Vincent and the Visitation, or Confusing Correlation with Causation

I feel uncomfortable commenting on Vincent Browne's article in today's Irish Times, because I've not read Marie Keenan's Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power and Organisational Culture. It's clearly an important book, and one I'll need to read. 

I've read mountains of statistical data and other research on abuse over the years, with special reference to Ireland and to the Church, but also more broadly, and it does seem to me that this is essential reading. I must know at least a couple of people who have copies, so perhaps I'll see if I can borrow one of theirs at some point.

That said, if Vincent Browne's representation of the book is fair, it seems to have at least one utterly colossal failing. Vincent's article consists of, in the main, two things: a potted summary of Marie Keenan's book, and a completely misguided criticism of the summary report of the recent Apostolic Visitation of the Irish Church. I'll quote his summary of Keenan's book at length:

'Clerical sexual abuse is inevitable given the meaning system that is taught by the Catholic Church and to which many priests adhere.

Contradictions in that system lead to failure, increase shame and a way of living that encourages deviant behaviour.

This is the thesis of a revealing book on sexual abuse within the church by an Irish academic and therapist who interviewed, at length, nine priests and brothers convicted of child abuse, who counselled several other clerical abusers and who undertook extensive research on the issue for her book Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power and Organisational Culture. The author is Marie Keenan of the school of applied social science at UCD.

[...]

The culture inculcated in Catholic clergy is that they are separate from other human beings because of their special “calling” from God, because of their sole capacity to administer the sacraments, to turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, because of their power to forgive sin and administer the last rites.

From the moment of their ordination they are apart, apart in the minds of other convinced Catholics and apart in their own minds. And they are also celibate, because of that “calling”. Abjuring intimate sexual relations, sublimating their sexual urges and widely admired in the communities they inhabit on account of that sublimation.

Keenan says this theology of sacrifice eclipses all human considerations. She says her argument is not that clerical celibacy is the problem but a Catholic externally-imposed sexual ethic and a theology of priesthood that “problematises” the body and erotic sexual desire and emphasises chastity and purity, over a relational ethic (how as human beings we should treat each other).

She says this theology of sexuality contributes to self-hatred, shame and a sense of personal failure on the part of some priests.

This tension is often exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness on the part of many priests within a hierarchical, authoritarian church, subject to the authority of bishops or heads of religious orders, often allowing them with little sense of being in control of their own lives. And this is further added to by loneliness.

Some priests cope with this by easing off on the celibacy bit. Some ease off the celibacy bit with guilt, some with a sense of doing their best with their human frailties.

According to Keenan it is often the priests who aspire to priestly perfection and are hugely conflicted with the demands of such perfection that resort to child sexual abuse, usually, she says, not opportunistically, but consciously and deliberately over time. And this seems to be confirmed by other research.

Moreover, in many ways, the release of the confessional – the opportunity to dispel guilt in a secret ritual – compounds the problem. The “external” imposition (by the church) of the priestly ethic, rather than the cultivation of an internal ethic, also contributes to the propensity to abuse; for the construction of an internal ethic involves reflection on the impact of one’s conduct on the lives of others and that seems to have been missing in the make-up of many of the clerical abusers.'

While I've no doubt that there is something to this analysis, I don't see that it can possibly make sense. The statistics don't allow for it, as two considerations should make clear.

Firstly, clergy seem to abuse at a rate that is no higher and that may be significantly lower than the general male population. Yes, we all know that abusive clergy and those who've protected them and callously or naively facilitated their activities have done a nightmarish amount of harm, but the fact remains that in Ireland, clerical abuse is but the tip of a massive national iceberg of sexual abuse. The 2002 SAVI report found that for every person abused by a priest, 59 people were abused by people who weren't clergy. As Fintan O'Toole has said, the sex abuse scandal in Ireland has nothing to do with Catholicism.

