Denum Ellarby

Clare Ellarby, the mother of a seven-year-old boy with Down’s Syndrome, has accused the local Catholic Church and the Diocese of Leeds of discrimination for refusing to allow her son to make his first Holy Communion with his classmates.


Preparation of children for the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist began in West Yorkshire parish of St Mary of the Angels in September, but Denum Ellarby was unable to attend the first meeting as he was ill. Father Patrick Mungovin explained to Mrs Ellarby that the classes were full, and that her son would have to wait until the following year when he hoped Denum would be able to receive the sacrament.

Mrs Ellarby took the matter to Leeds Diocese, but Monsignor Michael McQuinn, the Vicar General, after discussions with Denum’s headteacher, supported Father Mungovin’s decision. Writing to Mrs Ellarby earlier this month, Mgr McQuinn expressed concerns about whether Denum would be able to prepare properly for the sacraments or to understand them. He indicated that Denum might be better equipped to join the classes next year.

Despite the expectations of the Diocese that the parents of candidates for first Holy Communion should attend Mass each Sunday, Mrs Ellarby and her husband Darren, who is a property developer, do not do so, saying that the parish’s one-hour Mass is too long for their son. They believe they ought to be allowed prepare their son for Communion at home, and over the last fortnight have collected 400 signatures supporting them.

A diocesan spokesman has explained that although babies are baptised to bring them into the life of the Church, the sacrament of Communion is only given to children who take part in the Church’s regular life, something the diocese hopes Denum and his family will do as he grows older.


-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 26 January 2012

Terry Pratchett and the Right-to-Die Debate

A.S. Byatt caused a stir some years back when she publicly disparaged the phenomenal success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, describing them as little more than a comfortable patchwork of clichés, unworthy of comparison with the writings of such fantasists as Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, or Terry Pratchett. Pratchett, she felt, was an author unfairly neglected, notable for – among other things – his amazing sentences, his metaphysical wit, and the startling originality with which he dealt with death.

I’ve long agreed with her. Pratchett’s books fill a shelf at home, many if not most of them graced with his signature, mementos of all the times in Dublin and Manchester I’d queued for hours to thank him for the joy he’d given me, to describe playing a parade of characters in an amateur production based on his Wyrd Sisters, and to talk of another of Beaconsfield’s great authors, G.K. Chesterton.

Pratchett had largely been responsible for leading me to Chesterton, whose writings had in turn been instrumental in drawing me back to the Faith, so I’ve always felt I owe him a great debt.

Pratchett’s books regularly strike a Chestertonian note. We might think of the clear debt Monstrous Regiment owes to The Man Who Was Thursday, the philosophical outlook that sees the most tired of preconceptions turned on their head, or snippets of wisdom that recognise that life is a gift, with human life being perhaps the most precious gift of all, and that there can be no true standard by which things can be judged moral in a wholly material universe.

The profundity of Pratchett’s writing demonstrates how right Chesterton was when he explained how foolish it is to assume funniness and seriousness are incompatible.

In 1998’s Carpe Jugulam, for instance, right after dismissing the question of how many angels could dance on the end of a pin by airily saying that if the pin in question is a typical household pin then the answer is ‘sixteen’, Pratchett’s hard-headed witch Granny Weatherwax addresses her priestly travelling companion in a far more pointed fashion:

‘And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’

‘It’s a lot more complicated than that--’

‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.’

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better working definition of sin.

I was horrified to learn in December 2007 that Pratchett was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, though I applauded how he subsequently used his plight to campaign for increased research into Alzheimer’s and to help people understand the condition, all the while continuing to write books to delight and enrich us.

Within two years of disclosing his condition, however, Pratchett announced that he had no intention of dying naturally and hoped to be helped to end his life when he felt the time was right; since then he has become Britain’s most prominent advocate of assisted suicide, despite the fact that he believes that his wife would like to look after him through his illness until the very end.

This advocacy bore fruit some weeks ago with the publication in Britain of the findings of the privately-appointed ‘Commission on Assisted Dying’, which argued that adults diagnosed with less than a year to live should be allowed to request and receive medication to help end their lives, and which scorned the current status of assisted suicide in British law as inadequate and incoherent.

