A Fine Country To Visit!

Back when I was doing my first degree I had the opportunity to do an enthralling course on European geographical awareness during the Middle Ages; aside from introducing me to the work of such wonderful scholars as Michael the Scot and Herman the German, it ensured that never again would I be so ignorant as to think that belief in a flat earth had ever been a part of mainstream Christian thinking and deepened my fascination with the Mongols and the Vikings.

Medieval travelogues played no small part in the course and it's been fun recently -- in connection with looking at Mongol warfare -- to pore afresh over the pages of William of Rubruck, John of Plano Carpine, Odoric of Pordenone, and that delightful old fraud Sir John Mandeville.

All of which has reminded me of some of the most scurrilously amusing passages from Marco Polo's Travels.

First up we have a passage upon which historians have been keen to cast aspersions; it refers to an area that Polo would have had to have detoured extravagantly to visit, and has a whiff of protesting too much about it:

'The province of Kamul, which used to be a kingdom, contains towns and villages in plenty, the chief town also being called Kamul. The province lies between two deserts, the Great Desert and a small on three days' journey in extent. The inhabitants are all idolaters and speak a language of their own. They live on the produce of the soil; for they have a superfluity of foodstuffs and beverages, which they sell to travellers who pass that way. They are a very gay folk, who give no thought to anything but making music, singing and dancing, and reading and writing according to their own usage, and taking great delight in the pleasures of the body.

I give you my word that if a stranger comes to a house here to seek hospitality he receives a very warm welcome. The host bids his wife do everything that the guest wishes. Then he leaves the house and goes about his own business and stays away two or three days. Meanwhile the guest stays with his wife in the house and does what he will with her, lying with her in one bed just as if he were his own wife; and they lead a gay life together. All the men of this city and province are thus cockolded by their wives; but they are not the least ashamed of it. And the women are beautiful and vivacious and always willing to oblige.'

Unlikely though it may sound, similar customs were recorded as having been practiced in nineteenth-century Afghanistan and Iran, so who knows...

Speaking of Tibet -- which then encompassed modern Sze-ch'wan and Yun-nan  to the east of the present Tibetan frontier -- the Venetian had this to say:

'This desolate country, infested by dangerous wild beasts, extends for twenty days; journey, without shelter or food except perhaps every third or fourth day, when the traveller may find some habitation where he can renew his stock of provisions.

Then he reaches a region with villages and hamlets in plenty and a few towns perched on precipitous crags. Here there prevails a marriage custom of which I will tell you.

It is such that no man would ever on any account take a virgin to wife. For they say that a woman is worthless unless she has had knowledge of many men. They argure that she must have displeased the gods, because if she enjoyed thed favour of their idols then men would desire her and consort with her. So they deal with their women-folk in this way.

When it happens that men from a foreign land are passing through this country and have pitched their tents and made a camp, the matrons from neighbouring villages and hamlets bring their daughters to these camps, to the number of twenty or forty, and beg the travellers to take them and lie with them.

So these choose the girls who please them best, and the others return home disconsolate. So long as they remain, the visitors are free to take their pleasure with the women and use them as they will, but they are not allowed to carry them off anywhere else.

When the men have worked their will and are ready to be gone, then it is the custom for every man to give to the woman with whom he has lain some trinket or token so that she can show, when she comes to marry, that she has had a lover.

In this way custom requires every girl to wear more than a score of such tokens hung round her neck to show that she has had lovers in plenty and plenty of men have lain with her. And she who has most tokens and can show that she has had most lovers and that most men have lain with her is the most highly esteemed and the most acceptable as a wife; for they say that she is the most favoured by the gods.

And when they have taken a wife in this way they prize her highly; and they account it a grave offence for any man to touch another's wife, and they all strictly abstain from such an act. So much, then, for this marriage custom. Obviously the country is a fine one to visit for a lad from sixteen to twenty-four.'

That's from the Penguin translation. It's worth it for the last line, I feel, which the translation used by Project Gutenburg renders with even more enthusiasm: 'Now I have related to you this marriage custom as a good story to tell, and to show what a fine country that is for young fellows to go to!'

Yes, as with Herodotus, it's the sexist quip at the end that really rounds the story off. Did this ever actually happen? 

We've no idea. That's the problem with Marco Polo. He was telling strange stories from far away places. He could have been making half of it up, or passing on tales he'd heard himself. It wasn't as if his audience was in a position to check, after all.

I'm looking forward to looking at some earlier writers again soon enough. Einhard, Bede, Gregory of Tours, and the supremely snide diplomat Liutprad of Cremona, just to start with. Not for a while, though. Other jobs need doing.

That said, if you're good I'll grace with some Mandeville before too long. You'll like him.

Mister Gove Again

I was more than a little bemused yesterday to see Neil Gaiman tweet:

'I'm still trying to get my head around a Catholic Sex Education manual that plagiarises from John Norman's GOR book'

And linking to this blogpost, which in turn links to another blogpost and to an Observer article.

The Basics

The story, on the face of it, is pretty simple. In 2010 Catholic schools in Lancashire were visited by the Californian couple Jason and Crystalina Evert, who spoke to pupils in years 10 and 11. They spoke to students about chasity, and after talks gave out booklets including one entitled Pure Manhood: How to become the man God wants you to be.

The contents of the book clearly bothered people, at least in part, such that Brendan Barber, the TUC's general secretary, wrote to the Secretary for Education, Michael Gove, to complain about its allegedly homophobic content, arguing that the terms of the Equality Act 2010 were such that discrimination against individuals was forbidden, and . Gove declined to take action, saying:

'The education provisions of the Equality Act 2010 which prohibit discrimination against individuals based on their protected characteristics (including their sexual orientation) do not extend to the content of the curriculum. Any materials used in sex and relationship education lessons, therefore, will not be subject to the discrimination provisions of the act.'

This, understandably, has led to both confusion and anger, with the TUC again referring to Evert's booklet as homophobic material, and describing Gove's lack of concern' as 'very alarming'.

Now, I'm no fan of Mister Gove, who always reminds me of a slimmed-down version of Kenneth Graham's Mister Toad, what with his fads and fetishes and innumerable enthusiasms, but I think he may well be right on this one.

Where?

I'm troubled by how this is being reported and commented upon. I've seen several reports on this and they don't quite add up. I'm not quite sure of where the books were handed out, for starters, though I suspect they were distributed in part of Lancashire and throughout Cumbria. Why? Because that's what the Diocese of Lancaster covers. Southern Lancashire is divided between the dioceses of Liverpool and Salford, with Blackburn being in the latter diocese, such that it has no business being cited in this post.

This might seem like a picky detail, but when I see inconsistency in this kind of stuff I tend to get suspicious about everything else.