Secondly, insofar as Catholic clergy have abused children, they don't seem to have abused at a more-or-less uniform rate. In America it seems about 4% of clergy have been subject to credible abuse allegations, and according to the first Murphy Report, accusations may have been levied at as many as 6% of priests who served in Dublin from the 1940s on. Damning though these figures are, it's striking that accusations seem only to have been levied at 0.6% of Catholic priests in England and Wales; given that the theology of the priesthood is no different in England than in Ireland, one wonders why Irish clergy seem to have been ten times more likely to abuse, or be accused of abuse, than their English brethren. 

It really looks to me as though Marie Keenan's book, at least as represented by the likes of Vincent Browne, eschews statistics for anecdotes, begs a few questions, and above all confuses correlation with causation.

On the Visitation

As for the rest of Vincent's article, well, it seems as though he rather missed the point of the Visitation, which was never intended to focus on the precise issue of abuse. Rather, it's worth revisiting how Benedict first announced plans for the Visitation, in his 19 March 2010 letter to the Catholics of Ireland:

'Furthermore, having consulted and prayed about the matter, I intend to hold an Apostolic Visitation of certain dioceses in Ireland, as well as seminaries and religious congregations. Arrangements for the Visitation, which is intended to assist the local Church on her path of renewal, will be made in cooperation with the competent offices of the Roman Curia and the Irish Episcopal Conference.'

The purpose of the Visitation was to help the Irish Church towards  renewal. It would hardly within the remit of the Visitation to consider how society treats priests who had been found guilty of abuse or to have weighed up how the theology of the priesthood contributes towards a culture of abuse when the statistical evidence suggests it does no such thing. 

It should be recognised, though, that the Visitation clearly looked into the Church's current safeguarding procedures and found that they're up to scratch now. Of course, we know that; the Cloyne Report found that the Church's child protection policies are superior to those of the State, and on the basis of the various reports Ian Elliott had conducted into how those procedures are being implemented, it seems that Cloyne had been the weak link in an otherwise -- if belatedly -- strong chain.

That said, it is hugely unfair of Vincent to have said, as he did:

'In general there seems to be little interest in why this clerical abuse has occurred and what it is within the Catholic culture that has engendered it. The dismissive explanation that it is all due to the "flawed" personalities of the abusers ignores the cultural and formative factors that at least contributed to the phenomenon.'

Over the last day or so I've heard no shortage of snorting and sneering about the summary's focus on seminaries and the issue of fidelity to the teaching of the Church. The fact is that these are crucial to ensuring that the Church is renewed in Ireland and that abominations like the abuse scandal don't happen afresh. It's clear that both selection and priestly formation must have been deficient in the past, and there is widespread dissent from the teaching of the Church, not least among the clergy.

There's a sense in which there's a straightforward equation at work. Careful selection and better formation should lead to better priests, and better priests will be less likely to abuse, better equipped to deal with allegations of misconduct of whatever form, and better able to minister to their people.

The Visitation also addresses the issue of clericalism when it talks of a new focus on the role of the laity; it's asking ordinary Irish Catholics to step up to play a responsible, faithful, informed, and active role in the Church, rather than being passive figures.

The Summary should be recognised as being but a summary; it deals in broad brush strokes when it says that if we want a better Church we need a better clergy and a better laity, and while it hints at how these can be achieved, it doesn't dwell on detail. We can assume the detail is, has been, and will be a matter of serious discussion. Matters will become more clear.

In the meantime, we shouldn't be criticising the Visitation's summary for not being something it was never meant to be.

Leaving aside the Question of Whether there were Two Patricks...

Given previous posts arguing that Saint Patrick was a serious contender for the title of the Greatest Ever Briton, commenting on the impact he and other missionaries had on Britain and mainland Europe, pointing out that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles didn't get his legend quite right, and linking to a painting by the Brother of the mountain most closely linked with our first national saint, I was a bit of a loss as to what to say today.

And then I saw this story. It seems to be everywhere today.

Seemingly a Cambridge academic named Roy Flechner has announced that Patrick almost certainly fled to Ireland to shirk an inherited and unpopular career as a tax collector, and that while in Ireland, far from being a slave, he surely acted as a slave trader.  

It’s impossible to evaluate Flechner’s claims properly based on the various newspaper reports, as while they all say that Dr Flechner's published his research today, not one of them says where Flechner’s research can be found. I have no idea whether it’s in a journal or is a book in its own right. It seems that no journalists have done their job on this one. 

