Choose Life. Choose Military History. Choose Counting.

A hundred or so years ago, the Prussian Hans Delbrück transformed military history when he sought to show how warfare and politics mirrored each other as social activities. Using his method of Sachkritik, he analysed historical battle narratives in the light of simple physical realities and what was known to have happened in other battles.

I used to enjoy explaining this to my students back in the day. Military history, as a lecturer on the American Civil War had pointed out to me once upon a time, doesn’t make much sense without maps, and as I said to my students, armies aren’t just dots on those maps. They take up space. People just tend not to realise how much space crowds can take up...

The figures of Herodotus, so-called father of history, had long been viewed askance by historians, but it took Delbrück to show just how ropey those figures were. Herodotus claimed that the Persian army that invaded Greece in 480 BC was made up of 2,641,610 soldiers, and an equal number of servants and camp followers. As an exercise, Delbrück imagined how much space such an army would have taken up had it followed the Prussian marching system:

“According to the German order of march, an army corps, that is 30,000 men, occupies about three miles, without the baggage trains. The marching column of the Persians would therefore have been 420 miles long and as the first troops were arriving before Thermopylae the last would have just marched out of Susa on the other side of the Tigris.”

These were German miles rather than the ones we know, and the Persians obviously didn’t march in the Prussian fashion, but still, Delbrück had made his point: Herodotus’ figures were ludicrous.

Delbrück didn’t stop at the soft target that was Herodotus, either; he went on to explain the impossibility of Atilla the Hun easily moving an army larger than the Prussian one of 1870 across an area that at that time lacked decent roads, and to show through issues of food supply how Julius Caesar’s figures for his Gallic opponents had been grotesquely inflated to superb propagandist effect.

When I was doing my master’s degree on Hannibal’s victory at Cannae, I spent an immense amount of time grinding numbers in a way that numbed the brains of my friends when I talked of them. Marching rates. Space per man. Unit depth. Legion width. Quantity of vegetation needed daily to feed an elephant. Close order formation. Open order formation. Manipular replacement. Javelin range. It went on.

All of this stuff may have sounded boring, but it was needed as the nuts and bolts of assembling a thesis on what exactly happened in the biggest and bloodiest battle the Romans ever fought and lost.

Who said this stuff isn't useful?

I’ve moved into a more conceptual area of ancient and military history now, but the whole battle reconstruction thing has given me some habits. On Saturday they came into play. There was a march in Dublin on Saturday, billed as a ‘March for Choice’, with an expected attendance, according to the organisers, of thousands from across the island of Ireland.

It turned out to be rather a damp squib, with a few hundred gathering on O’Connell Street, and accumulating numbers as they made their way over the Liffey towards Kildare Street and round to Merrion Square.

Shortly afterwards, under the headline declaring “Low turnout for pro-choice rally”, the Irish Times reported on the march as follows:

“Less than 1,000 people joined the ‘March for Choice’ in Dublin this afternoon in what had been billed as the first major mobilisation of pro-choice activists ahead of the publication of a major report examining how the Government should deal with the abortion issue.

Organisers had predicted that several thousand people would gather for the march which left the Spire in O’Connell Street at 2pm ahead of a gathering at Merrion Square.

Those behind the march claimed that between in excess of 2,000 people took part howver gardai at the Store St station said that closer to 500 people had showed up for the event.”

This report was at odds with what people associated with the march claimed; the Labour senator Ivana Bacik said on Twitter that 5,000 had attended, and one person who’d acted as a steward on the march wrote on Facebook that she had personally counted 3,200 people, with a Garda she spoke to having said that between 3,000 and 5,000 people had marched. Sinéad Redmond, one of the march organisers, rejoiced at how happy the 5- to 7,000 who she said had marched were.

Graham Linehan, ever the sentinel of the internet, declared on Twitter that “The Irish Times is a ****ing rag”, subsequently saying that Irish Times’ reporting was either prolife propaganda or sheer laziness; not for one moment does he appear to have entertained the possibility that it might have been right.

People connected with the march began appealing for pressure to be put on the Irish Times to change its story, and eventually it did so.

Why exactly did you change your story?

You can read the story of what happened elsewhere, but what’s significant is that after vocal public criticism of the paper, the Irish Times sought a different Garda source to that it had originally contacted and under the headline “Thousands attend pro-choice rally” declared:

“Several thousand people joined the ‘March for Choice’ in Dublin this afternoon in what was billed as the first major mobilisation of pro-choice activists ahead of the publication of a major report examining how the Government should deal with the abortion issue. Organisers had predicted that several thousand people would gather for the march which left the Spire in O’Connell Street at 2pm ahead of a gathering at Merrion Square. Several hundred people gathered for the start of the march, with their numbers swelling by the time it reached St Stephen’s Green.”

