On the Eve of All Saints

Oh dear. There was an article by Marina Hyde in yesterday's Guardian -- I know, I'm not quick with this, but I am busy elsewhere -- emblazoned with the heading 'The internet has done for Scientology. Could it rumble the Christians, too?'

The headings's probably the work of a sub-editor of course, as I gather Guardian journalists rarely write their own headings. Ms Hyde's not really talking about Christians in general here, or even using Christianity as catch-all to criticise all religions, though some of the commenters on the article believe this is so; all three of the critical references to other religions in the text are to Catholics in particular. She compares the Pope's response to certain Anglicans as an attempt to lure them into a cultish communion; she cites the rantings of Mel Gibson, who espouses a rather peculiar strain of Catholicism, about the apparently inevitable damnation of Anglican wife; and she imagines a senior cardinal being asked whether he accepts -- albeit in caricatured form -- the most basic teachings of the Catholic faith. Frankly, it looks as though she has an axe to grind against Catholicism in particular, in that peculiarly English way. But I digress.

Predictably, Ms Hyde is picking up on the story of how the French have found the Church of Scientology guilty of serious fraud, and indeed on other recent developments:

'In France, Scientology was found guilty of defrauding its followers after a judge effectively debunked the idea of the church's trusty e-meter, a crude polygraph whose readings are used to encourage Scientologists to purchase everything from books to extreme sauna courses. In Los Angeles, the Oscar-winning (even if it was only for the abysmal Crash) director Paul Haggis cut his ties with Scientology in protest at what he branded their tolerance of homophobia, adding for good measure that the church's claim that they do not tell people to "disconnect" from unsupportive family members was untrue – his own wife had been ordered to do so. Meanwhile, Scientology's chief spokesman Tommy Davis stormed out of a television interview with Martin Bashir, after the latter pressed him on what we might delicately term "certain articles of faith". The alien stuff, basically.'

Hyde's general argument is that all this has happened because of the internet, that the internet has proven a threat to Scientology that L. Ron Hubbard never imagined facing. Structurally, Scientology is a mystery religion -- like the Greeks had at Eleusis, say, or the Gnostics who played with the Christian template in the centuries when the early Church was fighting to survive. It claims secret knowledge, and for a price you can be initiated into that knowledge, being purified in the process; the more you pay, the more you learn, and the purer you get. The thing is, thanks to the internet, huge amounts of the Scientologists' secret knowledge is in the public domain, and -- as South Park caricatured it in 'Trapped in the Closet'- it's not really very likely. Alien warlords? Spaceships like DC-8 airliners? Intergalatic genocide? Hydrogen bombs? Volcanoes? In fact, it's just the kind of scenario that a hohum pulp sci-fi writer from the middle of the last century might have been inclined to make up.

That's bad enough, but then there's all the whistleblower stuff, and most recently the thing with Paul Haggis, and then the rampant loopiness of what Tom Cruise said about Scientology last year, when I particularly loved how he was introduced:

'There is a worldwide arena where the game is played for the fate of whole populations . . . where one side schedules entire generations for psychiatric drugging, and marks five million more for lethal toxic exposure . . . Also on the board, scores of nations where no workable technology will even be permitted . . . and plans in play to keep people so restimulated they can barely envision a future, much less consider the eternal scope of Scientology.But there's someone on the other side of that global arena . . . Someone advancing Scientology on a fully epic scale to a very different future . . . And he is Class 4 OT7 Platinum Meritorious and IAS Freedom Medal of Valor Winner . . . Tom Cruise!'

And, then for me there's the jewel in the crown, which is that it's very easy to find solidly researched biographies of L. Ron Hubbard online, which depict him, frankly, as a fraudster, as someone who made this all up with the aim of making money.

That's the key point, really, and that, I think, is where Ms Hyde's article falls down. She goes on:

'Yet there is the rub. In France, Scientology is deemed a sect as opposed to a religion, which is why they are required to produce evidence for their claims, where recognised religious leaders are not. For those of us who believe that all religions are full of tall tales, this might seem slightly unfair [...] Clearly, Scientologists should be forced to justify their doctrinal lunacies – the only sadness is that other religions are apparently exempt from having to do the same. Imagine for a moment a Bashir-type interviewing some senior cardinal. "So," he might inquire, "you're saying that by some magic the communion wafer actually becomes the flesh of a man who died 2,000 years ago, a man who – and I don't want to put words into your mouth here – we might categorise as an imaginary friend who can hear the things you're thinking in your head? And when you've done that, do you mind going over the birth control stuff?"'

