Notes on the Papal Visit 1: Cost and Purpose

Sick in bed all today, I wrote a very long Facebook post about the Papal visit and the controversy some have tried to kick up about it. Thinking it mightn't be a bad idea to post it here too, here goes...

I've gotten rather tired of playing whack-a-mole with all the crazy myths being perpetuated about the Papal visit, so here's a pretty straightforward summary of where I stand on this.

THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF STATE VISITS

Firstly, the Queen has made at least two formal state visits to the Holy See at the invitation of the Pope, and at the Holy See's expense. Given this, is it really so odd that the Pope, as head of state of the Holy See, should have been invited here or that he should have accepted? It is worth pointing out that the Holy See, to which the United Kingdom's ambassador is accredited, is not synonymous with the Vatican City, and predates most if not all other European states, dating back well into the medieval period.

There are straightforward political reasons why the British government should have wanted the Pope to visit. The British government and the Holy See work together in the fields of international justice, development, and debt, as well as other issues such as the environment. The government wants to develop these ties further to make use of what it perceives as the Holy See's massive 'soft power' in these areas. This is why the Pope has been invited here on a formal state visit, and is why more than half the cost of the visit is being paid for by the state.

THE COST OF THE VISIT

Why not all the cost, as would normally be the case? Well, the Pope is taking advantage of being here in order to perform his pastoral duties for British Catholics, and to oversee the beatification of Cardinal Newman, one of his heroes, and one of mine, for what it's worth. Benedict would hardly have come here if he could not have done such things, and such pastoral and ecclesiastical elements of the trip are being paid for by the Church, which is having to seek special donations from Britain's Catholics to fund these, as when John Paul II visited in 1982, the Church in Britain was left broke and in debt.

(For what it's worth the Queen shall be visiting Ireland in 2011, and shall be doing so at the Irish taxpayers' expense. I hope there shan't be Irish people upset at the prospect of paying for the Supreme Governor of the Church of England to visit their country.)

It looks as though £8 million of the costs shall be borne by Britain's Catholics, with the remaining £12 million or so - according to the government - being borne by the state that's invited Benedict to visit. This £12 million figure excludes security costs, but the government reckons they'll cost about £1.5 million. Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society, on the other hand, is screeching that the visit will cost about £100 million, but given that the G20 Summit last year had a security budget of less than £8 million, I very much doubt that the Pope's visit shall cost eleven times that amount.

In short,  it looks like the taxpayer will be paying something in the region of £14 million for the visit. Presumably the government believes this will be money well spent if it means that it gain the support of the Holy See in achieving some of its foreign policy objectives. And £14 million, lest people feel that that's an outrageous amount to be spending on helping starving people in Africa, say, isn't that much; it's about 23p per head of population. And if that still bothers people, Halifax reckons everyone has, on average, seven tiimes that amount buried in their living room couch.

What then of the other reasons being wheeled out against Benedict being here? Two seem to be paramount, being the abuse scandals and the supposed effect of Church teaching on AIDS in Africa; there are other issues, but these pale into insignificance next to these. So...

Should Cardinal Brady Resign?

I know. It's been ages, yet again. I keep wanting to post, but I'm insanely busy, and most of the things I want to write about are things that I'd legally compromise if I discussed them here, or things that I'd probably get screamed at if I expressed my thoughts on.

Still, I'm going to use this today to get my thoughts in order on the whole furore about Cardinal Sean Brady, the Archbishop of Armagh, and thus the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The story, if you don't know it, and which broke in a rather muddy way over the weekend, is as follows.


The Story in Brief
Brendan Smyth was probably one of the two most notorious child molesters ever to have disgraced the Irish priesthood. Ordained a priest in the 1950s, he abused children almost from the offing, and the bungling of attempts to bring him to justice in the 1990s led to the collapse of a government. He eventually died in prison while serving a seven-year sentence for his crimes.

Over the weekend it turned out that the current Irish cardinal, Sean Brady, had learned of Smyth's actions back in 1975. An ordinary priest at the time, Brady was a schoolteacher who had been trained in canon law. In this capacity in March and April 1975 he interviewed two teenage boys who had reported Smythe's behaviour, taking notes on the interviews and administering oaths that required the boys to confirm the truthfulness of their statements and to guarantee that they would preserve the confidentiality of the interview process.

Father Brady, as he then was, passed on his findings to his bishop, who made his decision -- that Smyth's priestly faculties should be withdrawn and that he should receive psychiatric help -- which he passed on to the superior of Smyth's order, the Norbertines. The Norbetines, as we know, utterly failed to enforce the order restricting his priestly role, simply moving him from place to place, and we all know what horrors ensued.


Response to the Story
Now, this all came to light over the weekend, or thirteen years ago for people who were paying attention, and did so in a garbled form. Early reports suggested that the interviewees were children of 10 and 14, and that one was a girl, rather than, as per the Cardinal's statement and as everyone now seems to accept, that they two were boys of 14 and 15. Reporting hasn't been clear on the nature of the oath, either -- what exactly did it require, how was it phrased, and what obligations were there on the boys to sign it?

Despite this, and despite support for the Cardinal at mass in Armagh this Sunday, plenty of people have, understandably, been calling for the Cardinal's head.

Some, such as the Guardian's Andrew Brown have said it would be best if he stepped down as head of the Irish Church, as a public repudiation of the old ways. As someone who doesn't have a personal axe to grind against the Catholic Church in Ireland, I think his opinion is worth listening to on this, unlike, say, that of Vincent Browne at the Irish Times, given Browne's longstanding hatred of the Irish Church. Despite the vast amount of good work he's done over the years, Browne's comments on this issue look to me as him using abused children as a political football, and he's not been alone in doing this in the Irish Times over recent months. Others such as Colm O'Gorman have responding in a likewise predictable fashion, but it's hard not to raise an eyebrow when Martin McGuinness, of all people, holds anyone to account for their actions -- or inaction -- decades ago.


What is the Problem?
It's worth trying to isolate the problem here. The issues seem to come down to two key questions. In administering an oath of secrecy to the two victims, did Sean Brady somehow pervert the course of justice? Did Sean Brady, in knowing of Smyth's behaviour but in not reporting it to the Guards, effectively allow that behaviour to continue?

I don't think he did, on either count.