The final version of the story was much the same, save for apparently giving the lie to the headline:

“Their numbers swelled to several thousand by the time it reached St Stephen’s Green. The Garda Press Office, which earlier put the number of attendees at about 500, said this evening there ‘may have been in excess of 2,000 people involved’”.

So after repeated phone calls, the Guards shifted from saying that around 500 were involved to a claim that perhaps more than 2,000 participated, and after criticism from irate marchers and their sympathisers, the Irish Times went from reporting that fewer than 1,000 took part to claiming that several thousand marched.

The Journal reports that the Guards said about 2,500 were in the march. Even if true, this hardly merits the adjective ‘several’ the Irish Times is now talking of, it has to be said.

You see, it's all about the Personal Transferable Skills

Now, let’s think about numbers. I know, whether it’s right or not to end the life of another human being isn’t a numbers game, but we’re solely talking about reporting and how numbers can be used to propagandist effect.

As people argued on Saturday afternoon about the numbers attending, a common cry on the pro-choice side was to look at the video, as the video showed that there were thousands of people on the march, not just a few hundred.

It’s worth looking at the video, shot by Darragh Doyle just by the Shelbourne Hotel. It’s difficult to estimate numbers on it from a casual glance, as Darragh pans back and forth several times, giving the impression of a vast throng of people. The video lasts for just over two and a half minutes, and for the first minute and a half the marchers can be heard eagerly chanting – those bringing up the rear just amble along chatting to each other.

With some judicious use of the pause button, it’s easy enough to make a stab at numbers here, even with the extravagant camera movements. Easy, that is, unless you just stare and think “there are loads of people... there must be thousands!”

The marchers were marching in informal rows four, five, six, eight, maybe even ten across on the odd occasion. Most rows, for want of a better word, seem six or seven across. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the typical row is eight across, and then count the people who go by the camera, as though each is the end of a row. You won’t get an accurate figure, but you’ll get a ballpark one, something to give you a fairly decent feel for the size of the crowd. I tried it on Saturday, and made it about eighty rows, before what looked like an uncountable mass at the end. 640 marchers, plus maybe another 150, so. 790 people, allowing for error. How much error could I have made, though?  Could I have undercounted by more than one or two hundred?

I tried again earlier today with a different approach, thinking about how much space those marchers seemed to have covered, and bearing in mind how a friend on the march has said on Saturday that the marchers had been almost the full length of Kildare Street; he reckoned there’d been about 1,500 or so there.

Looking at Google Maps, it seems Kildare Street is about a thousand feet long, so let’s assume my friend was right – allowing for slight exaggeration – and that the march occupied more than three quarters of the street. 800 feet of marchers, so, on a street about 30 feet wide.  This would probably provide room for 960 Roman soldiers, give or take; more could have been fitted in, but only in a very packed formation. I could do the sums, but it’d take us off topic by some way.

The people in the march weren’t packed together. Their deployment, for want of a better word, was nothing like a Roman army in close formation. The rows, however wide, were fairly close together at the start, maybe three feet or so apart, but by the end the marchers – dawdlers in many cases – were well spaced out, some pushing buggies or even cycling! There was no comparison between the relatively close front rows, with their chanting and shouting, and the stragglers at the back, strolling along and having a natter. Given this disparity, it’d have been reckless to have counted, say, all the rows in the front hundred feet of the march and then multiplied it out, as is a fairly standard way of calculating the numbers involved in a march.

Now, in case you’re wondering, I was a teenage Commerce student, doing statistics and economics etc before changing subject and doing something more challenging the following academic year, so am reasonably clued in to how statistics work. I know that when moving crowds need to be counted, professional crowd counters use assigned counters to tally people passing points in given time periods and calculate upwards accordingly – indeed, I’ve had friends who’ve done this – but for a crowd this small that kind of thing is neither worthwhile nor necessary.

After all, during the two-and-a-half minutes’ filming, Darragh saw most of the march go past him; if he’d hung on for another minute, maybe 90 seconds, he’d have seen the last stragglers dawdle by. Four minutes. That’s not worth sampling.

It’s clear that there were no such counters present, in any case, and we don’t have high quality aerial footage of the march. We just have several foreshortened shots of the crowd, statements from marchers who – vested interests aside – were in the march and thus not really in a position to observe and count the marchers, widely differing guesses from the Guards, and a YouTube video that doesn’t even try to convey the march size in an accurate sense.

As such, flawed though it is, we can really only go by the YouTube video which shows that the marchers, even in the front ranks, were generally rather more than an arm’s width apart, and that towards the rear of the march the crowd density was a lot thinner than in the van. This wasn’t even a reasonably compact crowd.

Given how the spacing seemed to work, I couldn’t help but think the Roman figure gave a useful guideline for an educated guess. It looked about right, recognising just how spread out the march was. And it wasn’t that far off my first estimate. Again, it was only a ballpark figure, but it was one that suggested that the march probably wasn’t more than a thousand strong.