Wolf?

The supposed link with John Gorman's misogynistic Gor fantasy novels appears to be complete tosh, despite how much the aforementioned blogger harps on about them.

There's a passage in the booklet which apparently likens a boy's capacity to love slowly being destroyed by exposure to pornography to a wolf being killed by constantly licking a knife in arctic conditions. The blogger claims that the Snopes community sourced this story to John Norman's 1978 book Beasts of Gor and goes on to claim:

'Jason Evert, apparently, is a Gor series fan. At least, that’s where he’s taking his illustrative examples from, to teach to teenage children at Catholic schools... I am alarmed and amused about The Beasts of Gor being used as a teaching aid.'

Balderdash. Go to the Snopes discussion and take a look at what's actually said.

In 2006, Snopes quotes someone as saying that he'd heard the wolf anecdote from his pastor, and that Snopes had heard the story several times in the years leading up to that point; Snopes wondered whether the story was true or simply an urban legend [sic] of conservative Christianity in America.

Note that. Snopes wondered whether it was just a an urban myth. Or a rural myth. A tundra myth, maybe. A myth, at any rate.

Anyway, the dicussion began, with one poster saying that he'd read in his childhood of exactly that way to kill wolves; the book where he'd read this had been about the extirpation of wolves from America's great plains, and this passage related to the killing of wolves in snowy Montana. The poster doubted whether it was true, but still, he recognised that it was an old story.

Another poster pointed out that the scenario did feature in a Gor novel, and speculated that the story had been around for a long time and been picked up on by John Norman.

So, while it is possible that Evert drew his example from Norman's book, it seems at least as likely that he drew it from a book on how wolves were killed in America in the past, and far more likely still that he took it from a sermon he'd heard somewhere, as the story seems to be a trope of American conservative Christianity.

Knowing that I know nothing, I know something

The next thing we need to do here is to admit how little we know. I've yet to speak to one person online who says they've seen Evert's booklet. I don't dispute for a moment that the booklet contains the passages I've seen quoted, but passages shorn from context are always rather shy of meaning.

The booklet's more than 50 pages long, so I'm deeply wary of getting stroppy about a few sentences in it. I would hope that somewhere it also includes the Church's teaching that homosexual people must be treated with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Even if it doesn't, I would expect that the speaker would have made this point if he spoke on the subject, and that the teenagers' teachers would have said the very same thing when discussing matters with students.

That said, the reviews on Amazon suggest that there's stuff in the booklet far more problematic than what's being quoted. This apparent extract claims that 'the life expectancy of homosexual men is half that of heterosexual men', which seems highly improbable, at least in the developed world. 

I'm intrigued as to why such details haven't been reported on, assuming that that's indeed the case.

Discrimination?

Regardless of how objectionable people might find the extracts from Evert's book, I'm not sure how they'd ever constitute discrimination. Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of people based on their race, religion, gender, sexuality, or whatever. It involves behaviours, and the denial of opportunities -- of access to goods or services, say. The UK Citizens' Advice Bureau says that 'Discrimination means treating someone worse than other people because of who they are.'

I asked somebody about this on Twitter this morning: 'All else aside, how would this constitute discrimination? In what sense?'

The answer I got was 'Because it's homophobic? Imagine being gay & being told that this may stem from an unhealthy relationship with your dad, an inability to relate to other guys or sexual abuse. No-one would say that about heterosexual feelings, ever-and the sexual abuse bit I find particularly repugnant.'

The reason why nobody would ever say this about heterosexual feelings is that Occam's Razor makes creative explanations unnecessary. We are sexual creatures no less than birds or bees, in that we reproduce sexually. Without sex, the species dies out. Heterosexual feelings are easily explained by the species' reproductive drive.

As my accountancy teacher once put it, with reference to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory, 'After air, food, water, and so on, there's sex, which tends to preoccupy you lads. And that's a good thing, because it keeps the species going. When you get to my age you're happy with a mug of tea and two sugars.'

That said, there's a serious point there that the book could well make people feel uncomfortable -- and that's where I'd hope it would be used sensitively, but is that discrimination? Again, discrimination is about behaviour. It's about offering things to some people and denying them to others based on their identity -- or some aspect of their identity.

What could possibly be being denied here? Respect? Love? Perhaps the booklet encouraged people to discriminate against gay people, such that, even if not itself discriminatory, it'd constitute hate speech?

Well, let's take a look at what I hope is the relevant passage.

Fingers Crossed

Now, this blog claims to contain lengthy extracts from the book. It seems to tally with what the Observer article says, so I'm going to hope it's accurate and run with it...

'What if you have homosexual attractions?'

'The world tells people who have same-sex attractions that they have two options: either hide in the closet in fear or come out, embrace your identity, and sleep with whoever you want. Acknowledging your attractions but living a pure life isn't even proposed as a realistic choice, because the world assumes that sex equals love, and no one should have to live without love.

A guy who has these attractions may not want them, or even know where they're coming from. Perhaps they stem from an unhealthy relationship with his father, an inability to relate to other guys, or even sexual abuse. Whatever the case may be, purity will help him understand the origin of his feelings.

Every guy needs male approval as part of becoming a man. But in this need for masculine love, some guys may question their identity and try to find it in sex. But that will not satisfy their calling to make a total gift of themselves. The homosexual act is disordered, much like contraceptive sex between heterosexuals.

Both acts are directed against God's natural purpose for sex- babies and bonding.

Even if a person does not believe in God, he cannot argue with nature. For example, the life expectancy of homosexual men is half that of heterosexual men. Furthermore, imagine what would happen if all people with same-sex attractions were placed in their own country. It would be empty in a century, because bodies of the same gender are not made to receive each other. Even if a man has same-sex attractions, his body is heterosexual. He was designed to give life. If you struggle with same sex attractions, realize that you are not alone. God loves you and has a plan for your life. The Church has a network of those who carry the same cross and choose to glorify God with their bodies.'

So, first off, I'm deeply uneasy with the claim about life expectancy, as I said, and I find it extremely odd that Evert, in speculating on the possible causes of homosexual feelings, homes in entirely on environmental factors without considering the possibility that genetic ones may be at work too. While he doesn't discount other explanations, I feel the possible explanations he puts forward don't seem calculated to help teenagers grappling with their sexuality to feel any better about themselves.

I'm hoping the booklet wouldn't have stood on its own, but would have been discussed and explored. That's the Catholic way, after all. We tend not to rely on books alone...

That said, what's this actually saying?

Evert, when you get down to it, is saying a small number of things, notably that our sexuality has a purpose and that this purpose should be respected, that God loves everyone and has created everyone for their own unique purpose, and that no matter how people may struggle they are not alone and are called to glorify God.