The Oath
It was only today that the Irish Independent bothered to ask what exactly the oath was that the teenagers were required to sign, and unsurprisingly the Independent pointed to Crimen Solicitationis, a 1960s Vatican document that basically restates a 1920s one.

The article doesn't quote the whole oath, by any means, or how it works in the context of the investigation that would have taken place, and indeed it looks as though the oath as quoted would have been taken by the investigators rather than the denouncers, but even so you can get a good idea at how it was to work by looking at sections 11, 12, and 13 of this ropey translation. The only oath I can see, for what it's worth, is to be found in formula A of the appendix, and the oath of secrecy for denouncers is mentioned but not detailed in formula E.

For what it's worth, though, even the oath for investigators doesn't seem to block the investigators from reporting crimes to the police -- it makes specific exceptions for those matters which can be legally made public.

So, was this oath an attempt to pervert the course of justice? I don't think we can be dogmatic on this without access to the wording, and the claims of the Independent aside, we don't have it. However, allowing for the fact that the Church says that the purpose of the oath was to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of the investigation process, that the oath for investigators -- even badly translated -- does not require them to maintain secrecy about things which could be legitimately made public, and that an accurate translation of Crimen Solicitationis reveals that oaths concern confidentiality about the trial itself rather than about the subject matter of the trial, I really don't see that it can be argued that the oath was designed to stop the two boys from going to the police if they saw fit.

Vincent Browne is wrong, I'm sure of this. Section 17 of the Offenses Against the State Act only comes into play when someone administers an oath to promote, assist, or conceal the commission of a crime. There's not a jot of evidence to suggest that the oath was intended to prevent the teenagers from reporting to the Guards what had happened, and, of course, it's significant that the boys' parents, who I presume were already familiar with the allegations, don't appear to have been required to sign any oaths at all.


Silence?
What then of Father Brady's silence in the years after he took these depositions?

Section 5.36 of the Murphy Report notes that misprison of felony is an offense in common law. It occurs when a person knows a felony has been committed but conceals it from the authorities. The Cardinal might, on the face of it, be guilty of this, although you'd have to concede that all he knew was that a felony had been alleged.

More broadly, I would say is this concerning his failure to report the allegations to the Guards. Abuse cases are nasty things that pollute people even loosely connected with them. Was the Cardinal guilty because he didn't go to the police? Maybe. But if he was, what of the victims' parents? Didn't they know too? And yet, did they go to the police? If they didn't, don't they too share in the guilt, possibly to a greater degree than the Cardinal? What of the victims themselves? In not reporting it to the state authorities, even years later, as adults, didn't they somehow allow Smyth to keep going in his vicious, wicked career?

Irish Brehon law used to have a thing called a 'crime of eye'. It meant that if you knew a crime had been committed, or believed a crime was being committed, and you didn't act to stop the crime or to punish the perpetrator, you shared in his guilt. In cases like this, a little knowledge is a poisonous and polluting thing.

The early victims of Brendan Smyth aren't responsible for what he did to children years later. They told their parents -- or some of them did -- and they told Smyth's superiors. The boys' parents likewise told Smyth's superiors. Maybe they should have told the Guards, but I've been assured by a friend in the Guards -- when discussing the pattern in the Murphy Report of Dublin parents going to the ecclesiastical authorities rather than the civil ones -- that complaining to the priest's bishop was a reasonable way of discharging of their responsibility.

So what of Father Brady, then? He took the evidence and passed it on to his superior, who made the decision. The abused children and their parents clearly regarded this as a matter for the bishop -- not the police -- to deal with, and he evidently took the same line. I don't see that you can fault him any more than you can fault them.

The bishop's decision, which was to bar Smyth from acting as a diocesan priest, to report the matter to Smyth's order, and to advise psychiatric involvement, may well strike us as hopelessly inadequate, but it doesn't seem unusual for the time. Indeed, section 1.81 of the Murphy Report is particularly enlightening on this point:

One of the aims of the Archdiocese and the religious orders was not to punish the priest but to help him towards recovery or rehabilitation. The Commission considers this to be reasonable provided he is not at liberty to commit other abuses.

Smyth's bishop, then, seems to have taken a decision that would have been seen as utterly reasonable and responsible at the time. Unfortunately, it was up to Smyth's order to enforce this decision, and it is pretty clear that the Norbertines were utterly culpable in this regard. As Breda O'Brien pointed out in the Irish Times recently, repeating a point made by the Presbyterian head of the Irish Church's child-protection agency, there are 184 parts to the Irish Church, and in reality nobody is in charge.

Should Father Brady, as he was then, have personally challenged the bishop's decision, reasonable though it would have been seen as being in the context of the time, and should he have made a point of ensuring that it was being properly enforced? Should he have spent the decades after he'd taken the evidence in trying to find out whether Brendan Smyth was indeed being kept locked away from children? Truth be told, we don't even know if he was told of the bishop's decision, or whether he simply collected the evidence, signed his own oath of secrecy, and then returned to the school where he trained the football teams and taught Latin, Commerce, French, and Religion, before heading off to Rome in 1980, only returning to Ireland in 1993, a few months before Smyth was finally arrested.

No, the Cardinal shouldn't have to resign, and he shouldn't be blamed for what happened. He's tainted, sure, but it's hard to find anyone who knows anything of an abuse case who isn't. Look at the SAVI report from 2002. Aside from finding that one out of every 250 Irish adults had been abused as a child by a clergyman, it found that almost one 1 in 4 Irish adults had been abused by somebody else. How many of us know somebody who was abused? How many of us know abusers? And how many of us do nothing about it?

The Church failed disgraceful in how it dealt with abuse among its clergy in the past, such that thousands of Irish children were abused by priests and next to nothing was done about it. At least, however, the Church is doing something about it now, such that it has child-protection measures better than any other organisation in the land, and monitoring systems of convicted and suspected abusers that, though still imperfect and difficult to enforce, are far superior than the non-existent measures the State is taking. Granted, policies are only as good as the people who have the job of implementing them, but all the Church's steps towards becoming the safest place in the land for children have been taken with Sean Brady as Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.
 

The problem of child abuse in Ireland is far bigger than the Catholic Church. Thousands of Irish people were abused by priests, but hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of other Irish children were abused too. Child abuse is a national scourge. We need to deal with it now, and to direct our resources above all to where the problems are now. If we don't do that, we'll fail yet another generation of Irish children.We've failed too many already.