Wrongly and all-too-frequently presented as an independent body, the Commission was independent only in the sense that a lynch mob could be described as an independent jury; unofficial but by no means impartial, it was proposed by the lobby group known until 2005 as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, and was largely funded by Terry Pratchett.

While it may be too easy to sneer that whoever pays the piper calls the tune, it can hardly be accidental that the Commission’s chair, Lord Falconer, and nine of the eleven other commissioners began their work as known supporters of assisted suicide.

More than fifty organizations boycotted the Commission in response to its blatant bias; the British Medical Association publicly questioned the Commission’s independence and impartiality. This had not been the case with the House of Lords’ 1994 Select Committee on Medical Ethics or its comprehensive and wide-ranging 2004-5 Select Committee on Assisted Dying, which received more than 14,000 submissions from the public and took evidence from more than 140 expert witnesses in four countries before recommending that there should be no change in the law on this matter.

None of Ireland’s national broadsheets saw fit to mention any of this in their scant coverage of the private commission’s findings, just as they neglected to report that the vast majority of Britain’s healthcare professionals are opposed to assisted suicide, and that among the most prominent opponents of assisted suicide are all the UK’s major disability rights organizations.

That such bodies should oppose the legalisation of assisted suicide shouldn’t surprise us; they recognise that a right to die, once enshrined in law, could all too easily become a duty to die, especially for the most vulnerable and least obviously productive among us.

We should remember how the hugely influential Baroness Warnock, Britain’s leading moral philosopher, argued in 2008 that dementia sufferers should consider taking their own lives rather than inconveniencing others and wasting taxpayers’ money, an argument that was roundly condemned by, among others, leading figures in the Alzheimer’s Society and the Alzheimer’s Research Trust.

Tragic though cases such as Terry Pratchett’s are, it’s worth keeping in mind how it has been at least a decade -- perhaps longer -- since anyone has been prosecuted for helping a loved one take their own life. Hard cases make bad law, and as Peter Smith, Archbishop of Southwark, has said, we cannot change laws that are there to protect the vulnerable without grave long term consequences. Campaigns to legalise assisted suicide distract from our need to put our efforts into improving palliative care, so that when we die, we can do so with real dignity.

In his controversial 2011 documentary, Choosing to Die, Pratchett said that ‘When I can no longer write my books, I'm not sure that I will want to go on living’.

The idea that some lives aren’t worth living ran through the programme, but we are more than our abilities. We matter because of our humanity; only things have value merely because of what they can do.

People as things, that’s where it starts.

-- from The Irish Catholic, 26 January 2012

Helping to see a Brighter Future

I’d a lot of catching up to do in Dublin over the Christmas, not having been home from England since February, so it’s probably not surprising that my oldest friend and I sat up talking till past six in the morning when I went to visit him.

My friend’s father, who’d always been an important figure in my own life, had died during the year, and as we talked of him my friend spoke fondly of the sisters who’d looked after his father in his last months. He marvelled not merely at the care and devotion they’d shown him, but at the prayerful life in which their work was rooted. Recollecting the beauty of the hypnotic call and response of the Rosary, he said how we’d grown up taking such things for granted and had taken to dismissing it as superstitious nonsense.

‘If we saw that sort of thing in Tibet or somewhere like that,’ he said, ‘we’d think it was really cool.’

My friend says he’s but a cultural Catholic now, but it was with genuine regret that he added, ‘And it’ll all be lost soon. That generation’s dying out.’

I’m not sure he’s right. The Church in Ireland is bound to get smaller over the next decade or two, but even in the short time I was home I could see real signs of hope for the future.

I attended Mass several times over the holidays in my local parish Church, and was struck by the size of the congregation each time; sure, there are fewer Masses now than in my childhood, but even allowing for that it didn’t take much more than a couple of simple sums to establish that rather more people go to Mass on a typical Sunday in my home parish alone than have become paid-up members of Atheist Ireland.

If the days of lots of people standing along the side aisles are long gone, so too are the days of lots of people chatting in the porch, heedless of what was being read from the ambo or taking place at the altar. In the main, if people are going to Mass nowadays it’s because they want to be there; this was borne out even last Sunday by an uncharacteristically real, if uneven, attempt by the congregation to sing their parts when called to do so, and to engage fully with the improved translation.

