Holy Crap! Look at these Guys!

It's kind of strange that after this week's Question Time, there are those in the BNP who are none too happy with their leader, feeling that he's not obnoxious enough. Something like that, anyway. According to the Guardian, the BNP's legal officer, Lee Barnes, has been far from discreet in his disapproval:

Barnes complained on his personal website that Griffin "should have stood up to these whining, middle-class hypocrites that use the race card for self-enrichment – and thrown the truth right back into their fat, sanctimonious, hypocritical, self-serving faces". He accused his party's leader of "failing to press the attack" on the "ethnic middle class" for "taking up the best jobs while still playing the bogus race card for every opportunity". And in a move that is likely to reinforce concerns that Griffin's appearance will spark violence, Barnes used his personal website to suggest that "perhaps there needs to be a few 'white riots' around the country a la the Brixton riots of the 1980s before the idiot white liberal middle class and their ethnic middle-class fellow travellers wake up".

Charming, eh? Of course, there are worse folk out there than the BNP... have you heard of the BPP? Yes, the British People's Party, who despise the BNP for its opposition to racism. No, really, they do.

These guys manage the curious feat of making the BNP look reasonable. Their spiritual leader seems to have been responsible for drawing up their 'eternal principles' that 'still hold good today'. It's nice to learn that eternal principles don't get outdated within a few decades, but I'm not sure on these, though. Adolf Hitler as a gift from god? As NMRBoy said to me last night, it probably gives these guys an instant advantage in internet flame wars. You can't really accuse them of falling victim to Godwin's Law, after all...

They fight, and fight, and fight and fight and fight

After a seminar the other day, I read the most extraordinary article from the new Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. I think the general thrust of it is generally right, but at times it crosses the line into -- well -- into rather unacademic language, which is particularly odd given that its occasionally deployed against a colleague.

I'm baffled by what's intended a complement to one academic, who is described as having 'took up his shillelagh for the soundness of the tradition.' A shillelagh? In the hands of one of the most English people imaginable? Frankly, it was difficult getting past that, but I'm glad I did because it brought me to this, and I'm changing names for the sake of discretion:

'Jeff and Geoff, as proper classicists, were acutely alert to anachronism: they called for one ancient genre, history, to be colonized by other ancient genres, rhetoric and drama. So the adoption of their theories by this cynical crew must inspire in Jeff and Geoff the same strange mixture of horror and pride that a father might feel upon learning that his fourteen-year old son has got a classmate with child.'

Good, eh? It gets better. Its finale is as follows:

'Finally, when history is cast out of the Latin historians, discarded also are the robust intellectual habits of the modern historian, to be replaced, if the restraint of stern philology fails, with the weak and whimsical instruments of the contemporary literary critic. A sense of argument, of proof, of scale, of proportion -- even of logic and coherent language -- all depart. Scholarship becomes indistinguishable from its parody, and the subject of inquiry shifts from the geysering fascination of antiquity to the dull, trend-obsessed, and self-obsessed mind of the critic. The result is like the diary of a fat teenager: riveting only to its creator, repellent to others, and illuminating to none.'

That's telling them.

Planet Narnia

Tom Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham, has a review in today's Times of Michael Ward's Planet Narnia: the Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis, a book which expounds on a theory I first heard of last year, and which the BBC devoted a show to at some point over the Easter.

It seems that at some point Dr Ward became intrigued by Lewis' penchant for games and puzzles and began wondering whether there might be another layer of meaning in the Narnia books, below the Christian allegory level which itself obvious underlies the fantasy adventure stories. After reading Lewis' 1935 poem 'The Planets', which features the influence of Jupiter in 'winter pass'd / and guilt forgiv'n', he started wondering whether the medieval understanding of the planets might have influenced Lewis's most famous works, and, after buckets of researched, has found that each of the Chronicles is thematically built around one of the seven medieval planets after which the days of the week are named.

This might sound a bit crazy, but the idea has some merit: Lewis was one of England's greatest scholars of medieval literature, and this sounds a perfectly medieval way of writing, drawing on astrology in this way. Lewis was indeed very fond of puzzles, and his science fiction trilogy, the Perelandra books, are explicitly built around the three planets of Mars, Venus, and Earth. And then if you think of how Eustace meets and chats with the resting star Ramandu in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, it does start to look more likely.

Allowing for this, then, Dawn Treader is clearly about the Sun, Prince Caspian draws on warlike Mars, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which deals with the banishing of winter and the forgiveness of guilt is naturally based upon Jupiter. The Silver Chair is apparently a lunar tale, while The Horse and his Boy seems to be a Mercurian work, with its emphasis on communication and its twins, reminiscent of Gemini who Mercury rules. The Magician's Nephew draws on Venus, it seems, and The Last Battle is built around Saturn, the darkest and most mysterious of planets, which could so easily go bad.

I know, it sounds like there's some crowbarring going on here to fit a theory, but I'd not be inclined to chuck the theory out straight away. Why wouldn't a devoted medievalist have embedded a medieval understanding of the universe in his books? It would just be another way, after all, of saying that the Universe was sacramental, created and redeemed by God, and that everything means something.

