Papers of Record Don't Refuse Ink

The Irish Times hasn't exactly had a spotless record on the abortion debates in Ireland over the last year or so. 

You'll remember how last September it bowed to pro-choice pressure and jibes from the likes of Graham Linehen to revise initial reports that "less than 1000 people" had participated in a pro-choice rally -- a figure borne out by video footage taken at the march -- in favour of a claim that "several thousand people" had taken part.

You'll remember too how last November it broke the story of Savita Halappanavar's death, relating a range of details which were subsequently cast into question by April's coroner's inquest. It also falsely claimed that in Britain doctors are "legally able to carry out abortions until the 24th week of a pregnancy for all reasons, not just medical"; I know someone who wrote to the paper to alert it to its misrepresentation of British abortion law, just as I did so about the discrepancies in the paper's reporting of the story. Neither letter was published, and corrections did not follow.

I could go on, pointing out the relative emphases given to different stories, depending on whether they leaned towards a pro-life or pro-choice agenda, but time is short and you get the idea. The last couple of weeks, though, may well have topped this. 

On 23 August, the following story appeared on the paper's front page, relating how a twin pregnancy had been terminated at the National Maternity Hospital on Dublin's Holles Street to save the twins' mother's life; supposedly this was the first termination conducted under the terms of the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act.

A tragic story, it provoked the hospital's Clinical Director and former Master, Dr Peter Boylan -- yes, that Peter Boylan -- to call the report "outrageous", declaring that the details in the Irish Times allowed the woman in the story to be identified: "The breach of patient confidentiality - that's the most serious thing about this whole episode."

Peter Boylan, you'll have noticed, was named in the article as having been party to the decision to terminate the pregnancy:

"The Act does not provide for the identification of either patients or the doctors involved in the process. In this case, it is understood the master of the hospital Dr Rhona Mahony, former master Dr Peter Boylan, other senior obstetricians at the hospital and a paediatrician were involved in the decision-making process."

Given his supposed involvement in the process, you can understand his anger over how the woman being treated could be identified; presumably, you might think, he knew exactly who the paper was talking about. No wonder he was talking about possibly reporting a fellow doctor to the Medical Council.

The day the story broke, however, the Department of Health issued a statement pointing out that the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill 2013 had not yet commenced -- I'm not sure how the paper's legal people missed that little detail -- and the following day the article on the paper's website was prefaced with a sentence to the effect that subsequent sentences were untrue. The headline wasn't the only part of the article that was poppycock, after all; from the very first sentence on, the article, seemingly, was claptrap. 

A week later matters took a turn for the truly bizarre, as tucked away in a corner of page seven of Saturday's paper was a little box reading as follows. 

"On August 23rd last, under a story headlined 'First abortion carried out under new legislation', we reported on a purported clinical case at the National Maternity Hospital. The hospital has pointed out that the case described in the article did not happen. The Irish Times accepts this and apologises unreservedly to the hospital for any distress caused. 

The National Maternity Hospital has welcomed the correction and apology, accepts that the article was published by The Irish Times in good faith, believes the matter is now concluded and wishes to make no further comment."

Now. I don't even know where to start with this. The key sentence, of course, is: "The hospital has pointed out that the case described in the article did not happen." 

Yes, the entire story, we're now told, was fiction from start to finish. The Irish Times ran a piece of fiction on its front page, and eight days later issued a tiny discreet correction to the effect that Ireland's so-called paper of record doesn't refuse ink.

As Simon McGarr has so well shown, newspapers have a duty to correct errors with "due prominence", guidelines on how to do this being conveniently supplied by the Press Council of Ireland. I think it's pretty clear that that's not been done here. This, rather, is the journalistic equivalent of tucking something away in a dark cellar at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".

When I did Accounting in school I was taught that when you'd made an error, you corrected it by putting a line through the erroneous figure with the correct one above the struck out one; under no circumstances, we were told, were we to reach for the Tipp-Ex bottle* and cover up the error so people couldn't see the problem. It's a good principle and one that the Irish Times would do well to live by.

Sadly, it seems that the Irish Times editorial staff weren't sitting in on my bookkeeping lessons, because the original story has now been wiped from the website, with all its fictional detail a thing of the past. Instead, under the same old dodgy headline, we have the bald statement that the HSE had confirmed on 23 August that the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act, signed into law by the President on July 30th, 2013, had not yet commenced, followed by the 31 August correction.

Thing is, I'm still a bit puzzled. 

There was no termination, as the hospital says and as the Irish Times now accepts. I understand that. 

Had there been a termination, it would not have taken place under the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act, as that has yet to commence. I understand that too.

What I don't understand is this. Given that he'd been identified as party to this supposed double termination that we're now told didn't take place, why on earth did Peter Boylan react to the original story by saying that the breach of confidentiality was an outrage and that the woman in the report was identifiable? Why didn't he say that such breaches of confidentiality are completely unethical, that to his knowledge the case described in the report never happened, and that he could confirm that he personally had never been party to such a case?

I don't understand that. Why not kill the story on the very first day?

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* You remember Tipp-Ex, right?

Armageddon on the Aufidus: Locating the Battle of Cannae

For the historian of ancient warfare, there can be few tasks as frustrating – or as tempting – as trying to locate the sites of ancient battles. Our sources rarely say much about topography, what they say is usually vague or contradictory, and, to make matters worse, two thousand years of earthquakes,  floods, and common-or-garden erosion is generally enough to transform any landscape, especially when assisted by the twin forces of farming and construction. 

Despite these difficulties, military historians over the years have relentlessly sought the locations of the major battles of Antiquity, notable the great clashes of the Second Punic War, Rome’s infamous life-and-death struggle with Carthage at the end of the third century BC. Predictably enough, considering the spell it’s cast on tacticians and military historians over the years, the quest to locate the battle of Cannae has been an unashamed free-for-all. Offhand, I can think of about a dozen different theories of where the battle took place.

Just to put this into context, in the summer of 216 BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal was marauding around Italy with an army of around 50,000 men.  Having been decisively thrashed by him in their three previous encounters, the Romans concentrated on building up their army to a total strength – perhaps, this is debated – of 86,000 men. Hannibal seized the grain stores at Cannae, near Canusium, and the Romans under their consuls Paullus and Varro moved closer, evidently planning to give battle soon. They set up camp by the river Aufidus, across the river from Hannibal’s camp. Hannibal crossed the river and made camp, the next day offering battle to the Romans, who declined. 

The following day the Romans under Varro crossed the river to challenge Hannibal, and Hannibal led his men across the river to face them. Despite being massively outnumbered, Hannibal was able to outflank the Romans and surround them, killing 50,000 men in a manoeuvre – the ‘double envelopment’ – which has been a model to generals ever since.

At the south-western end of the citadel at Cannae there’s a small modern monument, a simple column bearing an inscription from Livy, with a magnificent view of what you might assume is the battlefield. You can see it here, a broad flat plain with the river Ofanto – the ancient Aufidus - shown running across the centre of the shot, rendered clearly visible by the trees and bushes that line its banks. The town in the background is San Ferdinando, which some historians have identified as the site of Hannibal’s camp before the battle. It all looks very straightforward – and if you ask in the museum, or at the small tourist office at the train station, you’ll be told that it is. Unfortunately, as with virtually everything that we touch in the field of ancient history, matters aren’t anywhere near so simple.

Back in the late sixteenth century it seems to have been normal to assume the battle took place on the south-eastern bank of the river. If you ever visit the hall of maps in the Vatican Museum and seek out the map of this area  by the Dominican friar Ignazio Danti you’ll see that not only has Danzi seen fit to mark the site of the battle of Cannae on the southern bank of the river, with the two main camps on the northern bank, but he’s painted both armies deployed for battle with the opposing commanders clearly identified. He does a similar thing with other maps in the series, showing, say, the opposing camps before the Battle of Lake Trasimene, and Caesar about to cross the Rubicon.

