat self-aggrandising, point about the importance of free speech. That strikes me as doing something bad in the hope of achieving something good, and, well, there are forbidden weapons.

The Hobbit: The Battle of How Many Armies?

I went to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies yesterday, thereby wrapping up a cinematic adventure that began for me back in December 2001. The film, I think, is definitely a mixture of good and bad drawn from Peter Jackson’s urns of blessings and ills, but my main thought coming from it, as since I saw Return of the King back in 2003, is that Jackson doesn’t really understand Tolkien.

I have friends who get furious about this, and rant about all manner of little changes the films make from the books, but I see those kind of changes as – in the main – simply the price of adaptation. Books aren’t films. When we change media, we change stuff. That’s what happens. Characters change and get compressed, dialogue gets trimmed, episodes are cut or even invented, depending on what the story needs. Bill Goldman's very good on this, in both Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? What shouldn’t change, though, is the theme and tone. If you’re going to change those, why are you bothering at all?

As I said nearly eleven years ago, Jackson eviscerates the story by leaving out the Scouring of the Shire, that conclusion to the Lord of the Rings which sees the hobbits returning home and having to clean up their homeland, where petty greed and viciousness and power hunger have taken over, as hobbits willingly serve Saruman’s new dictatorship and rejoice in holding forth over their weaker neighbours. There’s a sense in which the episode is an anti-climax, and it’s probably for that reason that Jackson omits it from the films, but given he has about seventeen other endings to The Return of the King, I think he could have ran with it.

The omission of the episode shows up a profound difference between Tolkien and Jackson. Tolkien, it has to be remembered, was an articulate, informed, and orthodox Catholic, something that runs right through his books, such that you tend to miss half of what’s going on, not least the point of Tolkien's stories, if you can’t see with his eyes. Tolkien, indeed, called The Lord of the Rings "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision," explaining that what he called "the religious element" in his writing was not on the surface, but was "absorbed into the story and the symbolism."

Catholic that he was, Tolkien believed very strongly in Original Sin, in the notion that there’s a darkness in the heart of man, and that cracks run right through all of us; for Tolkien the Ring is something that deepens our darkness, that widens our cracks into chasms, that magnifies the faults that are already within us, and that amplifies our tendency towards sin. Crucially, though, while the Ring is a corrupting force, it is not an originating one: it doesn’t make people evil, rather it fosters and worsens the evil already within. As such, even when the Ring is destroyed, evil remains in the world. It’s a petty, cheap, brutish thing, and it doesn’t go away. The Hobbits save the world, and still have to save their homes.

Not so for Jackson. For Jackson, evil is an external phenomenon. The Ring is, of course, an externalisation of Sauron’s power, but that’s not to say that Tolkien thinks evil is external. On the contrary, he sees it as within, with the eternal frontline in the war between good and evil being in the depths of the human heart.  But for Jackson, once the Ring is destroyed, the shadow falls and evil is banished from Middle Earth. Prices still have to be paid – Frodo will carry his wounds as long as he remains in the world – but there is no wickedness in the world after the Ring is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom.

Jackson sees evil as something outside us, and something that’s embodied in a Ring or “other people,” especially ugly monstrous ones – orcs, goblins, trolls, dragons, giant spiders – or swarthy foreigners from the east and the south.  Yes, Tolkien makes these identifications first, but he does so in a context where we all have the capacity for evil. Not so for Jackson, as is shown by his removal of the “Scouring” without a substitionary episode or speech to make the same thematic point: no, get rid of the Ring, his story says, and everyone will live happily ever after.

And so to The Hobbit.

Leaving aside his failure to understand Tolkien, I think Jackson had two main problems with the first Hobbit film, An Unexpected Journey. One was that Tolkien could distinguish between his dwarves by just giving them different names, whereas Jackson had to make them all into recognisable individuals with distinct appearances, voices, mannerism, and personalities, all of which added time to the film, making it far longer than the tale it was telling merited. The more serious problem, though, is that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings sprang from The Hobbit, and grew far beyond it in a deeper, darker, richer way. Jackson can't do that: his Hobbit has to function as a prequel to his Lord Of The Rings, and has to maintain the already established tone and look of the original trilogy.