Wright, at any rate, is convinced by this, saying that 'This introduction to a masterpiece is something of a masterpiece in its own right,' and he's not alone in this, but I must confess to finding the whole idea very unlikely. Granted, I haven't read Ward's book, so I can't judge fairly, but it seems to me that in referring to the Chronicles as 'the Narniad', Wright identifies a fundamental problem with Ward's thesis.

Central to Ward's approach -- and Wright's review -- is the assumption that the seven books were planned as a seven-book set, and as such must be somehow unified, whether by connections to the seven virtues, the seven deadly sins, the seven sacraments, or - as in this theory - the seven planets. But the thing is, this assumption doesn't appear to hold any water whatsoever. Lewis wrote to a fan in 1957 saying that the Chronicles had never been intended as a seven-book set, but instead grew organically:

'The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last, but I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published.'

Even if he thought up a thematic link later, which is possible, you'd expect that the planetary themes would manifest themselves far more clearly in the books that were written last, with this connecting idea in mind, than in the early ones, where he had no such idea. And if anything, the opposite looks to have been the case. And he certainly didn't rework the early books with the intention of turning his spontaneous series into a single narrative, in the way that T.H. White did with his early Arthur ones when he wrote The Once and Future King around the same time.

Another problem, as far as I can see, is that there doesn't seem to be any clear proof that Lewis was hiding anything in the Narnia books. You'd expect that if he was being so clever-clever that there'd be some record of letters between him and Tolkien, say, where J.R.R. commends him on the underlying astrological stuff, while nonetheless repeating his view that the whole thing still looks like a mish mash, and besides, he hates allegory, Christian or otherwise. You'd at least expect that there'd have been letters to people or records of conversations where Lewis talks of an extra layer of meaning. And as far as I can tell, there's no trace of him ever having made such a claim.

This whole affair looks like a typical academic fantasy, where people want Lewis's books to be more complex than they are. They're Christian allegories, and they're children's stories, and they've a clunky style enlivened by dry authorial asides, and the fifth book begins with one of my favourite sentences ever, but one thing they're not is a unified work of art. We can call them the Narnia books, and we can probably call them the Chronicles of Narnia, but we certainly shouldn't call them the Narniad. That's asking for trouble, and invites questions that simply have no business being asked.

Stops WHAT in your Mouth?

On an entirely different note, are you aware of Imodium?

Well, until the other day, I wasn't. I was strolling down the aisle in a local supermarket, and I saw a load of packets of it hanging on a rack, each one bearing the legend 'Stops Diarrhoea Melts In Your Mouth'.

I don't mind telling you, I'm a bit concerned.

The product website is great, though. You can learn all the myths about diarrhoea -- probably stuff about Herakles and the Augean stables, and maybe about British soldiers with slashed shorts in Burma -- and there's a whole section to help you find toilets. I'm not sure if it links it with a gps-based iPhone application, but if not, Imodium are missing a trick.

Wrapping Up Relics

Right, so I was saying yesterday that although people tend to think of the veneration of relics as a peculiarly -- even a grotesquely -- Catholic thing, in many ways it's just a popular manifestation of normal human behaviour. Loads of us keep photos of loved ones, treasure keepsakes from special places, visit museums and exhibitions, and lay flowers at graves. There's hardly anyone among us who isn't appalled when graves are desecrated or when war memorials are treated as urinals. We don't think of graves as mere patches of ground, of gravestones and monuments as lumps of carved rock; of wreaths as dead plants or mass-produced paper decorations: these things matter to us, for reasons that go beyond sentiment, though we may find it hard to articulate what those reasons are.

In historical Christianity, as George Weigel keeps saying, 'stuff matters'. The baptismal water actually counts. The holy oils used at baptism, in confirmation, in ordination, and in extreme unction all count. At communion, the bread and the wine really mean something. Ashes, blessed fire, holy water, baptismal salt, incense, candles, palm leaves, flowers, vestments, food -- they all mean something. But what? And how? What does the Church mean when it says that there is scarcely any proper use of material things which cannot be directed toward the sanctification of men and the praise of God?

One of my favourite statues is a piece just off Trafalgar Square, in the porch of the Anglican church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Called 'In the Beginning', it's by Mike Chapman, and is a big squared off block on the top of which is carved a newborn baby, with unbilical cord still attached, and around which are the words, taken from the first and fourteenth verses of the first chapter of St John's gospel, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh and lived among us.'

The Catholic Church makes a point of not ripping Biblical passages out of context and resting whole arguments on individual 'proof passages', but I don't think it's going too far to say that this first part of John's first chapter is absolutely central to Catholic theology. John uses the word sarx - flesh - thirteen times in his gospel, and every time he does so he does so in a brutally physical sense. He goes out of his way to show that flesh and spirit are utterly distinct, but he doesn't do this in a Neo-Platonist or Manichean sense; for John flesh may be distinct from spirit, but even so, the Word became flesh! God, who is pure spirit, did not merely veil himself in flesh, as in the popular carol, but he became flesh, and by doing so he sanctified the material world, a world he had already created and recognised as good.*

This incarnational and sacramental understanding of the material world underpins the whole theology of relics, and has done so -- albeit not in a carefully worked out way -- from the time of Our Lord himself. Think of the story of the woman who thought to herself 'If I only touch his garment, I shall be made well,' and who reached out from behind Jesus and touched the fringe of his garment and was healed (Matt. 9.20-22). Her humility alone is striking, as she deliberately doesn't approach Jesus, instead tentatively stretching out merely to touch something he had touched, but even putting aside her indirect approach which Jesus fully validates by saying that her faith has healed her, it's worth asking why she thought this would make a difference. Why did she think that she could be healed simply by touching a thing?