If you look at a satellite image of the region round the hill of Cannae, with the river Ofanto – the ancient Aufidus – running in a more or less north-easterly direction from the bottom left corner, you can just about make out the hill of Cannae in the very centre of the shot.

What positive information can we gather from the sources? Well, Polybius 3.113 clearly states that the Roman right wing – the citizen cavalry were positioned by the river, faced by the Carthaginian left wing – the Celtic and Spanish horse. Further, Polybius 3.114 and Livy 22.46 tell us that the Romans faced south, the Carthaginians north. We needn’t be too dogmatic about what Polybius meant when he wrote ‘north’ and ‘south’ here. It can be taken as read, I think, that he meant ‘roughly north’ and ‘roughly south’; it seems unlikely that either Hannibal or the Roman commanders were using compasses to deploy their armies. 

What’s more, both armies had to cross the Aufidus to do battle, since most of their men were camped on the far side of the river; Polybius 3.113 states this unambiguously, while Polybius 3.110 indicates that they must have crossed from west to east, since only a third of the Roman forces were encamped on the eastern side of the river.

It can be helpful to see how people have read the data and attempted to locate the battle over the years. The turquoise box on this black-and-white satellite shot marks the area generally identified as the site of the battle of Cannae up to the early nineteenth century, and still generally pointed to as the battlefield by locals in Barletta and thereabouts. 

Obviously, I've enhanced the course of the river; the hill of Cannae should still be clear in the centre. The problem with the obvious identification is that it’s based simply on the assumption that this is a good, handy, flat space that would have been an obvious spot for a fight. Quite right, but unfortunately the sources rule out this location, at least if we take them at face value.

It seems pretty clear, from the aforementioned passages, that the battle must have been fought on the right bank of the river, with the two armies deployed more-or-less at a right angle to it, the Romans facing roughly south, the Carthaginians roughly north. Some nineteenth-century writers attempted to place the battle to the southwest of the hill of Cannae, notably Hesselbarth in his 1874 Göttingen dissertation and Thomas Arnold in 1886. Unfortunately, a cursory inspection of the area – represented with an orange box – ought to have ruled out such ideas – the ground they identified as the site of the battle is rugged and hilly, unsuitable for an infantry battle, let alone a battle involving the use of about 15,000 horses and some fairly sophisticated cavalry manoeuvres.

Attention returned once more to the left bank of the Aufidus, with the American Theodore Dodge placing the battle almost parallel to the river, close to the coast, as represented by the pink box; Dodge wasn’t working so much on the basis of the evidence as he was using what’s termed "inherent military probability". This is the idea that soldiers of whatever era will do what makes military sense, and that bearing in mind certain principles of warfare we can establish what historical generals are likely to have done. Although it ignores the fact that war’s a cultural activity – it varies in aims and methods between cultures – it is a useful tool. However, it’s a tool far too easily abused, as in this case; there’s not a jot of evidence to support Dodge, and plenty of it to refute his theory.

Konrad Lehmann and Hans Delbrück hypothesised that the battle was fought on the river’s left bank, a couple of miles west of the hill of Cannae, as represented by the green box, but Lehmann has the Romans facing roughly north and the Carthaginians roughly south, in direct contradiction of the sources, while Delbrück had the Romans facing roughly east and the Carthaginans roughly west. Again, their theories, however ingenious, lacked any real basis in our evidence. 

De Sanctis, at least, in placing the battlefield on the left bank as shown by the yellow box, with the Romans facing north-east and the Carthaginians facing south-west, had an explanation. Polybius, he believed, thought of Italy as a triangle with its base in the Alps and bisected by the Apennines; the Aufidus thus must have, in Polybius’ mind, flowed in a south-easterly direction; since the Aufidus in fact flows north east, all Polybius’ directions must be corrected – a Roman force facing roughly southeast, for Polybius, would in fact have been facing northeast, with its right flank on the river. 

It’s a clever idea but it doesn’t really follow that Polybius if envisaged Italy as a triangle he must have assumed that all rivers flowing into the Adriatic flowed south-east; besides, considering that Polybius explicitly speaks of the Aufidus having an east bank, it would seem that he believed the river to have flowed from south to north. De Sanctis’ theory, though ingenious, doesn’t hold up.

In 1912, Johannes Kromayer proposed that the battlefield was in fact on the river’s right bank, downstream from the hill of Cannae, on a front over four kilometres wide, with the Romans facing south-west-south and the Carthaginians north-east-north, the Roman right flank and the Carthaginian left flank both resting on the river. The red box here represents Kromayer's theory. Over time this theory gained more and more ground, eventually becoming generally accepted as the one that best fits the evidence, the topographical reality, and military practicality. See, for instance, the definitive book on the battle*. (Cough, cough)

Yes, I'm using the drawing in my book. So sue me.

 In 1981, however, Peter Connolly dropped a very astute bombshell onto this increasingly cosy consensus. It was all very well working on the basis of the texts, he pointed out, but we only have two items of geography to correlate with our literary evidence, and while the hill of Cannae is conveniently stationary, rivers have a habit of moving. What, he asked, if the Aufidus had flowed rather further north in 216 BC than it had done in his day? 

Assuming the river was at the northernmost limit of its floodplain in 216 BC, he placed the main Carthaginian camp at the modern town San Ferdinando with the main Roman camp just over a mile downhill. His proposed site for the battle, shown in pink below, falls down largely because it doesn’t allow for Hannibal having challenged the Romans to battle on the left bank of the Aufidus the previous day. Polybius 3.112 describes Hannibal’s army deploying for battle along the Aufidus, without crossing the river, and if we follow Connolly’s theory there simply isn’t space for them to have done that in the narrow stretch between San Ferdinando and Connolly's hypothetical battlefield.

Nevertheless, Connolly had raised an important point, one that Adrian Goldsworthy was to take up a few years ago in his book Roman Warfare (as shown in orange) and subsequently revisit in his books on The Punic Wars (with the battle located in the general area of the dotted turquoise box) and Cannae (as shown in olive green), where he explained his theory. Goldsworthy clearly changed his mind a couple of times as to the precise location of the battle, but that’s no argument against his basic thesis, which needs to be addressed. 

• First, he says, Kromayer requires Hannibal’s camp to be in the open plain rather than on higher ground at the modern San Ferdinando – of this he says "there could have been no intrinsic value to such a position apart from the pressure it applied on the enemy by its proximity to their camp". 
• Second, he argues that the location where Varro offered battle, according to Kromayer, is no less suited to cavalry combat than that location declined by Paullus the previous day. 
• Third, he points out that we have no reason to believe the course of the Aufidus in 216BC was anywhere near where it is now, and it could well have been much further north as per Connolly’s theory. 
• Finally, he says that Connolly has overestimated – and Kromayer has grossly overestimated – the frontage that a Roman army of 76,000 men would need. It would be possible, he argues, to squeeze an enormous Roman army into a battlefield only two kilometres wide – and with one Roman flank anchored on the river and the other flank anchored on the hill of Cannae or thereabouts, the Romans would be able to thwart any attempts by Hannibal’s cavalry to outflank and surround them.

Where do we start? Well, firstly there’s the issue of Hannibal gaining nothing from being encamped in the plain, barring the pressure that he’d apply on the Romans through being so close to their camp. Frankly, that could be reason enough to camp there – Hannibal wanted to draw the Romans out, after all. He wanted them to fight him, since he was sure that if they fought, he’d win.

What then of the charge that Kromayer’s proposed location for the battle is just as well-suited to cavalry combat as the the plain between the camps, in Kromayer’s thesis? That’s simply not true. The map I've cunningly nabbed from my own book shows that the terrain between the two camps is as flat as a pancake, perfect for cavalry combat, while there are at least a few contours in the area where Kromayer places the battle. But even if that area had been better suited to cavalry combat than the area where Hannibal had offered battle the previous day, Varro would still have had good psychological grounds for offering battle there. The previous day Hannibal had picked his terrain – now it was time for the Romans to pick theirs. This is an example of the dangers of applying "inherent military probability" to cultures that are different from our own.