He's done impressive work on that front. The opening shots of Erebor as a Dwarf metropolis to surpass the Elvish magnificence of Rivendell set up the world of The Hobbit as a real part of the Middle Earth he’d already envisaged.  In some ways it shows what Balin must have dreamt of in the darkness of Moria. His dwarves became a race of armoured Gimlis in leather and mail, almost wholly supplanting the books’ jolly chaps with colourful hoods – Dwalin in dark green, Balin in red, Fili and Kili both in blue, and others in purple, grey, brown, white, yellow, pale green, and in Thorin’s case sky blue with a silver tassle. The significance of the story had to be brought out: this is not just the story of Bilbo’s adventure, but is rather the story of the return of Sauron, of how new relations were seeded between Elves, Dwarves, and Men, of how one of Sauron's greatest potential allies was preemptively taken off the board before the War of the Ring, and above all how the Ring was restored to the world, and Hobbits entered into the world.

 

When you get down to it, Jackson's telling a huge six-part story of how the most insignificant and unlikely of people find the greatest weapon in the world and then destroy it and he manages to do it in a way that makes sense and looks consistent. Credit, so, where it's due.

For all the glory of Erebor, the first Hobbit film annoyed me. It retained enough of the chirpiness of the book to be childish without retaining enough to be childlike. My Maths teacher used to say “between two stools you fall to the ground,” and, well, I think that's what happened. There was far too much dwarf humour, a failing in Jackson’s original trilogy but one taken to excess here. How much falling over did there have to be? And did the whole Goblin chase sequence need to go on for quite so long?

The Gollum scene, though, was good, and I'm left wondering if Jackson will follow George Lucas’s precedent by tweaking The Fellowship of the Ring to show Martin Freeman, rather than an artificially young Ian Holm, as Bilbo finding the ring. I was okay with the Azog stuff too, to be honest. Sure, he’s not in the book, but he is referred to in the book as having killed Thorin’s father. I think giving a bit of individuality to the orcs wasn’t a bad thing. He also looks straight out of Guillermo del Toro’s sketchbook, which isn’t a bad thing.

The second film, The Desolation of Smaug, I found vastly better, though I wonder how much of this was due to me not watching it in 3D-HFR. The images were ones into which I could get absorbed, rather than ones that distracted me. I thought the sequence where they're all floating downriver and Tauriel's doing her arrow stuff absurd and straight out of a game, but, er, I'm not going to criticise Tauriel too much, for predictable reasons. I also liked the Smaug sequences, and the spiders, and quite liked Jackson’s casting of Steven Fry as the smug, self-important, oleaginous Master of Laketown.  Beorn was largely wasted, I felt, though I consoled myself with the thought that that otherwise irrelevant section might bear fruit in the third film, as indeed it does in the book, when Beorn shows up at the battle, retrieves Thorin’s mortally wounded body, and kills the Goblin leader Bolg, son of Azog. I thought too that the dialogue between Tauriel and Kili really could have been better, but overall I found it a smoother and much less laboured film than the first one, and came out of it thinking that while it was further away from Tolkien than ever, perhaps this was necessary to set up Jackson's – not Tolkien's – Lord of the Rings.

Bilbo’s discovery of the Arkenstone in the second film just hammers home, of course, how he clearly has the cheat codes for The Hobbit game, finding plot coupons everywhere he goes: elvish blades, the Ring, the Arkenstone. And game is right: if the Moria scene in The Fellowship of the Ring had felt like a game, the Hobbit sequence feels like a game time and time and time again.

And so to the third Hobbit film, The Battle of the Five Armies, whatever the five armies are meant to be: in the book it's clearly goblins, wargs, elves, dwarves, and men, but here it's definitely Azog's orc army, Thranduil's elves, Dain's dwarves, and Bard's men... but who else? Bolg's second orc army? Thorin's band of dwarves? The eagles?

 

Unfortunately, I watched it in 3D-HFR, having forgotten how much I’d disliked it in the first film, with everything seeming overlit, and the general feeling being as though we’re on set with people traipsing about in silly costumes and make up and fake ears. It couldn’t help but distances me from the action, as through it all I thought it all looked dreadfully fake, as did the longer shots of the CGI armies which looked like trailers for a game.