All of this is utterly mainstream and orthodox Catholic teaching. So too is the bit about artificial contraception being wrong.

I saw one person online saying she'd be furious were she to learn that her son had been exposed to this sort of stuff at school. Fair enough, but I'd imagine she'd not choose to send her son to a Catholic school. It kind of goes with the territory: if you send your children to Catholic schools, you do so in the expectation that they'll be taught Catholic stuff.

Anyone who thinks this shouldn't be taught at all, is basically saying that they think Catholics shouldn't be allowed to teach Catholicism. And anyone who thinks that should be directed to the European Convention of Human Rights, article nine of which reads as follows:

'9.1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, and to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.

9.2. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.'

Catholics, like everyone else, have the right to manifest our religion in teaching; this right should only be curtailed when it is both legal and necessary to do so for the protection of others' rights and freedoms.

Now, which rights do people think are curtailed by Catholic teaching on homosexuality? You know, the teaching that says homosexual persons must be treated with respect, compassion, and sensitivity, and which while identifying homosexual acts as sinful such that Catholics can never approve of them, nonetheless recognises that individual citizens may freely engage in activities that fall within the common civil right ro freedom.

Go through the list of the rights the ECHR recognises, and then come back to me on this one.

The Church and AIDS in Africa

It’s rare that I lose my temper, but I got indignant a few weeks ago when a friend declared that the Catholic Church has nothing to offer today’s world. Normally I’d dismiss such nonsense with a shrug, but caught at an off moment I exploded.

‘You don’t think that being the world’s second-largest international development body and its second-largest aid organisation is a good thing? You don’t think this is useful? You’d like the world’s largest single healthcare provider to stop helping people? You’d rather that the quarter of all African hospitals the Church runs were shut? You’d rather that healthcare and education provided by the Church, which play a crucial role in Sub-Saharan African countries with largely Catholic populations having lower HIV and AIDS rates than other sub-Saharan countries, were stopped?’

None of this even touched on the truth of the Church’s teaching or the reality of the sacraments, but my friend’s an atheist and would never have accepted that. I continued to rant, culminating with a question that no decent person could ever answer in the negative: ‘You don’t think it’s good to help the poor, the sick, the disabled, the old, the young, and the dying?’

Rhetoric aside, it wasn’t one of my finer moments. To my friend’s credit, he didn’t answer with the clichéd calumnies that the Church only helps Catholics, or only helps people with a view to them becoming Catholics. These are common myths, and completely false; Benedict XVI, in his first encyclical, 2006’s Deus Caritas Est, reminded us how our love must be unconditional, and specifically warned us against using charity as an evangelical Trojan Horse.

‘Love is free,’ he said, ‘it is not practised as a way of achieving other ends... Those who practise charity in the Church’s name will never seek to impose the Church’s faith upon others.’

I got thinking about this discussion in London recently, when at Mass to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Catholic Agency For Overseas Development. The English equivalent of our own Trócaire, CAFOD is the official Catholic aid agency for England and Wales.

A friend of mine, frustrated by inadequate government responses to the famine in east Africa, is running the London Marathon in April to raise money for CAFOD and had been invited to the Mass; knowing I was down she asked if I’d be coming too, so I joined her, her parents, and about 2,500 others in a packed Westminster Cathedral.

In his homily, Bishop John Arnold, Chair of CAFOD’s board of trustees, spoke of CAFOD’s achievements in 46 countries, citing among his examples businesses run by women survivors of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, orphans of the Rwandan genocide growing with a sense of self-determination, and new homes for the dispossessed Sri Lankan victims of 2004’s Indian Ocean tsunami.

The key to CAFOD’s work, he said, is ‘partnership with local people, local communities – working to bring about change together’. CAFOD’s approach – supporting rather than supplanting local organisations – is shared with Trócaire and more than 160 other organisations in Caritas Internationalis, the Church’s confederation of relief and development agencies.

Rather than ‘parachuting’ in help from abroad, CAFOD and similar organisations work to empower local bodies, such that the Church’s relief and development work is usually carried out on the ground by local people who use local knowledge to address local needs.

This principle – that decisions should be taken and actions carried out at the lowest possible level – is a profoundly Catholic one, and one that people all too often fail to grasp; the wrongheaded notion that the Church is a single centralised organisation with a clear hierarchy is something that blights the popular understanding of the Church. In practical terms, the Church is best understood as a loose network in which almost everything other than doctrinal teaching tends to be bottom-up rather than top-down.

Given the vast range of challenges facing the developing world, Bishop Arnold explained how CAFOD has had to develop its own expertise in areas as diverse as livelihoods, nutrition, advocacy, climate change, and HIV/AIDS. The last of these, of course, is the subject of yet another of the modern world’s most poisonous anti-Catholic myths.

In the aftermath of John Paul II’s death in 2005, the now-discredited Johann Hari decreed in the Independent that ‘the Pope’s response to the greatest threat to human life in our times – AIDS in Africa – was to make it far worse,’ while the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee joined him in insisting that ‘with its ban on condoms the church has caused the death of millions’.

Richard Dawkins in March 2010 described Benedict XVI as ‘a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa,’ and when Benedict visited Britain later that year, Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science and another supposed devotee of evidence-based reasoning, pronounced the Church to be ‘a serious global public health problem’.

They’re by no means the only people to have made such claims. It might be asking a lot, but I wish people would refrain from exploiting human tragedies to bolster their pet prejudices and instead take a look at some basic facts. Statistics in Africa aren’t always quite as precise as we’d like them to be, but we can say this.

In Sub-Saharan Africa there are nine countries where Catholics make up more than a third of the population. With the exception of tiny Lesotho, surrounded by AIDS-ravaged South Africa, not one of these is among the nine countries where more than one-in-ten people suffers from HIV/AIDS.

Although Catholics comprise roughly half the population of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, only 1.4 per cent of the population carry the HIV virus; that’s a tragically large number of people, of course, but it’s worth contrasting it with the more than 17 per cent of South Africans similarly afflicted, in a country where barely 6 per cent of the population are Catholic.

There’s no correlation between Catholicism and AIDS in Africa; if anything the opposite appears to be the case. Only those determined to ignore evidence in favour of blind faith in the salvific powers of condoms claim otherwise. Far from making the situation in Africa worse, Catholic organisations may well be doing more than any other organisations to make things better.

This shouldn’t make us complacent, but it should help give us confidence to act, as Bishop Arnold said in his homily, as ‘ambassadors for Christ’. We’re the Body of Christ and shouldn’t be afraid to carry on His work.

We have a lot to offer the world.

