Maternal Abstractions

Last year I attended my first ever carol service -- I'd attended Christmas concerts in the past, of course, but never a designated carol service. It was at an evangelical Anglican church where I used to go with friends, and out of a spirit of curiosity and a desire to understand. Afterwards a friend asked me what Catholic carol services were like. I said I didn't no, but that they were probably much the same, though there was a chance that Adeste Fidelis would be sung in Latin, thus skirting the problem of old translations sounding rather odd to our prosaic ears.

A few days later I went to my first Catholic carol service, and indeed it was much the same, albeit with Adeste Fidelis in Latin, and Stille Nacht in German. The priest who presided over the ceremony gave a remarkably wide-ranging sermon, and though much of it's lost to the mists of memory, I remember one detail.

In his book Motherhood of the Church, Henri de Lubac tells of how the Belgian Cardinal Suenens had told him of a conversation he'd had with Karl Rahner:

'I asked Father Rahner how he explained the decrease of Marian piety in the Church. His reply is worthy of attention. Too many Christians, he said to me, whatever their religious obedience, have a tendency to make an ideology, an abstraction, out of Christianity. And abstractions have no need of a mother.'

At Christmas we remember how God became flesh, how he became as puny and frail and vulnerable as we all are when we enter into this world, how he couldn't stand on his own two feet, much less feed himself or wash himself or speak; this weakness, this absolute dependency on others is part of the human condition, and it's a part of it that God took on. 

For many Christians, Christmas is the only time of the year that any thought is given to Mary at all; in pushing her aside so often, they ignore what it means for the world that the Word became flesh, failing to engage with the fullness of Jesus' humanity, which deserves our embrace as much as does his divinity. In so doing, they reduce Our Lord to an abstraction and turn Christianity into an ideology. 

God deserves better than that. He isn't an idol. Stronger than all of us, he became as weak as any one of us. Christmas, as much as Good Friday, allows us to contemplate just how weak and helpless he was; in meditating on the fullness and the weakness of his humanity, we enter into a profound understanding of the value and worth of every single one of us, no matter how weak and helpless we might be.

Happy Christmas.

Midnight Mass

It being Christmas Eve, and with Christians imperilled in the most ancient heartlands of the Faith, this seems as good a time as any to type this up....

 'The 24th of December 1099 was the first Christmas Eve for more than 450 years on which free, armed Christians might celebrate the Nativity in Bethlehem. The great marble basilica built by the great Constantine was packed to overflowing. Many of the congregation had been there all day, to make sure of getting in; but places had been kept for the distinguished lords come down from the north, Bohemond of Antioch and Baldwin of Edessa, and tall Tancred had pushed his way in to kneel beside his uncle.

The Midnight Mass of Christmas, after the Latin rite which was now the only use in Bethlehem, was to be offered by Daimbert, Archbishop of Pisa, the newly arrived papal legate with the pilgrimage. The new legate was evidently as tough as his predecessor; for he proposed, after offering the Midnight and Dawn Masses in the Church of the Nativity, to ride to Jerusalem and sing the Morning Mass of Christmas within the Holy Sepulchre. Of course he had been fasting throughout the Vigil of Christmas, and he must continue the fast until dinner on Christmas Day.

When the clergy entered Bohemond had been kneeling on the marble pavement for some hours. This was the very place, the very time, of the Incarnation; the manger in which God had become Man was only a few feet away. To be free to kneel here at this hour the best knights in Christendom had left their homes; for three years they had marched and fought, until the greater part of them were dead; but the survivors had accomplished all they set out to do. Tears streamed down Bohemond's cheeks as he tried to thank God for the Incarnation. Then he began to pray for the souls of dead comrades. But they were martyrs who had gone straight to Heaven. they would not need his prayers.

He was accustomed to long hours in church, to kneeling on bare stone pavements. But it was difficult, tonight of all nights, to keep secular thoughts out of his head. Our Lady had lain on this spot of earth in the agony of childbirth, while St Joseph cleared up the droppings of the ass and the ox. But it had been a tricky moment when Tancred pushed in to kneel on his right, within arm's length of Count Baldwin kneeling on his left. Luckily the two had smiled at one another; this was not a place for enmity.

The bell tinkled for the Consecration. God was present again in body as He had been for the first time more than a thousand years ago. Peals thundered from the tower in token of rejoicing. That brought a comforting memory. Only a few months ago Tancred had hung those loud bells. The infidels who had ruled here so long did not tolerate bells in Christian churches.

Here was the Pax coming round. They had brought it to him gratifyingly early, probably the first among the laity. but politics could not be ignored even on this sacred occasion. He motioned to the subdeacon to present the little olive-wood carving first to Baldwin and then to Tancred. As he himself kissed it in third place he knew with joy that those two had once again exchanged the Kiss of Peace. In a few moments they would receive Communion side by side. In Cilicia Baldwin had compassed the deaths of many Apulians, and the injury was still unavenged; but after such a reconciliation in such a place the blood-feud could never be revived.

As he received Communion the love of God entirely filled his mind. But he was not a mystic, and he could not keep his soul at full stretch for very long. As often happens, the Devil began to tempt him while he was making his thanksgiving. Was he worthy to receive the Body of God? Was he truly in a state of grace? Was he genuinely a pilgrim?

Such thoughts must be faced, and dismissed. No Christian was worthy of anything, but in receiving Communion he was obeying the Will of God. If there was such a thing as a Church, he was in a state of grace; he had been absolved by a priest who had received the power of absolution in unbroken descent from the Apostles. Was he also a pilgrim, entitled to the Great Pardon promised by Pope Urban?'