There is good stuff in the film, it has to be said. Thorin's madness is very well handled, echoing Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. While this seems yet another instance of someone being corrupted by an external force, in this case the treasure burnished for decades by Smaug’s greed, it nonetheless feels more normal, somehow, than the corrupting effect of the Ring, especially in combination with Steven Fry's common or garden greediness, and that of his henchman. The film, then, at least recognises that it doesn’t take a monstrous evil to turn people into monsters, but that most of the time evil is a petty, small thing, people bearing cracks of original sin that such as the Ring can turn into chasms. This goes some small way to remedying the deepest problem with the original films. Martin Freeman is great as Bilbo, and Bard is very well done. So yes, the film really does have good points.

Unfortunately, it’s not just got good points.

The appearance of Dain is written in a way to suit the actor far more than the character, I'm afraid. It is immensely enjoyable, but still, it's jarring, and shatters any sense of immersion you might have been lucky enough to get even with the blasted 3D-HFR. You’re not watching Dain Ironfoot, the eventual King Under The Mountain who will fall with Bard’s grandson decades later at the Battle of Dale while hundreds of miles to the southwest Aragorn and Legolas and the lads – and Eomer – are doing their thing at the Pelennor Films. You're watching Billy Connolly being, well, Billy Connolly.

The armies look dreadfully false in the battle scenes, row upon row of faceless automatons in identical armour moving as one as though telepathically commanded. If you know anything about ancient or medieval warfare this simply doesn’t hold up: warriors tended to own and supply their own equipment, and would have had distinct shields and helmets and variations in their armour. Having them all look uniform just feels dreadfully wrong.

The fighting too owes more to 300, or the games that inspired that, than to reality: elves and dwarves don’t get on, we’re told, and bear old grudges, and yet when the moment comes, with no planning – let alone training – they all know exactly what to do. The dwarves form an impressive shieldwall, with hints of the Roman testudo, and look set to withstand the orcish attack, establishing an unpassable barrier behind which the elves could use their long bows and winnow the orc forces. Instead, though, the elves cast aside their massive tactical superiority in terms of their lengthy killing zone, and vault over the dwarf wall, rendering it pointless, and start swirling among the orc forces, laying into them to cinematically impressive and militarily ludicrous effect.

This is a thing. Too many people rave about the battle scenes in Jackson’s films, oblivious or indifferent to just how ludicrous they are. The Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen.  If you want to see plausible cinematic renditions of pre-modern battles, you can’t do much better than The Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, and Ran. More recently, the one at the start of Gladiator is okay too, and obviously people love the ones in Spartacus and Braveheart, but really, it’s the Kurosawa ones that bear most rewatching.

There’s an astounding lack of tactical sense in the Battle of the Five Armies, with nobody attempting to take out the Orc signalling system until Thorin shows up and decides to target Azog who is directing commands from the signal tower.  Not that sense is really part of the sequence: if I’d thought the bit in The Two Towers when the horses run down a cliff one of the most absurd things I’d ever seen, it’s solidly trumped by Legolas leaping from falling block to falling block in a manner reminiscent of Mario, somehow resisting the urge to headbutt gold coins out of the air.

Beorn does appear in the battle, but rather than mysteriously appearing and saving the day, as in the book, he instead joins battle as an airborne bear, flown from the far side of Mirkwood, presumably, by the Eagles ex Machina, and isn’t shown doing anything especially impressive other than running into the fray. He doesn’t kill Azog’s son and lieutenant Bolg, that honour being left to the wonderful Tauriel, or any other prominent orcs, and the overall effect is to leave me wondering what the point of Beorn being in the story was. We don’t see him accompanying Bilbo home either. It’s all very odd.

“Farewell, good thief,” the dying Thorin says to Bilbo in the book, continuing, “I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed.” It’s an impressive line, pointing to the importance of an afterlife to the dwarves, but the line doesn’t make it to the film; indeed, to see Thranduil’s sorrow at elvish blood being shed, you’d never imagine that fallen elves have their souls cleansed and their bodies reborn in their own land, never to return to Middle Earth. For a film that’s about battle from beginning to end, it has precious little to say about death – and never touches on how Tolkien saw death in the context of Middle Earth. In these films, when you're dead, you're dead. That's it. Maybe modern audiences prefer things that way, but it's not how Tolkien thought, and it's not how things are meant to be on Middle Earth.