Well, this sacramental understanding of the world had long been a part of Judaism. Look at the stories of Elijah and Elisha. I'm not sure whether we should regard the story of the waters being parted after being struck by the cloak of Elijah (2 Kings 2.8, 13-14) as an example of this, but given how the mechanics of this appear to contrast with Moses' more famous parting of the Red Sea (Exodus 14.21-29), it may well be so. Perhaps more instructive is the tale of the bones of Elisha:

'So Elisha died, and they buried him. Now bands of Moabites used to invade the land in the spring of the year. And as a man was being buried, lo, a marauding band was seen and the man was cast into the grave of Elisha; and as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood on his feet.' (2 Kings 13.20-21)

I don't think it does any good to talk here of a measure of the Holy Spirit having stayed with the decaying corpse of the prophet in such a way that a fresh corpse could be revived on contact with Elisha's bones; I'd be very much inclined to doubt that Divine power is a finite resource, or that it gradually fades away, like Carbon-14. I think we simply have to talk here of God choosing to act through physical matter, that matter being the bones -- the physical remains -- of one of his most devoted servants.

The belief that God could -- and did -- act through physical things associated with the most distinguished of his servants was clearly common in the early Church. Think of how, in the months after Pentecost, believers 'even carried out their sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and pallets, that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them,' and how years later, when Paul was at Corinth, 'God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them' (Acts 5.15, 9.11-12).

The last pagan emperor of Rome, Julian the Apostate, in a notorious anti-Christian diatribe, Against the Galileans, seems to indicate that the two apostles' tombs were being venerated even during the time of the apostle John: he says that John only explicitly identified Jesus as God, something the earlier evangelists had refrained from doing, after he had heard that the tombs of Peter and Paul were being worshipped. Indeed, he regarded the tendency of contemporary Christians to 'grovel among tombs and pay them honour' as one of the more ridiculous Christian practices.

It's worth taking a look at the Martyrdom of Polycarp, an account of the execution of the second-century bishop of Smyrna in modern Turkey. St Polycarp, of whom St Irenaeus of Lyons was a disciple, had himself been a disciple of St John, and thus a younger contemporary of St Clement of Rome and St Ignatius of Antioch. He was burned at the stake for refusing to burn incense in honour of the Roman Emperor, and afterwards the Christians of Smyrna gathered up his bones which they treasured and used to call to mind his heroic example:

'And so we afterwards took up his bones which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and laid them in a suitable place, where the Lord will permit us to gather ourselves together, as we are able, in gladness and joy, and to celebrate the birth-day of his martyrdom for the commemoration of those that have already fought in the contest, and for the training and preparation of those that shall do so hereafter.' (Martyrdom of Polycarp, 18.2-3)

Relics, then, and the veneration of them, have been a feature of Christianity from earliest times, long before the Bible was definitively shaped into the form we currently have it. There's no denying that at times this practice got out of hand, and was abused, but while it may occasionally have veered towards idolatry, far more often it is best viewed simply as instances of ordinary people, believing absolutely in Jesus but too humble to approach him directly, reaching out to touch those who he himself had touched.

In case you're wondering, no, I didn't go to see the relics of St Thérèse, whether in Liverpool, in Salford, or in Manchester. I'm afraid I've been stuck here trying to work.

I missed them in Ireland a few years ago too. I think I was in Greece at the time. Mind, I often wonder how many people in Ireland did go to see them. Lots, surely, but hardly the three million I keep reading in the press nowadays. Three quarters of the population? Really? And yet I've never heard anyone once mention having gone to see them. I know we can be oddly quiet about things, but that quiet? I'm pretty sure that loads of people went to see the relics more than once, and that the count was a tad on the high side at every venue and at every mass, with people who'd queued to see the relics getting counted afresh if there were masses there too. It wouldn't take much to massively inflate the numbers.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that huge numbers of Irish people didn't go to see the relics last time out, just that I very much doubt that the numbers were quite so huge as are being made out. Mind, I'm an ancient military historian -- I always think big numbers are inflated, and I'm always suspicious of big multiples of three.

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* Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons I'm very fond of the sentiment expressed, however scornfully, in the Monty Python song 'All Things Dull and Ugly'. He didn't just make the things that are bright and beautiful; he made everything, including a huge amount of ugly things, and he never made anything to last.

Haunted by the Reformation

Well, the European qualifiers for next year's World Cup are over, and I doubt there are many people out there who would have predicted at the start of this campaign that when the qualifiers came to an end, only five of the 53 countries would remain unbeaten, those five being Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and, um, Ireland. Of course, this doesn't give us a huge amount to crow about: of the eight second-place teams that go through to the play-offs, Ireland earned the fewest points over the campaign. Still, fingers crossed for the next match...


So yes, yesterday I was talking about the visit of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux to England and Wales, and about how one Sophia Deboick, writing in The Guardian, seems to think it remarkable that the Catholic Church should use a saint to promote Catholicism. I know, astonishing, eh? In this day and age...