And so on.

That's from Count Bohemond, a 1964 historical novel by Alfred Duggan, a good friend of Evelyn Waugh, and a man whose sense of the grittiness of Christianity seems to have been just as clear as Waugh's. I first read that passage on a now-defunct blog some years ago, and intrigued by it I sought the book out.

In the main the book's not nearly so explicitly theological as in the passage above, and concentrates on the characters, the violence, the rivalries, and the intrigues that marked the First Crusade. It doesn't go into the historical roots of the conflict, which it presents -- as in some ways it must have seemed to those first crusaders -- as being in many ways just another stage in the Norman expansion that had in previous decades seen them conquering England, southern Italy, and Sicily. They were warriors; fighting was what they did.

Still, good though it's been to revisit Duggan's book this evening, it's left me feeling somewhat maudlin. I don't know why it is that I didn't visit Bethlehem when I was in the Holy Land years ago. I wish it were practical to go to Midnight Mass this evening, as I've never been before. And far more important than my own petty regrets, it strikes me as a tragedy that throughout the world this evening and tomorrow there'll be Christians who'll be unable freely to celebrate the Incarnation. 

But this has always been the way. We shouldn't leave Herod out of our Nativity plays. The Church was born in the jaws of the wolf.

The Boy Reporter: A Catholic Hero?

As I said the other day, I have of late been reading my way through Hergé's Tintin books, finishing them this week. They're remarkable, really, and once one gets beyond the crude stereotypes of the first couple of volumes they develop in subtle and intriguing ways.

A few weeks back I read a post on Dylan Parry's Reluctant Sinner blog in which he took issue with a ridiculous column in the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, which argued against restrictions on how Tintin in the Congo is sold in Britain.

Pointing out that such columns make a joke of a once-important paper and run the risk of making the Church and Rome seem out of touch with reality, Dylan rightly homes in on L'Osservatore Romano's ludicrous and embarrassing attempt to argue that Tintin in the Congo isn't racist, and I think I'd agree with almost everything he says.

Almost everything. Not all of it, though. Drawing his post to a close, he says:

'Tintin is a cartoon character, and one would be hard pushed (as far as I know) to find any explicit reference to God or religion in Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin. Although Hergé first published the Tintin stories in a Catholic newspaper, it's probably right to say that his time in the Boy Scouts had more of an influence on the cartoons than did the Catholic catechism. Being a divorced and remarried man, one would have to question, too, how much of an influence, if at all, Catholicism really had on Tintin's creator.'

Well, having read all the books in a fairly concentrated period, I've been surprised to discover just how Christian -- and in particular how Catholic -- Tintin is.

Hergé originally created Tintin for the youth supplement of Le Vingtième Siècle, a Belgian newspaper a strongly Catholic and conservative slant; its editor until 1933, when the first Tintin stories were written, was Abbé Norbert Wallez, a right-wing priest-journalist who had an immense influence on Hergé. There's a level, then, at which Tintin was originally intended as Catholic propaganda, but what's remarkable is the extent to which religion remains important in Tintin right up to the end.

Frankly, there's more evidence for Tintin being Catholic than for Tintin being a reporter...

Religion first appears in an overt way in the early, controversial, and quasi-canonical Tintin in the Congo, a book that makes for very strange reading now, notable not merely for its racism but for Tintin's rather dramatic depopulation of the local wildlife, whether accidently gunning down more than a dozen antelope, shooting a chimp so he can don its skin as a costume, or using dynamite to dispatch a rhinocerous in a rather decisive fashion. 

Anyway, there's a scene where he's rescued from crocodiles by a Belgian missionary priest, one of I think only two clergymen to appear in the entire Tintin oeuvre, the other being Reverend Peacock who appears and never speaks in a scene in The Cigars of the Pharaoh. I'd be inclined to assume Peacock's an Anglican to judge by the context -- British India -- but given that he's introduced as 'our padre', I'm not sure.

So, having been rescued Tintin is taken off to the Mission, where we see the only church that appears in all 24 volumes, that being the Mission's chapel, with the cross displayed prominently on the roof. Impressed by all of this, Tintin's dog Snowy remarks 'Missionaries are the tops!'

Hergé eventually struck out from Vingtième Siècle but in the subsequent decades there are occasional moments when Tintin's Catholicism flickers through. It is, after all, his knowledge of Christian iconography that enables Tintin to solve the riddle of Red Rackham's Treasure.

While some might be tempted to dismiss this as simply childhood knowledge, retained while his infant faith faded away, but there are glimmers that show Tintin as holding fast, even when nobody is looking, to the faith within which this iconic Belgian would almost certainly have been raised.

Look at his comments about how Captain Haddock seems to have some kind of heavenly protection. In Prisoners of the Sun he explains to a presumably-Catholic Peruvian boy that the Captain's guardian angel has a full time job. While that is something that every educated Christian, or whatever denomination, should recognise as part of the deposit of faith, the line in The Crab with the Golden Claws, an earlier book telling the tale of how Tintin befriends the Captain, about there being a patron saint of drunkards, reflects a more distinctively Catholic theology.

This begs the question of where the Captain stands on the whole issue of religion, and there are glimmerings that he is, at the very least, clued in on the subject. In Flight 714, for instance,  he's seen imagining a grateful man in prayer, as though he thinks of prayer as a natural reaction for a grateful man.

That's worth noting, as it happens. Prayer's a real rarity in the Tintin books, save amongst Muslims, so it's striking that when Haddock imagines it he does so in the context of prayers of thanks and praise, and not of petition. Flight 714's an odd book all told, hardly short on religious references, and it's striking that Haddock's contribution to the jigsaw is to think of prayer and to refer to a French saint notable for having heard messages...

