On First Looking at the Marriage Consultation

So, I've been reading the Government's Equal civil marriage: a consultation. Regardless of where people stand on the issue, they should quickly realise that it's a shoddy piece of work, undermined by the fact that its authors clearly don't know what they're dealing with.

I've just been glancing through it today, and think it might be worth getting a few of my thoughts down. For future reference, if nothing else.

A Couple of Oft-Misunderstood Points

In reading it, it's crucial to remember two things.

• Weddings and marriages are not the same thing. A wedding -- otherwise referred to as a marriage ceremony -- is an event. This event gives access to marriage, that being an institution.
• There is no legal distinction between civil and religious marriages. There are legal distinctions between civil and religious marriage ceremonies, but that's it. In English law, it is legally meaningless to speak of either civil or religious marriage. There is only marriage. That's it.

Bearing that in mind, you should realise that the document is misnamed. It's impossible to speak of 'equal civil marriage' in a meaningful British context; one can only speak of 'equal marriage'. 

Of course, those of us who subscribe to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are already signed up to the concept of equal marriage; men and women, it says, have the right to marry and found a family, with both men and women being entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage, and at its dissolution.  Calling 'same-sex marriage' 'equal marriage' is an Orwellian hijacking of an established term.

And before anyone pipes up, there's a reason why both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights speak of men and women in their articles on marriage; they specifically mean that men and women have the right to marry each other.

We have to read the documents in their entirety, and not look at articles in isolation. Both documents speak of 'everyone', 'all', and 'no one' in all their other articles, but specifically refer to 'men and women' only in their articles on the right to marriage.

If that sexual complementarity wasn't important, why not just say 'everyone' again? And why link 'men and women' to the foundation of the family, that being 'the natural and fundamental group unit of society', if the Declaration isn't about how families can be naturally founded? In nature, as Camille Paglia puts it, 'procreation is the single, relentless rule'. I'm pretty sure Darwin said similar things.

There's a handy annex at the back, including all questions being asked, and it gets interesting if you edit them to reflect legal reality. Look at questions five and six, for instance.

• Question 5: The Government does not propose to open up religious marriage to same-sex couples. Do you agree or disagree?
• Question 6: Do you agree or disagree with keeping the option of civil partnerships once civil marriage is available to same-sex couples?

Yep, utter gibberish. Questions five and six make no legal sense unless the Government is planning on legislating to create new institutions called 'religious marriage' and 'civil marriage'. As it stands, there's only the one institution, which we call marriage, and which has been defined, since at least 1662, as being the union of a man and a woman primarily for the purpose of bearing and rearing children.

Should Marriage Be Redefined?

People who have issues with the whole idea of truncating the definition of marriage such that it's reduced merely to a bond of commitment between two adults, and who believe that we shouldn't be casting aside the one institution that has always upheld the ideal that children should always be raised by their mother and father, will want to pay attention to the following four questions in particular:

• Question 1: Do you agree or disagree with enabling all couples, regardless of their gender to have a civil marriage ceremony?
• Question 2: Please explain the reasons for your answer. Please respond within 150 words.*
• Question 14: Do you have any comments on the assumptions or issues outlined in this chapter on consequential impacts? Please respond within 1,225 characters (approx 200 words).
• Question 16: Do you have any other comments on the proposals within this consultation? Please respond within 1,225 characters (approx 200 words).

Granted, the Government may just smile indulgently at your concerns, as section 2.8 of the consultation document makes it clear that the Government plans on redefining marriage whether people like it or not.

Early Problems

Looking at the consultation, and bypassing the erroneous title, things get messy very quickly in the ministerial forward. Same-sex couples, we're told, have access to the same civil rights as married ones, bar the ability to be married and the ability to say they're married.

It's an odd sentence, and not merely because it wouldn't take much to say 'opposite-sex couples have access to the same civil rights as same-sex ones, bar the ability to enter into a civil partnership and the ability to say they're civil partners', which for some reason the government doesn't see as an injustice in need of rectifying.

No, as we all know, the Government's claim is not quite true. I'm pretty sure 'marriage' isn't a protected term in Britain. While they may not be able to say so for legal purposes, couples in civil partnerships regularly say that they're married, and so do lots of people when talking about them. What's being proposed here is that others should be compelled to accept that same-sex couples are married. That's a rather different thing.