Third, and now we’re moving into the meat of the Connolly/Goldsworthy hypothesis, what if the Aufidus flowed rather further north in Hannibal’s day than it does now? The first thing that has to be borne in mind is that, yes, the river’s current path almost certainly doesn’t match its route in 216BC. It doesn't follow exactly the same route now, even, as it did when Kromayer drew his map. Rivers move, and over the course of six or seven centuries the river could easily move from one side of its flood plain to the other. 

The Aufidus – or the Ofanto as it’s now called  isn’t a particularly impressive river, after all. It’s neither broad nor deep, and lacks in power – it’s the type of river that would always take the path of least resistance. But there’s no evidence at all for what path it took in Hannibal’s day. Yes, it’s rather arbitrary to assume that the river’s current course matches its course when the battle was fought, but it’s equally arbitrary to assume that its course in 216 BC was along the northern limit of its floodplain. It’s even possible that its course then was slightly further to the southeast than it is now, so that it would have tightly hugged the hill of Cannae.

Certainly, whatever path the river took when the battle was fought, two things are definite. Firstly, its general direction must still have been towards the northeast, and second there's no way it followed the almost straight path we see in Connolly and Goldsworthy’s diagrams – though not in Connolly’s reconstruction, which is a more accurate reflection of reality. Rivers don’t follow straight paths in their old age – they meander wildly, as Gerry Fee taught me in geography class millions of years ago, and whatever course the Aufidus would have followed would have been marked by twists and turns, just as today’s river is, if not more so. 

The only way to find what the course of the Aufidus would have been in 216 would involve a close topographical and geological study of the area, looking for evidence of meanders and oxbow lakes – these would almost certainly have been filled in over time, but they could be found. Once found, they could be cored, and the cored deposits could be dated. Without such a project, any attempt to locate the ancient course of the Aufidus must be regarded with suspicion.

What then of the idea that a Roman army of 70,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry could have been squeezed into a plain two kilometres wide? Well, it’s possible. It does seem terribly convenient, though, doesn’t it? The Roman army can, just about, be squeezed into a frontage two kilometres wide… and the gap between the hill of Cannae and the river Aufidus can, just about, be stretched to two kilometres wide. It does rather look as though the facts are being forced to fit the theory here. Besides, it would have been very tricky to deploy an army squeezed so tightly together into such a narrow corridor.

What about the suggestion that with their flanks protected by the river and the hill the Romans would have been well-protected, at least in theory, from Hannibal’s cavalry? Well, the first thing you might wonder is "why doesn’t Polybius or any of our other sources for the battle even hint at the Romans having adopted such a position?" That doesn’t disprove Goldsworthy’s theory, by any means, since ancient writers are often far from forthcoming on the topography of battlefields, but Goldsworthy’s asking us to accept that Polybius was willing to relate the positions of the armies at Cannae to one of the battle’s crucial landmarks, but not to the other. Such a half-silence would be curious, to say the least.

We also need to remember that the encounter at the Aufidus had been invited in the first place by Hannibal’s seizure of Cannae’s citadel, as is described in Polybius 3.107 Hannibal had since then moved the bulk of his army to the left bank of the Aufidus (Polyb. 3.111.11), but it seems unlikely that he would have altogether abandoned the most important and defensible strategic point in the vicinity. For what it’s worth, Plutarch suggests that Hannibal had control of the heights around Cannae when he describes a rather feeble joke made by Hannibal while on a hilltop viewing the Roman army being deployed (Plut., Vit. Fab. Max. 15.1)

If Hannibal did control the hill of Cannae it would have been suicidal for the Romans to have anchored their left flank on it, exposing their men to a potential bombardment of missiles from above – such missiles might not just include the heavy stones that Hannibal’s Balearian slingers could hurl for great distances, but even such simple things as rooftiles! Again, this doesn’t definitively refute Goldsworthy’s thesis, but again it should cause us to pause before swallowing it.

One thing that’s crucial to remember in evaluating this hypothesis is that the hill of Cannae is not an isolated hill. Rather, it’s part of a ridge about fifty to sixty metres high You can pick out Cannae on this shot, just about, by squinting and looking for the memorial column. 

These hills are quite steep with something in the region of a 45 degree slope. All very well, you might think, but bear in mind how little space Goldsworthy allows for the Roman frontage – somewhere in the region of two kilometres – 360 metres for the 2,400 citizen cavalry at the river, 1050 metres for the infantry in the centre, and 540 metres for the 3,600 allied cavalry at the foot of the hills. This seems terribly constricted. 

It’s reasonable to assume that the cavalry by the river were squeezed tightly together –  Polybius 3.115 and Livy 22.47 relate how with little room to manoeuvre the cavalry battle by the river turned into a barbaric melee with all fighting being done at close quarters. But what of the cavalry on the other flank? Polybius 3.116 gives no hint that the cavalry there lacked room to move; on the contrary, it seems as though that part of the battle was characterised by the typical skirmishing and repeated sallies so typical of the Numidian cavalry; there’s certainly no suggestion of any close combat between the Numidians and the Allied cavalry, something which surely would have happened had they been wedged between the infantry and the steep slopes of Cannae and the adjoining hills. No, this part of the battle took place in the open plain.

So where does this leave us? Goldsworthy’s theories don’t really hold up, but can we simply return to Kromayer? Not quite. Kromayer’s theory that the battle was fought on the plain where the uplands near Cannae slope gently towards the sea at Barletta is still the best theory to date, fitting all the facts we have. Unfortunately, the river moves, and until we know exactly what course it took in 216 BC we can never be fully sure where the battle was fought. 

As it happens, even that may be too optimistic; part of me suspects that unless we find a big pile of spearheads with ‘made in Carthage’ written on them we’ll never know for certain, but that’s just me. 

– Modified from a talk first given in July 2005.
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* Also available in Italian, and a second Italian version at that. I hear it's good. 

Violence and Islam

The brutal murder on 22 May of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich by two young Muslim men has shaken Britain. One of the murderers, blood still on his hands, promptly addressed a cellphone camera held up by a witness to declare: “I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land, women have to witness the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments, they don’t care about you. … Tell them to bring your troops back and you can all live in peace”.

As the tattooed hordes of the English Defence League sought to hijack popular disquiet by taking to the streets,  it was all too easy to forget how two years ago, when gangs of teenagers rioted and ransacked England’s cities, Britain’s Muslims were models of the virtues the English see as distinctively their own. Muslims took to the streets to protect communities and businesses from the rioters, and when three Muslims were killed in Birmingham, it was the Muslim community, led by the bereaved father of one of the slain, who appealed for calm.

Aggressive

This seems a distant memory now, with too many seeming willing to accept the constant refrain that Islam is an inherently aggressive religion. Some of these will concede, echoing the lazy clichés of the new atheists, there are plenty of peaceful Muslims, but this is only because they’re not doing it right. To their mind, it is hardly surprising that Islam, as Samuel Huntingdon put it in 2000’s The Clash of Civilizations, “has bloody borders.”

Such claims, however, betray an ignorance of Islam symptomatic of that religious illiteracy which Christians so rightly castigate when displayed by atheists, and which the 2012 parliamentary report Clearing the Ground identified as a serious challenge for public discourse in modern Britain.

It would be absurd to deny that the Qur’an is replete with martial passages – notably the eighth and ninth suras – calling for acts of warfare and violence against those who defy Allah. It would, however, be equally absurd to assume that such passages must necessarily be read in so brutally literal a way.

Over the centuries, Muslim scholars have often historicized the more violent parts of the Qur’an, seeing them as primarily relevant to the martial age in which they were composed, and arguing that passages about slavery, the rights of women, and jihad against non-believers represented stages in a process of liberation.