Anyway, the gist of the article is as follows: when Thérèse died in 1897, her sisters set about moulding her image and building a cult around her, and were supported in this by Rome, where Thérèse was seen as a useful modern example of meek female purity. She was canonised in 1925, and in the 1960s was presented as a great theologian and as a proto-feminist. Nowadays, when the Church supposedly regards virginity and motherhood as the only acceptable female conditions, she is a perfect example of the former, while her mother, whose cult is growing, stands as a useful example of the latter.

I'd like to have seen a lot more of this, because as it stands it's just a handful of sweeping statements, hardly substantiated at all. The stuff about her autobiograph having been creatively edited by her sisters is fascinating, and I'd like to learn more about that. The idea that photos of her were suppressed in favour of sentimentalised paintings is almost as interesting, but it rather clashes with what I've read elsewhere about how much of her early popularity was due to the novelty of a saint - and long before canonisation we was widely regarded as a saint - having been photographed. Claims about virginity and motherhood being the only acceptable female conditions in the eyes of the Church are utter bunkum, as I said yesterday, and indeed I don't think I've ever heard Thérèse being singled out as a virgin: as a thinker, yes, as a saint, certainly, as someone who struggled on a daily basis to live for Christ, absolutely,but as a virgin? No. It's always kind of gone without saying, as a rule, her having been a nun. It was never something to specifically focus on. Until reading Ms Deboick's article, I'd never heard of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the Holy Virgin, though I'd heard time and again of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower.

Still, the comments on the article are well worth a read, not least for how they gxpress a discomfort with this kind of stuff. I don't mean the usual tribalism of most of my fellow Guardian readers - or at least most of those who leave comments - which tends to manifest itself as a kind of unthinking pack atheism; I'm talking about a straightforward unease, of the kind that Basil Hume was so concerned about in 1997, when the idea was first proposed that the relics should be brought to England. He felt the time wasn't yet right, as the old English view of Catholicism as superstitious, idolatrous, and 'other' was still too powerful.

Taking some of the comments, and stitching them together, you get the following:

'I do find the whole spectacle rather gruesome. I thought the dead were supposed to be allowed to rest in peace not go on world tours... All seems rather medieval and macabre. Can't they just let Thérèse rest in peace... I love Ellis Peters' Cadfael books. I just never thought that people would take them so seriously and decide to promenade St Winifried's - sorry, that should be St Therese's - bones all over the place in such a bizarre Dark Ages fashion... Cardinal Hume, an intellectual giant compared to his infantile British successors, refused to allow what he saw as a display of superstitious idolatry... I have to say that I just do not get this relics thing... This Dead People's Bones Worship Cult thing seems to me to bear no resemblance to the Christianity described in the Bible or practiced by other mainstream faiths... Can anybody explain to me why these pitiful tubercular bones are being hawked round the country rather than been given a decent Christian burial. It couldn't be a cynical ploy to make loads of dosh for the Catholic church could it? I thought we had a reformation in this country... Anyone starting today to dig up the body of a dead person, cut it up and cart it round for other weirdos to goggle at would have a net thrown over them and be invited to some heavyweight counselling... It is really hard to understand the hold that a few bones from, at the time of her death, an unknown Carmelite nun can still have over so many people (I guess more women that men, which is rather strange in itself) And they all have the vote!

There's standard anti-Christian stuff as well, of course, but this is more specific. It is, in effect, Calvin's anti-Catholic legacy in its current incarnation, a strand in modern English anti-religious thinking which tends not merely to identify religion in general as a mental disorder, but to pick out Catholicism as a particularly pernicious and sinister variety of such, drawing on all the old clichés and myths to do so.


Relics, I think it has to be said, are probably one of the things about Catholicism that most non-Catholics are uncomfortable with. Even when they're not dismissed as fakes they're seen as weird, grotesque, superstitious, idolatrous, and even pagan. What's more, they even leave a lot of Catholics cold, or at any rate engender mixed feelings. One of the more considered and informative comments on the Deboick article is from a fellow who identifies himself as 'a Catholic who does not do relics and was never particularly keen on St Theresa's style of spirituality'; he's far from alone in this, though it's interesting that even so he found himself going up to Aylesford out of curiosity last weekend, where he was particularly taken by the homily at the mass.


I tend to think of myself as not being a relics person, but if I'm totally honest with myself, that's nonsense. While I may laugh at the dubious provenance of such oddities as, say, St Thomas's finger, and while I stop short of kissing the feet of statues, that hasn't stopped me from kneeling in the Church at Calvary or by the tombs of St Peter and of St Francis of Assisi. I think the fact that whenever I'm in London I pray by the grave of Basil Hume is largely accidental, though; he just happens to be interred in a chapel that I love.

But still, if I think about it's pretty obvious that I've a thing for relics, and secular ones as much as religious ones. I've thrilled to see in Olympia the helmet that Miltiades wore at Marathon, and stood with a lump in my throat at the hill of Thermopylae, drank in one of Dickens and Chesterton's favourite haunts, ate in the Place du Forum in Arles, and been speechless at Dachau and Auschwitz. Arrayed along my shelves are a medley of keepsakes - a pebble from the Dead Sea and another from the Wadi Rum, a meaningless shard from Petra, a lump of rock from Mount Vesuvius, a chunk of bog oak from Mayo, the plastercast of a Carthaginian coin. Most of all, I keep all sorts of things because people who've meant something to me have touched them: letters written and cards made by friends, a ribbon that was once wrapped round a birthday present, old photographs, books signed by favourite authors. I'm hardly queasy about human remains, either: a few years back I spent a summer in Greece digging up ancient graves and carefully cleaning skeletons with toothbrushes and souvlaki sticks, and even now a medieval human skull grins down at my from my bookshelves.