There seems something pointless about showing indistinguishable CGI automata trading blows for as film does without showing us what death really involves. All else aside, I’d like to have seen Thorin’s funeral. That would have been a suitable ending, or part of it,

“They buried Thorin deep beneath the Mountain, and Bard laid the Arkenstone upon his breast.
‘There let it lie till the Mountain falls!’ he said. ‘May it bring good fortune to all his folk that dwell here after.’
Upon his tomb the Elvenking then laid Orcrist, the elvish sword that had been taken from Thorin in captivity. It is said in songs that it gleamed ever in the dark if foes approached, and the fortress of the dwarves could not be taken by surprise. There now Dain son of Nain took up his abode, and he became King under the Mountain, and in time many other dwarves gathered to his throne in the ancient halls.”

The Iliad ended with the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses. It’d not have been a bad example for Jackson to have followed.

The Immaculate Conception: For the Day that's in it

From an old email to an Anglican friend of decidedly Calvinist leanings...

"Two big issues there, but I’ll do my best with one anyway. For the sake of brevity I’ll put off saints in heaven to another day, as I need to think about how to explain that concisely. It takes time to write short emails.

Mary’s preservation from sin has been mainstream Christian belief from about as early as we can tell in Christian history; it’s been embraced through history by Catholics, the Orthodox churches, and such Protestants as Martin Luther. Partly, it has to be said, the belief derives from incredulity that the flesh from which Jesus was made – Mary’s and Mary’s alone – could ever have been tainted by sin and been what C.S. Lewis called ‘enemy-occupied territory’.

At Luke 1:28, the angel salutes Mary as Kekharitōmenē, traditionally translated ‘Full of Grace’, but more accurately rendered as something along the lines of ‘you who are already, absolutely, and enduringly endowed with grace’. It’s an extraordinarily unusual grammatical form, and is also the only instance we know of that an angel ever honoured any of us with a title. Being completely graced by God leaves no room for sin; this can’t be dismissed as though it just means ‘highly favoured’.

Following 1 Corinthians 15:45-9, the early Church looked at Genesis 3:15 and saw our redemption as a re-enactment of Eden: just as Eve’s disobedience opened the way to Adam’s sin, so Mary’s obedience opened the way to Jesus’ saving of us. You’ll see this in such second-century writers as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyons, who, as you’ll know, was taught by one of John’s pupils and was the first person we know of who to describe the four Gospels – and those alone – as canonical. By the fourth century, it was almost proverbial that Mary was the new Eve, and could hardly have been created less than her: as Eve was created sinless, so must Mary have been.

Jude 1:24-5 points to how this could have happened in a way in harmony with the rest of the Bible. There are two ways of saving people: you can rescue them after they’ve fallen into a hole, or you can prevent them from falling in to begin with. It’s obviously better to be saved by prevention than cure, and it’s in this sense Mary was saved by Jesus: he preserved her from sin, rather than allowing her to fall into it and dragging her from the hole like the rest of us. And why wouldn’t he? He loved and honoured his mother: if he could save her by preserving her from sin, rather than allowing her to fall into sin in the first place, why would he have done otherwise?

The point of the Immaculate Conception is to glorify Jesus, the new Adam made from untainted flesh and the perfect saviour who is able to keep us from falling."

His reply, to my amazement, suggested I'd almost convinced him and that he needed to think more on this. I must ask where he got to with that.

All Souls: For the Day that's in it

Adapted from my journal last year...

 

It being November, today is the feast of All Souls, or The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, as my missal has it.

 

I was somewhat bemused just before All Souls' Day last year when a dear Anglican friend asked me whether Catholics celebrate All Saints’ day, or “All Hallows”, as she called it; we do, I thought, surprised that Anglicans celebrated the day, and wondering what it meant for them; Catholics believe the saints in heaven are praying for us and acting for us and can be addressed by us as we seek their prayers, but I’m not sure what Anglicans believe on this score.

 

The funeral rites of the Church of England’s official prayer-book say of each dead Christian that he or she died “in sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life”, but I don’t think Anglicans, as a rule, believe that the saints can intercede for us; indeed, I’ve been quizzed in the past about why it is that I think the saints are even aware of our prayers, let alone that they can act in response to them.