My First Real Art Class

I know, I've been away. I've been incredibly busy, and I've had huge blog posts in my head, the kind of things that would have got in the way of work if I'd posted them. They've stayed in my head, so, except when my more forgiving friends have allowed me to indulge in a monologue or two.

Anyway, I'm just posting now to say that this week I went to my first ever life-drawing class -- indeed, my first ever art class of any sort since primary school. It was brilliant, and has me dying to find proper space in my life for this stuff again. We did loads of ultra-quick sketches, a couple of three- and five-minute ones, and then one longish one, for twenty-five minutes or so. Over the course of the evening I ditched my own pencils and borrowed some charcoal to try that. I did two drawings of the last pose, this being the latter:

I'm fairly pleased with it. It's not perfect by any means, but I think it's not bad for a sort-of-beginner. It's weird, really - I don't think I've drawn since I did this at Christmas 2007, so I'm surprised at how quickly I loosened up. I can't wait till the next class. In the meantime there's lots of work to be done.

The Murphy Report: From an Email to a Friend

I spent all last night reading the 700 or so pages of the Murphy Report from home, and while this probably wasn't the most productive or healthy use of my time, I couldn't really stop myself, given the rather strong personal interest I have in the matter. I've been thinking about it ever since the news broke, and trying to get my thoughts in order, and largely did so when writing a comment on a Guardian article. Expanded and ordered a bit more carefully, I thought they might interest you.

To be honest, I've mixed feelings. Although it's horrific, I don't think it's hugely surprising. We knew this happened. We knew it was badly handled. Given my own experience of big instiutions closing ranks, I'm far from startled to read that mishandling on this scale takes a combination of machiavellian self-preservation, naivety, misplaced hope and mercy, and sheer incompetence. About the only thing that's new in the big picture is the scorn cast upon the idea that the Hierarchy was on a 'learning curve' until the late nineties - and I'll get to that.

But still, in a tactile way, it's painfully real to read of one abusive priest living for years in a house around the corner from that of one of my closest friends while we were in school, of another having ministered in my own parish and been to a degree protected by a curate who was there through my childhood, of others having ministered the two nearest parishes to my own, and of the bishop who confirmed me having handled this matter worse than, well, almost anyone.

Still, I do think it's important to stress two broad points: firstly, any thoughts on the report in the media simply cannot be regarded as deeply considered given how big the report is and how it only came out yesterday, and secondly, the whole thing is monstrous and Diarmuid Martin's response over the last couple of days is the best and only hope for the Church.

The Report is not a Statistical or Sociological Survey

For all that, though, I think it's worth stressing that this whole report is anecdotal rather than statistical in nature. That's not to say that it's not accurate in its findings - I think it surely is, but I'd be wary about drawing certain conclusions based on it. The Guardian has a piece about how Catholics supposedly attribute the abuse problems to gay clergy if they're right-wingers and to clerical celibacy if they're left-wingers. One thing the Murphy Report doesn't do, as far as I can see, is throw any light whatsoever on that question.

The Report says that male victims of clerical sexual abuse seem to have outnumbered female victims by 2.3:1, so they seem to have made up about 70% of all victims (1.10, 11.12). It's difficult to be sure, though, as the report itself, while based on a statistically representative sample of priests about whom credible charges of abuse were made, is far from statistically useful on the subject of victims. It cites some priests as having claimed hundreds of victims, so reading it all I kept wondering how many victims there were (1.9). After all, it only cites I think 440 complaints from 1975 to today, so there must have been hundreds of other victims.

It also doesn't systematically consider the ages of victims and so forth, which is hardly surprising, given that a demographic breakdown of the victims wasn't in the Report's remit; it'd probably be possible to make some rough generalisations, but you'd have trouble doing Excel charts, putting it bluntly.

The report's also not much better on the question of what percentage of  priests were reported to the authorities, though it looks like me it's between 3 and 4% of those who served in the archdiocese over the period. It'd difficult to tell, given that there's no clear picture given of how many priests served in the Dublin archdiocese at the time, but it looks as though the Report reckoned 102 priests out of a possible c.180 priests were within its remit (1.8), and that perhaps 3,000 priests served in the diocese over the period. That's based on 1,350 being ordained for the diocese from 1940 on, 1,450 clergy from religious orders being based there, and there being an unquantifiable number of supply priests from outside the diocese, &c.

Some Possible Flaws in the Report

Before getting to what the Murphy report gets right, I think it's worth looking at what it gets wrong. It is, after all, broadly right, I think, so I think it's better to do the caveats first rather than detracting from the findings afterwards. In no particular order, then:

• I think the entire section on Canon Law is unfair (4). The problem seems not to have been that Canon Law is murky (4.6, 87-93), though it clearly could have been somewhat clearer on this issue (and probably would have been clerical sexual abuse had historically been as huge a problem as it now is), as that Canon Law simply wasn't applied. This is one of the most important points, I think.
 

• In connection with this Crimen Sollicitationes predictably comes up (4.6, 17-28),  but it is presented unfairly. In the first place, Murphy stresses the secrecy required by the procedures for investigating solicitation, but completely omits the canonical obligation to report solicitation. Secondly, Murphy takes no account of how CS deals purely with confessional solicitation, and does not preclude the involvement of the civil authorities in instances where crimes have been committed; indeed it indicates that the mechanisms must be modified in such instances. Its sole comment on extra-confessional sexual misconduct, whether criminal or otherwise, is to say that judicial or administrative mechanisms should be implemented to deal with it. In light of this it's worth noting that only one of the priests cited in the Report, the late Father Donal Gallagher, seems to have been accused of conduct which would have constitituted confessional solicitation (22.7,8).

• I'm deeply uncomfortable with the implication that Murphy could find 'no direct evidence' of there having been a paedophile ring among priests of the Archdiocese (1.76). This seems to suggest that there is indirect evidence of this, but while I did indeed spot two or three worrying overlaps in the sections on the 46 priests, I'd be wary of inferring intentional links between them or suggesting further involvement.
 

• The whole issue of 'mental reservation' bothers me (58.19-22). Murphy reports that one of the abuse survivors was angered by the Church's use of this in dealing with complaints, that Cardinal O'Connell explained what the concept entailed, and that the aforementioned survivor and another survivor gave independent examples of this. I've been looking this up, and as far as I understand it, mental reservation was an idea that was basically condemned by Innocent XI more than three hundred years ago. The instances described by the two survivors strike me as common or garden legalese, where people say something true without revealing the full truth. I'm not saying this is good or admirable or anything akin to who priests ought to behave, as I really think it isn't, just that I don't think these are instances where doctrine can be blamed.   