The veneration of relics -- and it's veneration, not worship, so just respect and honour rather than adoration -- is a perfectly normal human instinct, drawing on the same characteristics that lead us to visit graves and museums. It's more than this, though; it's not just a combination of curiosity and sentiment. I'll explain tomorrow. For now, my bed calls.

Watching from the Touchline

I was glad to see today that Carter-Ruck backed down from their absurd attempt to prevent the Guardian reporting on a parliamentary question. I'm no wiser, though, as to what their ridiculous behaviour was intended to achieve; it was surely contrary to the British Constitution, it clearly wouldn't withstand a legal challenge, the question and answer would be recorded in Hansard no matter what, and this was guaranteed to draw bad publicity to their client Trafigura. And yes, there's such a thing as bad publicity.


Speaking of the Guardian, there's a piece in it today about St Thérèse of Lisieux, by one Sophia Deboick, who is currently conducting research into Thérèse's cult. The article, while not nearly as comprehensive or as fair-minded as Joanna Moorhead's Independent piece of a couple of months back, is well worth pondering. It's quite interesting in its way, though it makes me think of the bit in the introduction to Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, where he says:

'The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plain clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle; though they do not call an editor's office a coward's castle. It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it would be much truer of journalist. The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him. They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press about why the churches are empty, without even going there to find out if they are empty, or which of them are empty.

[...]

It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.'

I'm not saying that Sophia Deboick is theologically illiterate by any means, but it does seem that she comes across as someone studying religion from the doorway, neither in nor out. In amongst the useful historical stuff, explaining the way in which Thérèse's cult was initially fostered by her sisters, you get half-truths like this:

'Named a Doctor of the church on the centenary of her death in 1997, Rome now uses the radical, intellectual Thérèse to pay lip-service to calls for reform in the church's social attitudes. The current pope has made it abundantly clear that, for the church, virginity or motherhood are still the only acceptable states of female existence. While Thérèse represents the former, her own mother, Zélie Martin, who was beatified alongside Thérèse's father in October 2008, has become the church's poster-girl for ideal Catholic motherhood.'

If you think for a moment you'll realise it's nonsense to claim that the Church regards virginity and motherhood as 'the only acceptable states of female existence', let alone that the current Pope said this back in 2004.

One might respond to this, as one of the commenters does, that 'The alternatives are contraception, abortion, or infertility. The first two are sins, the last considered a misfortune rather than something to aspire to. This also applies to men. Men may aspire to be virgins or fathers of families.' These points are all good, albeit somewhat inconvenient for those who are determined to bash the Church, but despite being spot-on, they don't go far enough.

Look at what the article says: for the Catholic Church the only acceptable states of female existence are virginity and motherhood. In other words, if a girl has even once had sex, whether of her volition or not, she has no option, in the eyes of the Church, except to become a mother; once deprived of virginity, failure to achieve motherhood is unacceptable. What's more, by this reading, married women -- even widowed ones -- must become mothers; failure to achieve motherhood is unacceptable. Does anyone really think the Church believes this? Does anyone think it ever believed this?

Sure, Our Lady was both virgin and mother, but think of the popular western picture of St Mary Magdalene, apostle to the apostles, patron saint of sinners. Despite the fact that in the Bible she is described simply as someone from whom seven demons were cast, from the sixth century on she was conflated in the popular mind with Mary of Bethany and with the woman with the alabaster jar who anointed the feet of Jesus; as such she was regarded and venerated as a former sinner who had changed her ways and adopted a virtuous life, a reformed prostitute who was neither virgin nor mother, like St Paul someone who had gone and sinned no more. The saints are exemplars for us, but for the Church as imagined by Deboinck, such a change would be pointless: to her mind, once virginity is lost there is no salvation outside the maternity ward.

In the later Middle Ages, and you'll get this from even a cursory reading of The Canterbury Tales, it was clear that the Church back then tended to think of women as, in the main, virgins, wives, or widows. This was a bit of a caricature, but as a crude summary it has some merit. When I was an undergrad we used to make much of this, noting that medieval women were largely defined by what they were, whereas medieval men tended to be defined by what they did, though by Chaucer's day the classic division of men into oratores, bellatores, and laboratores had long faded into obsolescence, if it had ever been valid. Now, does anyone seriously think it's likely that the modern Church has an understanding of women that is markedly less nuanced than that of the medieval one?


The Guardian article had linked to a 2004 letter by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, saying that he had made it abundantly clear that virginity and motherhood were the only acceptable states of female existence. It's worth reading the letter, in which he says nothing of the sort. In the letter he expressly states that the 'feminine' values discussed in the letters are all, ultimately, human values, since the human condition of man and woman as created by God is one and indivisible. This means that both motherhood -- yes, motherhood -- and virginity are universal values, rather than exclusively female ones. How can this be?