Spiritual Warfare

Spiritual and symbolic readings of the Qur’an’s more difficult passages have been even more common, with difficult passages being regarded as models of internal spiritual warfare. Sufi Muslims especially embraced such interpretations over what they saw as the naïve literalism of those who believed the Qur’an advocated real

warfare.

Radicalism and violent fundamentalism may blight parts of the Muslim world now, but this is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Fundamentalism is an act of violence against tradition, with fundamentalists reading religious texts as modern atheists often do; they read them directly and literally, heedless of history and context, as though their meanings are self-evident.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that religious literalism is conspicuously popular among university students of engineering, medicine, and the sciences, where poetic and multi-layered writing is frowned upon and where binary thinking is all too common.

Coping Strategy

Although fundamentalism is a coping strategy for those who would barricade themselves against the complexities and challenges of modern life, it’s ineffective and sometimes degenerates into a violent fanaticism. This fanaticism draws on models of terrorism as pioneered by the European anarchists of a century ago, nationalist groups such as the Stern Gang and the IRA, and especially Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers. Islamic terrorism, far from being a medieval throwback or something intrinsic to Islam, is a child of globalised modernity.

What’s striking about much modern smugness towards Islam is that it disregards how our Christian and Jewish scriptures can themselves be mined to justify all kinds of violence. The description of Samson’s death in Judges seems tailor-made to justify suicide attacks, after all, while the 1994 slaughter of twenty-nine Muslims in a Hebron mosque by New York-born Baruch Goldstein was explicitly identified as a response to the biblical injunction to make war throughout time on the Amalekites.

Of course, Catholics aren't meant to read the Bible in this fashion; the violent passages of the Old Testament, calling for bloody warfare and even the absolute extermination of Israel’s enemies, have been read from antiquity in a spiritual sense.

Christians such as Origen of Alexandria followed in Jewish footsteps by developing the idea of the four senses of Scripture, drawing on the example of Jesus who taught the disciples on the way to Emmaus how the Jewish scriptures constantly spoke of him.

Biblical passages were understood as having a basic literal meaning, which needed to be understood in light of the literary genre and historical context of the text – history wasn’t the discipline it now is when the Bible was written, such that it’s naïve to treat it as historical in a modern sense – but they could also have as many as three spiritual senses: the moral; the allegorical, which usually points to Jesus; and the anagogical, referring to our eternal destiny.

The effect of such nuanced readings of scripture was such that over the course of the Middle Ages scholars and theologians developed humane doctrines limiting the legitimate grounds for wars and controlling to some degree the way wars were fought, especially with an eye to how non-combatants should be respected. Unfortunately, these gains were cast aside following the invention of printing as widespread access to the Bible for those unfamiliar with nuanced ways of reading it ushered in one of the most violent ages Europe has ever known.

Justify

During the wars of religion, it was all too easy to justify the extermination of one’s foes on the basis that they were the Amalekites of the day; the butchery of women and children could easily be justified on the simple basis that “nits breed lice”.

The Biblical conquest narratives cast a long shadow. In his second inaugural address, for example, Thomas Jefferson explicitly appealed to God as having led his people to a promised land. Ideas such as these naturally led to the subsequent Manifest Destiny theory that America had been given to the European settlers, and that those already there could legitimately be swept away.

Such readings abuse the Bible, which should be read within the Church in light of reason and traditional understandings.  Crude literal readings are alien to Catholicism and relatively rare among other Christians; we should refrain from assuming that our Muslim brothers and sisters are incapable of similarly avoiding a brutal and dangerous fundamentalism.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 20 June 2013.

Who controls the past, controls the future...

It’s astonishing to look at the reaction of so many people in Ireland to the recent inquest into the death last October of Savita Halappanavar in Galway, and in particular at how so much attention is being paid to Dr Peter Boylan, erstwhile master of the National Maternity Hospital, that the inquest seems to be being rewritten in the popular mind.

Everyone seems aware of what Dr Boylan said at the inquest, but in directing the jury towards its verdict, the coroner didn’t so much as acknowledge Boylan’s claim that Savita would have survived if the law permitted doctors to terminate pregnancy in order to pre-empt hypothetical risks rather than real ones.

The jury could, of course, have disregarded the coroner's advice and given a narrative verdict which would have given due weight to Dr Boylan's belief that the law was the problem. Instead it opted for a verdict of medical misadventure, accepting the coroner's recommendations, the emphasis of which was almost wholly on procedures and systems failures, with the sole reference to terminations being a recommendation that the Medical Board and An Bord Altranais should have a common, clear, and explicit set of guidelines for how situations such as Savita’s should be handled. It looks, in truth, as though the inquest implicitly rejected Boylan’s analysis.

The official response from Galway University Hospital seems to recognise this, with lots of browbeating about systems failures and not a word said about the law putting Galway's staff in an impossible position.

If the inquest implicitly rejected Boylan’s analysis, Savita’s widower Praveen seems to have gone rather further, going so far as to cast aspersions on Boylan’s integrity.

Praveen's View

Interviewed by the Irish Times, Praveen stated that he believes Dr Katherine Astbury, the obstetrician who was in charge of Savita’s case, used the law as an excuse, a scapegoat for Galway’s poor handling of the case, and suggested that Boylan, by determinedly attributing Savita’s death to a failure of law, was effectively covering for her.

"Well everyone has their opinion. He's a doctor. I think he was soft on Astbury. I was told the obstetricians' is a small world and they all know each very well. I don’t know. It looked like he came across very soft on her."

Although Katherine Astbury trained at the National Maternity Hospital, among other hospitals, it should be pointed out that Peter Boylan says he does not know her. It’s intriguing that those who were so keen to make Savita a martyr for the pro-choice cause have been rather quiet about her husband questioning the integrity of the one obstetrician who keeps pushing the idea that Savita's case shows a need for a profound change in the Irish law, far beyond legislating for the X judgment.

I watched Boylan reel off his spiel on Prime Time on Friday night, and listened to him on Marian Finucane yesterday; I was too busy to experience him a third time this evening on Vincent Browne, but irked by his contemptuous conduct yesterday, and with my work done for the night, I think it’s worth highlighting a few issues with things he’s said over the last couple of days.

British Abortion Law: A Basic Primer
Boylan burbled away yesterday about terminating a pregnancy on hypothetical grounds being illegal in Ireland but legal anywhere other than theocracies. This simply isn’t true. Let’s take Britain for example, as that’s the nearest jurisdiction where abortion is routinely available, and the one in which more than 4,000 Irish women have abortions in any given year – a horrendous figure, but one that's been in steady decline for years, probably reflecting the long overdue demise of the cruel and unjust stigma against single mothers that used to mark the popular mind at home.

Now, I'm not saying a British doctor wouldn't terminate on the grounds of hypothetical harm, but I am saying they'd probably be breaking the law if they did so and would only get away with it because the British system is poorly audited and basically assumes doctors act in good faith.

If Peter Boylan had been in Britain and terminated the pregnancy of a woman he believed to be physically and mentally well, there's a good chance he'd have been in breach of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act.

Here’s the thing most Irish people don’t get, which enables all manner of people to muddy the waters: abortion is not legal in Britain.

I know, roughly 200,000 human beings are killed in Britain every year whilst still in their mothers’ wombs, but the fact is that the 1861 Act forbids abortion. The 1967 Abortion Act did not legalise abortion; rather, it provided doctors with a series of defences that could be used to justify the performance of abortions on medical grounds.

There are seven such defences, and it’s worth looking at them with a view to seeing how Savita’s request for a termination as she wanted the ordeal over with might have been understood.

Grounds F and G relate to clinical emergencies, where a pregnant woman’s life is in danger or there is a grave threat of permanent injury to her physical or mental health; as Boylan makes clear, there was no emergency until Wednesday, so these grounds wouldn’t apply.