• I don't believe Murphy makes sufficient allowance for individual incompetence, weakness, or naivety. McQuaid's abysmal handling of the Father Edmondus case in 1960 might be a good example of this, where Murphy finds his own recorded justification for his deeds incredible, and concludes that he must have been acting simply to avoid scandal (13.11). I'm not entirely convinced by this, as it does seem possible that McQuaid could have been won over by the explanation offered, risible as it seems to me, by Edmondus. After all, even now, after more than three years of institutional mistreatment by You Know What,  keep on seeking to rationalise away behaviour I've experienced and continue to experience that is, on the face of it, utterly wicked. It's as though I'm desperate to avoid facing the reality that some people are flat-out evil and some things are monstrous and cannot be painted otherwise. Painting McQuaid's actions as self-serving and wilfully negligent strikes me as a classic hindsight bias, and one marked by a willingness to apply to McQuaid charges that might more fairly be put to his successor.

• There seems to be an attempt being made to assume that there can be a blanket explanation of what happened across the period, most clearly the thesis that the Irish Church was, quite simply, willing to do anything in order to preserve itself. I think this approach is flawed. A consideration of the role of the three canon lawyers who advised Cardinal Connell rather shows its weakness: the former chancellor Msgr Gerard Sheehy believed the Church should deal with these things internally but was opposed to applying and penal processes and interfered in others' handling of things; Msgr Alex Stenson, chancellor from 1981 to 1997, was a far less machiavellian figure, and handled accusations very well, but was pretty much incapable of enforcing his decisions; Msgr John Dolan, who replaced Stenson and is still chancellor, was neither as cynical as Sheehy nor as weak as Stenson, but he took a while to find his feet in an initially chaotic situation.

• It seems to me that there is a recurring inaccuracy in the case of the unnamed priest considered - with redactions - through section 20. The priest in question apparently served in my parish at some point, though I'm having difficulty discerning when. It seems to have been at some point before 1972. Difficulties arose with this priest when visiting the parish in 1982 and again in 1986, and in both occasions, seemingly, the Parish Priest, Father Con Curley, was brought onboard (20.64-66, 92-102). The thing is, though, Father Curley was never Parish Priest, to my recollection. Father Daly, I think, was PP at the time of my First Communion in 1982, and he was succeeded by Father Kelly. Father Curley was a curate under both priests as far as I can remember, and only became a Parish Priest when he moved out to an inner-city parish. He died a few years ago. Granted, this may not be important, but it bothers me. If such a detail can be wrong in the only bit about which I could speak with any authority, I can't help but wonder what the rest of it is like.
  

The Bigger Picture

These difficulties doesn't take away from the bigger picture, of course, and that is absolutely damning. I don't see a conspiracy to cover things up, but there was certainly a tendency to do this and the same patterns of behaviour happened time and time and time again.. The end result was the vicious abuse of hundreds if not thousands of children, and this is convincingly shown throughout the report. Granted, lots of individual accusations probably wouldn't stand up in court, but that doesn't mean they're not true; the consistency of the disparate allegations from independent sources leave no real doubt about what happened.

One of the most intriguing details is the decision in the late eighties to get insurance against future abuse claims. Was this decision made in expectation of claims based on diocesan experience, as Murphy and all commentators seem to believe, or was it made following the example of American dioceses. Did other Irish dioceses do the same thing? Other dioceses anywhere? It's astonishing that there seems to be little evidence here of high-ranking prelates being asked to explain the reasoning behind their actions.

So without their analysis, the question remains: why?

There are some who are seizing on this as a newly varnished stick with which to beat the Catholic dog, asking whether there's something in Catholicism that invites this kind of behaviour, but I don't think we need go down that road. I've read in the Guardian that half of all Swedish girls who were taken into care over the last century were raped; and if this is even close to true, it shows that secular organisations can be just as wicked. It's also important to remember that the vast majority of sexual abuse occurs in the home, conducted by family or friends of the family. That's not to excuse what happened in Ireland in any way, just to say that the Catholic Church does not have a monopoly on sexual abuse in any country, and that we should be wary of scapeboating it.

One important clue to all this comes in the Primetime panel discussion on RTE, where, about half an hour in, Archbishop Martin, who is clearly having trouble dealing with this, despite having done as good a job as could be hoped for over the past few years, notes that something changed in the sixties. He says he's been through the files, and that the Diocese had acted decisively against abusive priests in the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s. And then, he says, something changed. If we must seek an explanation then I think that's where we should look. The SSPX crowd would say, of course, that with Vatican II the smoke of Satan entered the Church, and though they may have something there, I think that is, in itself, an utterly facile explanation.

Making the Perfect Storm

No, I think we're dealing with a range of prosaic elements which together combined to make a perfect storm. The issue, of course, is not why some priests abused, but why they were able to get away with it for so long. 

As Primo Levi says, pondering his time in Auschwitz, in his afterword to If This is a Man, which must be one of the last century's essential books, 'Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.' This, of course, has always been my issue with You Know What --  it's not what She Who Must Not Be Named did, so much as how others let her do it! But I digress...

• Clerical loyalty is a factor, of course. It seems precious few priests were willing to act independently, or against the wishes of their bishops. Granted, you might say that they have taken oaths to obey their bishops, but it's striking that no former clergy spoke out.

• It also seems to have been the case that this loyalty was horizontal as well as vertical, with priests simply being unwilling to believe the significance or seriousness of allegations against their fellows. That's an important point - even when allegations were believed, they were often dismissed as trivial.
 

• This tendency to downplay the significance of allegations was tied with an unwillingness to believe that priests could really be so wicked as was being alleged. This was simple naivety, I think, and in many cases claims that abusive priests had reformed were gratefully accepted: call it an excess of mercy, if you like. Such naivety is disastrous when dealing with child abusers, who tend to be highly manipulative.

• Some clerics appear genuinely to have been determined to defend the Church at all costs. They seemed to have confused the institutions of the Church with the members of the Church, and to have regarded the former as far more important. I don't see much evidence of this beyond a small number of key individuals, but they had an immense influence.