And then, lest we think that that was just a slip, we see the false distinction between civil and religious marriage rearing its head before the page is out:

'That is why we are, today, launching this consultation to seek your views on how we can remove the ban on same-sex couples having a civil marriage in a way that works for everyone. We are clear that no changes will be made to how religious organisations define and solemnize religious marriages and we are clear that we will retain civil partnerships for same-sex couples.'

Obviously, I've tidied it up a bit. The 'topic' section on the next page, headed 'About this consultation', blurs issues in exactly the same way, making the law seem a lot simpler and more compartmentalised than it really is:

'This consultation seeks your views on how to provide equal access to civil marriage for same-sex couples.

The Government is focused on looking at this specific issue and is not considering wider reforms to marriage. It is therefore not considering any reforms to religious marriage. Neither does this consultation look at opposite-sex civil partnerships.'

Never forget. The State, like the Church, says marriage is just one thing. There's only one institution called marriage. It's one house which we can enter by either of two doors, not two semi-detached ones with their doors side-by-side.

Was the Government Listening?

Most of the 'Executive summary' is fair enough, though 1.4, 1.5, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10, 1.11, and 1.12 feature these absurd phrases 'civil marriage' and 'religious marriage' again and again; it falls apart at 1.7 in more ways than one.

'We have listened to those religious organisations that raised concerns about the redefinition of religious marriage. We are aware that some religious organisations that solemnize marriages through a religious ceremony believe that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. That is why this consultation is limited to consideration of civil marriage and makes no proposals to change the way that religious marriages are solemnized. It will not be legally possible under these proposals for religious organisations to solemnize religious marriages for same-sex couples. There will therefore be no obligation or requirement for religious organisations or ministers of religion to do this. It will also not be possible for a same-sex couple to have a civil marriage ceremony on religious premises. Marriages of any sort on religious premises would still only be legally possible between a man and a woman.'

Let's read that backwards, starting with the last line. Marriages on religious premises will be illegal unless they're between a man and a woman. Ah, but the government means weddings, doesn't it? Otherwise a same-sex couple, married in the eyes of the State, would cease to be married once they stepped into a church. Think about it.

Perhaps more importantly, we have that wonderful statement that the consultation is only about civil marriage and not about religious marriage, even though they're the same thing.

And oh, look at the opening statement about the religious organisations that raised concerns about religious marriage. Did they really, Theresa and Lynne, did they really? Or did they raise concerns about marriage? Because I know the Church of England understands full well that in English law, there's no such thing as religious marriage, and I can assure you that the Catholic Church does too. So did they not make themselves clear or did the Government misunderstand? What exactly is going on here?

The Heart of the Matter

I'm tired of crossing out errors, but you'll see them again at 2.1 and 2.2. More interestingly, and in support of what I've been saying, 2.4 and 2.9 say basically the same thing, which is that there's no legal distinction between civil and religious marriage; it recognises a distinction between civil and religious weddings, but marriages are all deemed identical in law. Here is how 2.4 starts:

'There is, however, no legal definition of religious and civil marriage. Marriage is defined according to where it can take place, rather than being either specifically religious or civil.'

Obviously, the second sentence should read 'Weddings are defined according to where they can take place, rather than being either specifically religious or civil', but let's stay with the key fact that there's no legal distinction between religious and civil marriages. When government ministers or advocates of redefinition speak of 'civil marriage' or 'religious marriage', they're playing further Orwellian word games, making things sound neat, tidy, and easy to change. They're trying to make the whole project of redefinition sound reasonable, and playing down the effect it will have.

Marriage is a single phenomenon, the basic building block of British society and something integral to the British legal system, referred to 3,000 times in current law, not least in the official Anglican prayerbook, which is licensed by Parliament. There's no way this is going to be straightforward.

Would the Anglicans be obliged to celebrate Same-Sex Weddings?

2.10 and 2.11 are intended to allay the fears of those who fear Anglican ministers in particular would be obliged to celebrate same-sex weddings. The problem with these two sections is that they both perpetuate the myth that civil and religious marriage are different things. Given the way equality legislation works and how there's no distinction between types of marriage in British law, I think the Anglicans can be forgiven for being rather concerned that the Government's assurances can't be worth whatever paper they're written on; all else aside, would you trust them?

Because let's not kid ourselves: there are people who would happily see Christians criminalised for their views on what marriage is.

And What of Hate Speech?

2.12 is very slippery, and worth quoting in full:

'We are also aware that the doctrines of many faiths hold the view that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, and this belief is contained within the teachings of their faith. We are clear that no one should face successful legal action for hate speech or discrimination if they preach their belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.'

