Some People Disagree With You. Get Over It.

I was on telly on Tuesday morning, appearing live for my first time ever, and discussing something rather more controversial than Roman combat techniques,* this being same-sex marriage. It was terrifying, and I wasn’t very good, but I don’t think it was a disaster, and I’ll surely get better.

And, barring that moment before the first question where I thought ‘what if I freeze?’ and the sleepless night beforehand, I enjoyed it. The telly certainly added the proverbial ten pounds, though, distributing it evenly around my head. I clearly need a haircut.

Thankfully my Stonewall counterpart was as reasonable as he was likeable, and avoided the clichéd attacks on religion that have become so tedious in the current climate. I've gotten rather tired lately of hearing people say 'You only say that because you're Catholic.'

It's often not true, it's something other people couldn't possibly know, it's based on an unfounded assumption of unadulterated and utterly impartial rationality on the part of the person saying it, and frankly, even if it were true, so what? After all, unless people are saying that Catholics shouldn't be allowed play a part in the political process, what's their point?

Playing a part in the political process...

When Catholic Voices was established, I was delighted. I was tired of people misrepresenting the Church, and fed up with lazy media myths being propagated by Pavlovian dogs who drool on hearing anything bad about religion.

Christians should play a full and active part in political debate, just like everybody else, and I believe they should do so honestly and openly. We all have to live together, and we need to figure out a way of doing this, and I really think we can only figure this out in a way that'll work if we all put our cards on the table.

Obviously, I didn't apply to join Catholic Voices the first year as it was London-centred at that point, but did the second time out once the net was thrown further afield. The mock-interview in the interview was to be on Same-Sex Marriage, and my heart sank when I realised this. Although I had several serious concerns about SSM being introduced, the thought of arguing against it just felt mean.

The night before the interview I rang a very close friend who has been heavily involved in gender/sexuality-related politics ever since her first year in university. Her record of walking the walk rather than just talking the talk clearly marked her out as an ideal person to consult on this.

(She's also thoughtful, wise, kind, genuinely open-minded, fiercely intelligent, and somebody for whom I'd run through walls. She is, in short, one of the very best people I've ever known, and someone I love very deeply.)

She was okay with me getting involved and doing this; I'm not saying was was entirely comfortable with it, but she was okay with it. She disagrees with me, but she knows full well that there's not a homophobic bone in my body and can see that my concerns about what's on the table aren't coming from a bad place, instead being rooted in deeply-held convictions about the good of society as a whole and the rights of everyone.

I think that may be what’s most upset me about those lazily convinced that only homophobia or bigotry can explain opposition to marriage being redefined. If you think that, it's pretty obvious that you don't know me, and it might be worth looking in the mirror and asking yourself a simple question: 'what were you doing to campaign for this change two or three or four years ago?' 

Two years ago this wasn't on the political radar. It was at most an irrelevance and a distraction from the real issues affecting gay people in Britain: homophobic bullying, say, or the heartbreaking problems that face gay people if, getting old, they end up in nursing homes, and find themselves having to go back in the closet just to get some peace . Those things matter.

Anybody who wasn't campaigning for same-sex marriage before the ConDems plonked it onto the political agenda last Autumn was evidently none too bothered by the status quo, and should just admit it.

They may have changed their mind since, which is fine, but nobody should be getting indignant about others not having done so unless they’ve worked to change things. And I mean ‘worked'. I don't mean smug little pleasantries over coffee or dinner or drinks with friends. That’s just patting oneself on the back for being 'liberal'.

What's interesting about this is that I've found that my friend’s attitude isn't unusual among those who've actually tried to make a difference. While I’ve disagreed with several same-sex marriage advocates on air, we’ve also agreed on huge amounts while talking among ourselves, not least our conviction that grown-ups can disagree about this.

The problem is where inflammatory language is used, and it's been used on both sides; most of those sanctimonious keyboard warriors hurling around accusations of bigotry are folk who were warming a couch two years ago.

So, where do I stand?

What do I think? In the first place I think that gay people should have exactly the same rights as everybody else -- it's really as simple as that. 

I also believe, however, that words have meanings, institutions have purposes, different situations need to be dealt with in different ways, and that the right of conscience may be -- excepting the right to life -- the most important right we have.

It baffles me to see people wading into this dispute without knowing how UK law defines marriage, or grasping that weddings and marriages are different things, or understanding the differences in law between marriages and civil partnerships.

There's really only ever been one argument I've experienced in favour of introducing same-sex marriage, this being that it would have symbolic value. Supposedly civil partnerships are seen as 'second-class marriages', and this isn't fair. I really don't think this approach holds together, not least because people don't look down on civil partnerships. Indeed, a recent nationwide poll found that most gay people aren't persuaded by the claims made by the likes of Stonewall on this front.

I can't understand same-sex marriage advocates insulting civil partnerships as they do. Civil Partnerships haven't been around for long, but even in the few years that they've existed they've been a huge success, giving same-sex couples the same legal rights and responsibilities as married ones. Many people even regard them as marriages, and if our language is to change that’s how the change should happen: organically, from below, rather than by government diktat from above.

All else aside, this would set a very dangerous precedent. Are people really happy to have government redefine language in order to bring about something they'd like, even if by doing so they grant government power to redefine language to bring about something they'd dislike? 

That part of the debate worries me immensely. Gay couples already call themselves married, and plenty of people describe them as such; the government isn't considering 'allowing same-sex couples to say that they're married', but is instead considering changing the law so that everybody shall be obliged to agree that same-sex couples are married. This is a very different thing, and it will affect everybody.

I have issues too with how undemocratic this whole project is. In the UK in general the long-established parliamentary process for changing laws, especially important ones – identifying a problem, then a green paper followed by a white paper then finally legislation – has been utterly pushed aside in what looks like a clear attempt to railroad something though parliament. Something, it’s worth adding, that was wholly absent from the manifestos of all three parties in the 2010 election.

As for Scotland, if we look at the SNP Manifesto, all we’ll see is the following innocuous sentence:

‘We recognise the range of views on the questions of same-sex marriage and registration of civil partnership. We will therefore begin a process of consultation and discussion on these issues.’