This Year's Fable

As much as it can constructed, Flechner’s thesis seems to be as follows:

Everything we can say with any confidence about Patrick is based on what Patrick himself told us; as such, we can’t take it at face value, not least because of the two extant documents written by Patrick – his Letter to Coroticus and his Confession –  the second seems to have been written in response to allegations of financial impropriety. 

(I'd also point out that the reference in it to spending 28 days crossing uninhabited country is most implausible, but let that go.)

The Letter says that Patrick’s father had been a decurion, an unpopular civil service position largely charged with tax collection, but the Confession refers to him as a deacon. Flechner argues that in Patrick’s lifetime Roman government was collapsing, which would have made it difficult and perhaps dangerous to discharge the duties of a decurion, and so became a deacon instead, passing on his decurial duties to his son.

Flechner takes the view that Patrick’s claim that he was kidnapped from Britain in his adolescence, forced to work as a slave, escaped after six years and returned to his home where he reclaimed his status should be regarded as fiction, an attempt at promoting and perpetuating his own image.

Escaped slaves, says Flechner, existed outside the law and could be killed with impunity or recaptured by anyone. What’s more, he says, ‘the probability Patrick managed to cross from his alleged place of captivity in western Ireland back to Britain undetected, at a time when transportation was extremely complicated, is highly unlikely.'

Instead, he reckons Patrick actually left Britain for Ireland as he wanted to escape the ‘poisoned chalice of his inherited position in Roman Britain’, and that he probably brought family wealth – in the form of slaves – with him to Ireland, becoming a slave trader before becoming a priest and missionary in his own right.

Now, I agree completely with Flechner that his thesis has the advantage of being free from the hagiographic reverence that has often vitiated attempts to retell Patrick’s story over the years, but I can’t help feeling that his thesis doesn’t quite work.

Patrick's Journey Home

The reference to Patrick feeling from his place of captivity in western Ireland leaves me uneasy, for starters. There’s nothing in either of Patrick’s writings that says where he was kept as a slave, barring a reference in the Confession to the journey from his place of captivity to the port from which he set sail from Ireland being about two hundred miles. Tradition, for what it's worth, has always said that Patrick's place of captivity was at Slemish in County Antrim. Yes, that’d be in north-eastern Ireland, not in western Ireland.

Here’s a painting of it by the Brother, if you’re interested. Not a bad spot, eh? I can think of worse places to be forced to work as a shepherd, even in snow, in icy coldness, and in rain.

Look at the Brother's site to look at it in gorgeous colour.

As for the difficulty Flechner envisaged Patrick would have had crossing the country, well, even if we discount the possibility of miraculous assistance, we still have to recognise that much of Ireland at the time was a land of forest and bog; it would have been dangerous to cross, but such inhospitable terrain would have been ideal country for runaways. I'm not saying the journey would have been easy, but it'd have been far from impossible.

He could have made it to the coast, and once there, who would have known he was a runaway slave unless he had somehow been branded to that effect? If he got home, is it really tenable that his own people would have sent him back as he hadn't been redeemed? That, after all, seems to be the implication of Flechner's claim that:

'The traditional story that Patrick was kidnapped from Britain, forced to work as a slave, but managed to escape and reclaim his status, is likely to be fiction: the only way out of slavery in this period was to be redeemed, and Patrick was never redeemed.'

I'm not saying Patrick might not have had to redeem himself to his former owner if he ever found himself in and around Slemish when he returned to Ireland as a mercenary, just that he says nothing either way on that subject; there's no evidence whatsoever to claim that Patrick was never redeemed.

The End of Rome

I’m also troubled by the assumption that in a situation where Roman authority and law was collapsing it would obviously have been the case that Patrick’s father Calpurnius’ decurial duties would have been passed on to Patrick when Calpurnius became a deacon. 

Partly I’m bothered by the improbability of such obligations being passed on to a teenage boy – for Flechner’s thesis to work, I think Patrick would have had had to have been an adult when his father became a deacon. That’s a change to Patrick’s chronology that wouldn’t be without repercussions.