• An absolutely crucial element was the clericalism that was the hallmark of Irish society. Not merely did this allow the abusive priests into what strike me as bizarre conditions of proximity to children, but it led members of the Guards, for example, to hand over to the Church matters which they ought to have investigated themselves. Indeed, it also meant that the parents of abused children in many cases tended not to go to the Guards, but instead to complain to the superiors of the priests about whom they were complaining.

• A key new element in the mix, and this may be the something that 'changed' as Archbishop Martin put it, was a new aversion in the aftermath of Vatican II to the application of Canon Law to deal with offenses such as this. It seems that Canon Law in the post-conciliar decades was largely limited to issues of marriage and annulment, and that its penal aspects fell into disuse. It looks as though the Church was trying to shake off its legalistic image in the freer age the Council ushered in, though the net result was to allow abusive priests a freedom they had never previously had.

• Linked with this unwillingness to use penal mechanisms was an unwillingness to apply punitive solutions if pastoral ones were available. This was particularly the case in situations were abusive priests were regarded as classic paedophiles, given that Canon Law seems to regard paedophilia as a form of insanity or mental illness, which of course opens the possibility of whether paedophile priests should be regarded as truly culpable for their actions (4.59, 28.119). The Church seems to have felt it had a responsibilty to clergy it regarded as ill.

• While looking after these 'ill' clergy, the Church attempted to protect further children from being abused, but it seems to have been utterly incapable of enforcing its own disciplinary measures. A factor in this, of course, was silence; without letting all priests know the medical and personal history of priests accused of abuse, and without having a special internal police force, as it were, I don't see how this could really have been done. Of course, abusive priests, being highly manipulative, proved most adept at evading whatever safeguards were put up to restrain them. 

• Linked with this there seems to have been some confusion over the ultimate internal sanction, that being laicization. In the first place, there's a pragmatic argument for not defrocking priests, however wicked: this may be summarised as 'keep your friends close, but keep your enemies even closer' (13.57). This may simply have been a way of seeking to protect children, but however it works now, it seems not to have worked in the past. Furthermore, there is a reluctance to laicize priests, given the questions of whether the grace granted through the sacrament of Holy Orders can actually be withdrawn.

• Secrecy - or a culture of confidentiality - seems to have been a big factor in this, too, though I doubt it was a new one. 

So it's a combination of cynical rank-closing, secrecy, a culture of clericism, an excess of mercy, simple incompetence and human weakness, and - and this is new - an unwillingness to use the Church's own legal procedures against its own servants.

What Now?

Granted, things sound very tense at home, though I don't think this will be nearly as devastating for the Church in Ireland as some expect, though. The guts of this has been known for years, after all, and I can still remember some of the jokes about paedophile priests from fifteen years back, back when the mishandling of an extradition warrant for the man who may have been the worst of them all led to a government falling. So there's not a huge amount that's new, other than how certain individuals handled things they no longer have responsibility for.

And mass attendances, seemingly have been rising this year, even after the horrors of the Ryan Report.

From the point of view of protecting children, things began to improve from the mid-nineties, with the Church's internal mechanisms if anything implicitly denying the accused the presumption of innocence, taking the line that 'Caesar's Wife must be above suspicion'. 

It's not particularly fair, but then again, neither is child-rape, and the Diocese now seems to be taking the view that it's worth shaming a priest unfairly if doing so can save children. The current Archbishop of Dublin has been exemplary in his handling of the situation since taking office. His statement from yesterday is well worth reading. 

There is hope for the future, but the past needs to be faced first.

Spot the Ball

And so France goes to the World Cup Finals, having beaten Ireland with a rather dubious goal, with two players offside and the ball having been judiciously handled.

As the Brother said on Twitter: spot the ball . . . it's a tricky one, but there's a trip to South Africa in it.


'I will be honest, it was a handball,' as M. Henry says, 'But I’m not the ref. I played it, the ref allowed it. That’s a question you should ask him.'

Begging the age-old question of whether if a tree cheats in a forest, and the ref doesn't see the offence, has it still cheated?

Atheist Buses and Religious Labels

Just reading the Guardian this morning I saw that the Atheist Bus campaign is moving to its second -- and apparently final -- phase. You remember the campaign, of course, where buses were festooned with large ads declaring 'There's probably no God. No stop worrying and enjoy your life.' I know, that slogan could do with a lot of unpacking, but then so could all the ones for, say, the Alpha Course, so I'll let it lie for now.

Anyway, phase two is, I gather, intended mainly as an attack on Faith schools, and is based around the slogan, 'Please don't label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.' Apparently adults shouldn't tell children what to think; the irony of the slogan, supposedly voiced by a child, almost certainly being composed by an adult is difficult to ignore.

It seems to me that there are two major problems with this campaign, the first of which is that I'm not convinced its authors actually understand what religion is.

Take a look at the posters, and look at all the labels that the poster's backers have cited: Agnostic Child, Atheist Child, Scientologist Child, Mormon Child, Jehovah's Witness Child, Buddhist Child, Catholic Child, Protestant Child, Zoroastrian Child, Muslim Child, Sikh Child, Post-Modernist Child, Humanist Child, Anarchist Child, Libertarian Child, Conservative Child, Socialist Child, Capitalist Child, Marxist Child...

I think the point being made here is that all of these are, in the views of the poster's backers, belief systems, and that it's abhorrent to label children with beliefs held by their parents. Presumably if there were space we'd see such terms as Jewish Child, Hindu Child, Orthodox Child, Bahá'í Child, Wiccan Child, Rastafarian Child, Animist Child, Shintoist Child, Nationalist Child, Unionist Child, Fascist Child, Feminist Child, Pacifist Child, Modernist Child, Social Darwinist Child, Objectivist Child, Existentialist Child, Logical Positivist Child, and so forth.

The first questions we need to ask when looking at this sort of litany of belief-systems are whether it's a valid list, and where this whole anti-labelling mission comes from.


Because It's Always Fun to Quote Richard Dawkins
The intellectual underpinnings, and I use that phrase generously, of this thesis seem to lie in chapter nine of Professor Dawkins' lazy and ignorant The God Delusion. If I may quote:

'To put it another way, the idea that baptizing an unknowing, uncomprehending child can change him from one religion to another at a stroke seems absurd -- but it is surely not more absurd than labelling a tiny child as belonging to any particular religion in the first place. . . Even without physical abduction, isn't it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about? . . . Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place. . . I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life, and of morals. The very sound of the phrase "Christian child" or "Muslim child" should grate like fingernails on a blackboard. . . Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them -- "Catholic child", "Protestant child", "Jewish child", "Muslim child", etc. -- although no comparable labels: no conservative children, no liberal children, no Republican children, no Democrat children. Please, please raise your consciousness about this, and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening. A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents.'