I don't think governments should even think of changing something so important without a clear popular mandate to do so, and I don’t think vague manifesto commitments to consult on things count as binding pledges to legislate, leaving aside how in the 2011 election, the Scots weren’t given the option of voting for a credible party that wasn't proposing to consult on these matters!**

What difference would it make?

I think there'll be long-term consequences for society in general, of course: we can scarcely abandon the idea that it's a good idea to have a public institution dedicated to upholding the principle that every child should grow up with the love of a mother and of a father without there being some impact. That said, I wouldn't rush to speculate on what these long-term consequences would be. I prefer to leave dystopian fantasies to the dystopian fantasists.

More immediately, there will be very serious repercussions on religious freedom, all of which shall work themselves out through case law. Timothy Radcliffe pointed out some months ago that it's not so much that the Catholic Church is opposed to same-sex marriage, as that it believes it to be impossible. Britains’ other main religious bodies would likewise be unable to accept the proposed innovation. Among the most likely repercussions would be...

1. There's a good chance that church weddings will become a thing of the past, as the ECtHR says countries cannot facilitate same-sex marriage selectively: if marriage is to be open to all couples it must be open to all couples in the same way, and as most churches, mosques, and synagogues won't be able to offer same-sex marriage ceremonies, the likelihood is that they'll have to stop registering marriages altogether.

Government assurances on this are worthless, based as they are on the fallacy that UK law recognises things called 'civil marriage' and 'religious marriage'. It doesn’t. It recognises just one thing, called ‘marriage’, which is entered into through ‘marriage ceremonies’ – or weddings, if you like – which can be religious or civil in nature. It’s one room with two doors.

2. Churches and other religious bodies might well find themselves barred from manifesting their faith on this issue; the English consultation proposes guaranteeing the churches’ right to teach what marriage should be, but that's hardly the issue. The churches are very clear on what marriage is, and the right to teach that won't be protected; indeed, traditional church teaching would become utterly contrary to UK law.

This would have practical consequences for education, catechesis, and even things such as marriage counselling and the hiring out of church properties, as well as in connection with hate speech legislation. Lest that seem hysterical, we need but look at the Canadian experience over recent years.

3. In England, if not Scotland, a key effect would be the serious undermining of the Church of England, with whatever knock-on effects that would have on the UK constitution. To introduce same-sex marriage in England would entail changing or removing the licence from the official Anglican prayerbook, setting the Church of England on the road to disestablishment.

Naturally, this would have consequences for the monarchy, and thus the whole constitutional settlement. These might be good things, but I think all grown-ups should be able to agree that they should be enacted on their own terms, and not as mere side-effects.

For example, Catholics are technically third-class citizens in Britain, the only people explicitly banned from marrying into the line of succession. In a constitutional sense, we're inferior to Scientologists, Atheists, Mormons, and Muslims. Obviously, all those groups are constitutionally inferior to Anglicans, in that you have to be an Anglican to be head of state, but only Catholics are explicitly barred from being in the line of succession or even marriage to people in the line of succession. I'm okay with this: that symbolic imbalance isn’t so devastating in practice that the British constitutional settlement should be unwoven to suit me and my mates. 

There's an important question there. Is it right to impose real practical limitations on the rights of some people in order to give a merely cosmetic right to others?  

And all this for... what?

The right for same-sex couples to call themselves married in law would be utterly cosmetic, even more so than for the right of the occasional Catholic to marry into the line of succession. What would be gained, in reality, other than the right to use a certain word on legal documents? Would there be added respect because of this?

Those who want to call civil partnerships 'marriages' already do so. Others may well resent being compelled to do so. Indeed, a March ICM poll found that only a third of people believe that if same-sex marriages are introduced, schools should teach that they're the same as marriages as we understand them; this poll reported higher levels of support for same-sex marriage than any other polls on the subject back in the Spring.

Civil partnerships are not second-class marriages, and are not seen as such, but for lots of people, same-sex marriages would be just that. They'd be 'not really' marriages. Do we really want that? Does anyone want to engender such resentment and such a condescending attitude to gay people? I know I don’t.



_______________________________________________________________________________
* Although, frankly, in the right circles this can rouse some rather heated tempers.
** Yes, I know the Conservatives didn't propose this, but then in Scotland they're hardly a major party. Curiously, the Lib Dems are the only party that promised legislation rather than a consultation. They just twelve of their seventeen seats.

The physical presence of faith

Some years ago in a church in northern France, a friend of mine had to smother her laughter on noticing a statue of a fine-featured elderly man with a high forehead and a mane of white hair. It had never occurred to her before that St John Vianney, the Curé d’Ars, had borne an uncanny resemblance to William Hartnell, the original Doctor Who.

Having had this pointed out to me, I’ve found it next to impossible to look at pictures of the patron saint of parish priests without thinking of Gallifrey’s finest son, such that when I heard that my bishop had arranged for the heart of St John Vianney to be brought to England, my initial response was to quip “Well, one of his hearts, anyway. His other one shall presumably remain at Ars.”

Any such irreverent thoughts were banished last Thursday evening, when I joined hundreds of other Catholics at the Church of St Anthony in Wythenshawe, by Manchester airport, to pray by the heart of that nineteenth-century saint whose very existence was, in the words of Pope Benedict, “a living catechesis”, and whose priestly ministry was geared to showing that the dry rationalism so prevalent in his day was ultimately incapable of satisfying our deepest human needs.

Since then thousands more Catholics have venerated the saint’s relic at several other churches in Shrewsbury diocese, as well as in Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King and at Oscott College in Birmingham.

Veneration

Profoundly counter-cultural nowadays, despite the tens of thousands who queued in 2009 to pray alongside relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the veneration of relics is an ancient Christian practice that has long seemed jarring to English sensibilities. Ever since the destruction of the shrines of such saints as Augustine of Canterbury and Thomas Becket during the Reformation, it’s been common in England to think of the cult of the saints – especially as manifested in so concrete a way – as something as neither Biblical nor English.

That it should ever have been seen as either idolatrous or alien seems deeply ironic.