Saints are referred to one way or another throughout the Tintin books. If you're paying attention you'll catch references to Mary, St John the Evangelist, St George, St Augustine of Hippo, a St Theodore, St Vladimir the Great, and St Joan of Arc.

St John the Evangelist is the crucial element in the riddle of Red Rackham's Treasure, as I've said, and St John of Arc is mentioned by Captain Haddock in Flight 714, but what of the others? Well, if we read King Ottakar's Sceptre carefully we'll notice a few things. We'll notice that Syldavia is a tiny Balkan country the identity of which is defined by its early -- I would say historically impossible -- opposition to the Turks, where the King wears a Maltese Cross at  his neck, and where the crown is surmounted by a cross. The key national day seems to be St Vladimir's Day, and the kingdom is known as the Kingdom of the Black Pelican.

Here is where the crown jewels are kept; you can see the crown in the centre and beside it the royal sceptre, surmounted with a pelican, just as the canopy housing both items is surmounted with five pelicans. There's no explanation given anywhere in the text as to why the pelican is important to the Syldavians, but it's surely not insignificant that in Christian iconography the pelican has always symbolised Christ himself, with particular reference to his feeding of us through the Eucharist. If we look on the walls of this room we'll see a number of frescoes, at least two of which are religious in character; the one on the far left I cannot identify, though it clearly shows an angel addressing someone, while the on the far right we can see St George slaying the dragon.

It's striking that St George is evidently important to the Syldavians, given how closely his cult was linked with the crusades, and how Syldavia's nationhood was forged in war against the Turks. There appear to be haloed saints depicted on the king's royal carriage, which appears later in the book, but it's impossible to tell who they are.

If it's not really possible to say whether Syldavia should be understood as a Catholic country or an Orthodox one, there can be no doubts about the other great fictional land of Tintin's adventures, that being Latin America's troubled little republic of San Theodoros. The land is named after a saint, albeit in a grammatically dubious way, and it's clear that Carnaval is a high point -- perhaps the high point -- of its national calendar. And, as it happens, it houses the only church ever named in a Tintin book.

Yes, the principle church in San Theodoros' capital city, Los Dopicos, is the cathedral church of the Holy Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. This isn't the only reference to Our Lady in the Tintin books, though, as she also gets a mention in a scene in The Red Sea Sharks, a book which is largely about people being freed from slavery. Yes, people being freed from slavery in a story that entails them crossing the Red Sea. I'm not making this up, you know.

Anyway, there's a scene in The Red Sea Sharks where Tintin is adrift at sea with Haddock and an Estonian pilot named Skut; they come within range of a luxury yacht called the Scheherazade, owned by Tintin's recurring nemesis, Rastapopoulos. Onboard is Bianca Castafiore, the opera singer who appears on a regular basis in the tales, and someone whose reaction to seeing Tintin is in stark contrast to that of Rastapopoulos.

Whereas Rastapopoulos, clad in a red Conquistador outfit surmounted by two plumes and completed by a pointed beard, with the effect that it's almost a Mephistopheles outfit, swears by the Devil and by the fires of hell on seeing the heroes, Bianca responds with a delighted invocation of Our Lady. It may not be wholly insignificant that her name translates as 'White Chaste-flower', which itself calls to mind the idea of the lily, the standard medieval emblem of Mary; Captain Haddock, curiously, bears the name of a fish and bears on his body the emblem of an anchor, those being probably the two oldest symbols for Christ.

That might seem to be pushing things, but the more I look at Tintin, the more I think there are depths there that need excavating. Take, for example, this scene from Flight 714, where the millionaire Laszlo Carreidas is given a truth serum and asked to reveal his bank details to Rastapopoulos.

Immediately launching into a lengthy confession, he begins by telling of how he stole a pear. So what? Well, trivial though the theft of this pear was in itself Carreidas seems acutely aware of the damage such behaviour did to his soul, and there can be no doubt that Hergé must have adopted the idea of using this particular fruit in this way from St Augustine, who famously describes in his Confessions how he stole pears in his youth; it's a blatant allusion of a sort that every educated adult of Hergé's generation would have recognised.

Granted, that's probably the kind of subtext that would have bypassed all of  Hergé's younger readers, but he could be pretty obvious when he wanted to. Here, for instance, is how we learn of the fate that befalls the villains of The Broken Ear:

You can't really get much more to the point than that, can you? That last panel's coloured a striking red, for what it's worth, standing in stark contrast to the sequence of largely blue panels that preceded it, and it's not presented -- as in scenes where Snowy's or Haddock's better and worse angels squabble over them -- as merely someone's imagination. I think we're meant to take this as a genuine depiction of how villainous sorts who die suddenly without making their peace with God can wind up facing a very dark fate.

I've no doubt there's far more to say on this topic, but I'm a busy man and it's not for me to say it. I've work to be doing.

Praise be to Woody Allen Jesus

The hoohah in today's news about Tim Minchin's 'Woody Allen Jesus' song having been cut from Jonathan Ross's Christmas special is a curious one. There seems to be a certain disingenuity in how Minchin himself has been describing the song, and indeed in how others have followed the story.

On his own blog, Minchin says, 'Being Christmas, I thought it would be fun to do a song about Jesus, but being TV, I knew it would have to be gentle. The idea was to compare him to Woody Allen (short, Jewish, philosophical, a bit hesitant), and expand into redefining his other alleged attributes using modern, popular-culture terminology.'