Yes, those are my italics. Note the shift from 'can' to 'should'. What would happen if someone -- an Orthodox Jew, say -- were to argue not that marriages should only be between a man and a woman, but that marriages can only be between a man and a woman? What if that same Jew were to argue that the same-sex unions the government called marriages were nothing of the sort?

The rather more vague 2.39 seems to clarify this, saying that there'd be no affect on religious organisations' ability to teach and preach their beliefs on the definition of marriage. If this, rather than 2.12 is to be the guiding principle here, it seems religious bodies are to be given the right to deny the authority of the state, which is nice though an odd thing to legislate for, but I'm still not convinced it works. 

Religious organisations are one thing, but what of individual religious believers? It's worth remembering too that the European Convention on Human Rights recognises the right to manifest beliefs in worship, teaching, practice, and observance. Is the government saying we'll only have freedom in teaching?

This, I think, is where question 14 could come in handy. Might be worth asking for clarification on that one.

Should a Law be Deliberately Vague?
Marriages being essentially about ensuring the children are raised by mothers and fathers, it's always been the case in law that consummation -- the procreative act -- has been an essential part of a marriage; even now, failure to consummate a marriage is grounds for dissolution of a marriage. 2.15 says that same-sex marriages should be identical to marriages as they currently stand in law, which raises a bit of a problem...

2.16 is superbly fluffy in how it dodges the questions of what would constitute same-sex consummation and what would constitute same-sex adultery. Clearly not wanting to go near the issue of what that might mean, the Consultation farms off the questions, saying they'll be for the courts to decide down the line.

This, frankly, is irresponsible, as it means that same-sex couples won't know if their marriages are legally valid unless their sex lives are inspected in court, at which point the court will redefine what counts as consummation. Of course, since any definition of consummation that the courts come up with for same-sex couples will have to be applicable to opposite-sex ones -- all marriages being identical in the eyes of the law -- this will mean that the very notion of consummation will itself have to change for everyone.

Something of a Double Standard

2.17-20 makes it clear that civil partnerships should be maintained for same-sex couples even if same-sex marriage is introduced. On this I think Peter Tatchell has a point; it doesn't make a lot of sense to redefine marriage to allow same-sex couples to marry if we're not also to redefine civil partnerships so they can be entered into by couples of different sexes.

Indeed, a part of me is persuaded that Julie Bindel may be on the right track on this; maybe the State should just abolish marriage as a civil phenomenon, and just open up civil partnerships to everybody. That would, at least, ensure that same-sex couples would become identical in law, rather than equal, with opposite-sex ones, whilst nonetheless preserving marriage as an ideal.

I'm not convinced some of those crying out for what they see as marital equality would run with that, though. It's very easy to change things when you think doing so will have no impact on your own life, but once you've to pay a price...

There is, of course, also the question of whether society should abandon the only institution that exists so that children are raised by their mother and father, leaving it solely to religious bodies to hold forth that ideal. This, for me, is the one serious stumbling block in this idea. Marriage is a good thing, after all. We all gain from it. 

A Glitch in the Proposal

2.23 conflicts with what's previously been said 2.6 as it says that a bit of paperwork will be all that's needed for civil partnerships to be converted to marriages. Given that marriages require public vows, as described at 1.10, and how according to 2.15 the idea of this proposal is to make them identical, with both same-sex civil weddings being conducted in the same way as civil weddings are currently conducted, public vows would surely be needed. 

Which is it? Vows or paperwork? Either?

A Dose of Reality

2.36 is a bit reassuring, as the government acknowledges that not all countries will accept same-sex couples as being married. This could be messy, though it's a particular hoop that Spain, the Netherlands, and a handful of other countries have jumped already.

More interestingly, 2.37 notes that marriage is a devolved issue, so this won't apply in Scotland or Northern Ireland. 

I'm not sure if that means same-sex couples deemed married in England might find that they're not regarded as married in Scotland and Northern Ireland, or if it's simply the Government's way of telling gay couples that they'd best not even think of running off to Gretna Green.

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* Or 1,225 characters (approximately 200 words) according to the main text. I'm not sure why they can't even get this right. Were lawyers and proofreaders barred from looking at this ridiculous mess? Pathetic.

Working with Holy See towards common goals

I found very peculiar Enda Kenny’s insistence last Wednesday that the government was not for turning with regard to its decision to shut Ireland’s embassy to the Holy See, merely conceding that its stance might change if Rome were to relax its rules regarding the housing of embassies.