-- from The Irish Catholic, 9 February 2012

'Silly Little Questions To Trip People Up'

There's been much sniggering throughout the British religious blogosphere at Richard Dawkins' embarrassing performance on the Today show yesterday morning where, challenged by Giles Fraser, Professor D proved himself incapable of naming Charles Darwin's most famous book in full:

'On the Origin of Species... er... with... uh... Oh God... uh... On the Origin of Species... um... there is a subtitle... er... um... eh... With Respect to the Preservation of favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.'

Yes, he got the subtitle slightly wrong and left out surely the most important phrase in the title, that being the mechanism Darwin identified as essential to evolution. The correct title, for the record, is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

More sensible atheists had their heads in their hands over this one, but in truth, while it showed Dawkins for the posturing hypocrite he is, demanding standards of others he cannot meet himself, the real story was more interesting.

Dawkins and Fraser were on the show to discuss a recent poll conducted by Ipsos MORI on behalf of the Richard Dawkins Institute for the Smug which purported to find that even among those Britons who self-identify as Christians there is a very low level of religious commitment.

The purpose of this poll was, according to Richard, to break down the real meaning of whatever the 2011 census poll's question on religious should superficially reveal.

'It was very important to clarify the real meaning behind the religion question in the census, given that -- unfortunately -- the census asked a religion question at all.'

Leaving aside whether or not the census should have been asking a religious question -- and I've no doubt Professor Dawkins would have been quite happy for it to have done so had he expected the numbers to stack up in his favour rather than spectacularly against him -- I think this is, in principle, a worthy project.

In principle. Not necessarily in practice. Certainly not when the people doing the unpacking don't know what they're talking about.

Richard takes the view that most of those whose self-identify as Christians aren't truly Christian, that they aren't really Christians at all and don't think like Christians -- whatever that means -- merely ticking the Christian box, perhaps because they've been baptised. Of course, he makes a point of conceding -- after proclaiming such conclusions -- that his view on this doesn't mean squat:

'I'm not presenting my opinion here. This press released is offered to people to look down it and say "Look, these people who call themselves Christians actually don't read the Bible, don't go to church, don't believe Jesus was the Son of God, don't even know what the first book of the New Testament is -- it's up to you to make up your mind whether they're Christian." Don't ask me. My opinion is not relevant.'

Well. Quite.

After all that, only 6% are Atheists?

As Fraser points out, one of the results the survey clearly reveals is that only 6 per cent of the Britons surveyed said they didn't believe in God; a further 7 per cent either declined to answer the question, took issue with it, or said they didn't know. This isn't a detail Richard's been keen to proclaim.

If we're to give this survey any credibility, and I'm really not sure that we should, this figure must be recognised as remarkable, since it seems to suggest that despite all the efforts of Professor Dawkins and his ilk, religious belief -- however nebulous -- may even have grown since 2001.

Yes, grown. This survey suggests that in the 2011 census, 33 per cent of people would have said they're of no religion, with 1 per cent not knowing and a further 2 per cent declining to say. When compared to the 2001 census, that seems to point to a huge jump in disbelief, given that in 2001 only 15 per cent of Britons declared themselves of no religion, and 8 per cent, for whatever reason, didn't answer the question.

The thing is, as Giles Fraser rightly recognises, there's another question on Richard's survey which asks people what their view of God is. This question suggests that only 10 per cent of Britons either disbelieve or doubt the existence of God, with 2 per cent declining to answer the question and 1 per cent taking issue with the suggested answers.

I'm surprised that we haven't seen any headlines announcing 'Britain Only 6% Atheist - Dawkins Survey Finds'.

Of course the trick here is to disregard Richard's recommendation for us to read the press release, and instead to look at the actual surveys under discussion. They're definitely worth a look, especially with regard to Richard's claim that most of the questions being asked are fundamental to the Christian religion.

Let's take a look at a few, shall we? You'll see very quickly that the survey in general, not to mention how it's being presented, is marked by lazy presumptions about what Christians ought to be like.

Q3. You have said that you defined your religion in the Census as Christian or that you would have done so if you had answered the Census question yourself. Why do you think of yourself as being of this religion? Please select as many as apply.

Remarkably, given that people could tick as many boxes that apply, it's staggering that only 1 per cent of self-identifying Christians say that one of the reasons why they call themselves Christian is because they believe in the religion. I'm not sure how that differs from believing in the teachings of the religion, which 28 per cent of the self-identifying Christians went along with, but there you have it. In any case, it rather suggests that people just didn't fill out the form properly or weren't encouraged to do so.

They may have been in a hurry.

The first possible answer relates to baptism, with 72 per cent of self-identifying Christians say they regard themselves as Christians -- at least in part -- because they were baptised. Richard has contempt for this viewpoint, seeing this as an irrelevance -- such people are merely ticking the Christian box, to his mind -- but this rather reveals his total cluelessness of what baptism has always been regarded as in historical Christianity.

The word 'Christian', contrary to popular myth, doesn't mean 'follower of Christ'. Rather, as first deployed in Acts, it rather means someone who belongs to Christ. It means a member of Christ's household -- a slave or a family member. The crucial thing here is that it's not really a matter of our choice; we are Christians because we are Christ's, and it's baptism that makes us members of his household. Baptism is, if you like, the Christian circumcision. It's the rite that makes us irrevocably Christ's, signifying and effecting our adoption as sons and daughters of God. It's the sacrament that makes us Christians in the most profound and meaningful way.

This is the reason why I get uneasy when friends of mine say that I became a Christian after studying the historical evidence; rather, I became a Christian because when I was a baby my parents ensured that I was baptised into Christ and was indelibly marked as a member of his household, but only really came to believe in the truth of what the Church teaches as an adult, after studying the historical evidence.

What we think is as nothing compared to what Christ does. Ultimately, it's not about us. Richard seems incapable of understanding this.

Now, as it happens, although this understanding of baptism is how it has been historically understood, and still reflects how baptism is understood by most Christians, there are no shortage of Christians who would disagree with it.

These tend to include those Protestants who say that one becomes a Christian when one accepts Jesus into one's heart. There are lots of these, including most Evangelicals and Pentecostals. Does Richard's survey give them the opportunity of answering the question in the way most meaningful to them?

Don't be silly. Of course it doesn't. This survey is as unfair to Evangelicals as Professor Dawkins' interpretation of it is unfair to Catholics, the Orthodox, and those of the Catholic tendency in the Church of England.

Q6. Apart from special occasions such as weddings, funerals and baptisms or christenings, how often IN THE LAST 12 MONTHS have you attended services or meetings connected with Christianity?