Sometimes Children Can See Shades of Grey...
Where do you start with this? Well, back when I started secondary school, my very first religion class began, once we'd settled down, with an open question to the class from our teacher: 'Can anyone here tell me what the word 'religion' means?' After an awkward silence, I put up a tentative hand, and ventured, 'The belief in and worship of a deity or deities.' That was chalked up on the board, and the discussion began.

Now, I'm not saying I'd quite stick with that definition now, but I think my twelve-year-old self was onto something significant in identifying religion as requiring both belief and worship. As a rule, religion's a matter of both creed and cult; it's about what you do just as much as it is what you think.

This, I think, is why people who describe atheism as a religion are essentially wrong; atheism may be a belief system, but it generally lacks a cultic element, save in regimes where race, nation, state, class, party, leader, or something else is deified.

And therein lies a huge part of the problem with this thesis. Religion is only partly about what you think, and is very much about what you do, whereas political ideologies and philosophical stances are at heart simply about what you think. As such, I think it's pretty easy to make the case that it's reasonable to describe children as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and so forth, in a way that it's not reasonable to describe them as Conservative, Marxist, or Postmodernist.

In short, Dawkins' thesis, to which his acolytes and fellow-travellers have so unthinkingly signed up, is not so much incorrect as it is simply invalid. It's not even that he's comparing apples and oranges; he's comparing apples and tractors.


Post-Protestant Atheism in Action
Why might he be doing this? Well, part of the problem is that Professor Dawkins clearly retains a somewhat Protestant worldview; by his own terms a cultural Christian, he is, rather like Philip Pullman, an Anglican Atheist. Indeed, in the tail-end of his God Delusion chapter on 'religion as child abuse' he bangs on for a handful of pages about how great the King James Bible is, and how we should all be familiar with it as a literary reservoir.

Until the Printing Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, as Karen Armstrong has pointed out, religion was usually at least as much about orthopraxy as it was about orthodoxy. It was about doing -- whether in terms of rituals or ethics -- at least as much as it was about believing.

Religion changed, at least in Europe and the West, after Luther posted his theses and issued his battle-cries of 'faith alone' and 'scripture alone'. Out went prayers for the dead, clerical celibacy, pilgrimages, penance, Our Lord's command to commemorate him in the mass, and active participation in other sacraments as visible rites that make present divine grace. St James's emphasis on good works and compassion was nudged aside, and for many people the definition of a good Christian became someone who believed in Jesus and who read his or her Bible.

It's this essentially Protestant understanding of Christianity that nestles in the mind of Professor Dawkins, and indeed that leads blowhards like Christopher Hitchens to limit the term Christian to those who have read the New Testament, a criterion that would exclude most of history's Christians, most notably the Apostles.


Practising, not Professing
Religion, then, can be a practical thing, and this surely lies at the heart of the idea that a child who goes to Mass can be fairly described as a Catholic child, or a child who observes the Sabbath can be no less accurately described as a Jewish child, or a child who prays facing Mecca five times a day can be with equally good reason be described as a Muslim child. I can't help but think of how bemused the then unitarian G.K. Chesterton used to be when first getting to know the woman who would eventually become his wife:

'She practised gardening; in that curious Cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it.'

This incomprehension surely lies behind Professor Dawkins' failure to grasp that terms such as 'Catholic child' and 'Jewish child' can be meaningful in a way that 'Marxist child' and 'Logical Positivist child' can not.


Not Just What You Do... But What You Are
Betraying his prejudices most thoroughly, though, is his dismissal to understand the Catholic -- and indeed Orthodox -- understanding of what happens at Baptism. Here he is:

'It was a central part of the Roman Catholic belief-system that, once a child had been baptized, however informally and clandestinely, that child was irrevocably transformed into a Christian. . . Amazingly, for a rite that could have such monumental significance for a whole extended family, the Catholic Church allowed (and still allows) anybody to baptize anybody else. The baptizer doesn't have to be a priest. Neither the child, nor the parents, nor anybody else has to consent to the baptism. Nothing need be signed. Nothing need be officially witnessed. All that is necessary is a splash of water, a few words, a helpless child, and a superstitious and catechistically brainwashed babysitter. . . the idea that baptizing an unknowing, uncomprehending child can change him from one religion to another seems absurd.'

Leaving aside his apparent failure to grasp that extraordinary baptisms ought only to be performed in situations of dire necessity, and his evident ignorance that the Church only regards such baptisms as efficacious if performed by someone who genuinely intends to perform what the Church performs when administering the sacrament, what's striking here is that he sees baptism as simply something that changes someone from one religion to another.

For Dawkins, as we've seen religions are simply belief-systems, and if we define them as such then it goes without saying that baptism has no real effect whatsoever: it's a washing of the head, not of the brain! The thing is, though, that they're rather more than that.

Catholics and Orthodox Christians see baptism as a sacrament that enacts an ontological change in the recipient. It is a mechanism by which, in the words of the Catechism, 'we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers into her mission.'

Baptism, then is a process of divine adoption, wherein we are reborn as sons of God, and as part of the Church that is the body of Christ. The word 'Christian', in its original form, basically means someone who belongs to Christ. It has, in its essential form, surprisingly little to do with belief. This shouldn't be surprising, given Christianity's Jewish ancestry. After all, what is a Jew?

'A Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism. It is important to note that being a Jew has nothing to do with what you believe or what you do. A person born to non-Jewish parents who has not undergone the formal process of conversion but who believes everything that Orthodox Jews believe and observes every law and custom of Judaism is still a non-Jew, even in the eyes of the most liberal movements of Judaism, and a person born to a Jewish mother who is an atheist and never practices the Jewish religion is still a Jew, even in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox.'

Professor Dawkins, who has some interesting opinions about Jews, would doubtless dismiss this as nonsense, but that doesn't the change the fact that the traditional definition of Jewishness relates to what one is, rather than what one does, let alone what one thinks.