'Although motherhood is a key element of women's identity, this does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation. In this area, there can be serious distortions, which extol biological fecundity in purely quantitative terms and are often accompanied by dangerous disrespect for women. The existence of the Christian vocation of virginity, radical with regard to both the Old Testament tradition and the demands made by many societies, is of the greatest importance in this regard.Virginity refutes any attempt to enclose women in mere biological destiny. Just as virginity receives from physical motherhood the insight that there is no Christian vocation except in the concrete gift of oneself to the other, so physical motherhood receives from virginity an insight into its fundamentally spiritual dimension: it is in not being content only to give physical life that the other truly comes into existence. This means that motherhood can find forms of full realization also where there is no physical procreation.'

I think this is one of those things we're meant to ponder and meditate upon, rather than to simply read and react to. The letter as a whole indeed sees motherhood -- or perhaps more importantly, the capacity for motherhood -- as the defining attribute of feminity, but uses both 'motherhood' and 'feminity' as codewords for 'the fundamental human value to live for the other and because of the other'. As for virginity, this is surely meant here not as a physical state which can be lost forever, but rather -- though it includes that -- as a synonym for celibacy, and thus as an ardent refusal to be defined purely by our bodies, a passionate determination to rise above our biological destiny. Heady stuff, you might think, and certainly not what might immediately grab you about it.

In thinking about this letter, it's important to remember to whom it was addressed: it was addressed to the bishops of the Church, who were probably assumed to be fairly clued in to the biblical and theological ideas underpinning the letter. If it might seem opaque to us, we shouldn't get annoyed; would we really expect a conference paper on astrophysics to be easily accessible to anybody who had just done science in school? Complex questions often require complex answers, after all.


Deboick's closing paragraph is a bit dodgy:

'The pilgrimage site of Lisieux is second only to Lourdes in terms of visitor numbers and many will feel they have derived genuine benefit from visiting the relics during this tour, but we must recognise this event as part of the agenda of a Catholic church whose social proscriptions have become obsolete and for whom political expediency comes before popular opinion.'

I had to go a-googling to decipher the first part of this: Lisieux is the second most popular pilgrimage site in France, receiving more than two million pilgrims every year. The rest of it is baffling, though, since although Deboick says we must recognise this, she never really says why. After all, all she has to say about the supposed political agenda of the Church in this affair is the unsubstantiated claim that the Church 'uses the radical, intellectual Thérèse to pay lip-service to calls for reform in the church's social attitudes'. Given that Deboick seems convinced that the supposedly obsolete social proscriptions of the Church include the belief that the only acceptable states of feminine existence are virginity and motherhood, which we know isn't true and has never been so, I think we should take her 'must' with a rather liberal dose of salt.


I was going to talk briefly about relics, and got sidetracked. Hmmm. Maybe tomorrow. Some more work now, though, and then bed.

Who Guards the Guardians?

Or 'who gags The Guardian?' at any rate. This is astonishing:

Guardian Gagged From reporting Parliament

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The Guardian has vowed urgently to go to court to overturn the gag on its reporting. The editor, Alan Rusbridger, said: "The media laws in this country increasingly place newspapers in a Kafkaesque world in which we cannot tell the public anything about information which is being suppressed, nor the proceedings which suppress it. It is doubly menacing when those restraints include the reporting of parliament itself."

The media lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said Lord Denning ruled in the 1970s that "whatever comments are made in parliament" can be reported in newspapers without fear of contempt.

He said: "Four rebel MPs asked questions giving the identity of 'Colonel B', granted anonymity by a judge on grounds of 'national security'. The DPP threatened the press might be prosecuted for contempt, but most published."

The right to report parliament was the subject of many struggles in the 18th century, with the MP and journalist John Wilkes fighting every authority – up to the king – over the right to keep the public informed. After Wilkes's battle, wrote the historian Robert Hargreaves, "it gradually became accepted that the public had a constitutional right to know what their elected representatives were up to".

So all The Guardian can reveal of this bizarre situation is that the case involves the London firm of solicitors Carter-Ruck. Guido Fawkes, clearly recalling events involving Trafigura last month, wonders whether the gagged question might be one from Paul Farrelly, MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme. It seems an obvious choice, given that the Trifagura story involved Carter-Ruck and was reported on by David Leigh, just like today's mysterious story, but it's hardly the only possibility. Of course, the next questions have to be whether the Guardian is the only paper to have received such a ban, and whether there are plans to sue half the internet for discussing this matter.

I just don't see the point anyway. After all, the question and the answer will both be a matter of record in Hansard in no time at all. Leaving aside the constiutional question, what are Carter-Ruck playing at?

Manchester, and the Indirect Route to Excellent Education

There was an article in Student Direct, Manchester's student newspaper, the other week, that got my proverbial goat. I don't have a real one, alas. Anyway, the guts of the article was that Alan Gilbert, current head honcho at the University of Manchester, has admitted that the undergraduate experience at Manchester isn't what it might be:

'Vice-Chancellor Alan Gilbert has publicly admitted that students at the University of Manchester do not receive a satisfactory student experience.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Beyond Westminster, Gilbert said: “I am not satisfied with the quality of undergraduate education in the University.”

He also branded it as “too impersonal” and not “sufficiently interactive”, adding that “the curriculum has been developed a little incrementally and has not been profoundly thought through.