And, of course, it's shocking -- shocking, I tell you! -- that only 17 per cent of self-identifying Christians attend services once a week or more, with a total of 29% attending at least once a month.

It's certainly disappointing, especially among Catholics, to see such a low rate of attendance, but do other denominations require such regular attendance as the Catholic Church? It is, after all, a precept of the Church that the faithful should attend Mass each Sunday and holy day of obligation, and a precept that's sadly all too often ignored, but are Anglicans, for instance, bound to such a precept?

I've known devout Anglicans, humble and kind, frequent and careful readers of their Bibles who are involved in Church activities of one sort or another, who will nonetheless think little of missing out on services if they clash with other things; to their mind, they can read the Bible and pray alone, and if they feel a need for exposition of whatever they've read, they can track down sermons online!

This is pretty much an inevitable consequence of what happens when the Eucharist isn't central to your faith and worship.

Q10. How often, if at all, do you pray independently and from choice? I mean when NOT in a church service or other religious meeting.

The remarkable thing here is that Church services aren't seen as things people engage in independently and from choice. Given that the survey was conducted among adults -- well, people aged fifteen and up, which may skew the figures somewhat given teenagers' tendencies to muck about -- this strikes me as very odd. It would be bad news for, say, daily massgoers who also attend Rosary or Divine Mercy groups and join with other Christians to pray the Office, if they didn't also pray in isolation.

That said, while the figure of a mere 35 per cent freely praying on a regular basis on their own is disappointing, I think it's a pretty murky figure. I would have no way of quantifying how often I pray. Do Dawkins and Co understand that there can be pretty profound differences between 'praying' and 'saying your prayers'? The latter can often be the former, of course, but the former is by no means limited to the latter.

Q19. Which of the following statements best describes YOUR personal view of God? Please read out the letter for your answer.

This is my favourite, as it seems set up so that Christians are forced to choose between the box bearing the invisible subtitle 'I am a bigot' and the one bearing the invisible subtitle 'I am a relativist'.  There's no answer here that I can happily pick, except for 'None of these'.

It's an interesting one, in that it seems that 54 per cent of people surveyed see God as a personal being, with 9 per cent being old fashioned deists, 13 per cent being pantheists, 10 per cent holding some manner of vaguely spiritual notion of God, 4 per cent admitting that they didn't know, and just 6 per cent of people saying they don't believe in God. That's probably the real headline figure. 6 per cent.

Why wouldn't I be happy with this? Well, I fall squarely between the first two answers proposed; indeed, I'd say Catholics in general and plenty of other Christians do too. The first proposed answer is as follows:

'I believe in God and I believe that Christianity is the only true way of knowing him.'

Thing is, that's not quite true. Christianity teaches that nobody can approach the Father save through the Son, but it doesn't teach that nobody can approach the Father save through Christianity. I'm not even sure -- in this sense -- what 'Christianity' means. Does it mean Christian teachings? Does it mean the teachings of the myriad Protestant denominations? Does it mean membership of the Church? Does it mean attending coffee mornings and Student discussions? Does it mean any variant of Christianity is okay, as long as it's Christian? What about the odder Protestants who don't regard Catholics as really Christian and who seem wholly unaware of the Orthodox? What about my SSPX friend (sigh) who says that Protestants are members of false religions?

For what it's worth, Romans makes its clear that it's possible to know God from the world He has made, and while such knowledge would be imperfect, that doesn't mean it would be false...

That would seem to point me towards the second answer, then:

'I believe in God and I believe that Christianity is just one way of knowing him.'

Of course, the problem with this is that Christianity isn't just one way of knowing him; it is, rather many ways of knowing them, these not being equal to each other and not being equal to various non-Christian paths to God.

Without getting into theological language, and while staying within the crude misrepresentations of this idiotic survey, how hard would it have been for Richard and his pals to have offered as a possible answer, 'I believe in God and I believe that Christianity is the best way of knowing him'?

Q20. When, if at all, did you last read any part of the Bible? I mean independently and from choice, and not as part of a church service or other religious meeting.

What constitutes a part of the Bible? A fragment? A phrase? Richard has babbled elsewhere about how the King James Bible is part of the air the English breathe, and it strikes me as unlikely that only 15 per cent of people have read any of the Bible in the last week.

Presumably he means, however, sitting down to read the Bible, but he's phrased this in a peculiarly Protestant way. Aside from the presumption that adults don't attend church services or religious meetings from choice, this question is marked by a total obliviousness to the fact that the Bible was written and assembled with a view to being read publicly. The whole debate over the Canon between the mid-second and the late-fourth centuries was essentially a running battle over which books were suitable for public proclamation as part of the liturgy.

That's not to say that we shouldn't read the Bible in private, of course; it's very good to do so and the Church encourages this, as ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ, but we shouldn't in any sense confuse the private reading of the Bible with seriousness about faith. I'd be pretty confident that most Christians in the world rarely read the Bible in private, just as I'd be confident that the vast majority of Christians throughout history -- and especially in the first fifteen centuries of the Church -- wouldn't have done so.

We in the UK have opportunities to read the Bible that many of our ancestors lacked, but our failure to take those opportunities shouldn't be misconstrued as a mere nominal Christianity.

Dawkins here is very close to the late Christopher Hitchens' ludicrous claim that a Christian is, by definition, somebody who has read the New Testament. Nonsense in the first, fourth, twelfth, and fifteenth centuries, it's no less nonsensical now.

Q22. Which of the following statements BEST describes your personal view of the Bible as a guide to morality? Please read out the letter for your answer.

This bit's complete tosh, as it's clearly been written in the assumption that the 'ideal' Christian is a sola sciptura Protestant, despite such folk never having existed before the sixteenth century and being a decided minority in the Christian world even now. Again, I don't think there was even one answer offered that I could have agreed with in good conscience.

Why? Because the three substantive issues presented the Bible -- in isolation -- as a guide to morality. Not a hint there of the role of Sacred Tradition or the Magesterium or how the Bible must be read within the Church. As I've said before, the rulebook doesn't work in isolation: we need a referee.

Frankly, I'm not even convinced about Matthew being the right answer to the question 'What is the first book of the NEW Testament?' For my money it'd be First Thessalonians.

Q54. Do you consider yourself to be a religious person?
This one's a beauty. Dawkins and his droogs are delighted at the fact that only 45 per cent of Britons would seemingly tick this box, with 50 per cent of people saying that they're not religious. Of course, yet again such an interpretation merely shows the poverty of Richard's understanding.

I know of no shortage of people who would claim that Christianity is a relationship rather than a religion, and it was a common refrain of one of the ministers at my friends' Evangelical Anglican church that we're not called to be religious. Indeed, you could hardly move through the Christian blogosphere a few weeks back without stumbling across this chap proclaiming that he hates religion but loves Jesus.