That’s not to say that everybody got the new words right every time, but that’s to be expected. Old habits die hard, and we’ve only been using the newly-translated responses for four months; four decades after the Ordinary Form of the Mass was introduced by Paul VI there are no shortage of people who still respond to ‘Lift up your hearts’ with the long-supplanted ‘We raise them up to the Lord.’

Though the congregation tended towards the middle-aged, it wasn’t bereft of younger people; indeed, last Sunday saw a young man who can’t have been more than twenty years old reading at Mass and another commissioned as a new extraordinary minister of the Eucharist, while among the other ministers present at the time was a young mother holding an eight-month-old baby.

A visit to the Dominican Priory in Dublin’s city centre bolstered my belief that the Irish Church may yet have a bright future. An erstwhile student of mine is in formation there, and at his invitation I joined him and his brothers for midday prayer and for a fascinating and highly entertaining lunch.

Whilst praying with the community, drawn into the same beautiful rhythms that had been prayed before me by St Thomas Aquinas, St Catherine of Siena, St Martin de Porres, and so many more, I was struck by the timelessness of the Dominican tradition and by the youthfulness of the Dublin community. With twenty friars in formation at the moment, more than there have been in many years, it’s clear that the Dominicans will play a dynamic and vital part in shaping the Irish Church of the future.

In truth, just listening to my friend speak in the early hours of that December morning, it seemed that even in his own family green shoots were breaking through the frost.

His siblings in America were adamant that their children should go to Catholic schools, he said, because Catholic education ‘grounds them in reality’. Regardless of his own doubts about God, he said he agreed with them, and wanted his own children to experience the opportunities and the grounding in reality that he felt only a Catholic education could offer them.

After decades of bad catechesis of home, such that most of us hardly know our faith, it says something when those who’ve lost their faith still feel there’s something of value in the faith they themselves have lost.

 

 

-- from The Irish Catholic, 19 January 2012

CAFOD and Boris Island

Father Ray Blake raises an interesting question on his blog about why CAFOD has objected to the prospect of a new London airport in the Thames Estuary; whatever is the Catholic Agency For Overseas Development doing commenting on a development in Britain, regardless of the ecological damage such a development might cause? CAFOD's mandate, after all, concerns overseas development.

All told, he feels this objection goes beyond CAFOD's mandate, and raises the question of whether this is simply another instance of CAFOD alligning itself with left-wing politics in general.

On the face of it, this seems a reasonable question, but I'm not sure it's a fair one. Leaving aside how I can't see that opposition to this development could in any way detract from any of CAFOD's more obvious and immediate projects, such that it surely does CAFOD's objectives no harm, it's striking that in objecting to the 'Boris Island' project, CAFOD, Christian Aid, and others specifically said:

'A new hub airport in the Thames Estuary would be a disaster for the environment, and, as a result, for people and wildlife in this country and globally. [...] Aviation is already responsible for more than a fifth of the UK transport sector's greenhouse gas emissions, and an airport accommodating 180 million passengers each year, as proposed by Boris Johnson, would be much larger than any airport in operation in the world today. Such a scheme would effectively be the death knell for the Government's promise to be the greenest ever, and would undermine its ability to show international climate leadership. That's why we will be opposing it every step of the way'

In other words, CAFOD is adamant that isn't merely a local or national issue; it seems to be taking the view that the planned development would be detrimental to the environment in a global sense, in that traffic through the airport would itself contribute in no small way to greenhouse gas emissions, and perhaps more importantly in that it would undermine Britain's credibility as a leading voice in international campaigns to care for the world we live in.

And is this a Catholic concern? I'd think so, yes. After all, if we look at the Pope's 'State of the World' address to the Vatican's Diplomatic Corps, as discussed here a couple of weeks back, you'll see how he drew his speech to a close by speaking of our need to care for our world, stressing a fundamental link between our duty to care for our world and our duty to care for each other.

'Finally I would stress that education, correctly understood, cannot fail to foster respect for creation. We cannot disregard the grave natural calamities which in 2011 affected various regions of South-East Asia, or ecological disasters like that of the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. Environmental protection and the connection between fighting poverty and fighting climate change are important areas for the promotion of integral human development. For this reason, I hope that, pursuant to the XVII session of the Conference of States Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change recently concluded in Durban, the international community will prepare for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (“Rio + 20”) as an authentic “family of nations” and thus with a great sense of solidarity and responsibility towards present and future generations.'