“The student experience can be considerably improved.”

[...]

However, Gilbert implied that the main reason for the shortcomings was insufficient funding for the University, as the top-up fees introduced two years ago nation-wide to boost institutions’ finances were too low to actually achieve this.'

I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with things developing incrementally, that being the English way, but it's good that Alan G has recognised that things aren't what they might be in Manchester. He said this more than a year and a half ago too, of course, but still, it's nice that he's not forgotten.

In the 2009 National Student Survey, not merely does Manchester fall four percentage points below the national average for student satisfaction, but of the 154 institutions listed here, 120 do rather better than Manchester. For one of Britain's leading universities, this might strike you as shocking, but in a way it's not really surprising. Manchester tends to do extremely well in global research-based league tables, invariably being in the top handful of British universities on such lists, but its ranking in domestic league tables, which focus more on teaching and the actual educational experience at universities, is as a rule far less impressive: perhaps most dramatically, the Guardian's latest table has it at a feeble 32nd place!

What's going on? Is Alan Gilbert right to say that the University is insufficiently well-funded?

I don't think he is. In 2007, Manchester's income was around £637 million, more than that of any other University -- although to be fair, Oxford and Cambridge colleges have extra sources of income independent of the respective universities. In other words, Manchester has more money than almost any other educational institution in Britain. This shouldn't come as a surprise: Manchester is enormous, and probably, in real terms, the biggest university in the country. Even so, though, it sounds as though the system is under some strain.

Look, let's be fair. Manchester has made a strategic decision, which is to try to become one of the world's top 25 research-led institutions. It's throwing its resources into that, with the plan being to invest heavily in research and to do whatever it takes to recruit prominent academics so that other prominent academics will be drawn to Manchester. This seems to be working: Manchester is slowly working its way up the Shanghai Jiao Tong league table, which as far as Professor Gilbert is concerned, is the only ranking that matters.

The problem is that without limitless resources you can't cover everything. Frederick the Great put it well: he who defends everything defends nothing.

Elite universities may well be destinations of preference for many of the best students in the world, as Professor Gilbert said in outlining the University's 2015 strategy; they may well support excellence in teaching and provide students with a superb learning experience. It seems that Professor Gilbert really wants Manchester to become such a place. The thing is, that may not be possible just yet. It may simply be the case that there's not enough money to go round to do everything at once, and so a strategic decision has been taken to make teaching take a back seat. Professor Gilbert effectively admitted this back in February 2008, when he said there was a trend in most of Britain's leading institutions towards emphasising excellence in research at the cost of excellence in teaching. This, he conceded, was far from healthy:

'Whether you like it or not, universities are fundamentally about the education of students, both undergraduate and postgraduate ... it is clear that a university becomes non-viable unless it is a satisfactory destination for good students. There is a flaw in the business of a research university unless it is seen to be dedicated as much to the learning outcomes of students as to its research outcomes.'

Manchester, he said more than a year and a half ago, was taking steps to rectify this. Given dropping rankings in national league tables -- 24th to 32nd in the Guardian table and a drop from 81% to 77% in the National Student Survey -- it looks as though these steps might not be working, but maybe they will in time.

In the meantime, it'd probably be useful if the University honestly and openly defended its strategic decision to invest in research in order to join the ranks of the global academic elite, with a view to using that position and the wealth it hopes to generate through leadership in research to become a world-beater in teaching as well. If this means that the interests of Manchester's actual students of today are to come second to the interests of Manchester's imagined students of tomorrow, well, that's an unfortunate price that just needs to be paid. Sometimes you have to play a long game.

Seriously, this is a defensible position. I'm not sure I'd like to be defending it, given that students, parents, and taxpayers from all over the UK might have doubts about so much indirect long-term investment in the English north-west, but the case could be made, and probably should be.

Honesty's usually the best policy, after all.

Fry's Poles, or, How Context is Everything

It's unfortunate how certain things get picked up on and misrepresented in the media. A friend linked on Twitter earlier to this Telegraph article by Gerald Warner, which quotes a Channel 4 interview with Stephen Fry, citing Fry as saying:

'There’s been a history, let’s face it, in Poland of a right-wing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on.'

Warner goes on to argue that Fry was trying to imply that Auschwitz was a Polish institution, and attacks Fry for attacking Poles and Catholics, pointing out that both groups suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazis.

Before leaping to any conclusions, it's worth watching the interview right through to the end, as the 'offensive' comments start five minutes into a six-minute interview about the Tories having recently allied themselves in the European parliament with the Polish Law and Justice Party. Context is everything, after all, but even so, let's take a look at what he actually says at that point:

Jon Snow: Stephen Fry - innuendo or facts?
Stephen Fry: Well, I've read the manifesto statements that they've made about gay people. I know they suppressed in about 2004-5, I believe, a gay pride march, this party, quite specifically, and they used the most inflammatory language about it, and I'm glad Charles mentioned also the anti-semitic element of the party, and, I think, there’s been a history, let’s face it, in Poland of a right-wing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on, and know the stories, and know much of the anti-semitic and homophobic and nationalistic elements in countries like Poland. This is a problem that is not going to get smaller, because as we start to pay for the financial disaster of the last year, as the bill comes in, a kind of great pimpled acne of nationalism and homophobia and racism is going to erupt around Europe because there's going to be trouble with unemployment, there're going to be all the problems. Do you remember the 30s? The problem with the 30s was not that period, it was the end of the 30s, it's when you start to pay the price, and that's why it matters now to make a stand, because yes, you may say "we can influence them, it will all be good," but we have to understand things will get worse.