Grounds A and B relate to situations which are not clinical emergencies but where termination is deemed necessary to prevent loss of life or grave permanent injury; again, these was no evidence of any such threat before Wednesday, so these grounds wouldn’t apply.

Ground E permits terminations where the child is expected to be born with a severe handicap, but the histopathologist Dr Michael Tan Chien Shang reported that the child had been perfectly healthy and normal; there was even, as Boylan has admitted, a chance she might survive and come to term.

Ground D concerns risk to any existing children of the pregnant mother; as Savita had no children, this ground clearly wouldn’t have applied.

This leaves ground C, upon which the justifications for 98pc of British abortions rest. This allows terminations when the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and where its continuance would be more dangerous for the pregnant woman than the termination of pregnancy.

Note that as far as Boylan was concerned, Savita was well until Wednesday*; assuming he believes this was the case, it is difficult to see on what basis he would argue that it would be have been better practice to expose her to risk through abortion than allowing her to give birth or miscarry naturally, given that the risks the latter option posed were purely hypothetical.

If a Ground C defence were to be legitimate it would almost certainly have to rest on the claim that terminating the child she wanted would have been less harmful to Savita’s mental health than seeing what would happen. Almost all Ground C terminations – 99.96pc of them – take place on mental health grounds, despite the RCOG pointing out that the evidence shows that abortion does not help people's mental health.

As Dr David Walsh explained on Vincent Browne last November, “the interventions carry risk as well as the non-interventions.”

What did Professor Bonnar say?
Interruptions were pretty much the hallmark of Dr Boylan’s Marian Finucane performance, and cutting in to ‘correct’ Breda O’Brien, he struck me as having rather egregiously misrepresented Professor John Bonnar, former chairman of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, with whom he’d discussed these matters on RTE’s Prime Time on Friday night.

“That’s incorrect,” butted in Boylan on Breda, explaining, “I was on Prime Time with him there last night I think it was…Friday night. And that’s not correct what he said. He said he would wait until she was ill and then he would have no hesitation in intervening… He was very clear about that because I picked him up on that.”

This simply isn’t true. John Bonnar did not say doctors should wait till a patient is ill before acting; he said they should find out if a patient is ill and then act.

Bonnar has said that had proper tests been carried out the hospital would have had evidence of substantive risk by Tuesday, and that this evidence would have justified termination. In other words, unlike Peter Boylan, and with microbiologist Dr Susan Knowles and apparently the Coroner, John Bonnar takes the view that the issue was systems failures and mismanagement, not law:

"My concern would be that the tests for infection were not heeded. There should have been swabs taken when she was admitted, we should have identified what the organisms were, we should have started the antibiotic treatment, and then terminated, and that could have been done by Tuesday."

Boylan’s response to this was simply to pull a sceptical face, while saying “John. Come on.” Like so.

Good eyebrow action. Always works well in the absence of an argument.

Note that Boylan hasn’t rebutted or refuted this argument; he’s merely looked condescendingly at another obstetrician, and then subsequently misrepresented what he said.



And remind me – what exactly did Dr Knowles say?

Earlier in the Prime Time discussion, Peter Boylan said something very odd.

“To me the deficiencies were mainly in appreciating that the ruptured membranes may well have been due to chorioamnionitis –" began Bonnar.
“There was no sign of that whatsoever,” butted in Boylan, “until the early hours…”

The thing is, that’s not quite true, and Peter Boylan should know this, given his supposedly forensic scrutiny of the case files and how he received transcripts of all testimonies at the inquest. He wasn't, after all, the only expert witness at the inquest.

Dr Susan Knowles was the consultant microbiologist who gave expert testimony to the inquest, and given that the whole Savita affair was basically a story of infection, I'd have thought her testimony should be given at least as much scrutiny as Peter Boylan's. She was, as Muiris Houston put it in The Irish Medical Times, a "beacon of light" at the inquest. She made several important points in this regard during her evidence.

• Firstly, she said that the Sunday blood test suggested that Savita’s body might have been fighting a subclinical infection even before her membranes ruptured, and that this test should have been followed up properly.
• Secondly, she pointed out there were “subtle indicators” of sepsis and chorioamnionitis on Tuesday.
• Thirdly, she made clear the antibiotic treatment Savita received prior to lunchtime on the day she lost her child was less comprehensive that what she would have received in any of the Dublin maternity hospitals and didn't meet Galway's own standards.

I realise that Dr Boylan has argued that the initial Sunday blood test probably didn’t mean anything, but I don’t think it makes sense simply to act as though the testimony of another expert witness – who happens to be a colleague of his at the National Maternity Hospital, as well as one of the country's leading experts on infection in pregnant women – simply didn’t happen.

Besides, even if Boylan were right to say that there was no evidence of chorioamnionitis before Tuesday, this would hardly negate Bonnar’s point that evidence of such things simply wasn’t looked for. As Dr Knowles pointed out, the Sunday blood test should have been followed up!

And, for those who are determined to support experts who say what we want to believe...

I’m loath to point to her, given her comments on the Savita affair have been sometimes prone to disregarding facts and to have shown a surprising misunderstanding of details that were in the public domain, but it might be worth looking at what the American pro-choice doctor Jen Gunter has said on this issue.

On 9 April she wrote that Savita’s combination of ruptured membranes, dilated cervix, and an elevated white blood cell count – all of which were in play by the early hours of Monday – all point towards a diagnosis of chorioamnionitis. On 13 April she added that the facts that Savita had an elevated heart rate –  on Tuesday evening –  and shaking chills –  by the early hours of Wednesday –  suggested that the infection had spread from her uterus into her blood stream as a result of chorioamnionitis being inadequately treated.

Now, I’ve been sceptical of Dr Gunter’s approach to this stuff, but I’ve seen pro-choicer after pro-choicer citing her with approval ever since the Savita story broke. If she’s even remotely credible, we have to at least recognise that her thesis poses a serious challenge to Dr Boylan’s claims.

To be honest, I think Dr Knowles’s testimony is challenge enough.

For the record, it's not Breda O'Brien who's been rewriting history...

Dr Boylan was very quick on yesterday's Marian Finucane to correct Breda O’Brien when she said that Savita had been admitted to hospital with her cervix fully dilated. He may well have been factually correct to point out that Breda was wrong, but it was both churlish and inaccurate of him to describe Breda’s point as “revisionism and the rewriting of the history of what actually happened”.

The problem is that even if Boylan is right to say that Savita’s cervix was not fully dilated when she was admitted – and he should know, as unlike most people, he’s had full access to Savita’s medical records – this isn’t what Praveen said back in November.

The Irish Times twice in November cited Praveen as saying that when Savita was admitted “The doctor told us the cervix was fully dilated, amniotic fluid was leaking and unfortunately the baby wouldn’t survive.”

Dr Olutoyele Olatunbosun, the gynaecology SHO who treated Savita on the Sunday told the inquest that she had found that Savita's cervix was dilated, and when addressing the inquest on 9 April, Praveen stated that when Savita was admitted she was told that there was “some cervical dilation”.

There may well be some revisionism – some rewriting of history – going on with this part of the story, but it’s not been Breda O’Brien who’s indulged in it. If Breda and her obstetrician friends can be faulted here, it’s for having trusted the original story as told by The Irish Times, and not having caught its most recent incarnation as told by Praveen.

Revisionism isn’t necessarily a bad thing, by the way. Sometimes we discover new facts or think of new questions, and these should force us to revise our old views and old narratives. That's just being honest and being thoughtful. Hanging onto "the crippling version of this story that was initially presented to the country by The Irish Times, which sought to shape this woman's tragic death into a rallying cry for a change to Ireland's abortion laws", would be neither honest nor thoughtful.

But that’s by the by.

Failings, failings everywhere...

Another oddity on Marian Finucane took place when Dr Boylan claimed that the only thing that the inquest identified as being deficient in the first two days was "the lack of a repeat of a white cell count".