 

The confidence of the Anglicans’ “sure and certain hope” seems to me unwarranted, in any case; while it’s easy to believe that the greatest of our predecessors were graced by God in this life and are now blessed by him and partaking in the Divine Vision, but what about the rest of us? What about those of us who’ve done monstrous things, who are not merely sinners but who are, by sheer force of habit, sinful?  What about ordinary plodders like me and probably most of us, who try to love God and live as he wishes us to, but who stumble and fall through our lives, and leave this world sullied and stained by the muck of our human frailty – what of us?

 

The Bible’s pretty clear that nothing imperfect can enter heaven and just as gold must be refined by flame, so too those of us who are not purified in life are purified in death by God’s consuming fire; Catholics used to envisage Purgatory as a mountain we climb towards heaven, confident of our ultimate and eternal destination, but whether we think of Purgatory as a place or as a process or as an event, we cannot get away from how for Catholics the Church is seen as a Divine ecology, where we seek the prayers of our brethren in heaven, while offering prayers for our brethren in Purgatory. We all help each other.

 

“Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory,’” sneers Thomas Cromwell to himself, mentally addressing Thomas More, in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. More, of course, wouldn’t accept the premise of the question: “Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Trinity’,” he might counter, before explaining that though Catholic teaching must always be in harmony with the Bible, it does not and never has originated with the Bible; the Church came first, after all, and the Bible was written within and canonised by the Church as a book – indeed, as the book – of the Church. And he could have pointed to plenty of reasons outside the Bible for the Catholic belief.

 

Still, he might then have indulged Cromwell by pointing to how 2 Maccabees 12:39-45 shows how the ancient Jews who rededicated the Temple before Our Lord’s day believed that prayers for the dead mattered, and if they mattered, one is forced to wonder how; the blessed hardly needed our prayers, and they surely couldn’t benefit the damned. Jesus seems never to have condemned this practice, and evidently joined in celebrating the Maccabees’ achievements, so it seems he agreed with this, and even in Cromwell and More’s own day, as now, Jews would pray for the purification of their brethren after they died. Again the question must be “why?”

 

Of course, Cromwell would counter by saying that he didn’t regard either book of Maccabees as being part of the Bible, glossing over how More would simply have cited it as a historical attestation to a practice that had continued through Our Lord’s time into their own day, with a belief implied by that practice, rather than as an inspired Scriptural mandate, so More would probably have been forced to look elsewhere.

 

Nothing unclean shall enter Heaven, according to Revelation 21:27, and after death what we’ve done will be tested by fire, with some of us being saved through fire with our badness burned away, if 1 Corinthians 3:13-15 is to be believed.  God, after all, as Malachi 3:2-3 points out, is like a refiner’s fire; he purifies us, refining us like silver and gold till we can “present right offerings to the Lord”.

One of the great works of mercy the Church requires of us, according to the famous image of the Sheep and the Goats at Matthew 25:31-46, is that of visiting those in prison. Oddly, though, prison is scarcely mentioned in the New Testament; aside from in that dramatic image of the Last Judgment, Jesus only mentions it when talking of people being put in prison until their debt is paid, notably at Matthew 18:23-35 and Matthew 5:25-26, where he juxtaposes “prison”, with those in prison not being released till they have “paid the last penny”, with Hell, from where there is no release.

 

It’s clear from the text that Jesus isn’t talking of earthly imprisonment, which invites the question of what this prison is where we can be placed till we have paid the last penny – and it’s worth remembering how the New Testament tends to use the language of debt when speaking of sin. Could this be the same prison that 1 Peter 3:19 has in mind in referring to how, after the Crucifixion, Jesus “went and preached to the spirits in prison”?

 

The word “Purgatory” may not appear in the Bible, but that doesn’t mean the doctrine isn’t there, readily drawn out from references to prayers that help the dead, to a fire that purifies us after death, and to a prison where souls go till their debts are paid.

 

Just as it’s for the Blessed to pray for us, so it is for us, then, to visit those souls in prison, praying for those destined for heaven that they may be purified less painfully and may more quickly reach the top of Dante’s mountain of hope.