The veneration of saints’ relics dates to the dawn of Christianity. Acts 9:11-12 describes how devout Corinthian Christians would take scraps of fabric that Paul had touched and carry them to the sick, healing them. The second-century Martyrdom of Polycarp relates how the followers of John’s martyred disciple gathered up his charred bones and treasured them, using them to call to mind his heroic example, and Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome, records how even before John wrote his gospel, Rome’s Christians gathered to worship at the tombs of St Peter and St Paul.

Pilgrim Routes

The early Christians were surely inspired to do this by stories of people being healed after merely touching the fringe of Jesus’ robe, and by the story at 2 Kings 13:20-21 of how a dead man had been restored to life after his corpse had touched the bones of the prophet Elisha. More profoundly, they realised through becoming flesh, God had specially sanctified the world; it made sense that he should work through the ordinary things of the world he had made and blessed.

For a thousand years, this gritty understanding of a sacramental world would mould the English landcape. Arguably the greatest single work of English literature purports to be a collection of tales told by pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury, and such place-names as St Albans and Bury St Edmunds testify to England’s first martyr and the king who was long honoured as her patron saint. As Shrewsbury’s Bishop Mark Davies has pointed out, explaining why he sought to bring St John Vianney’s heart to England, England has a distinct “spiritual geography”, criss-crossed with pilgrim routes and dotted with shrines and relics.

Since the Reformation such sacred places have multiplied, of course, in association with such martyrs as St John Fisher, the only one of Henry VIII’s bishops who refused to accept his breach with Rome, and St Margaret Clitheroe, crushed to death beneath a door laden with rocks for refusing to plead when charged with having concealed a priest.

“Without the priest,” as St John Vianney said, “we could not access the passion and death of our Lord… of what use would be a house filled with gold, if there were no one to open its door?… leave a parish for twenty years without a priest and people will end up worshipping beasts.”

The latest of our forerunners to have been recognised as among the cloud of witnesses cheering us on is the blessed John Henry Newman, who was beatified by Pope Benedict in September 2010. While it may still be too early to say whether Pope Benedict’s visit has had a transformative effect on English Catholicism, it’s difficult to deny that things have changed over the last two years.

Papal visit

At a Mass in Manchester shortly after the Papal visit, held to celebrate the reception of one of Newman’s few relics, it was observed that English Catholicism had dropped the ball after Pope John Paul II’s 1982 visit, but that there was no excuse for doing so this time. Unlike our predecessors in the 1980s, we have a clear Catechism, the new Code of Canon Law, the Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching, and a host of books, pamphlets, and online resources to help us.

One of the most striking changes during Benedict’s papacy has been a serious rise in the number of men studying for the priesthood in England and Wales. 20 priests were ordained in 2011, but 38 are on course to be ordained next year, while the Archdiocese of Southwark, for example, which had 10 seminarians in 2005 currently has 26. The establishment of discernment groups across the country has been a clear factor in this phenomenon, which has coincided with co-a ordinated campaign of prayer for vocations. In April the National Office for Vocations announced an ambitious three-year vocations drive inspired by the question Pope Benedict asked a gathering of some 4,000 children and teenagers from across Britain in September 2010: “what sort of person would you like to be?”

The centrepiece of the current English vocation project is Invocation, the national vocations festival held at Oscott College in Birmingham. About 250 young people attended Invocation 2011, with roughly 400 attending this year’s festival.

Fittingly, the visit of the relic of St John Vianney was timed to coincide with Invocation 2012, and so on Saturday night and Sunday morning hundreds of young English people were given the unique opportunity to pray in the physical presence of one who defined the priesthood as “the love of the heart of Jesus.”

It shall be interesting to see how many take up the challenge to love as he did.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 12 July 2012.

Reading into the Faith

“It is not bigotry to be certain we are right,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in his 1926 book The Catholic Church and Conversion, “but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.”

The recent announcement by prominent atheist blogger Leah Libresco that she has decided to become a Catholic has inspired a cavalcade of commentators expressing indignation and astonishment that any supposedly reasonable person could have come to subscribe to such gibberish. As one said, “as we see no good reason for someone who presumably understands and endorses our usual views on epistemology and ethics to turn around and start believing in patently fictitious and morally dubious nonsense, it is a little baffling to see one of us become a Roman Catholic.”

Some, predictably, have argued that she was never a real atheist, others have attributed her conversion to mental deterioration, and still others have dismissed her decision as easily explained given that she had had a Catholic boyfriend.

“Oh yeah. Duh,” sneered one, writing how his initial confusion on hearing of Leah’s decision had been dispelled once he’d been reminded of Leah’s former boyfriend: “Thing is, there’s a lot of evidence that religious conversions are mainly driven by people’s personal relationships.”

Truth

There’s some truth to that, of course, but this cuts both ways. If we’re to argue that a cradle atheist can become an active Massgoer who attends RCIA classes and prays the Office and the St Patrick’s Breastplate simply because they went out with a Catholic for a couple of years, we need to recognise that people are even more likely to slip from religious practice and belief if they mainly associate with atheists, just as spending most of one’s time with sedentary people who eat unhealthy food is liable to make one fat.

Reducing Leah’s decision to a matter of herd mentality really doesn’t work, anyway: by her own account, she was raised atheist and attended a high school alongside many people who were culturally Jewish, without really believing in their ancestral faith; she broke up with her Catholic boyfriend six months ago, and the four people closest to her now are respectively atheist, secular Jewish, Catholic, and Russian Orthodox.

Before starting college, Leah hardly knew any Christians, such that she thought the typical one was a Young Earth creationist. At Yale, however, where she studied political science and wrote for the Yale Daily News as well as for the Huffington Post, she befriended intelligent, informed, articulate Christians who challenged her assumptions. She still thought they were wrong, but realised that she’d been deeply mistaken as to what they believed and why.

Just as importantly, she began to see her own position’s flaws. When a friend turned one of her questions around and asked what would convince her that Christianity was true, she had no answer. She simply hadn’t considered that possibility; she couldn’t imagine that she was wrong.