That all sounds very innocent, really, and on the face of it, one would think Minchin could be excused for being a bit miffed at how his song, the lyrics of which had gone through the lawyers and producers and so forth, had wound up being cut from the show at the last minute; seemingly Peter Fincham, ITV's director of television, got nervous in light of how people might react, and said it had to go.

Well, okay, but it's worth listening to the song, or at the very least reading the lyrics -- as accurately transcribed, in the main, by this fellow -- and then wondering whether they really would have been ideal Christmas television.

Sure, the song starts with a Woody Allen comparison, which, even if wholly contrary to what historical evidence we have -- Jesus doesn't seem to have been admired by his peers or been remotely political, as far as we can tell -- is nonetheless not something that would bother many people, but then it starts to crank things up. Comparing Jesus with Darren Brown doesn't quite work, as it suggests that Minchen doesn't understand what magic supposedly is, and how it differs in rather profound ways from conjuring and from miracles, but it's only with the next verse that things get really tricky.

'Jesus died but then came back to life
So the Holy Bible said
Kinda like in Dawn of the Dead
Like a film by Simon Pegg
Try that these days, you’d be in trouble
Geeks would try to smack you with a shovel

Praise be to Jesus
Praise be to Magic Woody Allen Zombie Jesus
Magic Woody Allen Zombie Jesus!'

Now, given that I'm a huge fan of Stewart Lee, who's gone much further than this in his attempts to lampoon Christianity, being far more offensive, far more original, and far more intelligent than Mr Minchin, I'm hardly going to say that Minchin ought not to be allowed say such things. That'd be absurd. No, I'm just saying that I'm a bit surprised he was naive enough to think this would be the sort of thing that would be likely to be broadcast as bland light entertainment at Christmas.

And, of course, he went on in his puerile way, comparing Jesus with a superhero flying into the sky and Mary with a parthenogenetic lizard or snail, and likening Jesus to Psychic Sally because of his ability to communicate with the deceased -- though I'm not sure when he's meant to have done that, unless that's a really oblique reference to the Transfiguration.

In any case, that's a prelude to saying,

'Jesus lives forever, which is pretty odd
But not as odd as his fetish for drinking blood'

Which, let's face it, was never really going to be broadcast by a thoughtful or pragmatic broadcaster at Christmas time. Saying, 'Hey guys, did it ever cross your minds that Jesus was a bit like a zombie or a vampire?' is, aside from being neither a challenging nor an original idea, something that ITV probably wasn't ever going to run with, especially at Christmas time, and most especially not with a presenter whose career they're relaunching in the aftermath of stupid behaviour on BBC.

There's a sense in which Minchin's point is about free speech, but like it or not, commercial television isn't about free speech. It's about advertising and making money, within the limits of official broadcasting standards. Sorry, but that's how it works. On his blog, Minchin says

'It’s 2011. The appropriate reaction to people who think Jesus is a supernatural being is mild embarrassment, sighing tolerance and patient education. And anger when they’re being bigots. Oh, and satire. There’s always satire.'

Fine. Minchin's fully entitled to his views, childish and ill-informed though they are. But he must surely realise that others are entitled to theirs too, and that lots of people's views might differ from his own, and it's only prudent of ITV to take them into account. He must be extraordinarily naive -- childish, even -- if he can't grasp that. This isn't even about fear of the Daily Mail. It's about being polite, and having basic respect for people, and not insulting people's views just because you don't agree with them.

Especially at Christmas. Because there wouldn't be a Jonathan Ross Christmas special for Mister Minchin to tinkle the keys on were there no Christmas to celebrate, and because there wouldn't be a Christmas if it weren't for Christians, and because there wouldn't be Christians if it weren't for Christ.

After all, despite all the factoids long absorbed by so many who think themselves educated, Christianity predates Paul of Tarsus and Christmas was not a creation of the Emperor Constantine.

I've liked some of Minchin's work. He's a talented musician, and sometimes can pen some genuinely witty songs. This isn't one of them.

The Famous Boy Reporter?

The last month's been an odd one, as readers of this blog will probably have guessed; output here has dropped due to a combination of being busy and being ill, such that priorities haven't been what they were. My studies take most of my time, of course, and other matters have rode into second place, so the blog and other things have slipped a bit behind them. I'll be rectifying that from now on, all going well.

Work and other matters aside, I've not even managed any serious reading of late; Congar's The Meaning of Tradition remains unfinished and I've made little headway into David Copperfield. I have, however, managed to plough through Hergé's entire Tintin oeuvre, which has been both fascinating and fun.

There's an immense amount to say about Tintin, and no doubt pretty much all of it's been said already, but one of the first things that's struck me is how the boy reporter seems to be no more dedicated to his trade than Doctor Watson was to his practice or Father Brown to his parish. Indeed, were one to exclude the quasi-canonical Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo from the Tintin canon -- as my set of hardback omnibus volumes does -- one would wonder about the veracity of Tintin's press credentials.

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets first began running in 1929, telling the story of how Tintin travelled to the infant Soviet Union in order to tell the world of the evils of communism; the story features the only instance in all twenty-four Tintin tales of the boy reporter actually filing copy.

Well, I say 'filing copy'; he writes a huge amount, but a whole series of shenanigans follow and there's no suggestion in the story that he ever gets around to filing his work; indeed, it seems to be left behind in his room as life gets in the way of his plans.

Still, he's evidently very successful, as Tintin in the Congo shows him being approached by several newspapers from other countries offering him huge sums of money to pay for his dispatches. Tintin, of course, will have none of this, having given his word to his own paper, Le Petit Vingtième.