That may have been the only thing he identified as deficient in the first two days, though even then he played down the significance of that, but it simply wasn’t the only thing the inquest identified as deficient in that period.

The coroner recommended – and the jury strongly endorsed this view – that blood tests should always be followed up properly, with procedures in place to make sure such errors as happened don't occur, and that there should be proper communications between hospital staff. Now...

• Susan Knowles noted that Savita was not given a vaginal examination or checked for leaking of amniotic fluid on the Sunday.
• The failure to follow up the blood test Dr Olatunbosun ordered on the Sunday meant the hospital's treatment of Savita was conducted in the assumption that Savita was not already fighting infection, whereas she may already have been afflicted with a subclinical infection.
• Dr Andrew Gaolebale said that he was not informed of the results of the Sunday blood test and he was not told that her membrane had ruptured after he saw her, even though he was still on duty for another 12 hours into the Monday.
• I don't know if Tuesday evening counts as being within the first two days, but just over 48 hours after Savita was admitted there seems to have been an issue with information about Savita's elevated pulse being brought to Dr Ikechukwu Uzockwu by the midwife manager Ann Maria Burke; we don't what happened, as their evidence is contradictory, but it seems that something went wrong with tachycardia, a classic sign of sepsis, not being taken properly into account.

To this I'd add that when Peter Boylan asked Breda, "Which is what? What have your colleagues – your obstetrician colleagues – identified as proper care?", I cannot help but recall how John Bonnar's answer, quoted above, sums up what he believed ought to have happened, had the white blood cell issue been spotted, perhaps in connection with Dr Gaolebale been told in a timely fashion of how Savita's membranes had ruptured since he'd inspected her, with her collapsing and vomiting.

It’s striking how Dr Boylan cuts Breda O’Brien short and misrepresents her as saying that an elevated white blood cell count would have justified a termination; she had never said any such thing.

What she was clearly trying to get at, though, was that if this had been spotted –  as Susan Knowles said it should have been, and indeed as was obviously the case from the HSE leaks some weeks ago –  it could have justified a whole series of other steps, as outlined by John Bonnar, which in turn might have justified a termination in accord with Irish law and normal Irish medical ethics.


I'd also point out that if the New York Times has reported things accurately, Dr Astbury herself, like Dr Knowles and evidently Dr Bonner, gave rather more weight to the failure to follow up the Sunday blood test than Dr Boylan did.

"The inquest has also heard testimony that several hospital protocols were not followed, amounting to system failures that contributed to Dr. Halappanavar’s death. Dr. Astbury said she might have intervened sooner had she been made aware of the results of earlier blood tests."

She presumably didn't mean she'd have leapt in to terminate or accelerate the miscarriage, but rather would have taken steps to find out what was going on  – steps that could have found out just how sick Savita was, regardless of how she appeared, and that would have necessitated decisive action. It's nonsense for  Peter Boylan to say there was no other evidence of problems; there was no evidence because the evidence wasn't sought.

As John Bonnar has said, there were ways of seeking that evidence.

___________________________________________________________________________

* No, really. That's the central plank of his argument. 44 minutes into Marian Finucane, for instance, he tried to explain away Galway’s failure to terminate Savita’s pregnancy before Wednesday morning by saying it’s an issue of law and clearly stating “She was well till then – that’s the issue, you see.”

This seems, at best, a presumption, as if she really had been well till Wednesday, then we must assume that she developed her infection on Wednesday. The reality, clearly, is that she merely appeared well, while harbouring a serious infection that had yet to kick in in a serious way.

That the white blood cell was high on Sunday may well have indicated that she had arrived in hospital fighting a subclinical infection, according to Susan Knowles, who is adamant that the test should have been followed up. Even without following up the test, and conducting further tests along the lines suggested by John Bonnar, who suspected that the rupturing of Savita’s membranes just after midnight on Monday may have been due to chorioamnionitis, it’s clear the hospital had recorded  'subtle indicators' of sepsis and chorioamnionitis before Wednesday, however, including a high pulse rate on Tuesday, according to Susan Knowles.

Falling at the First Hurdle

“The Catholic Church, aka the western church of the Latin rite,” Diarmaid MacCulloch begins an astonishingly dodgy piece in today’s Irish Times, “trades on tradition.”

It takes real effort for a respected historian to start an article with such an egregious factual error, but MacCulloch manages it, and then parades out a litany of dodgy statements that will no doubt be nodded along to by almost all the Irish Times’ declining readership, with hardly anyone bothering to check the claims of an esteemed Oxford academic, especially one they might have seen on the telly.

This isn’t the first time that MacCulloch’s described the Catholic Church in this clunky and inadequate way; in his 2009 book A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years he deployed this description as being, in his view, more neutral than descriptions which emphasise the papacy, as it acknowledges what MacCulloch deems “the equal historic status of the various Churches of Orthodoxy in eastern Europe and the Middle East [...] not to mention the various Churches of Asia and Africa which decided after the fifth century to ignore or repudiate the Chalcedonian Definition of the nature of Jesus Christ.”

Now.

Here’s the thing. Anybody who paid attention when John Paul died and Benedict became pope may have noticed a few lads knocking around at the funeral and investiture while wearing hats that, well, weren’t your typical common-or-garden bishops’ mitres. Like so:

These guys are the patriarchs and metropolitans of the Eastern Catholic Churches. The Catholic Church, contrary to Professor MacCulloch’s claims, is by no means simply “the western church of the Latin rite”; rather, it’s a network of dozens of churches, all unified by their association with the Pope, who acts as a physical and indeed personal point of unity for the Church. The simplest working definition of a Catholic is a Christian who is in communion with the bishop of Rome.

The biggest church by far within the Catholic Church is indeed the western church of the Latin rite – leaving aside the little matter of there being more than one Latin rite – but there are plenty of other smaller churches all in union with Rome, the most prominent of which being the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, the Maronite Catholic Church, and the Melkite Catholic Church.

These churches are among those being most heavily persecuted in the Middle East, and their members are just as much members of the Catholic Church as I am; indeed, friends of mine in America were received into the Melkite Church some years back, and I’ve been to a Melkite Mass in Aleppo. 

This is one of the reasons why it's inaccurate to refer to the Church as the Roman Catholic Church; it's not just a Roman or Latin Church. It's just what it's said on the tin since before Ignatius of Antioch used the word in 107 or thereabouts: Catholic. 

And no, it won't do to say that MacCulloch was right to equate the Catholic Church with the "western church of the Latin rite" because the other churches in the Church are so small as to hardly count. Or, at any rate, it won't do unless you don't think Benedict should have appointed two Eastern patriarchs as cardinals in his last consistory, making sure they'd have a say in the selection of his successor, and basically don't think they matter.

Mind, if that is a common view it could explain why we've done so little in recent years to help the beleaguered Christians of  Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere.

MacCulloch’s article begins by misrepresenting the Catholic Church. It doesn’t get better.

Beware the Idiots’ Lantern or They hide that information in books, you know

I’ll come back to MacCulloch’s dreadful article in a bit, but at this point it mightn’t be a bad idea to drag up an email I wrote a couple of years back when a devout and intelligent Anglican friend – a scientist rather than a historian – asked me what I’d thought of MacCulloch’s BBC series on Christianity’s history. It'll give you a sense of what where I'm coming from on this. When you approach a historian, listen to the bees buzzing in his bonnet before you listen to what he says, as E.H. Carr advised. That goes for me as much as for Diarmaid, of course.

“So, I got to pondering your question about Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity, and wondered whether I was being unfair. You looked a mite troubled when I said how poor I’d found it, and given that MacCulloch is a very highly respected scholar of the Reformation, I wondered whether my gut reaction had been wrong. With that in mind, and believing that you deserved a far better answer than I’d given you, I decided to give it another shot, so put my work aside last night and watched the first couple of episodes. Unfortunately, and I scrabbled down some notes as I watched just to keep a shape on my thoughts, I found it even worse than I’d remembered.