I know, this is silly: the Scientologists are being asked about their beliefs because they 're a mystery religion that in return for payment will reveal secret knowledge; Christians wouldn't need to be grilled in quite this way, as Christian teaching is freely accessible to everyone. In a way, though, she does have a point. Extraordinary claims can hardly be taken on face value; these things need to be justified, and Christians, for example, shouldn't expect to be treated with kid gloves. Indeed, 1 Peter 3.15 pretty much says we should expect to have to justify our beliefs: and should always be ready to do so: 'always be prepared to make a defence to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.'

The thing is, though, if you're going to ask someone to justify their beliefs, you have to be prepared to listen to what they say. And I don't mean to smile and nod politely, I mean to listen. Given that we all too often find each other's beliefs to be, to a greater or lesser degree, ridiculous, the big questions here are surely not so much based around 'what?' as they are variants on 'why?'

Some of these questions are philosophical and scientific, such as 'why do you believe there is more to the universe than meets the eye?', or 'why do you think, in an exclusively material universe, one pack of neurons is more valuable than another?' or 'why do you think, in an exclusively material universe, you have any control over how the atoms bounce in your head?', but others are historical...

Is there any basis for Scientology's fundamental beliefs other than the claims of L. Ron Hubbard, who made huge amounts of money from his claims? Is there any basis for Mormonism's fundamental beliefs other than the claims of Joseph Smith, who was widely regarded as a fraudster in his own time and who gained influence and several dozen wives from the religion he founded? Is there any basis of Islam's fundamental beliefs other than the claims of Muhammad, who used his claims to rally an army and conquer Arabia? Is there any basis for Christianity's fundamental beliefs other than the claims of -- as Paul says at 1 Corinthians 15 -- witnesses such as St Peter, St James, St Paul, and hundreds of Christ's other followers, none of whom had anything to gain from the claims they made, and many of whom faced persecution and death for making these claims?

These are the kind of questions that should be asked. I don't mind justifying what I believe, but if someone's going to demand an explanation, they ought to be willing to listen to it.

Whether you consider it a religion or not, Scientology's a new phenomenon, not yet 60 years old, and it's one that's had a very ease ride so far; this is something Ms Hyde seems to be skating over. It's a shame, she says, that other religions are exempt from having to justify their beliefs. I can't speak for Buddhism, Hinduism, and so forth, but I'll say this: Christians have been justifying their beliefs for two millennia. For the first three hundred years of the Faith they regularly did so at the point of a Roman sword, and even now, throughout the world, this is still all too often the case. It'd be worth thinking of the martyrs tomorrow, especially given how there may well have been more of them in twentieth century than in all the previous Christian centuries combined.

It's one thing to attack religions; it's another to attack them because you can't be bothered finding out about them. It's not close-minded to disbelieve religious claims, but it is close-minded to dismiss them without considering the evidence fairly and thoroughly. This stuff has been justified, and continues to be justified every day. I'm not saying that Ms Hyde would accept these arguments, but it seems remarkable that she's unaware that they're out there. They don't just hide that information in books, you know, nor do they only proclaim it in churches that are open to all. It's on the internet too.

You know, the thing that's rumbled the Scientologists.

A Bruton rather than a Briton?

I was more than a little startled to read yesterday morning that John Bruton has decided to put his name forward for the Presidency of the European Council, should the Lisbon Treaty be signed into Czech law by Mr Klaus. I just hadn't seen it coming at all. The debate about the Presidency has been annoying me for ages, mainly because people keep referring to it as the European Presidency, when it's nothing of the sort, and because people in England have been getting their knickers in a twist over the prospect of Tony Blair getting the job.

Frankly, I don't know what David Miliband was on about the other day, when he said that Blair would be perfect for this job, as he believed that 'we need somebody who can do more than simply run through the agenda. We need someone who, when he or she lands in Beijing or Washington or Moscow, the traffic does need to stop and talks do need to begin at a very, very high level.'

The Council President's main job is to chair a handful of meetings -- or summits, I suppose -- every year. That's it. I can't really see him being called upon to go and conduct talks at the highest level -- that's surely a job for the President of the Commission, or, more probably, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. But if the President has to be sent in to negotiate, well, does anyone really think someone making a common case for 500 million people who generate more than 30 per cent of the World's GDP is really going to be ignored?

Surprised though I was, I, like Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber, think Bruton must have a serious chance of being selected for this role. I think Jan-Peter Balkenende, from the Netherlands, is probably the most likely contender, but I reckon Bruton's got a fair chance.