This, as it happens, must have been a bit perplexing for those young readers of Le Petit Vingtième, a children's supplement, who surely wondered where Tintin's despatches were to be found. Search as they might through their weekly eight-page supplements, not once would they have found any of these dispatches for which Tintin was handsomely remunerated. It's all very fishy.

Making matters far worse is that we never again see Tintin doing even a jot of work. Sure, 1937's The Broken Ear features Tintin scribbling in his notebook while scurrying for facts, but even if we assume that he was in journalistic rather than detective mode at that point, it doesn't last long.

No, within a couple of panels he's chasing crooks, as is his wont, and he continues doing so, battling baddies and thwarting drug-smugglings and people traffickers for a further four decades or so, all the while being hailed as a great reporter whilst clearly living off Captain Haddock and coasting on his youthful reputation.

Home Again

Well, I'm home.

It's been a long ten months away, but it's already nice to be back. Some terribly sad news in the car from the port, but still, I'm glad that I was here to hear it.

The journey was a smooth one, and well-fuelled with a flask of tea, said flask having been excavated from the attic last night in a fit of thrift. A kind lift got me to the station in the proverbial nick of time, and then it was a train, a swankier train filled with luggage, and a peaceful journey on the boat, with plenty of reading done on the way. 

It made for quite a contrast with last December's Christmas return, in the dead of night in a train crammed with hundreds of exhausted and hopeful Irish people, struggling onto a boat that'd been delayed for us at Holyhead, and then befriending people and getting into uncharacteristic rounds with complete strangers on the boat, with thousands of us arriving home in Dublin, bright-eyed and rosy cheeked on a snow-blanketed Christmas Eve.

This time it was a gentle and mild affair, and hardly was I off to boat, looking around for my lift, when I met my accoutancy teacher from school, there to collect his daughter, who'd been behind me in the queue at Holyhead.

Because even if the world's not always a small place, Dublin is.

Is Rupert Really Due An Apology?

I see the odious Kelvin McKenzie's in the news this week. Last Thursday he claimed that the Sun's vicious calumnies about the Hillsborough disaster were due to reporters from Liverpool, and on Friday he said that he'd got that wrong, and he was sorry about that. 

Of course, he doesn't seem particularly sorry about the calumnies themselves, about which he's changed his line a few times. In 1993 he says he believed the lies because he'd been told them by an unnamed Tory MP, and in 2006 he said he'd only apologised as Rupert Murdoch had told him to do so. Indeed, in an interview in Press Gazette that year he said, 

'When I published those stories, they were not lies. But I don't really think of it all in the way you suggest. They were great stories that later turned out to be untrue -- and that is different. What am I supposed to feel ashamed about?' 

All of which throws a supremely ironic light onto his current rant in the Spectator.

The Spectator's really not had a good few weeks, and I know because there's a big pile of them in our bathroom, with the newer ones being less readable than those below them. No, really, there is, and though it's not been me who brings them into the bathroom I have been known to peruse them in my more idle moments. They're often fairly well-written and sometimes they make sense. Not so much lately, though...

The recent trouble started with Rod Liddle's column about the Stephen Lawrence trial, which the jury had to be asked not to read and which may yet lead to a prosecution, and was swiftly followed by an article and a front cover banner devoted to the crazed claims of that chalatan Nils-Axel Mörner; now McKenzie has a particularly emetic piece entitled 'Who Will Say Sorry to Rupert?'

Beginning with 'Welcome to the world of journalism, Nick Davies,' the McKenzie piece is an excoriating and hypocritical attack on Nick Davies and the Guardian for the Guardian's coverage of how the News of the World had hired Glenn Mulcaire to hack into people's phones, including that of the then-missing murdered schoolgirl Millie Dowler.

As has become clear, the Guardian's claim that Mulcaire had deleted messages from the girl's voicemail account and that by doing so he gave her parents false hope seems to have been wrong. It seems, instead, that while Mulcaire may well have been responsible for messages being deleted -- by listening to messages he set in motion the voicemail's own automatic deletion process -- he wasn't responsible for the particular deletions that generated false hope.

Was the Guardian factually wrong on this? Yes, it certainly seems to have been.

Does that mean that McKenzie can claim the moral high ground for the Murdochs and their minions? Don't be silly.

After all, as the Dowlers' own lawyer, Mark Lewis, has said, 'It remains unchallenged that the News of the World listened to Milly Dowler's voicemail and eavesdropped on deeply personal messages which were being left for her by her distraught friends and family.'

And unless Kelvin McKenzie thinks it acceptable for newspapers to hack into the voicemail accounts of missing schoolgirls -- regardless of whether they're still alive or not -- in order to make money from their plight and their families' distress, then I don't see that he has a leg to stand on. After all, it was hardly exclusively with reference to the deletion of messages that Rupert Murdoch said in October that:

'When I met with the Dowlers in July, I expressed how deeply sorry I was for the hurt we had caused this family. The behaviour that the News Of The World exhibited towards the Dowlers was abhorrent and I hope this donation underscores my regret for the company's role in this awful event.'

The Spectator's let itself down by publishing this vile sophistry. It's been a bad month.

The Superhero With A Thousand Faces

Few books have ever had as big an impact on me as The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell's massively influential study of the archetypal hero's journey in the world's myths, legends, and folklore; since reading that just and a book-length interview with Campbell after I turned twenty-one, I've ploughed through several of Campbell's other books, including his monumental study of comparative mythology in general, The Masks of God. 