Obviously I’m coming at this from a different perspective than MacCulloch; he’s recognised as a brilliant scholar of the Reformation, and is an Anglican who was ordained as a deacon but declined -- or was declined -- priestly orders because of the Church of England’s stance on non-celibate homosexual clergy, him being openly gay himself. All of this affects his take on things, as far as I can see, giving his argument a serious bias. 

It could equally be argued that as a straight Catholic ancient historian, with some background in medieval studies, I have biases of my own, and this is true, but all I can really say on this is that it’s largely for historical reasons that I’m a Christian – and in particular a Catholic one – now, and I’d have been unlikely to have distorted and misinterpreted my evidence to give me the answer I wanted. I didn’t set out wanting to return to Catholicism, after all, and was an extremely reluctant revert!

There are things MacCulloch does very well. It’s admirable and important that he draws attention to highly ritualistic churches of the East, with their ancient roots, as we often forget them, though he glosses over how there are hardly any of them and how a large proportion of them have reunited with the Catholic Church over the past few hundred years. He’s elegantly concise in explaining the Arian and Nestorian controversies that the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon attempted to resolve, and I think is depressing on the ball in showing how the Church’s teaching on purgatory and indulgences became corrupted and turned into a scandalous industry in the late medieval period.

Other than that, though, I thought both programmes were very poor. I know from personal experience how television requires simplification, but there’s a point at which simplification – if carried out selectively enough – becomes falsification. And the programmes were blighted by such selectivity, with inconvenient evidence being ignored and details being cherrypicked to support a highly questionable thesis. Questionable? Yes, I’d say so, because I don’t think it works to present Christianity as a mere accident of history, which could very easily have been very different and far more Eastern in its appearance. 

That works perfectly well as a thesis if you assume God doesn’t exist or takes no interest in us, but I don’t think it works at all if you believe, as we do, that He does exist and loves us too. There’s a passage in C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves where he says that strictly speaking for a Christian there’s no such thing as chance. I wish I could find the quote, but having spent the past ten minutes flicking to no avail through my battered paperback edition, I’m coming up blank. Anyway, if Lewis is right, then it can’t be a mere fluke that the Church – in the broadest sense – takes the shape it has done through history.

One of the first things that bothered me about the programme was how little reference there was to the Bible in it, and how what references there were seemed skewed. This all struck me as seriously problematic, because I think it’s a very weird history of Christianity that doesn’t have the Bible in a fairly central place, not least because the Bible tells us how the Church began. I’d also argue that the story of how the Bible was written and slowly pulled together over the first Christian centuries is itself one of the most interesting and important parts of the Christian tale. 

That aside, though, it was only by leaving out a serious treatment of what the Bible is and says that he was able to launch into his main claim that Jerusalem was the natural centre of the Church and that it was only after the destruction of the Temple that the Church looked elsewhere for leadership, looking as much to east as to west until Constantine came along. As he sees it, nobody before the fourth century would have ever imagined that Rome could have become the headquarters of the Church.

This is poppycock by any definition. Well before the fall of the Temple the Church had looked west; look at Paul’s letters, and Peter’s presence in Rome, and at how Revelation features the Greek churches of Asia Minor. Were it not for the crowds at Pentecost, we’d have no Scriptural reason to ever believe there were any Christians in the east at all! Indeed, the fact that all the New Testament documents were written in Greek should be a clue as to which direction the Church was inclined to look! 

As for Rome itself, before 100AD a bishop of Rome wrote to the Corinthians to settle rows there, and just a few years later a bishop of Antioch who had been a disciple of John would write commandingly to numerous other eminent churches but say that he wouldn’t dare tell the church at Rome what to do. 

By the late second century the bishop of Lyons, formerly of Asia Minor, would write of how the Roman bishop stood in a direct line from Peter and Paul and should be regarded as a point of doctrinal unity for all Christians, and within twenty years of that the African Tertullian, having turned from the Church, sneered at the bishop of Rome as ‘the bishop of bishops’.  No, Rome’s position may have been copperfastened by Constantine in the early fourth century, but there’s no honest way of claiming that it wasn’t preeminent long before that. 

Against this he builds up a fantasy of what the Church might have been, inspired by the tiny relics that are the churches of the east. Glossing over what their ritualism might imply, and over their Eucharistic beliefs, he goes straight to what he sees as their core. These, he believes, are churches that have always listened, churches that have compromised with the societies in which they lived. Given his own personal history, I can see why he’d approve of churches that accommodate themselves to the values of the lands where they might be, but is this really what Christianity is about? 

I don’t believe Jesus ever presented his teaching to his disciples as a religion of compromise. He assured his disciples that they would be at odds with the world, and that the world would hate them as it had hated him. If the apostles had compromised, would they have been martyred? It would have been very easy for the Christians of the west to compromise with their Roman persecutors: all they had to do was to sacrifice to the emperor; they didn’t do it, and were persecuted accordingly. It was this, and really only this, that marked them out a distinct from all the other eastern cults that came to Rome and melted away in Rome’s religious hotpot. By refusing the compromise, they weathered the many storms of persecutions and eventually came out on top, unlike the eastern churches which compromised with their overlords and who now number just a few million souls.

It's painfully obvious that MacCulloch’s no more of a medieval historian than he is an ancient one, as glaring errors mark his comments on why Rome’s main church of St Paul is where it is, on when and how Britain was reevangelised, on Charlemagne, and on the Crusades. Most striking, though, was what he had to say about the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, where the Church clarified its language for describing what happens at the Eucharist. 

For him this whole idea of the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ was a new invention, based on pagan philosophy, when it was nothing of the sort. The language was new, sure, but the language was an attempt to grapple with a long held belief, a belief we can see in John 6 and 1 Corinthians 11, a belief which is very clearly expressed by Christian writers from the generation taught by the apostles, and a belief which is shared by the Orthodox and the churches of the east, none of which would have been inclined to adopt a new Catholic doctrine in the thirteenth century.

I may give the later episodes a shot later, because surely he must be better when he moves into his own specialist field. And I am rather tempted to read his big book on Christianity, which being a massive tome must be less likely to leave out inconvenient truths. It’s had very high praise from people who know what they're talking about, so it probably is worth looking at. Not yet, though.”

On this email, yes, I know parts of it may cause eyebrows to raise, but it was addressed to someone who knows that when I spoke of a Biblical focus in early Christianity I was speaking purely in terms of it as a historical text rather than an inspired one, who realises that the persecutions the early Church faced tended to be sporadic, localised, and erratic in application, and who’s well aware of my view that historians of the early Church should start from an essentially agnostic position.

As ever, there's a basic rule of historical analysis which says that when considering what somebody says, you need to pay attention to their target audience. Mine was a dear friend who's smarter than most and who shares certain preconceptions with me so I didn't need to spell everything out; Diarmaid's were ordinary BBC viewers and now are Irish Times readers.

And yes, I’ve since read his book, and found it a mixed bag. I'd definitely recommend it as well worth a read, but it certainly shouldn’t be the only general survey of Christianity anyone tackles.

Anyway, what of today’s article? Well, some of the points in it are basically addressed in my email to my friend, but to take a few others:

Peter and Rome

Rome’s prestige, MacCulloch says, “derives from possessing the tomb of the Apostle Peter, who probably never visited the city. This Palestinian fisherman, who would have spoken a version of Aramaic, plus enough street-Greek to make himself understood in the forum, may have been illiterate in either language, but he is represented among the books of the Bible by two elegantly-penned Greek letters written by two different authors – he himself was neither of them.”