 

With that in mind, then, I pray today for all those for whom I prayed this time last year, and also those, dear to me and dear to those near to me, who have joined them over the past year, including Christy Bailey, Agueda Pons, David Fitzgerald, Mary Ward, Tom O'Gorman, Michael Kerrigan, Marian Emerson, Kitty Temple, Michael Heywood, Christine Buckley, Agnes and John Ainsworth, Tom Savage, Clare Edmonds, Spiros Polyzotis, Audrey Gilligan, Phyllis Shea, Brian Spittal, Noel Sweeney, Joe Harris, and Father Martin Ryan.

 

May the Lord God almighty have mercy on their souls, and may his perpetual light shine upon them; may they rest in peace.

Converts and Reverts: Floundering towards a Catholic Taxonomy

'It is a curious thing, do you know,' says Stephen Dedalus' friend Cranly to Dedalus in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 'how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.'

 

I've been thinking about this in recent weeks, following discussions with friends where the subject of Catholic 'reverts' -- those who'd been raised Catholic, but left the Church, only to return as adults -- has come up.

 

I don't mean cradle Catholics who just turned their back for a few months, or lapsed for a little bit, or doubted. The latter, especially, is pretty normal: as Pope Benedict said back in the day, believers never really are free from doubt, and it's that doubt that saves them from complete self-satisfaction; as Flannery O'Connor puts it, 'Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea.' For plenty of us, though, that doubt has implications that can lead us, perhaps combined with laziness or misery, away from the Church, at least for a while.

 

No, I mean Catholics who've lapsed or who've determinedly rejected the Church for significant periods of their lives, baptised Catholics who've abandoned ship and spent years away from it, living apart for a period that can't be dismissed as a passing phase, a mere whim, only to come back to it, whether following a sudden change or slowly, painfully, inch by reluctant inch.

 

Does it make sense, as has been ventured in recent conversations, to think of these reverts as more akin to converts than to cradle Catholics? Or are they a separate breed altogether?

 

Friends have said they're best thought of as closer to converts than cradle Catholics. I'm not so sure. Some weeks ago, when researching an Aleteia piece, I was advised by a priest friend that it was especially important for vocations directors to visit secondary schools in order to help build a 'culture of discernment', by planting seeds that may come to fruition later. There's more than one important point there, I think, and one of them is that the blossoms and fruits of our adult lives may well spring from seeds planted much earlier: the faith of reverts may have very deep roots.
 

One of the more interesting -- if sometimes far from persuasive -- books I've read on Catholic culture is Andrew Greeley's The Catholic Imagination. He talks at great length of how our religious cultures shape our minds, something which may horrify the more ardent secularists among us, but only if they are, as George Weigel puts it, 'the most ghettoized people of all [...] who don't know they grew up in a particular time and place and culture, and who think they can get to universal truths outside of particular realities and commitments.'

 

Religious culture, if Greeley is right, can saturate our minds, such that even artists who've left the Faith -- one might think of Joyce, Anthony Burgess, Umberto Eco, Don DeLillo, Frank Capra, Martin Scorcese, P.T. Anderson -- still 'feel' Catholic in some sense when you read them or watch their films. Growing up Catholic isn't indoctrination -- massive lapsation rates are proof of that -- but it is inculturation, and something of their Catholic upbringing stays with Catholics as they grow and lapse. When reverts return to the Church they bring that back with them.

 

Reverts have something important in common with converts, of course, in that both groups practice and believe largely because of conscious adult decisions and have probably had a lot of catching up to do. They differ too, though, because reverts tend to have loads of mental furniture that converts lack; it's inevitable, really, given sacramental preparation, innumerable Masses, childhood prayers, local churches as focal points of childhood, and the sacramental small change of Catholic family life.

 

And that leaves aside the realities of grace brought about through having been baptised and even confirmed in childhood, not to mention having received communion and absolution a fair few times! It makes sense to dismiss the importance of this if you don't believe in sacramental realities, of course -- if it's a symbol, then to Hell with it, as O'Connor famously said of the Eucharist --  but what if you do?

 

Taxonomy is a tricky game, and I haven't even gotten here into whether there tend to be cultural, philosophical, theological, or imaginative differences between converts from other Christian traditions, other religions, or atheisms. As it stands, though, I'm really far from convinced that reverts are more like converts than cradle Catholics. It seems, to be blunt, that reverts actually are cradle Catholics, albeit ones who've followed a strange path in life.