Why so many of our stories are similar is an interesting question, and one open to all sorts of answers, whether psychological, sociological, or theological. I'm inclined to favour a theological explanation, following the likes of Chesterton and Tolkien in seeing the legends of the world as prefiguring the Incarnation in which they were fulfilled; it makes sense to think of the story of Jesus as a true myth, where God expresses himself in reality rather than through dreams and poetic images. 

Still, attempted explanations aside, I don't think there's any getting away from the fact of how structurally similar our myths tend to be. Campbell's work has had a huge impact on Hollywood, as is well known -- George Lucas is surely his best known acolyte, but one thinks of George Miller too, and more recently Christopher Vogler, author of a staggeringly influential memo, and whose book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, has proved a potent conduit for Campbell's thinking. David Eddings has said that using mythic archetypes in storytelling is the literary equivalent of peddling dope, and in that sense there's a fair case for calling Vogler a narrative drug-lord.

His book, it's worth saying, is well worth reading, no matter what one thinks of it: his influence on the craft of storytelling has been such such that it needs to be understood. One thing I'm left wondering, though, is whether he had any influence on Disney's 1997  film Hercules, because that follows a very clearly beaten path and it's most definitely not the path beaten by the Heracles of ancient myth -- in any variant.

I'm not saying it doesn't owe a lot to Greek mythology -- it does, in that its loaded with characters and references from ancient Greece, but these ingredients are used in a recipe which is far from Classical. In fact, the story of Hercules seems to be not so much ancient Greek as modern American, in that as far as I can tell it draws from the template most firmly laid-out in 1978's Superman: The Movie.

Let me show you what I'm talking about. I've reeled this comparison off enough times over the years that it shouldn't take long here...

A Heavenly Child raised in Obscurity...

Both films start with a little baby boy being cherished by his parents in a place far from our own, a place where mere lesser mortals like ourselves don't belong. All, however, is not blissful in these paradises; Krypton is doomed, while Hades makes it known that his exclusion from Olympus does not please him...

Like Moses in his basket, the infant Kal-El is sent away from Krypton by his parents in a small spaceship destined for Earth, while Hades' henchmen kidnap young Hercules and take him away from Olympus where they attempt to turn him mortal. Each infant is found by a childless couple who resolve to adopt him as their own...

And all the adults are astonished by the little boy's prodigious strength. By this point, in case you're wondering, the Hercules story has already strayed some way from the myth; in the legends, he is indeed the son of Zeus and the strangling of serpents is an important tale of his infancy, but it's not quite like this. Rather, Heracles is the child of Zeus and Alcmene -- a mortal, and not Zeus's sister-wife Hera; consumed by anger and jealousy it was Hera who sent serpents to kill the baby in his cradle. I'll not point out any further differences, unless it's seems really obvious. You can look them up for yourself.

Anyway, the boys grow up and never quite fit in. Young Kal-El goes by the name of Clark Kent, and doesn't play football with the other teenagers in Smallville, while Hercules isn't allowed to play discus with other Greek lads of his age. Neither boy had any idea of his real identity, until he comes unto the possession of a mysterious amulet found with him as a child.

Taking the amulets with them, the boys leave home and set out on foot on a long journey, crossing the most barren of wildernesses...

Until they eventually reach great white temples...

Where they can finally speak to their real fathers, who tell them everything about who they really are and how it is their destiny to become heroes.

Clark's eighteen when he arrives at the Fortress of Solitude and begins his training, whereas Hercules isn't so young -- he'll fly off on Pegasus, who features in the Belleraphon myth, to meet and be trained by Philoctetes, who in Classical myth is someone who only shows up as Heracles dies, but will be eighteen by the time the crucial events in the story play out.

From Obscurity to the Big City

Anyway, once they're ready, they set out for the big city. Clark Kent, who we'll henceforth know as Superman, arrives in Metropolis, while Hercules goes to Thebes, 'the Big Olive' as it's known. The two heroes meet a sharp-nosed, sharp-tongued brunettes who comment on his innocent farmboy routine. Lois Lane will bestow the name Superman on Clark, while Megara refers to Hercules as Wonderboy.

Lois and Megara both fly with the heroes, much to the girls' consternation...

You've got me? Who's got you?

And both girls press the heroes for information about themselves, including potential weaknesses.

Do you like... pink?

Time goes by, and the heroes make great names for themselves, doing all manner of wonderful deeds and saving countless lives, but all is not well, because while they can soar through the skies, great dangers lies beneath their feet.

Deep under the ground live people who are determined to destroy our heroes, supervillains, for want of a better word, who have huge plans for real estate deals -- yes, both Lex Luthor and Hades both refer to their apocalyptic plans as real estate ventures -- that they realise Superman and Hercules could thwart.

Each of these villains is notionally aided by two none-too-bright henchmen...

And each does most of his scheming in a large round room, built around a large round map.

Triumph, Death, and Resurrection

Well, the villains eventually put their plans in motion and capture the heroes, removing their powers.

But though the heroes lie impotent, eventually they are enabled to get back on their feet so they can thwart the villain's plans and save the world.

Unfortunately, even then victory comes at a cost, as in both cases the price of the world being saved was the life of the girl. 

'There's some things,' says Phil to Hercules, 'you just can't change,' but Hercules refuses to accept that and instead sets out to change things by defying the law of death itself, bringing Meg back from the dead by going to the underworld and diving into the swirling waters of the Styx to save her. Likewise, Superman resolves to restore Lois to life by breaking the laws of time, despite the admonitions of his father; he will turn back time if that will restore the one he loves to life. 