Or Counting. That’s good too. I learned that in primary school. 

Still, as discussion about this carried on today, I gritted my teeth and decided to count people in the video as best I could. Given the relatively small size of the crowd, this was going to be a manageable task, even if it was bound to be a tedious one.

I worked through the video, pausing and taking screenshots as I went, using banners and distinctive people in the crowd as markers for when I scrolled forward or to be returned to after Darragh had finished his latest bout of panning.

And then I worked through the shots, marking people with red spots. I decided to estimate upwards, such that anything I thought might possibly be a marcher would be counted as such. The handful of pedestrians walking past at a normal speed, rather faster than ‘marching’ pace, had to be discounted, of course.

I made it 850 marchers, more or less. 

Not a thousand. Not two thousand. Not five thousand, Ivana Bacik. Not seven thousand, Sinéad Redmond. Not a lazily non-specific several thousand, Irish Times.

Because even if I undercounted, and I suspect I'll have missed a few at the marker points each time, I didn’t undercount by that much. Don’t believe me? Well, why should you? Please try it yourself. It doesn’t take that long. We shouldn’t even need to have this discussion.

The rights and wrongs of abortion aren’t a matter of numbers, so I don’t see why those involved in Saturday's march have been so determined to exaggerate their numbers so egregiously. Still, if Saturday’s march tells us anything, at the very least it shows us that there’s no great democratic demand for abortion in Ireland.

850. The Irish Times was right the first time.

Surveying the Faith

Last week Red C Research published the findings of WIN-Gallup’s ‘Global Index of Religions and Atheism’, suggesting that Ireland was abandoning religion faster than almost any other country. The papers weren’t slow to regurgitate claims that whereas 69pc of Irish people were religious in 2005, only 47pc were in 2011. 

That’s not what the poll says, however. Contrary to Red C’s press release, the WIN-Gallup poll doesn’t find that Ireland is one of the least religious countries in the world; it finds that Ireland is one of the countries in which people are most reluctant to describe themselves as religious. This is a very different thing, not least as the word ‘religious’ means different things to different people. 

This was made very clear to me a couple of years ago at an Anglican church in Manchester, where I used to go so I could learn how evangelical friends lived their faith on their own terms, rather than relying on how my fellow Catholics described them. 

The curate spoke at length about how Christians shouldn’t be religious, because religious people are hypocrites. We’re called to love God, not to be religious, he said. Christianity, after all, isn’t a religion: it’s a relationship. 

I agreed with him up to a point. It’s a cliché that Christianity is a relationship rather than a religion, but it’s only a cliché because it’s largely true; the very word ‘Christian’ suggests that. 

Rather than meaning ‘follower of Christ’, it literally means someone who belongs to Christ as a member of his household. Romans 8:14-17 says that we’re brothers and sisters of Christ, God’s children rather than his slaves, and as 1 Corinthians 12:13 says, it’s baptism that adopts us into this family. 

Talking about this in the pub later, some of the regular congregation said they felt that the curate’s core point was sound but that he’d expressed himself poorly. Religious people can be hypocritical, but ‘religion’ shouldn’t be dismissed as mere lip service. 

Methodology

When discussing polls, it pays to look at the question and methodology. Ireland was one of the few countries in which this poll was conducted online; it’s difficult to see why Red C did this, as their website boasts of the accuracy of their telephone polling and warns that online polls are of questionable reliability in Ireland, where the over 55’s are inadequately represented in online panels and at least a third of adults lack internet access.

Red C's press release is adapted from WIN-Gallup's international press release, which conspicuously excludes Irish data from any tables showing how things have changed since 2005. Ireland, which Red C reports has experienced the second-largest decline in religiosity since 2005, is absent from the table of ‘ten countries experiencing notable decline in religiosity since 2005’, and from the two tables showing trends in religiosity and atheism in 39 countries surveyed in both waves.

It’s almost as though WIN-Gallup doesn’t regard the new data on Ireland as comparable with the 2005 data.

Allowing that the poll should be treated with caution, it’s hardly surprising that it found that the number of Irish claiming to be atheists seemingly has risen from 3pc to 10pc since 2005; the 2011 census figures and recent polls should have led us to expect as much. 

I doubt this figure will rise much further without government interference. If graphs in the official census highlights are remotely accurate, those most likely to deny a religious affiliation in Ireland are aged between 25 and 29, and even then only about 9.5pc of those do so. Denial of religious affiliation seems to drop back to 8pc among younger adults. 

Rather than rushing to embrace atheism, it seems Irish people are slipping into an ill-defined quasi-Catholicism, and it’s here that the question’s wording is all-important: “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?” 