Now, I’m quite happy to buy that Peter authored neither letter traditionally attributed to him, that being a well-argued scholarly orthodoxy, but it’s worth noting a couple of points about 1 Peter in particular. 1 Peter was clearly known to several early second-century authors, such that it must have been written before the end of the first century, with scholars tending to date it around 80, and it ends with the farewell:

“She who is at Babylon, and is likewise chosen, sends you greetings; and so does my son Mark. Greet one another with the kiss of love. Peace to all of you that are in Christ.”

Nobody believes Peter actually wrote this from the distant backwater that was first-century Babylon; rather, modern scholars are almost unanimous in holding that, as in Revelation, ‘Babylon’ is here a codeword for Rome. The question then is why, within a generation of Peter’s death and the lifetimes of many people who knew him, anybody who would have written a letter associating Peter with Rome had he not even visited the city.

Indeed, why would Clement, a Roman bishop generally thought to have written around 97, have in his Letter to the Corinthians held up Peter and Paul as the martyrs to whom the Corinthian Christians should look for example, were they not especially cherished by the Roman Church? Why would they in particular have been so cherished? One might even wonder Rome’s last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate, claimed in the mid-fourth century that Rome’s Christians used to gather to worship at the tombs of Peter and Paul even within the lifetime of the last apostle.

MacCulloch accepts even in the article that Rome holds the tomb of Peter, speculating in his book that Peter’s shrine was built in the 160s to mark the centenary of Peter’s death, but this avoids pointers that Peter was especially venerated in Rome rather earlier than that, and also how early second-century texts indicate that Rome had a pre-eminence of some sort within the lifetimes of some of those who’d been taught by the apostles. Clement, for instance, sees it as his Roman duty to direct the Church at Corinth in how it should conduct its affairs, and writing around 107, Ignatius of Antioch balks at exhorting Rome in the way he exhorted other early churches, saying “I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you.”

But MacCulloch knows all of this, which is why not once in his book does he go further than to say that it is unclear whether Peter ever played the role of bishop in Rome, even if he did die there, about which he comments: “the suspicion does linger that the story of Peter’s martyrdom there was a fiction based retrospectively on the undoubted death of Paul in the city.”

Which, I think we can all agree, is far cry from claiming that Peter probably never even visited Rome.

An Italian Prince?

Until the French Revolution, MacCulloch proclaims, the Pope was just one Italian prince among others.

Well, there’s some truth in that: certainly, I think we’d all agree that for much of papal history, the fourteenth century obviously aside, popes tended to be Italian princes; it is, however, ludicrous to say that they were just that, on a par with other Italian princes.

There were not many Italian princes whose definition of the dual nature of Christ would have been accepted by the gathered bishops of the Church at Chalcedon in 451, after all, but Leo I’s definition was supposedly greeted there with the great cry “Peter has spoken thus through Leo!” It's safe to say that few Italian princes in 595 would have commissioned Augustine of Canterbury to evangelise the English, as Gregory I did.

It would have meant nothing for an Italian prince to crown Charlemagne as Emperor, but it meant a lot for Leo III to do so on Christmas day in 800, and I think there’s no need to ask whether any other Italian prince could have stood at Clermont in 1095 and successfully called, as Urban II did, for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem to liberate the city and its pilgrim routes and to help the beleaguered Byzantines.

Which Italian princes would have been capable of transforming Christian Europe – and the wider world – through formally establishing such orders as the Dominicans and the Franciscans, as Honorius III was to do in 1216 and 1223, or the Jesuits, as Paul III would do in 1540? No other Italian prince had his realm become for centuries the great prize of European politics, with France so controlling the fourteenth-century papacy that the Templars were suppressed by Clement V in 1312 at the behest of a French king, with the papacy being based in Avignon for almost eighty years.

Yes, the Renaissance popes embroiled themselves as deeply as could be in the power politics of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, but again we have to ask ourselves whether they were simply Italian princes or whether they were something more than that. Again, all we have to do is look to Paul III, who for all his personal failings nonetheless convened the Council of Trent in 1545, after nine years of trying; in organising Trent and supporting the Jesuits, Paul III launched the Catholic Reformation and shaped Catholicism for the next four hundred years. I cannot see how a capable or honest historian could ever dismiss him as a mere Italian prince.

Whatever one might think of the actions of the popes prior to the French Revolution, I cannot see how any historian could dismiss said popes as mere Italian princes. They may have been that, but they certainly weren't just that. They had a reach, for good or ill, that no other Italian prince could even have dreamed of.

As for the Revolution?

MacCulloch claims that the French Revolution transformed the papacy by sweeping aside innumerable Catholic monarchs, prince-bishops, and other fiercely independent local jurisdictions in cathedrals and the like, leaving the papacy as the last piece on the board, enabling it to remodel the Church across the world, to eliminate local independence in Church government, initiative, and scholarship.

Yet again, there’s some truth to this, but MacCulloch’s description of a monarchical papacy owes rather more to the deep-seated Protestant paranoia that even now is latent among so many English – and, sadly, an increasing number of ill-informed Irish – than it does basic reason or cold historical fact.

Regardless of the fantasies of the ultramontanists, the papacy has never been monarchical in the way MacCulloch imagines; indeed, it could not have been. How, in an age before telecommunications and flight, could the papacy really have controlled matters in the local churches of Ireland, Paraguay, California, and the Philippines? 

Even now Rome’s power is profoundly limited in this respect: scarcely more than 2,000 people are employed in the Vatican – of whom only about half work, quipped John XXIII – and the budget of the Holy See is roughly half that of UCD or a decent-sized English university. The Catholic Church is, and has always been, profoundly decentralised.

It could hardly have been otherwise.

Bits and Pieces

The tail end of MacCulloch’s article is no better than the body of it.

The variety of Catholicism that predominated in Ireland until recently he sees simply as the creation of the Vatican; not for him the possibility that it might have been tainted by French Jansenism during the penal years, let alone that it was shaped above all by the Victorian values that marked the era in which it rose to dominate Irish public life; there is something to be said, after all, for Vincent Twomey's contention, in The End of Irish Catholicism?, that Irish Catholicism was rather out of step with the varities of Catholicism found on mainland Europe.

Benedict he describes as an arch-traditionalist, which really only suggests that he’s neither encountered any traditional Catholics nor engaged with any of Benedict’s writings. Did Benedict really say this week that nothing much happened in the Second Vatican Council? No, Diarmaid, he didn’t. He said something rather different and a damn sight more profound than that. Even our earliest account of his talk with Rome’s clergy made that clear.

It looks to me as though MacCulloch’s strolled into the trap John Allen so prudently warned of in the one very good section in his otherwise rather ropey 2000 book Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of the Faith:

“Because Ratzinger is a polarising figure, reaction to him is often uncritical, driven more by emotion and instinct than sober reflection. Progressives do not read his books, they disregard his public statements, and they assume every position he takes is based on power politics; conservatives revere most of what he says as holy writ, often spouting it mindlessly without penetrating to the principle or value he sees at stake. Neither response takes Ratzinger seriously.”

MacCulloch talks of a need for a multi-polar Catholicism, unaware of how that is, in so many ways, a reality already. John Allen puts it well, pointing out that the Church may be “top down on doctrine”, but is “bottom up on everything else”. Administration, finances, personal, and management are all run locally, bishops are basically popes in their own dioceses for most purposes, and among the most dynamic aspects of modern Catholicism are such new lay movements as the Focolares, Communion and Liberation, the Neocatechumenate, and L’Arche, all of which are basically grassroots phenomena.

Having displayed a shocking incomprehension of historical and modern Catholicism and the person and outlook of the current pope, MacCulloch wraps up with an ode to historians.

“But history has rich resources to offer: showing how they did things in the past, so Catholics can find sensible solutions for what to do next. In the middle of what any fool can see is a deep crisis in Catholic Church authority, let historians ride to the rescue.”

There’ll not be much point in our riding to the rescue unless we’re on the right kind of horses, wielding the right kind of weapons, carrying the right kind of ammunition, and clued in on the nature of our allies and our opponents.

Know yourself and know your enemy, and all that.