I’m also bothered by the fact that Flechner seems to be glossing over how Patrick claimed in the first lines of his Confession that not merely was his father a deacon, but his grandfather Potitus was a priest:

‘I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many, had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement [vicus] of Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age.’

It looks as though the priesthood was very much a family business for Patrick, and I’d be wary of putting too much weight on the reference in the Letter that says ‘by descent I was a freeman, born of a decurion father’.

More troubling still is the fact that Flechner seems to think that Patrick left Britain for Ireland at a time when Roman authority was collapsing. Traditional dating being unreliable, modern historians generally think Patrick was active as a missionary during the second half of the fifth century and so it seems unlikely that he can have been born much before 400 AD. 

So what? Well, Roman rule ended in northern and western Britain in the late fourth century, and ended in Britain as a whole in the early fifth century. Patrick was almost certainly from western Britain, somewhere between the Severn and the Clyde estuaries, so the likelihood is that Roman rule had ended at Bannavem Taburniae before Patrick was even born. 

Think about that. During the late Empire, decurions were tasked with collecting taxes on a local basis on behalf of the imperial government, but if Roman rule didn't apply in Bannavem Taburniae during Patrick's youth, then why on earth would his father have been expected to collect taxes? For whom? And is it even vaguely tenable that Patrick would have inherited such a pointless duty?

The fact is that Flechner has no more data to go on than anybody else, and that he's reading more into the sources than is actually there.

Surely, the most natural reading of the two documents is that Patrick's family were minor local aristocracy – the so-called decurion class – but that, given the collapse of Roman administration, they abandoned their previous decurial duties and took up ecclesiastical roles instead. It's wholly plausible that Patrick was one of the many Romanised Britons who were captured in Irish raids on the British coast, and that he spent years as a slave, before escaping, making his way to the coast and somehow being able to board a ship away from Ireland, eventually returning to Britain.

Don't believe me, though. There are children you can listen to instead.

Commonwealth Fantasies

There was an annoying article in last Friday's Daily Mail in which David Burnside MLP, formerly Ulster Unionist MP for South Antrim, argued that it was time for Ireland to rejoin the Commonwealth of Nations, formerly known as the British Commonwealth. This, he claimed, would be good for Ireland and good for the Commonwealth as a whole, as well as a wonderful present to Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of her sixty years on the throne.

Putting aside what we might think of Burnside's thesis, it's worth addressing some of his historical errors.

1. 'Relations between the Irish Republic and the UK were at their lowest ever point in the last third of the twentieth century because of the troubles.'

Is it really credible to decribe a 33-year period as a 'point', especially when the Republic of Ireland hasn't yet existed for 63 years?

Perhaps Burnside means that the specific lowest point in relations between Britain and Ireland since the Republic of Ireland act came into force occurred during that 33-year period. This is certainly an arguable claim, given that the most obvious challengers for the title of 'lowest point in relations between independent Ireland and the UK' -- the Economic War and the Emergency -- took place while Ireland was still a dominion.

2. 'Ministers in Charles Haughey’s Government shamefully helped to found and fund the Provisional IRA.'

Given that the Provisional IRA was founded in 1969, and that Haughey did not head a government until 1979, this statement doesn't quite add up.

Nonetheless, it's possible to see what Burnside is getting at, albeit in a muddled way. In 1970, during the so-called 'Arms Crisis', Haughey and Neil Blaney were both sacked from Jack Lynch's government for allegedly attempting to arm the Provisional IRA. The matter went to court, with Blaney being acquitted on 2 July 1970 and Haughey on 23 October 1970. I'm not saying the lads were innocent by any means, but I don't think anyone can claim with any degree of historical honesty that they were arming the IRA. We just don't know. 

3. 'The Republic continued its imperialistic, constitutional claim over Northern Ireland as an integral part of the Irish Republic, gave succour and support to IRA terrorism and refused to extradite murderers across the border to stand trial for their crimes.'

That the Republic, under the old articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution, laid claim to Northern Ireland can hardly be disputed.