The number of people willing to describe themselves as religious seems to have plummeted from 69pc to 47pc, whereas those rejecting atheism while saying they’re not religious seems to have risen from 25pc to 44pc. 

It’s difficult to tell what exactly this means, not least because the survey question – which confuses religious practice with atheistic belief – explicitly allows people who attend places of worship to say they don’t consider themselves religious. Red C thus observes that globally, “Most of the shift is not drifting from their faith, but claiming to be ‘not religious’ while remaining within the faith.” 

Judged purely on an Irish basis, this seems a fair judgement. The census found that 84pc of us still claim to be Catholic, even after the horrors of the Ryan and Murphy reports, but it’s clear that many of us have drifted from the teaching and precepts of the Church. 

Only about a third of us attend Mass every week, according to this year’s ACP and Irish Times surveys, while the Irish Times poll seemingly found a widespread rejection of basic Christian doctrines. For example, 15pc of those who’d call themselves Catholics don’t regard Jesus as the son of God, and 62pc believe that the Eucharistic elements merely represent Christ’s body and blood. 

Many who scorn atheism but wouldn’t call themselves religious would be among these; they’d probably consider themselves ‘spiritual’ rather than religious, or say that they have faith but disagree with organised religion. Others, though, would surely be ordinary Catholics, wary of boasting about their faith. 

Connotations

The word ‘religious’ carries uncomfortable connotations for a lot of us. A priest friend of mine once admitted that he found it hard to like a lot of religious people. “Some of the coldest, hardest, most unforgiving people I’ve ever met,” he said, “have been some of the most religious.” 

Outward Practice

‘Religious’, for him, clearly wasn’t a word to be crudely equated with ‘Catholic’ or ‘Christian’. It was, instead, something relating to outward practice rather than inward devotion; he’d found that people could be punctilious about their religious observance while being devoid of a spiritual inner life, or a simple love for other people. 

That’s not to say our external practice and attitudes don’t matter; on the contrary, they play a vital role in expressing and supporting our inner life. As Pope Benedict pointed out last week with reference to St Dominic: “… to kneel, to stand before the Lord, to fix our gaze on the Crucifix, to pause and gather ourselves in silence, is not a secondary act, but helps to us to place ourselves, our whole person, in relation to God.” 

Internal Realities

The problem, alas, is that too often our external and internal realities are at odds. Jesus made this unforgettably clear in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, in directing us to fast, pray, and give alms in secret, and in condemning as pedantic and hypocritical the ostentatious religiosity of the Pharisees. 

Familiar as we are with such admonitions, and increasingly suspicious of public displays of piety, it’s hardly surprising that for many of us the word ‘religious’ is a term we’ve become loath to apply to ourselves. Who wants to be seen as a ‘Holy Joe’, especially nowadays? Who dares to call themselves devout?


-- A version of this appeared in The Irish Catholic, 23 August 2012.

Primitive Dubbing Techniques

A friend of mine -- perhaps my closest friend, really -- had a little baby girl last night, all tiny and pink and perfect. I mentioned to an expectant friend today that the newcomer has a very pretty nose, which surprised me, as I tend to think of newborn babies as looking uncomfortably like Winston Churchill.

Oh yes.

She responded by pointing out that I'd not seen any of hers as newborns, and that my pretty nose comment reminded her of Asterix and Cleopatra. Rightly so, I'd say, but that in turn reminded me of this.

That third panel always strikes me as one of the finest comic panels I've ever seen -- it's utterly dependent on the incongruity of picture and words -- and possibly my favourite joke ever on a comic page.

The Dark Knight Rises: Hope does not Disappoint

Superhero films offer us a “faithless, modern mythology”, according to Tom Hiddleston, who played the renegade Norse god Loki in this summer’s Avengers Assemble. Writing in the Guardian this April, he observed that “In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.”

He’s almost right. Superhero films offer a modern mythology, but there’s nothing faithless about them. Modern morality plays, they’re expressions of a world built by Judaeo-Christian tradition, and embody not merely explicitly Christian ideas but also those universal images that J.R.R. Tolkien described in 1931 as having prefigured Christian truth: “The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there,” he said, “while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”

The Norse myths Tolkien so loved, for instance, pointed to Christianity through such images as Odin hanging on the World Ash, or Baldr, the dying god, but it remained for Christianity to fulfil the truths to which they pointed.

Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow makes a very modern mistake in Avengers Assemble when she says of Thor and Loki, “These guys come from legend. They’re basically gods.”
“There’s only one God, ma’am,” replies Chris Evans’s Captain America, a recently revived relic of the 1940s, “and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.”

This isn’t simple religious chauvinism; rather, having some idea of what the word ‘God’ means, Captain America recognises Thor and Loki as mere men writ large.  The ancient Vikings would have understood what he meant; they knew that their gods and the God of the Christians were different not merely in degree but in kind.