Let's look at the main names in the frame: Blair, Bruton, and Balkenende, as noted; Jean-Claude Juncker from Luxembourg; Belgium's Guy Verhofstadt; Vaira Vike-Freiberga from Latvia; Austria's Wolfgang Schuessel; Spain's Felipe Gonzalez; and Finland's Martti Ahtisaari.

It seems the Spanish have said that the Socialists are interested in the High Representative role, so it looks as though the symbolically more important Presidency is being ceded to the centre-right; this is hardly surprising given that almost every country in the EU currently has a centre-right government. Now, Blair is hardly on the left in real terms, but he is technically there, so he's surely out of the running for the top job. So too are the more genuinely left wing Gonzalez and Ahtisaari.

That leaves Juncker, Balkenende, Verhofstadt, Schuessel, Vike-Freiberga, and Bruton. They're all from small countries, so won't get anyone's back up, and are all from the centre-right.

Verhofstad will get nixed by the British, because Belgium and the UK can get arsey with each other in European matters, so unless there's a trade-off with Miliband to be High Commissioner, that probably reduces the list to five.

Likewise, Juncker would probably be seen by Britain and the Poles as 'too European' -- he's basically what you'd draw if you were asked to draw a caricature of a Eurocrat -- and will likewise almost certainly be ruled out. It's a shame, as given his years and years of EU experience, and his ability to get things done quietly, he'd be very good, but I think his obvious expertise, experience, and enthusiasm for the European project shall almost certainly hurt him. Four left, so.

Angela Merkel likes Austria's Shuessel, but I think this might be seen as German patronage, and more importantly others will see him as too right wing -- he'd had Haider's party as his junior coalition partners, after all. I have a feeling the socialist Spaniards will have doubts, for starters, and can't see this one flying. I hear he can't speak French either, and if true, that alone could irk Sarkozy; the French can be funny about these things. That leaves three.

Latvia's Vike-Freiberga could be a dark horse, and I'd half like her to get the job, because she'd probably be a reasonable choice and then I could namedrop by telling people that I met her in London a few years back. I doubt she has a real chance, though, as I suspect Germany would block her candidacy, given how pally Germany is with Russia nowadays: the Russians don't like the Baltic states. She was proposed as UN Secretary General a few years ago, and withdrew her candidacy after the Russians made it clear they would oppose any Eastern European Candidate.

Balkenende and Bruton then.


I reckon Balkenende has to be the favourite, not least because he's currently in his fourth stint as Dutch Prime Minister and knows everyone at the table who'll be making this decision. On the other hand, I can't help wondering whether it'd be wise for him to jump ship from the Netherlands at the minute, given the possibility of Geert Wilders and his crowd making further inroads into Dutch politics. What's more, I can't help thinking that the fact that he couldn't persuade the Dutch to vote for the EU Constitution back in 2005 might be held against him. After all, if it's possible -- wrongly -- to argue that Blair denied the British a referendum on the Constitution, imagine what could be said against Balkenende: the Dutch voted against the Constitution and then Balkenende went ahead and ratified a similar treaty anyway. He could look like a personification of the democratic deficit, and that wouldn't do the Union any good.


So what of Bruton? Well, frankly, I think he could be a brilliant compromise candidate that wouldn't pose any difficulties for anyone. To start with, he meets the basic criteria by being a Christian Democrat from a small country that's a member of the Eurozone. Although he's a conservative, his track record of working productively with left-wingers is impressive: his cabinet consisted of him, eight further TDs from Fine Gael, seven Labour TDs, and one TD from the Democratic Left. Despite him being a conservative Catholic it was his government that introduced divorce into Ireland, so he's not too conservative; on the other hand, his largely left-wing government introduced the low corporation tax that played such a huge role in creating the Celtic Tiger, so economic liberals should like him. In short, he's a right winger that doesn't throw his weight around and plays well with others.

What's more, he's deeply pro-European, but I don't think is so much so as to scare the likes of the British and the Poles, in the way that a Benelux candidate might; indeed, having worked closely with Conservative and Labour governments over Northern Ireland, I think he could be someone that British would be very comfortable with. His European credentials are impeccable, though. He was the effective head of the successful campaign to have the Maastricht Treaty ratified in Ireland, despite being in opposition at the time, and as Taoiseach he chaired the European Council and helped lay the foundations of the Euro. After leaving office he served as one of the delegates that drafted the proposed European Constitution -- which was ditched in the end, but which was substantially salvaged via Lisbon -- and has been the EU's ambassador to the United States for the past five years.