 

I say strange. I don't mean unusual. The other day, I heard of how research on Maynooth seminarians found that 42% of those surveyed identified with the statement 'I fell away from the Catholic faith at some point in my life but later returned to it'.

 

It looks like there are are fair few of us around.

Put Not Your Trust In Princes

'Put not your trust in princes.'

 

So Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, bitterly remarked on hearing that Charles I had signed his death warrant. Or, at any rate, so I was taught when I was thirteen. I didn't know then it was a quotation from the Psalms; I'm not sure, now I think of it, whether I was told that or not.

 

I have, for reasons I'll not go into here, been pondering that phrase a lot over the last year, and was mulling it over this afternoon when I visited Westminster Cathedral, puzzling briefly as I slipped in over why a Union Jack was fluttering next to the Vatican flag: the cathedral is mother church of England and Wales, after all, not of the entire UK.

 

As usual, once in the cathedral I turned right to the little chapel where Basil Hume is buried; with its mosaic of Saints Gregory and Augustine, it's always been a special place to me, and is a spot where I made a very important decision some years ago. It came to naught, as our plans so often do, but still, for good or ill it mattered, and pointed me along my path for a few years.

The path ultimately led to a cul-de-sac, but there you have it. These things happen. Still, the old decision was very much in my mind as I knelt down in the chapel and looked up at the mosaic.

 

The mosaic, as you'll see, is centred upon a picture of Pope St Gregory the Great and St Augustine of Canterbury, sent in the late sixth century as 'apostle to the English' after Gregory's hilarious 'not Angles but Angels' gag. A dove, representing the Holy Spirit, hovers above Gregory, while Augustine is holding an image of Christ, presumably that described by Bede in his accounts of Augustine's dealings with Ethelbert of Kent in 597.

 

As Bede puts it in chapter 25 of book one of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People,

'Some days after, the king came into the island, and sitting in the open air, ordered Augustine and his companions to be brought into his presence. For he had taken precaution that they should not come to him in any house, lest, according to an ancient superstition, if they practiced any magical arts, they might impose upon him, and so get the better of him.

But they came furnished with Divine, not with magic virtue, bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord and Saviour painted on a board; and singing the litany, they offered up their prayers to the Lord for the eternal salvation both of themselves and of those to whom they were come.

When he had sat down, pursuant to the king's commands, and preached to him and his attendants there present, the word of life, the king answered thus: ­ "Your words and promises are very fair, but as they are new to us, and of uncertain import, I cannot approve of them so far as to forsake that which I have so long followed with the whole English nation. But because you are come from far into my kingdom, and, as I conceive, are desirous to impart to us those things which you believe to be true, and most beneficial, we will not molest you, but give you favourable entertainment, and take care to supply you with your necessary sustenance; nor do we forbid you to preach and gain as many as you can to your religion."

Accordingly he permitted them to reside in the city of Canterbury, which was the metropolis of all his dominions, and, pursuant to his promise, besides allowing them sustenance, did not refuse them liberty to preach. It is reported that, as they drew near to the city, after their manner, with the holy cross, and the image of our sovereign Lord and King, Jesus Christ, they, in concert, sung this litany: "We beseech Thee, O Lord, in all Thy mercy, that thy anger and wrath be turned away from this city, and from the holy house, because we have sinned. Hallelujah."'

I've always thought of the chapel as being a chapel of Gregory and Augustine, but looking at it earlier it struck me that the chapel's less a commemoration of the two saints than it is of the Gospel they brought. They're very much commemorated as missionaries, as conduits, as mediums for the message. Look at the heart of the image.

 

 

Gregory's hand is raised in blessing, but in doing so draws our eyes and thoughts to the Holy Spirit, which seems to be speaking to him, as though his blessing only has merit insofar as he's guided by that Spirit; Augustine points directly at an image of our Lord, directing us to look solely to him. It's as if they're saying that in themselves they don't matter at all, and only have any significance insofar as the grace of the Spirit leads us through the Cross to Christ.

 

Those of us who find it difficult to trust can sometimes overcompensate, I think, placing our trust in those who haven't earned it, whether princes or priors, presidents or pretenders: in this imperfect world, getting the balance right can be very tricky, but in the meantime, the meaning of the system lies outside the system.