Avengers Assemble develops this idea when Loki attacks a crowd of people in Germany and demands they kneel before him, embracing what he sees as their natural state. “In the end,” he says, “you will always kneel”.
“Not to men like you,” says an old man, willing to kneel before the right person but recognising that Loki is as mortal as he is.
“There are no men like me,” replies Loki.
“There are always men like you,” answers the old man, clearly recalling his youth, when so many of his countrymen showed themselves willing to prostrate themselves before the false gods of Hitler, the German state, and the earthly paradise the Nazi regime promised.

It might seem odd for an avowed atheist like Joss Whedon, writer-director of Avengers Assemble, to make such meaningful theological points, but Judaeo-Christian tradition has so formed our world that modern secularism and even atheism stand on Christian foundations. The light of Christian truth, if there is any truth at all in our art, must inevitably shine through.

Interesting though Whedon’s theological asides are, Avengers Assemble is ultimately a light – albeit immensely entertaining – piece of work. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, on the other hand, is far weightier fare, and one which repays repeated viewings.

2005’s Batman Begins shows the young Bruce Wayne falling down a covered well, crashing to the bottom and being terrified by the bats that launch themselves at him. “Why do we fall, Bruce?” his father asks after rescuing him, before answering his own question with the words that define the trilogy: “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

The motif of fall and rise pervades Nolan’s trilogy, reflecting its themes of sacrifice and resurrection and embodying an idea that has been central to the western mind for millennia. The Apostles, in the earliest sermons recorded in Acts, cast the Crucifixion as a prelude to the Resurrection, while Paul, in Romans 5, explained that the price we pay for the Fall is nothing compared to the grace we receive through the Incarnation, a mystery distilled by the Easter Exsultet into the seemingly paradoxical cry, “O truly necessary sin of Adam... O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.”

Few mythic figures are more iconic than the scapegoat who bears the price of others’ sins, and as Michael Caine’s Alfred says in Nolan’s second Batman film, 2008’s The Dark Knight, it’s a role for which the Batman is supremely well-suited. “Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point of Batman. He can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make – the right choice.”

The Dark Knight concluded with the Batman apparently guaranteeing Gotham City’s future by becoming a scapegoat for murders committed by the city’s deranged district attorney, Harvey Dent. The Batman’s sacrifice enabled others to build a new era of law and order upon Dent’s supposedly pristine reputation, but as this year’s The Dark Knight Rises makes clear, a victory built on a lie – no matter how noble – is a false victory.

Eight years after The Dark Knight, Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon is haunted by the lie which empowered him to clean up Gotham’s streets, and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is a broken recluse, haunted by the death of his childhood love. The Batman is but a memory while the dead district attorney is idolised by a city unaware of his dreadful crimes. Gotham may be peaceful but the city's prosperity rests on rotten foundations, and it seems discontent is ready to boil over among the city’s poorest.

When the city’s underclass erupts from its sewers, it becomes clear that the Batman will have to face his greatest challenge, one that drives him to the darkest pit of despair and forces him to face the question of whether his city is worth saving.

The Dark Knight had answered that positively, but The Dark Knight Rises is more ambivalent; Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman points out that ‘innocent’ is a strong word to use for Gotham’s citizens, who seem to have revelled – or at best cowered – in the anarchy unleashed by Tom Hardy’s Bane. “You don’t owe these people any more!,” she says, “You’ve given them everything!”

“Not everything,” replies Batman, determined to save Gotham regardless of whether its people deserve it or not. A more convincing Christ-figure than at the end of The Dark Knight, the Batman is willing to go to his death for the guilty as much as for the innocent.

“Suffering produces endurance,” writes Paul in Romans 5, “and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” Batman has always been an adolescent revenge fantasy, but Nolan’s Batman suffers and endures until he learns to hope, transcending his self-imposed mask as an angel of vengeance, and is redeemed. The Dark Knight rises.

– from The Irish Catholic, 2 August 2012

The Freedom of the Press

Well, the Irish Times is on form today. 

The Freedom to Have an Opinion

Here's Fintan O'Toole, for instance, talking about Seán Quinn:

'Fr Brian D'Arcy, who is supposed to be in the morality business, addressed the Ballyconnell rally and essentially credited Quinn with the creation of peace in our time: “He brought peace to the country by creating thousands of jobs.” 

Senior GAA figures such as Mickey Harte, Jarlath Burns, Seán Boylan and Colm O’Rourke threw that organisation’s considerable authority behind Quinn’s outright defiance of the courts and determination to hang on to public money. Thus, a formidable if unofficial nexus of Sinn Féin, the GAA and the church is giving Quinn comfort. 

 This desire to kiss the rod inflicting the pain is surely rooted in something older than the current fad for designer masochism – some twisted notion of ethnic and religious solidarity in which Quinn has to be protected because he’s one of us – a Catholic, nationalist, GAA man.'