Okay, so he was kind of burbling, but his general point is clear, I think: every society has its dark side, and these dark elements gestate in dark times, so we ought to be alert to them now, and to be heading them off, rather than giving them credibility by allying ourselves with them. Societies that have been ground down tend to look for people to blame their problems on, with the most obvious candidates for scapegoat status being those 'others' who live among us, notably foreigners, gays, and gypsies.

What's this got to do with Poland, Auschwitz, and Catholicism, and indeed, what has it got to do with the Tories? In essence what Stephen Fry was saying was that all countries have their demons, and parties such as Poland's Law and Justice Party seek to gain power through summoning those demons; the problem is that these demons are very hard to control, and once at large can take on a life of their own.

Well, let's start with this: anti-semitism was rife in Poland in the first half of the twentieth century, and this anti-semitism became increasingly pronounced in the second half of the 1930s. There were anti-Jewish riots and assaults, and Jews were segregated in Polish universities, blocked from jobs in the civil service, and barred from joining the main trade unions for professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Unemployed Jews were denied welfare benefits, such as they were, and Jewish businesses were routinely boycotted, with shops being looted.

This wasn't a uniquely Polish phenomenon, of course. Anti-semitism was common through Europe at the time, and indeed the numbers of Jews in Poland rose during the interwar period, as Russian and Ukrainian Jews fled to Poland to escape pogroms in the Soviet Union; German anti-semitism, of course, goes without saying.* Sadly, Polish anti-semitism was closely intertwined with Polish Catholicism, not least because Catholicism was seen as the hallmark of the true Pole, just as in Ireland it was for so long seen as the hallmark of the true Irishman. The result of all this was that when Poland was carved up by Germany and Russia in 1939, the fate of the Jews wasn't a matter of huge concern to many Poles; as far as they were concerned, the Jews simply weren't Polish anyway.

That's not to say that all, or even most Poles were indifferent to the holocaust that was happening on their doorstep, just that some were, and in a country as big as Poland, 'some' translates to 'quite a lot'. The Nazis were almost as dedicated to the elimination of the Poles as they were to the elimination of the Jews, and so while many Poles responded to this by putting aside their differences with their Jewish neighbours, there was no shortage of Poles who felt that Polish lives mattered more than Jewish ones. After the war, Jews returning their homes in Poland were often met with hostility, and hundreds of Jews were murdered, 37 at the Kielce Pogrom alone. More than 100,000 Jews left Poland in the years immediately following World War Two.

It appears that anti-semitism may be on the rise in Poland at the moment, and sadly, this rise appears fuelled at least in part by certain strands of Polish Catholicism, with anti-semitic rants being a staple of the Catholic radio station Radio Maryja. This might seem particularly odd, and indeed it seems as though some Polish Catholics have almost chosen to forget the lessons of Auschwitz. I think this is what Stephen Fry was getting towards: the Nazis' worst crimes were committed on Polish soil, there were a fair few Poles that just didn't care, and it would be a tragedy if today's Poles were to forget this.

In this regard, it's worth remembering St Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who was killed in another's place in Auschwitz and who was canonised in 1982. Father Kolbe had clearly been at least mildly anti-semitic in the years prior to the German occupation, personally accepting without question such absurdities as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and with anti-semitic literature being published by the publishing press he ran. On the other hand, following more than two months of imprisonment after the Nazi conquest he sheltered and cared for perhaps as many as 2,000 Jews at his friary near Warsaw, tending to them as carefully and as lovingly as though they were Polish Catholics like himself. He's a useful lesson, and one well worth keeping in mind.

Catholicism, of course, ought never to be dragooned into the service of nationalism or called upon to justify anti-semitism or racism of any sort. Pius XI declared in 1938 that

'... in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our Patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites.'

A year earlier he had issued the German-language encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, drafted by the future Pope Pius XII, which condemned as idoloatrous and un-Christian the exaltation of race, nation, state, and political ideology:

'Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.'

Anti-semitism, therefore, is certainly never Catholic; sadly, however, this does not mean that Catholics are never anti-semites. The world would be a far better place if it were.

Stephen Fry's point seems clear, and it was most certainly not that the concentration camps at occupied Oświęcim were Polish institutions. We are living, he was saying, in a time of economic turmoil, and in such times it is all too often the tendency of the office boy to kick the dog. The Polish Law and Justice Party, he fears, have the look of a party that is seeking a dog to kick, and it troubles him that any British party should be standing beside them smiling benevolently while they do so.

In the afterward to the paperback edition of his autobiography, John Major summed up what he believed the European project was about and why it was worth fighting for: it was, he said, about keeping borders down, democracy in, and nationalism out. It seems a shame that his Conservative successors should have chosen to ally themselves with politicians who play on paranoia, who believe in bringing borders back up, and who rejoice in nurturing nationalism in its nastiest and most narrow-minded of forms.
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* Though we shouldn't subscribe to Daniel Goldhagen's sweepingly anti-German screeds, and again, there were of course some inspiring exceptions.