I'm not saying I'd take his line, of course -- quite the opposite, in fact -- but there are a lot of Christians who would. If Dawkins doesn't understand that, then it's just another item to add to the long list of things that show how shamefully ignorant he is of the that which he so scornfully and obsessively condemns.


And it goes on...

There's a whole extra section on the implications of belief for our lives and how we think the country should be run, but I may leave that for another day. What does keep striking me, though, is the sheer bizarreness of Richard Dawkins' argument that because Britain isn't -- in his view -- a predominantly Christian country, there is no need for faith schools.

I would have thought that if people of faith are in a minority there's an even more pressing argument for them having schools of their own in order to preserve whatever it is that they uniquely offer society. But perhaps Richard just thinks it should be purged from the public realm.

For starters.

Comedy Harmonists, or Medicine for the Soul

The first time I was in Crete, many years ago, saw me sleeping in a hammock, drinking raki, developing a passion for stewed goat and grilled octopus, learning to play airhockey, visiting innumerable ruins, and taking far too many photographs. 

Yes. Trees in the centre of the road. Welcome to Crete.

Riding shotgun in a friend's hire car -- a robust but antiquated Panda -- I was frequently intrigued by an improbable ditty he seemed to relish singing:

'You go as well with me as sugar goes with tea,

You go as well with me as A does go with B...'

After hearing this about seventeen times, in between discussions of the heroism of Patrick Leigh Fermor, I eventually asked what the song was.

Oh, it's a loose translation of a song by a German group called 'The Comedian Harmonists,' I was told, and then my friend told their sad tale.

He told me of how, in the twilight of Weimar and the rise of the Third Reich, the German close-harmony group known as the Comedian Harmonists were one of the most famous groups in the world, prodigiously gifted and astonishingly accomplished, capable of rendering the most diverse range of songs in the most beautiful -- and often hilarious -- of ways.

Half the group were Jewish, and so they fell foul of the Nazis, as one would expect. Eventually they were barred from performing altogether, and the three Jewish members fled abroad, there to form a new group called the Comedy Harmonists, while the non-Jewish ones remained behind to form Das Meistersextett.

Although all six members of the Comedian Harmonists survived the war, the group never reformed.

I spent that New Year in Germany: New Year itself was spent in Berlin, with a couple of days in Frankfurt on either side. In Frankfurt I made sure to pick up a CD of their songs, and to this day their regular medicine for me when I feel down.

They proved very useful on Sunday night just gone, the weekend not having been the jolliest.

It's worth your while exploring their work.

My introduction to them was the hilariously cheesy Du paßt so gut zu mir wie Zucker zum Kaffee, as sung by the Comedy Harmonists exile group -- you'll note that the song refers to coffee, not tea -- but the Comedian Harmonists' most famous songs are probably Mein Kleiner Grüner Kaktus and Veronika, der Lenz ist da.

Wochenend Und Sonnenschein, a German take on Happy Days Are Here Again, is most definitely worth a listen, as are their renditions of Tea for Two and the French Ali Baba.

For sheer beauty, I'd definitely point you to the almost painfully gorgeous Sandmännchen and the delightful An der schönen blauen Donau, while their version of Strauss's Perpetuum Mobile is brilliant.

And of course Ein Freund, ein guter Freund is a particular jaunty little number.

You can pick up what looks like a fine collection of their stuff for £3.99. I've bought pints that cost more than that. Give them a shot. You won't regret it.

They Don't Teach Geography Like This Anymore - Part II

So, as I was saying, Professor J.M.D. Meiklejohn's 1890 A New Geography On The Comparative Method is a work to behold. For those of us, whether cabinet ministers or otherwise, who rave about how much better British education was back in the old days, it's quite the lesson.

About half the book deals with the delights of Europe, as I've described, after which it moves on to explore the wonders of the rest of what was then a red-splattered world.


Asia
India, or Hindustan as the book reminds us it is also known, is rightly marvelled at for its phenomenal diversity, and then commended for its sheer luck in having finally come under British rule. Because this is a Good Thing, remember:

'It has been for ages the object of envy and the prey of different conquerors; until at length it reposes in peace and comparative prosperity under the rule of QUEEN VICTORIA, EMPRESS OF INDIA.' (241)

Yes, she got capital letters. That was Prof M, not me.

North of Hindustan, of course, one can make one's way to Thibet, or the Snowy Kingdom, as Professor Meiklejohn refers to it:

'The inhabitants form a branch of the Mongolian Family. They are gentle, frank, dignified, courageous, fond of music and song. They are Buddhists in religion.' (277)

'When two persons meet,' he explains, 'they salute each other several times by showing the tongue and scratching the right ear.'


You may remember how Professor Meiklejohn believed the Germans to be the best-educated people in the world; well, they may have been the best-educated people, but China, on the other hand, seemingly has the most highly trained mountain ranges, the must erudite deserts, and the most learned cities:

'In some respects, China is still the best educated country in the world; and it possesses the oldest literature.' (276)

What's more, Meiklejohn's Chinese seem a friendly race, if somewhat inclined to odd behaviour.

'The most distinguishing mark of the Chinese is their courtesy and kindliness. "Even strangers have travelled from one end of the land to another without even meeting with a rudeness or incility." Age is reverenced by all. A drunk person is never seen in the streets. Industry is the chief passion; and peace the universally required condition. Most of their customs are the exact opposite of ours. The place of honour is the left; the mourning colour is white; the sign of being puzzled is to scratch the knee. Physicans are paid when their patients are well; their pay stops when they fall ill.' (276)

To which is added what seems to be a proverb:

'In China, "roses have no fragrance; roads no vehicles; ships no hulls; workmen no Sundays; and magistrates no sense of honour,"'

The Chinese do, however, come off second-best to the Japanese, with whom Professor Meiklejohn explicitly compares them:

'In character the Japanese exhibit striking contrasts to the Chinese. The Chinese are dirty, the Japanese scrupulously clean; the Chinese are conceited and despise everything foreign, the Japanese keep an open and receptive mind for everything that is good, no matter from what quarter it comes.' (283)

That Professor Meiklejohn should be such a huge fan of the Japanese is hardly surprising, given its similarities to his own homeland:

'The beautiful land of Japan, or "Country of the Sun," has often been called, and with much justice, the "Great Britain of the Pacific."'(280)

Lest we wonder what these similarities might be, he reels off a baker's dozen of apparent likenesses, my favourite of which is:

'The climates of both are addicted to fogs.' (281)

So much for the Far East. What of the parts of Asia nearer to home? Well, with reference to Asiatic Turkey -- that's the Ottoman Empire on the far side of the Bosporus -- we read of Syria:

'Syria is a long strip of high mountain country which stretches in an almost straight line from the Peninsula of Sinai to the Gulf of Scanderoon. Its coast is called the Levant. A small district in the south is called Palestine or the Holy Land -- a district about twice as large as Yorkshire.' (303)

The reference to Yorkshire may not be entirely accidental; there are those, of course, who refer to Yorkshire as 'God's own county' and say that God Himself is a Yorkshireman. No, I have no idea why.