It’s as though the government doesn’t understand that that the point of an embassy is not to flatter the state or body to which it’s accredited, but to serve the country it represents. If Ireland’s interests are best served by having an embassy to the Holy See, there is no justification for not furthering our national interests because we don’t like the Vatican’s house rules.

The Taoiseach’s comments seemed especially ironic given that they came within a day of Baroness Warsi, the Muslim co-Chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party, having led a delegation to the Vatican where she outlined the importance of the UK’s diplomatic relationship with the Holy See.

Hailing the Holy See’s vast global reach, she explained that it made perfect sense for London and Rome to work together “to promote democracy, to fight for human rights, to encourage fair and responsible trade, to tackle climate change, and to help build stable nations.”

It’s hardly surprising that Britain should seek to realise her interest in areas of such immense global importance by building on her relationship with the Holy See in order to benefit the whole world. Baroness Warsi said that it was Britain’s hope that other countries would be inspired to work with the Holy See in a similar way, acting together in areas of common interest so that the global reach of the Catholic Church could further serve the common good.

Amplifier

This is often forgotten in discussions about whether or not Ireland should have a specific embassy for the Holy See; we understand that Rome is a superb listening post, but too frequently ignore how it can be an even more powerful amplifier. Ireland is a small country, but Rome can give us a big voice; we should be glad that Britain is seeking to remind us of this.

The rest of Baroness Warsi’s speech, engaging with the Pope’s Westminster Hall speech of September 2010, has proven far more contentious.

Addressing a throng of dignitaries Benedict XVI had spoken of freedom of conscience, the relationship of faith and reason, the need for ethical foundations for economic activity, and the vital contribution religion makes to civil discourse. In particular he warned against the marginalisation of religion in public life, and noted how religious bodies need to be free to act in accord with their own principles if they are to be empowered to serve society at large.

Baroness Warsi said she’d heeded these words, and that in order to encourage social harmony and ensure faith had its proper space in the public sphere, people need to feel stronger and more confident in their religious identities. Arguing that nations should not deny their religious heritage, she proclaimed that “Europe needs to be more confident in its Christianity”.

This might seem a strange line from a Muslim, but it’s worth remembering that the Jewish Jonathan Sacks had said something very similar only two months ago. Speaking in Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks said: “When a civilisation loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children, and their children not yet born, we – Jews and Christians, side-by-side – must renew our faith and its prophetic voice. We must help Europe recover its soul.”

Explaining how she had chosen to send her own daughter to be educated in a Christian school, knowing that she would be free to follow her faith there, Baroness Warsi went on to comment on how religious faith drives and inspires good works throughout the world.

Confident

Citing the examples of Irish nuns teaching in Pakistani Muslim communities and the response of organisations such as Caritas International to such tragedies as the Haitian earthquake and the East African famine, she recognised such ultimate enactments of the common good as expressions of strong and confident religious faith.

Stressing that such confidence in who we are and what we believe is necessary to guarantee openness and acceptance of others, she warned that the confident affirmation of religion was under threat in a variety of ways, notably from well-intentioned liberals and from those she described as “anti-religionists” who use a language of “secularist intolerance” in an attempt to eradicate religion from culture and the public square.

Leaving aside how I think true secularism allows faith a valuable space in public debate, I don’t see that our confidence should really be shaken by faith-denying devotees of militant secularism, however intolerant.

Puritanical atheists may be loud of voice, but they are very few in number. On the same day as Baroness Warsi’s speech, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science published the results of a survey finding that only 6 per cent of people in the UK disbelieve in God. Britain’s National Secular Society has no more members than the British Sausage Appreciation Society. Fewer people have paid to join Atheist Ireland than worship in my home parish on a typical Sunday.

Grandstanding gadflies like John Colgan and Clive Bone may irritate, but in themselves they’re of little import. The DPP is bound to dismiss as vexatious Colgan’s complaint that a homily by Bishop Philip Boyce constituted incitement to hatred, while contrary to how the National Secular Society has spun the decision, the English High Court only supported on technical grounds Bone’s case against Bideford Town Council starting meetings with prayers.

With regard to Mr Bone’s substantive argument that his human rights were being compromised by having to sit through others’ prayers, Mr Justice Ouseley was dismissive: “I cannot see that his freedom of religion, thought or conscience is infringed by the degree of embarrassment he feels, which is no more than is inherent in the exercise by the others of their freedom to manifest their religious beliefs, and his freedom to stay without participating or to leave. It is their freedom which would be infringed were he right.”