That's important too. Being Brussels's man in Washington has given him serious familiarity with America already, and it's worth noting that he addressed Congress back in 1996. Indeed, if the Council President is ever called upon to negotiate with the Americans -- and again, that's not really the President's envisaged role -- then I think he'd do okay. While no Blair, his last few years will have given him useful connections, and being an English speaker he'd come across as less exotic than Juncker, Balkenende, or any of the others. I think an ability to speak the Americans' language could prove a serious advantage, as could the fact that he embodies the responsible phase of the Celtic Tiger rather than the crazy excesses of the Fianna Fáil years.

What puzzles me most about this, though, is that Bruton came forward and nominated himself. writing to the 27 governments to ask to be considered for the job. Cowen has had to shuffle out to support the nomination. This is pretty irregular. It'd be more normal for someone to ask him in an interview -- and an interview would easily be contrived -- whether he would like the Council Presidency, and he'd say that he'd be honoured to be considered, and that he'd relish the challenge of the job blah blah blah, and then the Irish government or another would bring his name up when the heads of government meet in conclave. As it were.

But he came right out with this? Why? He's never come across as an arrogant or a reckless man. Does he know something we don't?

I reckon Balkenende's still the favourite, but it's probably only 60:40.

Give us your misogynists and bigots...

There's a remarkable piece by Richard Dawkins over at the Washington Post's site, which is drawing a lot of fire from Catholics, largely because if he'd spoken this way of Judaism he'd have been quite rightly identified as a vicious anti-semite, and because if he'd written anything like this about Islam -- well, he'd probably feel he'd have to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.

The premise of the article is rather strange, given that it's a response to the following question:

'The Vatican is making it easier for Anglicans -- priests, members and parishes -- to convert to Catholicism. Some say this is further recognition of the substantial overlap in faith, doctrine and spirituality between the Catholic and Anglican traditions; others see it as poaching that could further divide the Anglican Communion. What do you think?'

Professor Dawkins seems an odd person to direct such a question to, given that he's neither an expert in theology or the history of ecumenism, and and thinks all varieties of Christianity to be utter hogwash. Faced with such a question, you'd have thought he would have responded by saying that he didn't care, and that as far as he can it's just a classic case of two bald men fighting over an imaginary comb.

Sadly, while Professor Dawkins is an atheist, I think it's fair to say that he's a very conventional Anglican atheist, in that he's a product of England's semi-Protestant culture, and as such he's weighed down by the mass of anti-Catholic baggage that sadly burdens all too many English minds. Given an opportunity to shrug off recent developments as a complete irrelevance, he instead let loose a torrent of anti-Catholic bile.


By 'Evil' do you just mean 'Counter-Productive'?
His opening is dramatic, of course, rhetorically asking 'What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world?', and decreeing that 'In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders.'

I'd like to see the other contenders on Professor Dawkins' shortlist, not least because I wonder what he ranks as major institutions and I wonder whether any of the other contenders on the shortlist are things other than institutions -- things such as greed, envy, fear, and human nature in general.

I'd hope so, though if so, I'd wonder why human nature didn't win hands down. Leaving that aside, though, it seems perverse to see the world's foremost private provider of healthcare and of education as being uniquely wicked. In fact, it seems especially strange given the emphasis on caring for the poorest of the poor especially in Africa.

Much of what Professor Dawkins says is simply too vague or too subjective to counter, but some things are worth addressing. Try this heap of hooey:

'The Anglican church does not cleave to the dotty idea that a priest, by blessing bread and wine, can transform it literally into a cannibal feast; nor to the nastier idea that possession of testicles is an essential qualification to perform the rite. It does not send its missionaries out to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans, about the alleged ineffectiveness of condoms in protecting against HIV.'

Granted, he doesn't actually say that the Catholic Church does the things he here specifically says the Anglican Communion doesn't do, but I think it's implied. It's worth considering for a minute whether these charges are fair.


Priesthood and the Eucharist
To begin with, Catholics don't believe that the Eucharist is a form of cannibalism, although non-Christians have misunderstood this from the start. This was a charge Christians faced from at least the second century, when they were persecuted and regularly accused of engaging in 'Thyestean banquets'. Rather, Catholics hold that at Communion they partake in the glorified body of Christ, under the appearance of bread and wine.

Secondly, it's true that the Anglican Communion doesn't accept transubstantiation as a matter of doctrine, and indeed that the 28th Article of the Church of England explicitly rejects transubstantiation as a concept, but High Church Anglicans have long believed in transubstantiation, and in 1971 the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission issued an Agreed Statement on Eucharistic Doctrine which stated that they had 'reached substantial agreement on the doctrine of the Eucharist'.