She started going out with a Catholic, joining him at Mass, just as he’d join her for ballroom dancing; they debated religion constantly, and recommended books to each other. She read books he recommended by Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, and read more widely too, building an apologetics bookshelf including works by such modern Catholic philosophers as Edward Feser and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Starting her ‘Unequally Yoked’ blog in order to crowd-source and test her arguments, she experimented last summer with an ideological Turing test, repeating the experiment this year. Alan Turing had famously asked in 1950 whether a machine could mimic a person well enough in a written conversation to be indistinguishable from human. Leah’s tests asked Christians to write as though they were atheists and atheists to write as though they were Christians, and subjected their statements to polls to see whether readers were convinced by the impersonators.

Along the way, she found herself in sympathy with Chesterton’s description of historical orthodox Christianity as “a truth-telling thing”. Chesterton, she realised, “was converted not by a single metaphysical proof, but by his conviction that Christianity was in accord with his most essential beliefs about the world, and that, when he and the Church diverged, he usually came around to the other side after investigation. The beliefs he was absolutely sure of pointed him towards the theology.”

Leah largely agreed, but the fact remained that she didn’t believe in God. She longed for an atheist author in whom she felt as much kinship as she did for C.S. Lewis, and in this seemed to echo Lewis himself, who in Surprised by Joy described how, while still an atheist, he came to the view that “Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together, bating, of course, his Christianity.”

Eventually, the night before Palm Sunday, Leah had a discussion with a friend about morality. Leah was convinced that morality existed in and of itself, rather than something that had merely evolved or developed. As she put it in a recent CNN interview, she was really sure that “morality is objective, human-independent, something we uncover like archaeologists, not something we build like architects.”

Morality

Explanations of moral law that attempted to justify it as naturally embedded in us tended, she found, to display a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution, moral philosophy, or both. Her friend pushed her as to where she thought moral law came from, and eventually admitting her ignorance she said: “I don’t know. I’ve got nothing. I guess Morality just loves me or something.”

Realising what she had said, she froze and asked for a moment while she considered whether she believed that. She did: “I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth. And there was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth. I asked my friend what he suggest we do now, and we prayed the night office of the Liturgy of the Hours together.”

Many of those who’ve been notionally willing to accept as reasonable Leah’s conviction that morality is a person have been scathing about her decision to become a Catholic, seeing this as arbitrary or even perverse. It’s not that mysterious, really: convinced of the existence of an morality to which we owe a duty, she’s read widely in the Christian tradition which most interested her and become familiar with both the philosophical and the historical plausibility of the Faith.

It’s still early days, of course, and Leah admits she has some difficulties with some aspects of Catholic teaching, but she seems to have embraced its heart with joy, saying on CNN that “It’s exciting to be able to participate in the Mass and thinking that it’s actually the Eucharist.”

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 5 July 2012.

Is Scientology Evil?

The news that actress and baptised Catholic Katie Holmes is seeking a divorce from Tom Cruise, supposedly because of concerns about her daughter being raised within Cruise’s beloved Church of Scientology, has brought Scientology into the media spotlight in a way not seen since a 2005 episode of South Park ridiculed the organisation’s most esoteric beliefs.

As reports spread that Holmes feared she was being monitored by private investigators hired by Scientologists, something the Church of Scientology has denied, even Rupert Murdoch weighed in. “Scientology back in news,” he said on Twitter, ‘Very weird cult, but big, big money involved with Tom Cruise either number two or three in hiearchy.’ He later added, ‘Watch Katie Holmes and Scientology story develop. Something creepy, maybe even evil, about these people.’

Scientology was the brainchild of science-fiction author L.Ron Hubbard, who in 1950 reinvented himself as a self-help guru by publishing Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Hubbard claimed that people could be cured of fears and illnesses through a process called ‘auditing’, which would make them ‘Clear’ by erasing traumatic memories from what Hubbard called the ‘reactive mind’.

Although scorned by the American Psychological Association, which pointed out that Hubbard’s claims were without scientific evidence, the book became an unexpected bestseller and Hubbard established several foundations to train people as ‘auditors’.

Despite initial success, Hubbard soon ran into serious financial trouble, and in 1952 he announced that he had discovered an entirely new science which transcended Dianetics. Claiming undeniable scientific evidence for the existence of the soul, Hubbard outlined ‘Scientology’ at a series of lectures in Phoenix, Arizona and in his book What to Audit.

Scientology’s central claim was that our true selves are immortal and omniscient beings called thetans, who inhabit countless bodies over trillions of years. Scientology aimed to perfect the soul by erasing traumas suffered in previous lives, thus raising individuals to their full potential, that of an ‘operating thetan’ or an ‘OT’.

Reportedly having often remarked that “if a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start a religion,” it was hardly surprising that Hubbard legally incorporated the Church of Scientology in 1953, the first local church being established the following year in California. Early tax exemptions did not last, however, and it was not until 1993, more than six years after Hubbard’s death, that the United States government recognised Scientology as a tax-exempt religion.

Scientology had by then grown into a lucrative but controversial international movement. In 1978 a French court had found Hubbard guilty of obtaining money under false pretences, while his wife and several other senior Scientologists were convicted of conspiracy against the American government.

Seemingly incapable of banishing the whiff of sulphur that has haunted it from its foundation, the Church of Scientology has had mixed success in securing international recognition. Countries such as Ireland, Germany, and Belgium have all refused to recognise it as a religion or to grant it tax-exempt status. A French government report in 2000 described it as a dangerous cult, and in 2009 a French court found it guilty of organised fraud.

It continues to face accusations that it indulges in brain-washing, urges members to ‘disconnect’ from unsupportive family members, harasses those – notably former Scientologists – who challenge the organisation, and ruthlessly milks its members of money, with the cost of becoming ‘Clear’ running to tens of thousands of Euros.

In a 1972 policy letter Hubbard had directed senior Scientologists to ‘Make money… make more money… make other people produce so as to make money.’ One can only imagine how much it cost Tom Cruise to become a ‘Class 4 OT7 Platinum Meritorious and IAS Freedom Medal of Valor Winner’.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 5 July 2012

The Eucharist in Church history

In a 1955 letter to her friend Betty Hester, the American writer Flannery O’Connor described a dinner party she had attended some years earlier.