-- From The Irish Catholic, 23 February 2012

Ireland's Grey Lady is long past her prime...

It seems Patsy McGarry’s up to his old tricks again. Hardly a column of his goes by without me staring in astonishment. I know I should be used to it by now, but I'm hope over experience personified; it means I spend a lot of my life in a state of profound disappointment.

Look at today’s, and start with the title.

‘Lack of Vatican Co-operation over Child Abuse led to Closure of Embassy’

Interesting, isn’t it? It seems Patsy has embraced the growing consensus that rejects the Irish Government’s claim that economic motives were behind the decision to shut the embassy to the Holy See.

Granted, I don’t think that’s quite what he says in the column, but he’s not far off it, and Patsy’s editor can be forgiven for thinking that was his point. After all, columnists rarely get to decide the titles that head their work; this would have been an editorial decision. Of course, that invites the question of whether the Irish Times editorial team thinks the Government are lying. 

Patsy, as you’d expect, isn’t happy that people aren’t pleased about this. Perhaps he doesn’t see the value in the State having a real diplomatic presence in one of the nodal points of global diplomacy. Perhaps he doesn’t think the State should be seeking to enlist the help of the Holy See and some of the world’s largest NGO’s in achieving our supposed foreign policy aims regarding development, debt relief, conflict resolution, justice, and the environment.  Perhaps he just doesn’t care. 

It’s nonsense for Patsy to wheel out Malta as an example of a country that doesn’t have a resident embassy to the Holy See; he might be right, but only if he thinks our ambitions shouldn’t exceed those of a country barely a third of the size of County Louth and with far fewer people than County Cork.

Criminality?

Undermining our global diplomatic aims is fully justified, Patsy seems to be saying, because the Holy See undermined two Irish national investigations into criminality in the Irish Church. 

He’s referring to the two Murphy reports, of course, into how allegations of clerical child abuse were handled by the institutions of the Church and the State in the Archdiocese of Dublin between 1975 and 2004 and in the diocese of Cloyne between 1996 and 2009.

If you’ve read the reports even half as thoroughly as me, you’re probably blinking in astonishment.  Was either the Dublin Report or the Cloyne Report an investigation of criminality? If so, why on earth haven’t there been any prosecutions of the various bishops, priests, policemen, or staff of the national health service who the reports described as mishandling abuse allegations*

Is Patsy saying that these were investigations into criminality, and that no evidence of criminality was found? Is that the Irish Times’ line on this? 

The Cloyne Report doesn’t even consider the question of whether the law of the land was broken. With reference to the Church, the Murphy Commission examined whether abuse allegations received by the diocese of Cloyne between 1996 and 2009 were handled in regard to the diocese’s own internal rules.  Internal rules, mind, not the law of the land. Criminality wasn’t under investigation into any sense.

If McGarry genuinely believes that it was, and if the Irish Times does likewise, then I think it’s time to acknowledge that the title ‘Ireland’s Newspaper of Record’ is up for grabs.

Myths about Rome...

Aside from falsely claiming that the Murphy investigations were investigations of criminality, McGarry goes on to repeat a couple of long-discredited canards. 

Firstly we hear of how the Holy See refused to cooperate with the Murphy Commission's Dublin inquiry. As has been established for some time, the Holy See did nothing of the sort. The Commission wrote to Rome asking for assistance, and Rome contacted the State asking for communications on this matter to go through the usual diplomatic channels.

Accepting that the Holy See was fully entitled to ask that this request be handled properly rather than in an ad hoc way, the State informed the Murphy Commission of Rome’s response, and the Commission decided not to pursue the matter. Rome subsequently asked the State whether its message had been passed on, and was told that it had been. 

Rome was quite willing to cooperate; it was the Murphy Commission that chose not to avail itself of whatever help Rome could offer. If Rome didn’t know that the Murphy Commission couldn’t use the normal channels because it was also investigating the State – a dubious assumption on the part of the Commission – this was because neither the Commission nor the State informed them of this. The fault, on this, lay entirely with us.

Then we hear of the Nunciature refusing to cooperate with the Cloyne inquiry. Nonsense again. Murphy wrote to the Nunciature asking for whatever documents it held on matters relating to abuse allegations in Cloyne. The Nunciature replied saying that it held no documents as it did not deal with such matters, but that the diocese would have all relevant data and was bound to comply with the law on this.