That seems pretty clear: 'environmental protection and the connection between fighting poverty and fighting climate change are important areas for the promotion of integral human development.' If the proposed 'Boris Island' development would indeed harm the environment and Britain's ability to show real leadership on climate change, then it would undermine the Church's intrinsically connected campaigns to fight against climate change and poverty.

I don't think this is just about left-wing sympathies. It looks to me that it's about loyalty to the teachings of the Church.

The Pope and the Diplomats

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, Churnalism...

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

My Heart Would Be A Fireball...

I wasn't a good scout.

Years ago in Brighton, looking up into the July night sky, my then girlfriend was incredulous of how ignorant I was of the constellations.
'Weren't you a scout?'
'Well, yes...' I said, 'but not a very good one. Not like you. If you were one of the kind of scout that had "be prepared" carved into your heart, I was the sort with "ah, it's grand" scrawled across my chest.'
'"Ah, it's grand"?'
'Yeah. I was basically our motto. As in "There's grass on my burger!" "Ah, it's grand," or "Are you sure we can put up a tent without a middle pole?" "Ah, it'll be grand."'

I spent last night with my oldest friend, the two of us sitting up chatting till six in the morning, catching up on a year and a half of time having passed. Along with tales of building dams from lard, and other childhood memories, we got to talking of our scouting days, reminiscing of campcraft competitions in Rathdangan, where we were picked up on for mocking some passing Guards, practiced songs in a bluebell grove, and felt scandalised by other scout units being far too polished.

To my astonishment, Diarmait couldn't remember my first trip to Larch Hill. Not that he ought to have remembered it because it was my first time there; no, he ought to have remembered it, I thought, because it should have been unforgettable.

We can't have been more than thirteen. I was a new scout at the time, and hadn't yet been invested, when our troop spent a day working on skills at Larch Hill, the CBSI's official site in what we so optimistically call the Dublin mountains; this was my first experience of the potent brew we call camp tea, and also saw me being tutored in the art of knots and lashing.

So far so unremarkable, but what amazed me was that Diarmait couldn't remember what we got up to with the fire.

Our patrol leader, who was of course just a couple of years older than us, thought it'd be fun to see what would happen if we started putting things on the fire. Things? You know the kind of things you're not meant to put anywhere near fires? Yep, those things. The contents of the first aid kit, basically, and some unusual items he'd brought along himself, just for the craic.

The first thing onto the fire was the Burneze, the very stuff we'd need to spray on ourselves if we got burned. And, of course, it exploded, to our delight. With that promising start, aerosol after aerosol was hurled into the very fire we'd fermented camp tea on just an hour or so earlier. Eventually our patrol leader reached into his bag and took out his last explosive-in-waiting, a huge cannister of some kind of spray-on glue. Into the flames it was dropped, with all of us running away and ducking down behind a bank of some sort to wait for the blast.

We waited.

And waited.

Until eventually, as we were getting a bit concerned, we heard the cannister finally go... 'pfutt'.

Hugely disappointed, we looked at each other, until eventually a couple of the lads put on heavy duty gloves and stood up to take the can out of the fire.

And then it exploded.

There was a massive boom, and a fireball that shot straight up, scorching the branches of the trees. We all stared, as impressed by the explosion as we were relieved by the two lads who'd gone to retrieve our bomb not having been burned to death. And, as you'd expect, we exploded in laughter.

Diarmait has no memory of this, whereas I remember it clearly. I can picture exactly where it took place. I realise that it sounds a bit unlikely, in that there were actual leaders there that day, but they could have gone off with the other patrol for some reason, presumably to another field, there being no shortage of such on Larch Hill. I suppose they must have.

Still. Memories are funny things, as I've said before.

I gather it's different now in the scouts. Unsupervised weekend patrol camps -- and I could tell tales of those too -- are most definitely a thing of the past. Perhaps it's for the best, in that it reduces the likelihood of a bunch of young teenagers setting themselves on fire, but I can't help feeling something's been lost.

Behind the Curtain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

That left the substantive matter of the civil partnership scheme.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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.