Conversation had eventually turned to the Eucharist, which O’Connor’s host, who had left the Church in her teens, said that she had come to think of as a symbol, and a fairly good one at that. “Well,” said O’Connor in a shaky voice, breaking the silence that had marked her evening, “if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”


Unfortunately, if last week’s Ipsos MRBI survey for the Irish Times is to be believed, 62 pc of Irish Catholics share O’Connor’s host’s view that the Eucharist merely represents the body and blood of Christ.

Richard Dawkins’ branding of all such Catholics as dishonest should be recognised as the ignorant smear that it is, given that this is less likely to be the fruit of considered dissent than poor catechesis and human weakness, but the fact remains that in this respect it seems the majority of Irish Catholics are out of step with the Church throughout time.

The Eucharist, described by the Second Vatican Council as “the source and summit of Christian life”, has always been central to the Church’s existence.

Acts 2:46 describes how the early Jerusalem Church celebrated the Eucharist daily, meeting at the Temple for preaching and prayer, but breaking bread in their own homes rather than attending the Temple sacrifices.

Poor translations sometimes make it seem as though the phrase “breaking bread” is just another way of saying that the early Christians ate together, but the original Greek text is unambiguous in its distinction between liturgy and lunch.

Early Church
The first Christians’ devotion to the Eucharist shouldn’t surprise us. Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24-5 record how at the Last Supper Jesus commanded them to celebrate the Eucharist in remembrance of him, while at John 6 Jesus repeatedly describes himself as the bread of life, clearly stating “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.”

It might be tempting to interpret this passage in a symbolic or spiritual way, but the Greek text simply doesn’t allow this.

The passage describes the listening crowd being horrified at Jesus’ words, and asking him to clarify them; he did so by making his language more graphic, emphasising the reality of what he was asking his followers to do by replacing the word phagein – to eat – with the rather more tactile word trogein – to munch, or gnaw, or chew.

Significantly too, the word the passage uses for “flesh” – sarx – is used on six other occasions in John, each time as something emblematic of the physical rather than the spiritual world, beginning with the declaration that “the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us”.

Intolerable teaching
Many disciples left after this, finding Jesus’ teaching intolerable, while those who remained did so in apparent confusion.

It wasn’t until after the Last Supper that the meaning of Jesus’ words became clear and the Eucharist was embraced as a real participation in the body and blood of Christ, such that, as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 10:27, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”

The disciples’ own disciples took this to heart, and it seems clear from the writings of St Ignatius of Antioch – a pupil of John, and bishop of the city where Christians first bore that name – that an acceptance of the Eucharist as Christ’s body and blood was the hallmark of orthodox Christianity before the end of the first Christian century.

On his way under armed guard to Rome, where he was to be martyred, he wrote a series of letters to churches including one in which he said that those Gnostics who believed that Jesus’ body was but an illusion were easily identifiable:

“They even absent themselves from the Eucharist and the public prayers, because they will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in his goodness raised up again.”

Worship
St Justin Martyr, writing a few decades later in the middle of the second century, gives us the earliest detailed description of Christian worship: the main Christian ceremony took place on Sundays and had two parts: a liturgy of the word with readings from the scriptures and a sermon, and then a liturgy of the Eucharist, in which bread and wine were offered up, blessed, and distributed.

Explaining mainstream Christianity to the Roman emperor, he describes the Eucharist as follows:

“For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these... the food which is blessed by the power of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”

The Eucharist was so central to early Christianity that it was common for the Church’s Roman persecutors, who scorned that which they couldn’t understand, to describe Christians as cannibals – as well as incestuous atheists!

The early Church was so convinced of the reality of the Eucharist, that it wasn’t even deemed necessary to refer to the Eucharist in the Nicene creed; it simply went without saying that during Mass the Eucharistic elements would become the body and blood of Christ.

Of course, it was obvious that they didn’t appear to change, but the Church was unanimous that Christ’s word was to be trusted.

Metaphorical?
It was not until the ninth century that speculation began about how this change took place.

These debates attracted little attention at the time, but almost two hundred years later n archdeacon named Berengar of Tours began to wonder whether the Eucharistic change was merely spiritual or even metaphorical.

Berengar’s theories were recognised as contrary to the historical teaching of the Church, and were condemned, but further speculation continued and so the Church gradually embraced the idea that “transubstantiation” was the best way of explaining the Eucharistic change.

The language of transubstantiation may have been a medieval innovation, but the idea behind it – that the bread and wine literally change to the body and blood of Christ – stretched back to the foundation of the Church.

If it is true that only a quarter of Irish Catholics really believe that this happens at the Mass, it would seem that the International Eucharistic Congress isn’t happening a moment too soon.

We need to be reminded of what unites us with our fellow Christians throughout the world and throughout time.


-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 14 June 2012.

For a Friend

I've been reading a fair few short stories lately, and reading about them too -- trying to see behind the curtain, if you like, to understand what was in their authors' minds when writing them. It's given me a fine excuse to pore once more over The Habit of Being, that wonderful collection of Flannery O'Connor's letters. Here's one, just as a taster: her very first letter to Betty Hester.

Milledgeville

20 July 1955

Dear Miss A.,

I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.

I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It's to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

The notice in the New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call "A Good Man" brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching towards Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

You were very kind to wrote me and the measure of my appreciation must be to ask you to write me again. I would like to know who this is who understands my stories.

Yours sincerely,

The one frustrating thing about O'Connor's letters to Hester The Habit of Being is that it's just half of a conversation. Although the two didn't meet until a year after they first wrote to each other, they became close friends, and Hester wrote O'Connor hundreds of letters. Many of the letters between the two, not included in The Habit of Being, were made public in 2007. I have no idea of Hester's own letters to O'Connor were among them, or have survived in any sense.

Queen and Country

On Tuesday 15 May, the Norwegian Parliament voted to introduce a constitutional amendment to disestablish the Lutheran state church of Norway. Those besotted with outdated ideas of historical “progress” might cheer such a development, but on the same day in England the BBC published the result of a ComRes poll which found that 79 per cent of people believe Queen Elizabeth II has an important faith role, with 73 per cent believing that she should remain Supreme Governor of the Church of England and retain her title of “Defender of the Faith”.