So much for labelling, anyway. That leaves the second big question, which concerns whether parents should be free to educate their children in accordance with their beliefs, or whether they should be compelled to educate them in accordance with, say, those of Professor Dawkins. I'll get into that in a day or two.

Polybius and the X-Factor

Unlike sixteen-and-a-half million other people in the UK, I missed the X-Factor on Sunday, and thus didn't see Jamie Archer being decreed the weakest link, as it were. Still, I was intrigued to hear that yet again the judges had failed to save anyone, and had left it to the people to decide. It's curious that unlike last week there's been no outcry about leaving this decision to the public.

There seems some confusion in X-Factor over where power lies, as was demonstrated in the recent squabble between Louis Walsh and Dermot O'Leary over who the programme's judges are; are they the formal judges, as Louis cried, or are they the voting viewers, as Dermot countered?

Leaving aside what the X-Factor is for -- making money for ITV and for SYCOtv, and, to a lesser extent, giving youngsters a shot at some sort of fame, I can't help but think that the game is more than a little fuzzy, with the rules being unclear and the participants' roles being muddled.

I think some Classical shtuff might help here.


An Ancient Greek Political Primer
Polybius, the second century BC Greek historian of Rome's rise to Mediterranean supremacy, attributes Rome's ultimate victory over Hannibal's Carthage in the Second Punic War to the strength of Rome's political and military systems. The genius of the Roman constitution, he believed, was that it was a mixed constitution, containing elements of the three main constitutional types, all of which, in their pure forms, were liable to become corrupted. As he saw it, Rome was somewhat democratic in that ultimate power in Rome lay with the people, whose popular assemblies made laws and elected magistrates. However, the legislative agenda was effectively shaped by the the state's aristocratic element, the Senate, an assembly of former magistrates whose role was theoretically advisory and who were responsible for Rome's foreign policy. The two most important magistrates were the Consuls, elected on an annual basis and, like monarchs, commanding the armies in the field. The Roman state, as he saw it, was a healthy mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and thus was unlikely to deteriorate into tyranny, oligarchy, or mob rule.

I know, I've oversimplified, and ultimately it all went wrong anyway, but that's the gist of his thesis. Now what's this got to do with the X-Factor?



Lloyd Webber and the Mixed Constitution
Well, take a look at the set of West End Selection shows: How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?, Any Dream Will Do, and I'd Do Anything*. They all follow a similar format, which Polybius would regard as being almost perfectly balanced, and the framers of the American Constitution would probably agree.

Once the shortlist of finalists is drawn up by the expert panel, the final decisive stage in the process begins. Every week the finalists perform, and the expert panel express their opinions on them. Following their advice, the public cast their votes. When the public votes are in, the two least popular finalists have to perform again, and this time it's for Andrew Lloyd Webber to decide which one he has to save.

You can surely see how this rhymes with the Roman constitution, can't you? The aristocrats give their advice, the people pass judgement, and then the monarch has an opportunity to pardon one of the condemned. In the grand final, of course, the monarch has no such power, and it becomes a simple process of the experts advising and the people choosing.


Cowell and the Mixed-Up Constitution
X-Factor doesn't come close to this. The 'judges' - the experts in the X-Factor - have a stake in individual contestants, for starters, so their advice is hardly neutral: they don't necessarily have a stake in the best candidate winning; they have a stake in their candidate winning. Not merely does this generate the possibility of bias in their advice, it also generates bias in how they vote when each week's popular stragglers are revealed. What's more, there being an even number of judges means that the judges' decision is often a tie, making the popular choice final, and it's very easy for the final voting judge to choose to go for a popular decision if he or she thinks that will suit him or her than an expert decision. Don't forget too that one of the judges basically owns the show, and thus has interests and implicit powers that are very different from the others.

Leaving aside how the whole system lacks transparency through the voting figures beging kept secret from the voters and -- reportedly -- the judges,** you can surely see the problem here. Powers are anything but separate, and conflicts of interest are rife. Getting upset about it, as with the 3,000 people who complained because Simon Cowell allowed the public to decide on the whole Jedward issue the other week, is pointless. It's only a game, after all, and it's a game that's structurally unfair. Bias is built into it.

If it bothers you, don't watch it. You don't have to, after all. Three quarters of the British population skipped in on Sunday.
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* Which was brilliant, purely because it had Barry Humphries in it.
** Though given that Simon Cowell basically owns the show, you might be forgiven for wondering...

Brokeback Times

There's an amusing post over at Heidi's Beat billed as a tribute to 'the Brokeback Pose'. The what? Well, remember a few weeks ago I talked about the astonishing phenomenon that was -- and, sadly, still is -- Rob Liefeld? Liefeld was one of the most successful comic creators in the world in the early and mid-1990s, and he managed this without any discernible drawing ability whatsoever. In particular, he understanding of human anatomy was astonishingly poor, and as these fellas have pointed out, 'the most important thing you need to know before reading about all the terrible things Rob Liefeld has drawn is that he has never seen or talked to a woman in his life and has no idea what they look like or how their bodies operate.'

Now, in the world of comics illustration, Liefeld is hardly the only offender in this regard. There is, after all, a tendency in comic art towards idealised female physiques, just as there is towards idealised male ones, and sometimes people have some pretty peculiar ideals, and with most superhero comics being read by adolescent males, they tend to be strewn with scantily clad athletic girls whose breasts are larger than their heads. To be fair, this happens: I've known one or two girls in my life who are indeed so endowed, and I've tended to frown on looking at them, and wonder how their backs take the strain.

Which brings me to the Brokeback Pose. The first of these pictures I've taken from Heidi's post, and it's a relatively inoffensive variant on the pose. It shows Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat, proudly displaying both buttocks and a profiled breast. This, it must be said, is quite difficult to do; as Heidi says, 'unless you are a member of Cirque Du Soleil it’s actually impossible to turn your ass and your tits in the same direction'.

I'd be curious to know when the pose first began to appear in comics, but the second picture here may give a clue. It's a Liefeld, and I neither known nor care who it's meant to be. You can look at it in colour on the 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings site, where it is noted that this shot 'is a catch-all for "any time Rob Liefeld has ever drawn a woman."' Such a typical catch-all is necessary, as otherwise 'the entire list would be broken spines and colossal hooters'. It's not immediately obvious, as the rendering's so poor, but if you squint you'll can just about make out both breasts and both buttocks!