Arabia sounds like a most exciting place:

'It has always been an isolated region -- a land apart. Its hot climate and its barren soil have attracted no settlers, and its waterless deserts have repelled invaders; while it has poured out horde after horde of warriors who carried the religion of Islam with fire and sword into the richest countries of Asia, Africa, and Europe.' (307)

Peppered, it would seem, with most exciting people:

'The Arabs form a branch of the Semitic family. The Arab is a noble-looking man -- tall, spare, muscular, and with brown complexion, dark-eyed, dark-haired. "Independence looks out of his glowing eyes;" he is quick, sharp witted, imaginative, and very fond of poetry. "Courage, temperance, hospitality, and good faith, are his leading virtues."
"The Arab is satisfied with little; but all that he owns must be of the choicest quality. His dates, his perfumes, his coffee, are the best in the world."' (310)

But if the Arabs are exciting, the Iranians, or the Persians as they then were, sound a thoroughly superior sort:

'The Persian presents a striking contrast, in character and manners, to the Turk. The Turk (or Ottoman) is a stock-breeder, a husbandman, and a soldier; the Persian is a trader and, by temperament, an artist. The Turk is a man of few words and of serious speech; the Persian is a fluent talker and a brilliat logician.' (315)

Really, one would hope we'd never cross swords with such splendid fellows.

The Afghans, on the other hand, clearly are mere ruffians, and best avoided. It's difficult to see why the British, Russians, and Americans keep invading and expecting it to work out okay:

'Compared with the Persians, the Afghans are rude, almost coarse, and careless of outward show. But they are skilful artisans, hospitable, generous, and even truthful -- at least in peace; but when their evil passions are stirred up by war, they are cruel, revengeful, treacherous, and greedy. "God shield you from the vengeance of the elephant, the cobra, and the Afghan," is a saying current among the Mahometan Hindus. When any specially atrocious act is done, the Afghans themselves speak of it as "an Afghan job!" "Nothing is finer than their physique, or worse than their morale." They are extremely independent; all are equal, and no clan will obey any one but its chief.' (320)

Africa
Onward, then, to Africa, with the relevant section opening as follows:

'Africa has been called the "Dark Continent." And this for two reasons: first, because it is the least known and almost inaccessible of all the continents; and secondly, because it is inhabited by dark races.' (329)

Professor Meiklejohn classifies the inhabitants of Africa as original natives, old immigrants such as Copts, Berbers, and Arabs, and new immigrants such as Dutch, English, and French. The original natives are the aforementioned 'dark races', and the book takes care to distinguish between Bantus, Negroes proper, and Hottentots and Bushmen. Of these it says:

'The Hottentots have a yellowish complexion, low stature, and weak muscles. The Bushmen belong to the pigmy peoples that are said to be descended from the old aborigines who were deprived of their lands by more powerful races. "If Africa is the continent of the great anthropoid apes (gorillas, etc.), it is also the home of the most ape-like human beings."' (343)

Yes, I'll just let that sit for a while.Victorian schoolchildren must have felt very lucky to be English. British, even. Best in the world, clearly.

Barbaric though the Africans themselves might be, the late nineteenth century was clearly a good time for them, with them being lucky enough to have caught the eye of Europe's eligible suitors:

'Africa is at present in the peculiar position of being ardently coveted by the most enterprising states of Europe.' (346)

Of the eight European powers then holding portions of the continent, Germany, we are told, is 'always eager for more,' while Italy 'looks with longing eyes towards Tripoli'. 'The little enterprising country of Belgium,' meanwhile, 'has also on eye upon Africa; and the King of the Belgians is the "Sovereign" of the Free Congo State.'

The 'Race for Africa' is returned to later on, with the book detailing a series of European agreements on how best to carve up the continent, preceding this with the observation that 'For some time past the greater powers of Europe have been engaged in seizing as much of Africa as they could safely lay hands on without embroiling themselves with each other. Germany has been, on the whole, the most active aggressor; but England has always been the most daring and persevering explorer.' (371)


The Americas
I'm sad to say that Professor Meiklejohn isn't nearly as extravagant in his comments on the New World than on the old, but I was struck by his thoughts on Greenland:

'Greenland is probably an archipelago of elevated islands which are almost completely buried under ice, and are joined together by ice.' (387)

None of that pub quiz nonsense of 'what's the largest island in the world?' for Professor Meiklejohn and his protegees, thank you very much. Seemingly there are those who think that view may be right, too, that Greenland may in fact be at least three large islands rather than one huge one, all three bound together by glaciers.

With regard to Canada Professor Meiklejohn raves about its promise and what it might achieve; of the United States he notes with approval how there are 'very few illiterates' in the northern states, and comments on how small its army of only 25,000 men is.

I didn't notice him saying anything about the Falklands. Of course, presuming they're 'as British as Whitehall', as I've been told, I'd expect him to say something of the sort.  


Australia
And there's Australia, of course, a land of oddities...

'Though nearly as large as Europe, it has only one river of any size or importance; and that river does not reach the sea, and sometimes does not flow at all. It is full of other oddities: mammals lay eggs; cherries have their stones outside; trees shed their bark, not their leaves; quadrupeds run on two feet; flowers have no scent; and many birds no song. When the first European settlers visited the country, they found no grain to eat, no domestic animal to give milk or to drawn burdens, and not the smallest trace in the continent of what is called civilisation.' (445)

The book, predictably, has nothing good to say of the Australian aborigines. Brace yourselves:

'The native Australian is of the average European height, has a very lean body -- no calves (as is general with the dark races), nose broad and fleshy, complexion coffee-brown, much hair -- curly but not woolly, and a long narrow head with low brow. He is one of the most degraded of savages -- without house or domestic animals, with no weaving, no pottery, and no religion. His language can count up to five -- and no further. He lives on shell-fish, lizards, snakes, frogs, worms, insects, grubs, etc. He sometimes eats his own children. The chief occupation of the men is hunting and war; of the women, getting food and cooking it.' (454)

I think that's enough, don't you? You should all feel thoroughly well-informed at this point.

They Don't Teach Geography Like This Anymore - Part I

Well, like Frank Baum's Woggle Bug, I now feel Thoroughly Educated.