The monarchy’s not lacked good publicity of late. After sixty years on the throne, the Queen’s more than earned her place with Alan Bennett and Judi Dench as a “national treasure”, and last year’s trip to Ireland won over many of her more sceptical Irish subjects. Prince William’s April 2011 wedding, at which Richard Chartres, the Anglican archbishop of London, preached a sermon that may have been heard by more people than any other in history, was an occasion for national celebration that seemed to go far beyond cynical opportunism at an extraordinary public holiday. And, of course, the public image of the monarchy could hardly have been better served than by 2010’s Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech.

One of the film’s most arresting scenes takes place in Westminster Abbey, when Colin Firth’s soon-to-be-crowned George VI demands that his speech therapist, Geoffrey Rush’s Lionel Logue, vacate the coronation throne, the seat of Saint Edmund the Confessor.

“Listen to me,” cries the king. “Listen to me!”

“Listen to you? By what right?”

“By divine right if you must. I am your king.”

Roles

The idea of kings ruling by divine right may have a rather seventeenth-century air about it, but even now the idea that there is something holy about the monarchy underpins the British constitutional settlement. “The monarchy by its religious sanction now confirms all our political order,” wrote Walter Bagehot in his 1867 classic The English Constitution, still widely regarded as the most insightful book ever written about the structures of the British State.

Bagehot’s book is one of two treated almost as training manuals by young members of the royal family; the other is Elizabeth R: The Role of the Monarchy Today, written in 1992 by Anthony Jay, best known for his work on television’s Yes, Minister. Jay recognised, and the royal family have clearly embraced his explanation, that the monarchy has two roles: the Queen is called upon formally to be “Head of State” and informally “Head of Nation”.

It’s surely in the latter sense that she’s understood her role as “Defender of the Faith” as having developed over the decades. When she was crowned in 1953 she swore to the utmost of her power to maintain the laws of God, the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law, and the settlement of the Church of England.

It seems, though, that she does not regard her role as a narrowly sectarian one; on the contrary, she sees the Church of England as having a role in fostering pluralism. Earlier this year she explained that, “Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”

There’s a lot to be said for having a public figure or institution whose role is to stand as a permanent reminder of what religious faith does and has done for the country, especially at a time when, according to a recent parliamentary enquiry, religion is being marginalised in public life.

The report Clearing the Ground found that although Christians are not being victimised in Britain, religious illiteracy has created situations where religious belief is misunderstood and restricted; court decisions have established a hierarchy of rights with the freedom to manifest religious belief and act in accord with one’s conscience being deemed less important than other rights.

Of course, it’s impossible for a Catholic to discuss Britain’s monarchy without acknowledging the fact that, in a sense, Catholics are second-class citizens in Britain, the only people explicitly barred by law from marrying into the line of succession; any royal who wishes to marry a Catholic must abdicate their position in the line. Recognising that this is discrimination, David Cameron has made noises about changing this, in order to make the monarchy more modern, and the Archbishop of Westminster has welcomed this.

I’m not so sure. I think we all know that in a meaningful sense, British Catholics have the same rights as all other British citizens, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to start pulling threads out of Britain’s constitutional tapestry in order to achieve what would be but the tiniest and most cosmetic of symbolic gains.

Besides, Zara Phillips is off the market.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 31 May 2012.

A Republican Abroad: Reflections on Britain's Monarchy

I remember little about my first visit to England: being smacked for swearing, and meeting a cousin who I wouldn’t see again for more than thirty years; but then, I was barely two.

I was four the next time I visited, being roused from my bed in the dead of night by my dad, taken to my older sister’s flat, and bundled onto the boat, to sleep on the floor through the night and tread nervously across the gangway to Liverpool’s Pier Head in the morning, looking down at the Mersey’s dark waters. I wasn’t good at heights, even then.

I’ve clearer memories of that second trip, much of which was spent with a cousin a few years older than me: a taxi from the port to my mum’s elder sister’s house, my cousin teasing his older sister’s ‘yucky’ denim skirt and having his wrist hurt when one of his dogs tugged excitedly on the leash he’d wrapped around his hand, proudly whispering the few Irish words I knew to other cousins, skittering across the gravelled ground in a playground after ignoring instructions not to go on the slide as someone had put wax on it, admiring little rubber dinosaurs and finger monsters in a shop, and eating fish on Good Friday. I had a choice of packets of Monster Munch on the boat back home: not just the ones with the Cyclops on the back, the only ones you could get in Dublin, but ones with pictures and descriptions of the Minotaur and the Harpies too.

I’m not sure if modern crisp packets offer a rudimentary Classical education. I suspect not.

I really liked my knights

While I was there I was given a packet of toy knights by an aunt. Little silver-coloured plastic knights, wielding swords and maces. I was thrilled, and my cousin and I sat playing with them together by the window of the living room. ‘They protect the king,’ I said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said my cousin, ‘there are no kings anymore. Only queens.’  

‘What,’ I stared, ‘only queens?’

‘Only queens.’

A couple of years later a friend in Dublin earnestly informed me that the Queen had no power and that if she told me to kneel down in front of her then you wouldn’t have to, but that if Mrs Thatcher told me to then I would. That, of course, wasn’t an issue in Ireland, he said: ‘Because Ireland’s a free country.’

I had, it must be said, a somewhat confused childhood view of the British monarchy.

Strange though it seems, there were adverts on the telly when I was a boy, recruiting people for the Household Cavalry. I wanted to join, of course. Swords and breastplates, helmets and boots, black horses and red cloaks: the Life Guards looked like knights, and for a little boy besotted with the legend of King Arthur, this was clearly a career to which one should aspire.

Even now, I reckon the sovereign's escort justifies the monarchy's existence

Being English, my mother approved, though she was far less impressed by my reactions when she made me watch the opening of Parliament one year. The pageantry and the Queen cast no spell over me on that occasion, as I’d have rathered be drawing or reading or playing on the road: ‘Huh,’ I’d scowled, ‘I wish Guy Fawkes had blown it up.’