Both men drive onwards, circling as fast as they can to save the ones they love. It takes all their effort -- just look at Hercules who's clearly dying or Clark who is bearing the strain of someone who loves absolutely and who would do anything to save someone who has no idea how much he loves her, someone who will never be able to understand how much he has done for her.

And how do the two stories end? Well, Lois and Megara are both restored to life....

While as for the villains, let's just say that they both meet their just desserts, with Lex Luthor being locked away and Hades being himself dragged into the Styx. Both villains, curiously, end up bald as coots.

I've been banging on about this for years, and whenever I say to people that the plot of Hercules is obviously based on the plot of Superman they invariably laugh and say that surely I've got it the wrong way round. If anything, isn't it more likely that the plot of Superman is based on the ancient legends of Hercules. And then I sigh, and point out that the plot of Hercules owes very little to the Greek myths. Sure, the ingredients are ancient, but the recipe is rather more modern.

Though of course, there are those who'd point out that it's anything but modern, as the Superman story in the broadest sense is the story of a profoundly Jewish hero, and that the film owes more than a little to the story of Christ. Jor-El's words to his son, saying 'The Son becomes the Father... and the Father the Son.' The name, Kal-El, supposedly meaning 'Star Child', but clearly a theophoric Hebrew name like Emmanuel. The childhood rescue from certain death -- itself an echo of the Moses story -- followed by a life in obscurity. The emergence after thirty years in obscurity to perform all manner of wondrous deeds and save life after life. The transformation of death so that it becomes a path to resurrection, triumph over evil, and the salvation of the world...

I've come to disagree with Joseph Campbell pretty profoundly in some respects, but he's taught me an immense amount, not least how to look at stories, and to think about where they came from. If you've not read anything by him, you should give it a shot. The Way of Myth, his book-length interview with Fraser Boa, was my introduction to him, but I think Bill Moyer's The Power of Myth might make an even better starter.

Stick your toe into the water. You might end up walking on it.

Does John Cooney Want An Apology From Ronan Fanning?

I realise two posts in one day may seem a bit extravagant, but given how I've read that John Cooney's looking for an apology from Cardinal Connell for the then Archbishop of Dublin having rubbished the more lurid claims in Cooney's 1999 biography of Connell's predecessor, John Charles McQuaid, I think it's worth pointing out that Cardinal Connell was hardly alone in doing so.

Here, for instance, you can see how Ronan Fanning, then Professor of Modern Irish History in UCD, began a review of Cooney's book the following year:

'No work of Irish historical scholarship has been launched with such a sensationalist fanfare as John Cooney's long-awaited biography of John Charles McQuaid. It therefore comes as little surprise that the author's journalistic instinct to prefer the sensational sexually-charged interpretation to the dispassionate presentation of objective historical truth intermittently flaws what is otherwise a fine book.

The most outragerous example is the now notorious account of Dr McQuaid's alleged paedophile encounter with a publican's son in Drumcondra which formed the first of the extracts serialized in The Sunday Times. Mr Cooney adduces absolutely no evidence for his allegation beyond a piece of fiction cast as fantasy entitled "A Virgin Island", which was written by Dr Noel Browne and based upon the hearsay evidence of an unnamed Department of Education inspector concerning an episode which had allegedly taken place thirty years before. Although Dr Browne must be regarded as a hostile witness -- McQuaid had effectively destroyed his Ministerial career during the Mother and Child controversy in 1951 and his own autobiography is charged with bitter animosity towards his former adversary -- Browne himself believed that "A Virgin island" should not be published for the compelling reason that the allegations could not be substantiated. It would have been better for Mr Cooney's reputation as biographer and historian if he had respected Dr Browne's wishes.

Another example of how Mr Cooney's historical judgement has vitiated by his weakness for the sensational occurs in the introduction in a series of gratuitous references to instances of the sexual abuse of children by priests who served in the Dublin archdiocese and to the sexual and physical abuse of orphans in Artane and Goldenbridge. Again, Dr McQuaid is smeared by association without any evidence being adduced; that he was Archbishop when these terrible things happened in the Dublin archdiocese is, apparently, evidence enough.

Yet these and other passages in which Mr Cooney indulges his propensity for sexual interpretation take up only a very small proportion of his book and it would be a pity if would-be readers were deterred for the salaciousness which has surrounded its publication. For this is a book which should be read by all who have an interest in the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland or of church-state relations since independence.

The present Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, placed all historians in his debt when he realised the extraordinarily rich archive of the McQuaid papers -- not the least of the damage done by the sleazy controversy triggered by the Sunday Times is that his less enlightened and more timorous episcopal colleagues will scarcely be encouraged to follow his example -- and Mr Cooney is the first to publish the fruits of his labours in such a bounteous vineyard.'

Onward Fanning goes, commending Cooney's otherwise comprehensive analysis of McQuaid's reign. It's significant that Fanning has no problem in general with Cooney putting the boot into McQuaid; his concern is purely due to the sensationalist and blatantly ahistorical nature of Cooney's allegations of paedophilia. 

As I've said, if Cooney turns out to have been right on this, he's only right by accident. In the meantime he should either seek apologies from rather more people than Cardinal Connell, or should have the good grace to keep silent. 

I see, incidentally, that the matters raised about McQuaid have indeed been passed on to the Guards. This, of course, is line with the practice of the Archdiocese of Dublin. I've no idea why the Commission omitted this. Given that the Guards are already looking into the matter and will doubtless be in possession of the facts, One in Four's call for a statutory inquiry looks both redundant and hysterical.

Smoke Alarms Ring Even When There's No Fire...

So, there are alarm bells ringing about McQuaid again, are there? So the Irish Times reports anyway, in connection with a supplement to the Dublin Report that was published online back in July.