It’s completely true that the Nunciature doesn’t deal with abuse allegations, and thus couldn’t be of assistance in supplying documents. As for the diocese, the Cloyne Report acknowledges that unlike the HSE, it handed over everything, including legally privileged copies of documents that were sent to Rome.

That’s important to note, conspiracy theorists and paranoid anti-Catholics: Rome doesn’t have secret files on abuse cases; it has copies of files that are held in dioceses, and it only has them if the dioceses bother to send them to Rome. 

As the substance of both the Dublin and Murphy reports makes clear, for far too long, dioceses tended to avoid submitting anything in connection with abuse to Rome, preferring instead to handle or mishandle allegations at a local level. 

The Cloyne Report mentions only a handful of allegations ever being passed on to Rome, all bar one of those being submitted in the month before Bishop John Magee, after a quiet private discussion with then then Nuncio, ‘resigned’. The only report submitted to Rome before this – which happened to be in connection with the only Cloyne priest ever found guilty of any form of sexual abuse, for which he received a two-year suspended sentence – is dealt with comprehensively in the Report because the diocese cooperated fully, as the Nunciature had said it would.

How does McGarry characterise the actions of Rome in all this?

‘That was how the Holy See treated two inquiries set up by our government to investigate the gravest of abuses of thousands of Irish children by priests. It ignored them.’

Firstly, it didn’t ignore the investigations. Secondly, neither inquiry investigated even one case of abuse. The remit of the two investigations was, quite simply, to investigate how abuse allegations had been handled. It had no remit whatsoever to consider whether any abuse actually took place.

 

It did, obviously, and on a terrible scale in Dublin as shown by the Dublin report. But the abuse of thousands of children? No, Patsy, not even close. Hell, despite all the claims in the Cloyne Report, only two priests cited in it were ever charged in court. One pleaded guilty to acts committed with a teenage boy, and received a two-year suspended sentence; the other has been acquitted twice.

There’s no sense in which the Holy See can credibly be said to have obstructed the Murphy investigations, neither of which were into criminality. Things have got to a bad place when a still fairly well-regarded paper perpetuates such myths and does so with such determination.

And there's the subtitle...

And then, of course, there’s the most poisonous part of the whole article, with Patsy saying that now the furore over Cloyne has died down, craven defenders of the indefensible  are crawling out of the woodwork:

‘Then there are the usual suspects, lay voices who make a living from defending the institutional church when it is safe to do so, when outrage is settling after the Cloyne report.

It was the same after the Ferns, Ryan and Murphy reports. Their immediate reaction is practised horror. Then, with time, they’re back to their slithering ways, diluting truth, minimising the wreckage, playing it all down.’

Ironically, much the same thing could be alleged about Patsy, to judge by his comments at the time Father Kevin Reynolds' innocence was established, hanging his head on behalf of his too keen media colleagues, only for him but moments later to stick on the same scratched record he's been playing for years. Indeed, the line about lay Catholics making a living from defending the Church is a bit rich coming from an agnostic who paints himself as an expert on the Church and who as far as I can see makes a living out of attacking it  Perhaps most importantly, it’s also demonstrable nonsense. 

Who could he possibly mean? David Quinn? John Waters? Breda O’Brien, who he so shamefully defamed on national television a couple of months back, such that he should count himself lucky he wasn’t taken to court? The staff of the Irish Catholic?

Patsy’s surely not referring to these, all of whom were prominent in the media at the time of the Cloyne Report, condemning child abuse in Ireland while at the same time advising people to read the Cloyne Report to see what it actually said, because an injustice was being done to the Church as a whole because of the actions of John Magee and Denis O’Callaghan. 

But who, then? Who are these ‘usual suspects’? They allegedly have form for doing this. They’re people, clearly, whose names we should all know.

Why wouldn't he have named them? 

Could the Irish Times legal people have advised him against doing so, as for him to have done so would surely have constituted defamation?

Was he just rattling something off at speed, with nobody at all particularly in mind?

I honestly can't figure this one out.

You might have a better explanation. If you do, I’d be glad to hear it.


-- An edited version of this was subsequently published in The Irish Catholic, 1 March 2012

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* I'm not disputing the reality of the vast majority of allegations detailed in the reports, of course; what happened was monstrous, and it was spectacularly mishandled in disastrous ways, ways that made matters so much worse in Dublin, if not in Cloyne. I'm just saying that the reports weren't into the abuse itself, solely into how allegations were handled.

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.