The years passed, and the British royal family’s shenanigans seemed like one of those soap operas that you never watch but occasionally notice in the background. To this day I’m not sure of the extent to which my memories of Charles and Diana’s wedding are my own or ones manufactured by Sue Townsend and planted in my head by the fictional pen of Adrian Mole. ‘Lady Diana is a commoner,’ I remember my Mam telling me. This mattered, clearly, and was a good thing, though I wasn’t sure why.

We had a Charles and Di tea caddy at home too, acquired at the time of the royal wedding. I think it lasted longer than their marriage. We told scurrilous schoolboy jokes about the royal family at school. ‘Did you hear that Princess Diana is forming a band with Chris Rea? She’s going to call it Diarrhoea!’* ‘Why does Prince Charles have a multicoloured willy? Because he dips it in dye so often!’

None too respectful, you’ll surely agree, but well, we were about ten, and it was no worse than what we sang about what the Queen got up to in 1976. No, I’ll not repeat it here.

A Modern Republic

Curiously, our own largely symbolic head of state, President Hillery, didn’t impinge on my consciousness at all. He met ambassadors, and signed legislation, and inspected the armed forces, and played golf, and generally kept to himself. I remember seeing a red squirrel when peering through the gates of his official residence one day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one since.

1990 changed that, of course, as we had the first presidential election of my lifetime, with Mary Robinson beating Brian Lenihan and Austen Currie in an AV election.** Robinson changed the Presidency dramatically, expanding the office beyond its official role of ‘Head of State’ to give it a new direction as – to borrow the terminology of Antony Jay’s Elizabeth R – ‘Head of Nation’. She deliberately imbued the office with symbolism, and paved the way for President McAleese’s two terms. McAleese’s presidency, I think most Irish people would agree, was a model of what the presidency can be, and her role in 2011’s visit of the Queen brought that home.

Those English people who seem to think that the only alternative to a constitutional monarchy is an American-style executive presidency merely show how limited their knowledge is of political systems. There are lots of ways to run republics.

Ah, sure, the English are known for the craic...

When I moved to England the first time, back in 2001, I was scornful of the monarchy; it was obviously an anachronism, and an indignified one at that. As the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday passed I muttered about atrocities being committed against the Queen’s subjects by the Queen’s soldiers, and as the Queen’s fiftieth jubilee approached I scowled and told my friends in halls that there was no way I’d be joining them at the jubilee party at our brother hall.

Minutes before my friends set out I relented, and nine of us headed off, arriving just as one corpulent student – a South African, I think – finished belting out ‘God Save The Queen’. We settled in for an evening of drinking games and even karaoke, with Russell, visiting Dave, insisting that we all join in a rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ that was as energetic as it was surely cacophonous. At the end a drunken undergrad stepped up to join us, so we left him to slur a high-pitched ‘any way the wind blows...’

Afterwards he challenged me to a fight with giant inflatable boxing gloves in the bouncy castle the boys had hired. I smiled and let him charge at me, and stepped aside so that he fell. He struggled to his feet, and I knocked him over again. And again. And again. Letting him steady himself, I waited for his charge once more and again stepped aside so he crashed to the mat. And again I smiled as he wobbled upwards, before knocking him over again.

Afterwards my friend Paul, who died in an accident almost exactly four years later, admiringly said ‘Mister Daly! I’ve never seen such malevolent delight on anyone’s face before!’ He definitely approved.

Back in our own place, we set up a table and chairs and sat drinking and chatting on the lawn till half four. Koji, a Japanese fellow in our hall, joined us and took to running about – for no discernible reason – with his T-shirt drawn over his head. Madeleine rested her head on my shoulder, and we all decided it was time to crash. We planned to rendezvous at breakfast, and belt out at least a bar or two of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to startle the undergrads, some of whom had witnessed our travesty.

Needless to say, not one of us made it to breakfast.

It had been an absolutely superb night, and the first one we’d had out in weeks where we hadn’t been on edge for half the evening, expecting some kind of trouble. Mary McAleese is great, I thought, but she’s not once given us an excuse for a party.

Not a system I'd establish, but one I can embrace

Last year’s Irish presidential election was a horrible affair, such that I don’t know many people who wouldn’t happily have had Mary McAleese for a third term if only the Constitution would allow it. There was something incredibly unedifying about choosing a head of state – who we’ve now come to think of as a head of nation – through an election that dragged all manner of dirty linen and closet skeletons into public sight.

British republicans who cry out for the glories of an elected head of state seem to be speaking from dogma, not experience; they seem like embodiments of the saying about the grass being greener on the other side. The fact is that there’s something to be said for people being reared and trained through decades for such a role, with there being no question of who the next in line for the job will be.

I’m still a republican, of course; even with nasty elections like the 2011 one I prefer the Irish model of having a largely ceremonial president to a largely ceremonial monarch as head of state, but I’ve come to see that the British solution isn’t that bad, really. It’s not one I’d invent if I were charged with coming up with a political system, but it’s not a bad one to have ended up with, and it's such that I'm wary of attempts to tinker with it. I'm not sure how many wooden blocks can be eased away before the Jenga tower falls.

The monarchy gives constitutional stability, and expresses national unity, and provides a justification for the country being called the United Kingdom, after all. Get rid of the monarchy and the UK would need a new name. For starters.

God save the Queen, so. On balance.



_________________________________________________________________________________
* Yes, I know. Exactly the same joke was made about Chris Rea becoming lead singer of Dire Straits. It makes more sense in that context.
** Yes, because despite the lies of the No lobby in the 2011 AV referendum, more than three countries in the world use AV, with one of the ones using it being the only country with which the UK shares a land border. The first two times I voted it was in AV elections. I still think it's a better system than the absurdity that is FPTP, where the typical MP goes to Westminster having been voted for by fewer people than voted for other candidates.

Bunting

Years ago, some weeks before the last jubilee, I was living in halls when one of my fellow students asked me for help with an essay; I can't remember the topic, but people regularly came to me for advice on essays, whether they were on history, French cinema, Spanish literature, developmental economics, physiotherapy and the mechanics of the human elbow, or whatever.