Whether it gave succour and support to IRA terrorism is probably a matter of debate, although a fair analysis of the subject would have to recognise that Provisional IRA never accepted the legitimacy of the Irish State, that IRA membership was illegal throughout the Troubles as it is now, and that between 1971 and 1993 it was illegal under section 31 of the Broadcasting Act for Sinn Féin members to speak on Irish airwaves in any capacity.

It is true that extradition warrants for terrorist offences were regularly turned down during the Troubles, either because their offences were recognised as having been politically motivated, or because in many case there was a concern that the accused would not receive a fair trial or would be mistreated in prison. Between 1972 and 1990, for instance, only 7 of 112 extradition requests were granted, with 41 being refused.

4. 'The Belfast Agreement brought the Irish Republic in from the cold.'

This statement is perhaps too nebulous to challenge, but I do not think many people would argue that Ireland had been a pariah state prior to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Even in terms of dealings with the United Kingdom over Northern Ireland the position is scarcely sustainable; it's important to note how Burnside omits 1985's Anglo-Irish Agreement from his thesis.

5. 'Britain’s recent £7bn loan to Dublin in the Republic’s hour of need as it faced the eurozone meltdown underlines Britain’s commitment to Ireland, her closest neighbour.'

This is true, as far as it goes, but it's somewhat disingenuous to paint this as an act of altruism. The Mail itself reported in November 2010 that British banks -- and by extension British taxpayers -- were owed £88bn by Irish banks. The British State loaned money to the Irish State so that Ireland could repay money Irish banks owed British ones. And that's not even getting into how much money British banks were owed by continental ones, with them fearing an Irish collapse could bring down the entire Eurozone, washing them away in the financial tsunami that would follow.

6. 'Last year’s Royal visit to the Irish Republic, with all the symbolism it contained - the Queen's visit to the Gardens of Remembrance for both British servicemen and also Irish Republicans who died during the War of Independence...'

The first of the two memorial gardens the Queen visited when in Ireland was the Garden of Remembrance. This is not merely a memorial to those Irish Republicans who died during the War of Independence; it is a memorial to all those who died in the cause of Irish freedom, including the rebels of 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, 1916, and the War of Independence.

The Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge, the second memorial garden the Queen visited, is not a memorial garden for British servicemen. It pays no homage to the men of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire who were slain at the Battle of Mount Street Bridge, for instance, nor to those Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen who fell at Gallipoli.

Rather, the garden is a memorial to all those Irish who fell in World War One, in whatever army -- most served in the army of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of course, but others served in the American army, and yet more served in the armies of such British dominions as Canada and Australia.

The Great Cross of Sacrifice also bears the dates of the Second World War, so the gardens also operate as a memorial to all those Irish who fought and died as Irish servicemen in British or other uniforms during that struggle.

7. 'The old Fianna Fail Republicanism of De Valera, who withdrew the Irish Republic from the Commonwealth after the Second World War, should now be replaced by the independent Irish Republic rejoining the Commonwealth, where many thousands if not millions of Commonwealth citizens of Irish descent now live.'

It was John A. Costello, and not Éamon de Valera, who withdrew the Republic from the Commonwealth. Costello was Taoiseach from 1948 to 1951; it was under him that the Republic of Ireland Act was signed into law in December 1948 and came into force in April 1949. By becoming a republic we automatically left the Commonwealth; the British changed the rules a few days later, and de Valera took the government of the day to task for not applying to rejoin once it was possible to do so. I think Burnside's done him an injustice here.

Burnside's claim that thousands if not millions of Commonwealth citizens are of Irish descent is, of course, a colossal understatement. It is estimated that as many as six million people in the UK alone have at least one Irish grandparent, and this is without considering those of deeper ancestry, not to mention all those in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.

It's certainly arguable that David Burnside might well be right that Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth; the same can hardly be said of the arguments he puts forward in support of his case.

And yes, I know, there are probably better ways to spend my time than explaining why somebody in the Daily Mail is wrong. Still, what's done is done.

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.

_______________________________________________________

* 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

_______________________________________________________________

* 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.