Before anybody starts jumping to conclusions, they should do three things.

• Firstly, they should keep in mind that Archbishop McQuaid died in 1973, and thus is no position to answer any allegations. Innocent till proven guilty is a wise and fair precept, and no less so when speaking of those who are incapable of responding to claims dating back forty or fifty years, if not further.
• Secondly, they should understand that allegations that McQuaid had been a paedophile were first raised in John Cooney's 1999 book, John Charles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland, parts of which were published in advance in the Sunday Times. This is a vital part of the story. Keep that publication date in mind, and note how such historians as John A. Murray, Ronan Fanning, and Dermot Keogh roundly dismissed Cooney's claim at the time as having been ill-founded and deriving from sources both biased and unspecified.
• While on the subject of 1999, they should look into how it was reported that year that there had once been a Garda investigation into allegations that related to McQuaid, with McQuaid being cleared of all involvement. The important thing probably isn't that he was cleared so much as that there were stories about McQuaid in circulation in 1999.
• Thirdly, they should read the supplement to Yvonne Murphy's Dublin Report for themselves, rather than relying on secondhand summaries. It's only two pages long, after all. There's no excuse for relying on churnalistic paraphrases on this one.

The supplement, as you'll see, is structured as a narrative, explaining how the Commission came by new information, followed it up, and said it was a matter for the archdiocese to look into now. The supplement doesn't give McQuaid's name and uncharacteristically for the Dublin Report there are no details whatsoever given of what is alleged to have happened. This is more peculiar than it might at first seem: if you've read the Report you'll remember that Murphy doesn't like to skimp on details, however horrific. It's almost as though this time Murphy's saying that there's nothing to report, and this is merely being covered for the sake of completeness.

Telling thetale from the point of view of the Commission makes for an interesting story but is misleading. The Commission's remit concerned how allegations of clerical abuse were handled by the institutions of Church and State within the Archdiocese; it makes far more sense to retell the story in the order relevant to the bodies under investigation. Only that will give us any indications whether things have been handled properly.

The story from the perspective of the protagonists...

At an unspecified point -- we're not told when -- a letter was sent from an unnamed source to the solicitors for the Archdiocese; this letter indicated that people were aware in 1999 that concerns had been expressed about McQuaid. Given that 1999 was the year in which Cooney published his biography of McQuaid and in which it became public knowledge that there had once been a Garda investigation in relation to the then Archbishop, this is hardly surprising. It's quite likely that Cooney's researches would have caught people's attention even before his book was published. Taking all this into account, it would have been rather more surprising if concerns hadn't been expressed!

In 2003, some years after Cooney's book had publicly made dubious allegations about McQuaid, a man complained to the Eastern Health Board that he had been abused by McQuaid decades earlier. This complaint seems to have gone nowhere, for reasons that Murphy doesn't divulge. It may simply have been that the complaint was not credible, or that the Eastern Health Board felt it couldn't do anything in response to an unproven allegation about a man who'd been dead for thirty years; we cannot say.

When this complaint came to light several years later, the Health Service Executive did not pass this complaint on to the Murphy Commission. Again, we cannot for certain say why, but the Commission is satisfied that this was simply due to human error.

In May 2009, the HSE passed the complaint to the then Director of Child Protection in the Dublin Archdiocese, who informed Archbishop Martin, who immediately informed the Murphy Commission. This would seem to have been exactly what the diocese ought to have done, and I'd hope nobody would fault it for that.

The diocese conducted a further search of diocesan files, finding the letter which related to concerns that were abroad in 1999, and passing that on to the Commission, which was due to submit its report and unable to deal with such new information. Having examined the matter since then, it recognises that the Archdiocese had never been in a position to have responded to the concern, knowing neither the details nor the source of the matter, and with Archbishop McQuaid long dead.

In 2010 Archbishop Martin informed the Commission that he had received another complaint about his predecessor. As the Murphy Commission's remit had extended only to complaints received between 1975 and 2004, this was of no concern to the Commission, which recognised that Archbishop Martin had been under no obligation to report this matter to them.

Or to sum it up...

In short: sensationalist and unsubstantiated claims that Archbishop McQuaid had been a paedophile were publicly made and widely reported in 1999, and in the twelve years since these claims have been common currency two people have claimed to have been abused by him. We know nothing whatsoever about these claims, which may not have been remotely credible; the fact is that we just don't know.

In its July supplement, the Murphy Commission broke with its normal practice and gave no information on either allegation, save to say that on both occasions the Archdiocese came forward and reported the matter as soon as it was aware of the allegations, in one case when it was under no obligation whatsoever to do so. The Commission says nothing either way about whether these two complaints have been passed on to the Guards, that being practice in Dublin Archdiocese but not being required in law, it doesn't fault the Archdiocese's actions in the slightest, and it says that any further investigation of the matter is for the Archdiocese.

If there's a story here it should be that the Church responded in an exemplary fashion to reports of abuse having been committed by the most influential cleric of twentieth-century Ireland. Does anyone really think that'll be what happens?


Update: I gather John Cooney is looking for an apology from Cardinal Connell for his having poured scorn on Cooney's allegations. Presumably he's looking for apologies from Ronan Fanning and other historians too? Given that there's still no publicly accessible historical evidence to support his allegations -- Murphy evidently having deemed the allegations not worth publishing -- this is rather rich. After all, even should there turn out to be some merit to the complaints, it wouldn't change the fact that Cooney's allegations were based in large part on an unpublished short story which was written by a man who hated McQuaid. If he's right, he's right by accident.