Having talked about geography classes and my schooldays last night, I was delighted this morning to be shown a nineteenth-century geography book, Professor J.M.D. Meiklejohn's 1890 A New Geography On The Comparative Method. It was clearly a popular tome in its day, as my friends' copy proudly boasts of being the twenty-second edition of the book. 

It is, no doubt, the sort of book with which Michael Gove would think all British students should be acquainted. 

You'll no doubt be pleased to know that the book makes sure to confirm British schoolchildren in the conviction that they are, of course, the world's luckiest children. 'The British Isles,' it announces, 'occupy the best geographical position in the world.' (24)

Where the book really shines are in its sections on national stereotypes, or as it subtitles them, 'Character and Social Condition'. Allow me...

Of the French:

'The French people consist of a mixture of races -- Celtic, Romanic, and German; and their character gives evidence of the mental habits of all three. The Frenchman is said to be light and frivolous, but in most cases he is a very serious person; brave, when he is succeeding -- but too easily depressed; very clever with his hands, and generally amiable, polite, and urbane. Intellectually, the Frenchman is famous for lucidity of thought and expression, for fine taste and eloquence of style, for suppleness and even subtlety of intelligence, and for rigour and consecutiveness in his reasoning and methods. Few nations in the world have done so much for literature and art. The Frenchman is also a lover of justice, and has a keen feeling of his own dignity and equality. The working classes, more especially the small farmers, possess the virtue of thrift in the highest degree.' (98)

If the French are seen as being something of a curate's egg, the Dutch are clearly people of whom enough good cannot be said. 

'Attacked by the sea from without, and by rivers from within; gaining land from the ocean and saving it from river-floods; daily using the powers of wind and steam against the powers of water; employing the powers of water against hostile armies; gaining land here, losing it there -- but on the whole steadily gaining; wrestling new lands and farms from the depths of the sea and the beds of lakes, and thus making the whole kingdom grow and expland; eternally on the watch against inundations, -- such is the life of the nation called the Netherlanders.' (107)

And what sort of people does such a life of maritime warfare make? 

'The Dutch character has been determined mainly by two things -- the long struggle against the Spaniards, and the perpetual struggle against water. The Dutch love freedom and are very independent; they are hard-working and thrifty; they are brave and self-possessed; and they are generous to those who have been overtaken in disaster. The Dutchman is slow in promising; but he always keeps his promise. He is slow to make up his mind; but, having once made it up, he acts with untiring energy. He has plenty of common sense, and is fond of method. Generally taciturn and thoughtful, he is boisterous in his amusements. He is fond of old customs and old costumes; and quaint distinctive dresses still linger even in the towns. His most remarkable external virtue is cleanliness.' (113)

Yes, cleanliness. This seemingly, is a matter in which the Dutch have little choice.

'Cleanliness is a passion with the Dutch; and it is forced upon them by the moistness of their climate. From morning till night scouring, rubbing, scrubbing and washing goes on. Even the barges shines with polishing, and are "as clean as a new pin". "Stables are kept with the same care as a drawing-room." Houses, barns, gates, and fences are always bright, clean, and in thorough repair.' (114)

Frankly, this is a far cry from what I learned about the Cool Temperate West Coast Climate with a continental influence, but clearly the Victorians felt confident enough to take a more subjective approach to geography. 

If there's anyone the Victorian schoolchild was called upon to admire more than the Dutch, though, is would have to have been the Germans. 

'Germany is the name of the great military power which stands in the middle of Europe, and which is the chief guardian and guarantee for peace between the large and warlike empires that flank it on three of its sides.' (139)

Two of those, it's worth remembering, would have been France and Russia. Given how things played out within a generation, I can't help feeling this has a certain ring of irony. 

Later it informs us that 'Education is compulsory throughout Germany; and the German people are, on the whole, the best-educated people in the world... The Germans, on the whole, are a straightforward, honest, steady, hard-working, brave, and loyal people. The Empire is growing rapidly in population and in wealth; and, as a military power, it is the first in the world... German belongs to the same family of languages as English. The German printed in books is High-German; English is a kind of Low-German. German is a very pure language; English is greatly mixed with Latin and French words.' (145)

The English shouldn't feel too inadequate, of course, as the book had made sure to remind them early on of their essential Germanness, pointing out how the people of England belong to the Teutonic stock of the Aryan or Indo-European family. There was Scandinavian, Celtic, and Norman-French blood in England too, of course, but even so, 'In spite of all these mixtures, the Englishman is and remains a Northern Teuton.' (37)

The Scandinavians, it's worth adding, fall into the same general category of 'people more-or-less like us':

'The Norwegians are a singularly courteous, helpful, and kindly people: they are a nation of gentlemen. They are the "English of Scandinavia," and are famous for their tenacity of will. -- The Swedes are also good-natured, polite, and hospitable -- "cheerful without excess, firm without violence;" and they are also hard-working and thrifty. The vice of both nations is intemperance.' (167)

We later hear of dirty Russian peasants and Greek schoolboys learning their pages of Homer off by heart, but Where the book really comes into its own, of course, is when it turns towards feckless Latin types. We'd had a hint of that in its ambivalence towards the French, but it's once it turns to Italy that things get really interesting. Italy, of course, is raved about, but the Italians? Well, they don't fit their stereotype, says the book, making sure to remind us what that stereotype was...

'The common notion is that they are extortioners, uncivil, given to revenge, assassination, lying, treachery, and dirt. This is a mistake. The most impartial travellers speak warmly of "the disinterested couresy, the unselfish kindness with which they have been universally treated." The genuine Italian is kind and courteous to all -- high and low, rich and poor; and his courtesy is enhanced by a wonderfully gracious, charming, and attractive manner. He is sober and thrifty, and an ardent lover -- as he cannot help being -- of his country.' (199)

And then we come to the Spaniards. 

'The peoples of Spain differ from each other as much as the climates. The Catalan is hard-working, strong-willed, sober, and thrifty; the Murcian is lazy, sleepy, and given to reverie; the Valancian is industrious, gay, and easily induced to use his knife; the Arragonese so stubborn that he "drives in nails with his head"; the Andalucian graceful, eloquent, charming in manner, fond of song and dance and colour, lazy, poor -- and content to remain so. The Galicians and Asturians are the hewers of wood and the drawers of water both for Spain and Portugal. -- The "noble science of bull-fighting" still, unhappily, continues to brutalise the emotions of the otherwise noble Spaniard. 

The siesta or afternoon sleep, is an institution in Spain. Then, every city is like a city of the dead.' (211)

So much for the highlights of Europe. If I have time, I'll tell you tomorrow all about the rest of the world.

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