This is after lots of valid stuff, it should be said, but still. Is it really right to say Brian D'Arcy supports Seán Quinn, therefore the Church is part of an unofficial triumvirate of forces supporting Quinn? Brian D'Arcy?

Remember what Fintan said about Brian D'Arcy a few months ago, when he took the view that D'Arcy having -- at his own discretion -- to have a fellow priest glance over his writings to make sure they weren't completely off the wall was the worst thing that had ever happened?

Fintan saw D'Arcy as being part a powerless priest, being sadistically humiliated -- no, really -- by a heartless and clueless hierarchy.  D'Arcy, more to Fintan's point perhaps, was a decent and admirable man, somebody who stood apart from the institutional Church.

But now? Well, now that D'Arcy's saying something that Fintan (rightly) disagrees with, he's been elevated in Fintan's eyes to an official spokesman for the Church. This is the kind of inconsistent, hypocritical nonsense that's rendering the Irish Times less relevant by the day.

The Freedom to Disturb Religious Ceremonies

It seems only fitting that it's sitting in an edition of the paper where an editorial begins by absurdly saying that a clear instance of disturbing the peace wouldn't be considered an offence in modern Ireland if it took place in a church, since we've all moved on from that auld religion hogwash now, thank God:

'It's likely that if three young women in balaclavas marched up uninvited to the altar of the ProCathedral to then perform a crude punk ballad lambasting the church and the Virgin Mary there would be calls for their prosecution. Disturbing the peace, blasphemy . . . Such appeals might well have prevailed a couple of decades ago. Not so, one hopes, today. We have as a society developed an understanding that the sometimes-uncomfortable price of democracy and free speech is the tolerance of speech of which we may disapprove, which may offend, which may be blasphemous – we’re even thinking of removing the offence from the Constitution.'

Yes, the Irish Times editorial line now seems to be that it would be okay to do this. I'm not saying that the Russian Orthodox Church's reaction to Pussy Riot's actions in a Moscow cathedral isn't a tad over the top, but really, is it really okay to interrupt a religious ceremony in this fashion? Does freedom of speech really mean a freedom to interrupt other's worship? Does the Irish Times believe that freedom of religion so irrelevant that people should be allowed to interfere with it whenever they want?

The Freedom to Drive Out Jews

Oh, and then there's another piece about circumcision, which describes one of the defining Jewish and Muslim practices as barbaric, wonders whether Germany should hold a referendum on children's rights, and insists that in a secular society the rights of children -- as the author sees them -- should always trump religious freedom.

He's basically saying that the right of a child to retain its foreskin is more important than the right of a child to be Jewish.

I'm not sure what thought he's given to what Jews and Muslims should do in any country where children cannot be circumcised. Sure, there's much more to Judaism, say, than circumcision, but then there's more to bread than flour; it's still an essential ingredient. Maybe he'd just rather there were no more Jews. 

I do wonder if the author, the Thailand-based Kenneth Houston, is aware that Germany doesn't do referendums, mainly because of Germany's bad experiences with Nazi demagoguery using them to steer the mob. Or maybe he just doesn't care. 

That said, I'd be curious to see some serious large-scale surveys asking people, simply, whether they'd been circumcised, and whether infant circumcision should be illegal. I've a very strong feeling that the vast majority of those who'd been circumcised would have no problem whatsoever with the practice continuing, while those opposing it would probably be, in the main, people who've merely heard about it.

As for those who'd ban it, what do they think Jews should do in a country where infant circumcision is illegal? Leave altogether? Engage in circumcision tourism, ensuring their children are born in countries where infant circumcision is practiced? Arrange for backstreet circumcisions? Or just abandon their ancestral faith?

(Illustrations, for what it's worth, are from the anti-circumcision, anti-semitic, and deeply improbable comic Foreskin Man. He's a bit of an advert for Aryan supremacy, really. He's also neither well-written nor well-drawn. Offensive on so many levels...)

Creating a corporate culture

Last week’s announcement that Monsignor Philip Egan, Vicar General of Shrewsbury diocese, is to replace Crispian Hollis as bishop of Portsmouth has met with widespread approval. William Oddie, writing in the Catholic Herald, described it as the first appointment to the English hierarchy made on the advice of the new Papal nuncio, Archbishop Antonio Mennini. “It is,” said Oddie, “a cracker.”