My own work done for the evening, I ambled down to Sophie's room -- let's call her Sophie, for convenience -- to help her with her work. I knocked, and she answered, and I entered. And stared.

She'd been doing laundry, you see, and was drying it in her room. And not just any laundry, mind. Underwear, of which she appeared to have vast quantities.

She'd drawn lines of twine about her room and hung her laundry from these lines, such that her room was decorated with a multitude of thongs, myriad colourful triangles swaying in the slight breeze her window let in.

To this day I have never seen more pants.

We sat down to work, but after about the fifth time I frowned, restraining an obvious joke about whether she was expecting the Queen to visit, Sophie realised what was bothering me, started to laugh, and suggested we go down to the common room.

Even now, I can't look at bunting without thinking of Sophie's room and shaking my head. This jubilee weekend is proving quite a challenge.

Seal of confession and playing to the anti-clerical gallery

There’s something rather disingenuous about Alan Shatter claiming that the legality of the Confessional Seal is a “side issue”, “a diversion”, and “an entirely bogus issue” in the debate about mandatory reporting of abuse and other serious crimes.


To hear the Minister for Justice talk, you’d almost think that he’d never raised the prospect of the Seal being threatened and that Catholics are kicking up a fuss over nothing. All that’s necessary to refute that is a quick glance at what he said on the very day the Cloyne Report was published.

Announcing that he would be introducing a bill to make the withholding of information about child abuse an offence, Minister Shatter claimed that there would be no “legal grey areas” when it came to the implementation of this legislation. He specifically stated that the laws would also apply to the priests, even where this information is revealed in the confessional.

The crude one-size-fits-all nature of such legislation, as proposed, alarmed me, not least because the last coalition of Fine Gael and Labour considered and decided against introducing mandatory reporting, recognising that such legislation would be impractical and probably counter-productive.

Troubled by this, I took the – for me – unprecedented step of writing about my concerns to the Taoiseach, whose office forwarded it to the Ministers for Justice and Children for their attention. Nine months later, I have yet to receive a substantive reply from Frances Fitzgerald’s office, despite one being promised, but Minister Shatter’s office promptly sent me an interesting email.

Citing section 7(2) of the Criminal Law Act 1997 and section 9 of the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act 1998, the Minister’s office explained that all citizens already have a duty to report certain serious offences unless they have “reasonable excuse” for not doing so. It would be the purpose of the proposed legislation to extend this principle to cover the withholding of information concerning serious sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults.

It’s worth noting that the government has already extended this principle once; the Criminal Justice Act 2011, as Michael McDowell has pointed out, makes it a criminal offence to fail to report even trivial cases of shop-lifting.

“It must be borne in mind, however,” the letter concluded, “that in regard to the interpretation of the phrase ‘reasonable excuse’ it is a matter for the courts to determine whether any particular circumstances constitute a reasonable excuse. The proposed Bill does not propose any change in that position.”

Now that it’s been published, the Criminal Justice (Withholding of Information of Offences Against Children and Vulnerable Persons) Bill 2012 makes for fascinating reading, not least because it represents an impressive – and I think prudent – backtracking on the part of the government in terms of the exemptions it grants.

Under the terms of the bill, huge numbers of people are exempted from the legislation, notably – the legislation not having a retroactive aspect – everybody who currently has information of abuse having happened. There are vast numbers of such people.

The 2002 SAVI Study found that 27pc of the adult Irish population had experienced some form of sexual abuse in their childhood, most of this committed by people in the broad family circle, including neighbours and family friends. Almost half of Ireland’s abuse survivors – more than 350,000 people – had confided only in family, friends, or trusted professionals, without reporting their abuse to the Gardaí.

It is, I think, a relief that the government has decided against criminalising the tens or even hundreds of thousands of people who have committed no worse crime than listening to abuse survivors tell their stories.

This leaves the specific issue of the Seal of Confession. The reality is that regardless of what Ministers Shatter and Fitzgerald may say in order to look tough and decisive, nobody knows whether the Seal is under threat.

There’s no mention of the Confessional Seal in the bill, but this is hardly surprising: a law directly attacking such a manifestation of religious belief would almost certainly be unconstitutional and wholly contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees a right to manifest one’s religious beliefs save when it is both lawful and necessary to limit that right.

If neither the IRA’s conspiring with the Nazis during the Second World War nor Republican terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s had provided sufficient grounds to introduce such uniquely repressive legislation, it is difficult to imagine how its introduction now could be legally justified on the basis of “necessity”.

Is it, then, indirectly threatened?

At the heart of the new law is the principle that a person commits an offence if three conditions are met: he or she must know or believe that a sexual offence has been committed by another person against a child or vulnerable adult; he or she must have information which he or she knows or believes might be of material assistance in securing the apprehension, prosecution or conviction of that other person for that offence; and he or she must fail without reasonable excuse to disclose that information as soon as it is practicable to do so to a member of the Garda Síochána.

The obvious problem with construing this as an implicit legal ban on the Seal is that it would be completely unenforceable. Priests are not obliged to accede to requests for face-to-face confession, and given the anonymity which the confessional box exists to protect, why would priests believe themselves to have materially useful information that should be given to the Gardaí?

Even if a priest had known a particular penitent’s identity, how could it be proven in court that said penitent had informed a priest of anything? There would have been no independent witnesses to the conversation, and priests could only respond to interrogation by refusing to comment, barred as they would be from either confirming or denying any questions on the subject.

In practical terms, it seems that this law could only ever to be used to challenge the Confessional Seal if spurious “confessions” would be recorded in cases of entrapment.

More fundamentally, “reasonable excuse” is not defined in law, and the new legislation expressly states that it does not remove any rule of law entitling a person to refuse to disclose information. As such, the existing common law and constitutional recognitions of priest-penitent privilege would almost certainly preclude the courts against interpreting the seal as anything other than a reasonable excuse.

I don’t believe the Seal is threatened in any meaningful way, and if it is, it’s been threatened for fifteen years, with priests breaking the law for the last one if they’ve not reported penitents who’ve confessed to shop-lifting.

The reality, surely, is that the government is simply bluffing in yet another transparent attempt at playing to the anti-clerical gallery.

  -- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 3 May 2012.