Ben Towle, leaving a comment on Heidi's post, actually points to this very picture, and says credit needs to be given the the great 90s masters who originally broke this pose's eponymous back. 'This,' he says, 'is where the real artistic innovation began. Once the spine was broken (aesthetically speaking), adding the "boob twist" was really just icing on the cake.'

The bizarre thing, though, is that this pose is possible! As another commenter points out, in classical figure drawing, 'This sort of pose is not unusual at all (as far as showing the upper body in profile, and the rear to reveal both cheeks). The spine is capable of enough rotation to capture that pose. In fact, as an artist, it is, in general, it is your duty to twist the spine whenever possible to bring life to your figures, and imply movement. Stiff symmetrical figures are the hallmark of amateur artists. I think what make it in such bad taste is the over arching of the back which serves to lift the buttocks and heave out the bossom.'

And indeed, he illustrates his point by linking to a drawing by none other than Michelangelo, which I've flipped vertically below just so that all my brokebacks can face the same way. If this weren't enough to convinced you, though, the very first comment on the post, from one Steve Flack, was a claim to have witnessed this pose: 'I was shocked when I saw the video for Keri Hilson’s R&B hit, "Love Knocks You Down", and she actually manages to pull off this pose. Of, course, she has to lay down on a bed to accomplish it, but it still happened.'

He's right, too. You can watch the video if you want -- she contorts her callipygous form into this Fortean pose a minute and twenty-seven seconds in -- but to save you time, I've saved the key moment here:

It's amazing the things you can find out with the internet. Who would have thought that such a pathetic comicbook convention could have had such an artistic pedigree? Um.

Yes Minister: A British Political Primer

These last few weeks, when I've not been staring at the keyboard until my forehead bleeds, or sitting with a perpetual frown waiting for letters that never come, or sitting listlessly with books lying forlornly open before me, I've distracted myself now and again by watching Yes Minister.

I've only ever seen the odd episode in the past, so it's a curious experience to watch it on a daily basis. It's perhaps a bit indulgent to immerse myself in so much concentrated brilliance, but, well, times aren't good.

It all seems very timely, which, given that it's a product of the early 1980s leaves me wondering whether things ever change in this country -- or any country, as I opined to a friend in Rome the other evening -- or whether this magnificent show didn't merely reflect the political reality of the early Thatcher era, but has to some degree moulded the political reality of the decades since.

The fifth episode, for instance, has a sequence which rather betrays what lies behind so much British antipathy to European integration:

'Don't the Foreign Office realise what damage this will do to the European idea?', asks Jim Hacker, the minister of the title.
'Well, I'm sure they do: that's why they support it,' replies Sir Humphrey.
'What? Surely the Foreign Office is pro-Europe, isn't it?'
'Yes and no, if you'll forgive the expression. The Foreign Office is pro-Europe because it is really anti-Europe. The Civil Service was united in its desire to make sure that the Common Market didn't work. That's why we went into it.'
'What are you talking about?'
'Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause, we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it's worked so well?'
'That's all ancient history, surely,' stumbles Jim.
'Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work. Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased; it's just like old times.''
Surely we're all committed to the European ideal!''
Really, Minister,' chuckles Sir Humphrey.
'If not, why are we pushing for an increase in the membership?'
'Well, for the same reason. It's just like the United Nations, in fact. The more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up. The more futile and impotent it becomes.'
'What appalling cynicism.'
'Yes. We call it diplomacy, Minister.'

The real issue has always been the fear that a major power -- whether it be Spain, France, or Germany -- should have control of the Low Countries, with the key ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam, as control of these could serious threaten British naval supremacy, such as it once was. Nowadays, of course, European union and integration have pretty much ensured that sooner or later both France and Germany will have full use of these ports, so Britain's approach has become one of 'if you can't beat them, join them, but keep jostling about.'

This rather explains the superficially paradoxical British approach to Europe nowadays. The British establishment generally favours enlargement, even championing the prospective membership of unEuropean Turkey, but is opposed to the streamlining reforms to enable an enlarged EU to work smoothly. In all this, of course, Britain all too often simply acts as a catspaw for the Americans, whose agent in Europe they have generally been since World War Two. 'Party Games,' the bridge between Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister ably sums up Britain's main role in that regard:

'And as far as world politics goes, of course, the Foreign Office is just an irrelevance. We've no real power; we're just a sort of American missile base, that's all.'

That's not to criticise the Americans, who are simply playing the game of nations, or the Germans and French, who are doing likewise and who some time ago decided that it was not really in their national interest to be a vassal state for anyone else; it does, however, raise the questions of why the British delude themselves that their nuclear deterrent is in any way independent, why they were so willing to have Yorkshire turned into a vital target for anyone planning a missile attack on America, why Britain eagerly signed up to the Iraqi adventure, and why British soldiers are still dying in Afghanistan.

Anyway, as I was saying, the show is superb, and it seems to improve by the season. Season Three, though it has one 'writing-by-numbers' episode, is a treasure trove of brilliance, with the darkly ambivalent 'The Whisky Priest', infused with the spirit of Graham Greene, being my choice as the series' highlight.

But for all that, though, I think the finest, subtlest, most brilliant moment in the whole series is near the end of 'Party Games', when rumours are running wild that Jim Hacker is going to throw his hat into the ring to take over the leadership of his party, and thus his country.* A scene opens with a shot of the day's newspapers lying on a desk.

The shot lasts but a second or two before the camera drifts off, so if you're not quick you might not notice how the Guardian is spelled.
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* Yes, during a Parliament. An 'unelected' Prime Minister! Whoever heard of such a thing? Oh wait, hang on, isn't that the way it always works in the UK...

Google Priorities

I'm quite taken with the Google Doodles this week, as though I was no fan of Sesame Street as a child, in my admiration for the late and truly great Jim Henson I am second to no man. Or gargoyle.

I'm particularly fond of today's, which is very clever and which has the Count on it.

For all that, though, I'm a bit surprised at Google having chosen to commemorate so determinedly the fortieth anniversary of Sesame Street (and indeed the twentieth of Wallace and Gromit, seemingly), in the same week that everyone else is commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I'm not complaining, but I am a bit puzzled. Why would you pick a children's programme over the end of the Cold War, indeed over what may have been the most important day in European if not world history since the end of the Second World War?

It's not as though it's because Sesame Street has lots of bright colours. The Berlin Wall had those too. And better music. Of course, you can kind of blur the two.