The new bishop Egan shan’t have an easy task in Portsmouth, a large diocese of 96 parishes spread across Hampshire, Berkshire, part of Dorset, the Isle of White, and even the Channel Islands. Among the most immediate of his problems shall be a messy and potentially very important legal case which may yet go to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

A 47-year-old lady, referred to as ‘JGE’ in court, claims that she was abused when she was between six and eight years old by the late Father Wilfred Baldwin. JGE was at the time in a children’s home run by the Sisters of Charity in the Hampshire town of Waterlooville. She says that Baldwin, who as the local parish priest was regularly invited to visit the children’s home, raped and otherwise abused her, and that the sisters witnessed this and did nothing, having also disregarded previous claims that Baldwin had abused two boys.

The diocese rejects JGE’s allegations against Baldwin, who died shortly after they were first made in 2006, not least because Baldwin did not become parish priest of Waterlooville until September 1972, several months after JGE had returned to her mother’s care. At the time of the alleged abuse, Baldwin was acting as Portsmouth’s diocesan Vocations Director in Reading, some 40 miles north of Waterlooville.

In March 2011, the Court ordered that before considering the substantive issues of the case, it would be necessary to address the question of whether or not a bishop could be held responsible for the actions of diocesan clergy, just as employers can be deemed vicariously liable for the actions of their employees.

Employment

In November 2011, a High Court judge, Mr Justice MacDuff, found that bishops were indeed automatically liable for the actions of priests in the diocese by virtue of the fact that they ordain and appoint them. Accepting that priests were not employees of their bishops, MacDuff nonetheless found that their position as office-holders was nonetheless closer to employment than to self-employment, and that as such bishops could be held vicariously liable for any crimes committed by priests.

Believing this decision deeply flawed and liable to have serious consequences for religious bodies and the voluntary sector in general, the diocese appealed. Insisting that the original decision fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between bishops and priests, it argued that abusive priests acted in ways wholly contrary to everything the Church represents, and that it is unjust to hold a bishop liable for actions of which he would have been unaware and thus unable to prevent.

The diocese has stressed that this should not be seen as an evasion of responsibility; it fully accepts that where a bishop had been in a position to prevent a priest from committing harm but had failed to do so, then the diocese would indeed be legally liable, and should pay compensation.

Unconvincing

The Court of Appeal heard the diocese’s appeal in May, and on 12 July upheld the original decision although two of the three judges took issue with MacDuff’s claim that bishops endowed priests with “immense power” and rejected his implication that there was something inherently risky about ordaining somebody to the priesthood. All three judges commented on the difficulty of reaching a decision, and both of those who rejected the appeal nonetheless recognised the force of the diocese’s arguments.

Lord Justice Tomlinson, the only one of the three judges who believed the original decision should have been overturned, found the original decision’s reasoning “contrived and unconvincing” in its attempt to transpose commercial concepts of enterprise and benefit into the context of ecclesiastical relationships. Vicarious liability applies to businesses which exist to make a profit, such that compensation can be demanded from companies when harm is caused by one of their employees, but while priests are expected to act in accord with the aims of their bishops, they can hardly be said to act for their benefit.

“If Father Baldwin can properly be regarded as undertaking his ministry for the benefit of anyone,” Tomlinson found, “I should have thought that it was for the benefit of the souls in his parish.”

Lord Justice Ward, whose judgement made up the greater part of last week’s decision, applied a variety of tests to the question, including considering the Church as an organisation. Citing the Code of Canon Law’s description of a diocese as “a portion of the people of God […] entrusted to a bishop to be nurtured by him, with the close co-operation of the presbyterium,” he translated this into secular language as follows:

“There is an organisation called the Roman Catholic Church with the Pope in the head office, with its ‘regional offices’ with their appointed bishops and with ‘local branches’, the parishes with their appointed priests. This looks like a business and operates like a business.”

This ‘translation’ seems to owe more to popular myth than to any real understanding of the Church, and it is difficult to see how a judgment that recognises that priests are not delegates of their bishops, just as bishops are not delegates of the Pope, can have characterised priests as branch managers and the Pope as a kind of ecclesiastical CEO.

Legal advice

The Church’s sacramental unity is not reflected in its administrative structure, as Ian Elliott, the Protestant head of the Irish Church’s National Board for Child Protection observed in October 2009. Having previously thought of the Church as “one large but single body”, he had learned that even the Church in Ireland should not be understood that way: “Although it is described as a single Church, it is more easily understood as a single communion with close to two hundred different constituent elements.”

Things are scarcely different in England, where the Catholic Church is not recognised as a legal entity in its own right. Even individual dioceses lack legal personality, such that diocesan trusts are necessary for dioceses to own property and manage their financial affairs.

The Court of Appeal has refused the diocese permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, but the diocese is taking legal advice on this matter. By extending the concept of vicarious liability beyond well-established situations of employment, the High Court and Court of Appeal decisions have potentially transformed the relationship between bishops and priests, and threatened the voluntary sector in general, raising serious questions about the extent and nature of institutional liability.

These questions remain to be answered. At the very least, the Church is entitled to clarity.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 19 July 2012

Not Quite Forgotten...

Years ago, I attended a talk entitled something like 'Tedius Scholasticus: Another Forgotten Classic'. As it ended, and we packed up to head off down the corridor to the obligatory wine reception, the lecturer next to me sighed, and remarked that that was a classical author he would have been quite happy to have left forgotten.

That said, there are real gems in the minor league of the Classical canon. While not everyone can be a Thucydides or a Lucretius, there are delights to be found in the lower rungs. Two of my favourites are Publilius Syrus and whatever wag or wags were responsible for To Philogelos.

To Philogelos or 'The Laughter Lover' is a bumper fun joke book from the fourth century AD, supposedly compiled by a comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius. The jokes, I'm afraid, aren't the funniest, but are worth a read for all that. Here are a few:

'An egghead got a slave pregnant. At the birth, his father suggested that the child be killed. The intellectual replied: "First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine."'

'An Abderite wanted to hang himself, but the rope broke and he bumped his head. He went to the doctor and got some salve. After rubbing it on the wound he hanged himself again.'

'When a wag who was a shopkeeper found a policeman screwing his wife, he said: "I got something I wasn't bargaining for."'

'A Kymean constructed a huge threshing-floor and stationed his wife on the opposite end. He asked her if she could see him. When she replied that it was hard for her to see him, he snapped: "The time will come when I'll build a threshing-floor so big that I won't be able to see you and you won't be able to see me."'

'A rude astrologer cast a sick boy's horoscope. After promising the mother that the child had many years ahead of him, he demanded payment. When she said, "Come tomorrow and I'll pay you," he objected: "But what if the boy dies during the night and I lose my fee?"'

'A man, just back from a trip abroad, went to an incompetent fortune-teller. He asked about his family, and the fortune-teller replied: "Everyone is fine, especially your father." When the man objected that his father had been dead for ten years, the reply came: "You have no clue who your real father is."'

'While a drunkard was imbibing in a tavern, someone approached and told him: "Your wife is dead." Taking this in, he said to the bartender: "Time, sir, to mix a drink up from your dark stuff."'

'A young actor was loved by two women, one with bad breath and the other with reeking armpits. The first woman said: "Give me a kiss, master." And the second: "Give me a hug, master." But he declaimed: "Alas, what shall I do? I am torn betwixt two evils!"'

'A young man invited into his home frisky old women. He said to his servants: "Mix a drink for one, and have sex with the other, if she wants to." The women spoke up as one: "I'm not thirsty."'

'A misogynist was sick, at death's door. When his wife said to him, "If anything bad happens to you, I'll hang myself," he looked up at her and said: "Do me the favor while I'm still alive."'

Oh yes, there's far more where they came from. 255 more, to be precise, albeit with some duplication. Some aren't terrible.

Anyway, we used to be very fond of this collection back in my misspent youth. Not so much for the ancient jokes, of course, as for the endnotes. The edition of To Philogelos in our library had a prodigious quantity of endnotes, all detailing how various German academics speculated about why jokes were funny.

They tended to take the form of 'Moellendorf Willamowitz says that this is a pun on "salve", whereas Kromayer argues that this is a references to the sacking of the city by Philip II in 350 BC. Delbrueck thinks this is an allusion to Democritus, who was a famous citizen of Abdera.'

A German friend of mine -- who habitually borrowed this book to bring to the pub and show bemused friends -- was particularly besotted with the endnotes.

The great Publilius Syrus, on the other hand, is a very different kettle of fish: if the notes on To Philogelos filled us with joy, Publius Syrus filled us with wisdom.

Publilius was a Syrian who wrote Latin plays in the first century BC. His plays became famous for his maxims, such that the plays have all been lost but the maxims remain, with other similarly wise sayings being attributed to him. You can read all thousand or so statements in the Loeb volume Minor Latin Poets, Volume 1. 

Among the sort of things he says are:

'A suspicious mind always looks on the black side of things.'

'An angry man is again angry with himself when he returns to reason.'

'Count not him among your friends who will retail your privacies to the world.'

'In a heated argument we are apt to lose sight of the truth.'

'It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door.'

'Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.'

'It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.'

'Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.'

'There are some remedies worse than the disease.'

'Hares can gambol over the body of a dead lion.'

And so forth. Profound stuff, you'll surely agree. The kind of thing that folk should absorb before jumping to conclusions, thinking oneself into a circle, and then charging around casting aspersions on people.

Um. Anyway, we used to keep it on the handy shelf back in our postgrad days, thinking he'd be a handy man whenever there was a crisis.

'What should we do?'

'Let's find out what Publilius Syrus would say,' someone would say, reaching for the little red book, opening it and random and treating our ears with his mellodious Syrian wisdom.

Great days.

I'm tempted to start a Publius Syrus Twitter account. Just to help people, you understand. 

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.