I'm not sure why Professor Dawkins seems to regard sexism as nastier than cannibalism, but in any case it's of course nonsense to say that Catholics believe that the rite of Eucharistic consecration can't be performed by anyone without testicles. I'm not sure whether Professor Dawkins is being ignorant or simply crude here, because I'm fairly sure there are a few priests out there now who've received drastic treatment for testicular cancer, and who are still saying mass.

What Professor Dawkins is trying to get at, I presume, is that Catholics believe that only priests can celebrate the Eucharist, and only men can be priests. Now, you might think that's nonsense or unfair or outright misogynistic, but that's a debate for another day; what's significant here is that a significant minority of Anglicans share this belief. It seems that at least a part of the Anglican Communion cleaves to exactly the same 'dotty ideas' as the Catholic Church.


African Condoms
As for the idea that the Catholic Church sends missionaries to Africa to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans, well, I'm afraid this is bosh. Yes, it's true that incredibly stupid things have been said by at least one cardinal, at least one archbishop, and a host of priests and nuns, but it seems to be tad on the defamatory side to be claiming, firstly, that these were deliberate lies rather than sincerely believed falsehoods, and also I'd wonder why Professor Dawkins seems to think this is a policy. Does the Church send missionaries to Africa to tell people about the ineffectiveness of condoms in combatting HIV and AIDS? Or does it send them there to tell them about, well, Jesus? If it's the former I'm sure there must be a directive to this effect somewhere. No? Oh, well, fancy that.

One might interpret the Pope's comments on this matter as a policy statement, of course, because you may remember how back in March the Pope said that AIDS could not be overcome by the distribution of condoms. You'll probably remember quite a few people throwing a fit over this, not least President Sarkozy, but you may not recall the reaction of Edward C. Greene, who heads the AIDS Prevention Center at the Harvard Center for Population and Developmental Studies, who said 'the best evidence we have supports the Pope's comments'.

Needless to say, people got huffy about this too, citing instances where people have multiple partners, but I think it's pretty obvious that in a situation where AIDS is rife, the nhaving more than one sexual partner, whether or not you use a condom, isn't exactly a good idea. After all, they sometimes break, for starters. It seems, as it happens, that in areas with the biggest AIDS problems, people often use condoms

For what it's worth, more than half of all projects in Africa that combat AIDS are run by the Catholic Church, and more than a quarter of all HIV care in Africa is provided by Catholic agencies -- yes, agencies of that same Catholic Church that Professor Dawkins sees as a contender for the the title of 'the greatest force for evil in the world'. In terms of educating people in order to limit and prevent the spread of AIDS, sure, they teach abstinence and faithfulness, which seems to work, if the Ugandan figures mean anything, which they might not.

Where do condoms fit into this? We all know the Church is opposed to them, of course, but doesn't it seem somewhat paradoxical that someone merrily disregarding the Church's precepts on sex outside marriage should feel obliged to abide by its teaching on contraception? Besides, contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church doesn't teach anything at all about the use of condoms outside of marriage. No really, it doesn't. Sex outside of marriage is simply forbidden, and as a rule, the Church generally doesn't advise its flock on how best to sin.


Do we 'belong' to a Church or do we 'have' a Religion?
On Professor Dawkins goes, then, spluttering 'Poaching? Of course it is poaching. What else could you call it?' Let's see. A hefty minority of Anglican clergy, many of whom regard themselves as Catholic, have been unhappy in the Anglican Communion for some time. Many of these have been seeking some kind of reunion with the See of Peter for a long time, and had hoped to do so while retaining their Anglican identity. They've been knocking at Rome's door for ages, and the Pope having finally opened it, has said that if they want to come in, they're more than welcome, and indeed, they can keep their coats on if they insist.

They don't have to become Catholics if they don't want to. It's up to them. They can think for themselves, after all. I'm not sure Professor Dawkins realises this.


The Argument from Personal Incredulity
Why would they want to do this? Well, here Professor Dawkins can envisage only two possible explanations, being misogyny and homophobia. I'm not sure why he sees these as the only possible explanations -- it may be that he's not looked at any evidence, whether statistical or anecdotal, or it may be that he just can't imagine any other possibilities, and so assumes that his prejudices must explain everything.

I'm afraid his explanations are a bit subtle for me anyway. He seems to be saying that some of the Anglicans who'll swim the Tiber are homophobes who are joining a homophobic institution that's a refuge for homosexuals, while others believe the forgiveness of sins and the consecration of bread and wine so that it becomes the glorified body and blood of Christ are humble and unexacting duties. Paradoxes again, eh?


Statistically Informed Science?
On he goes, with a smirk, declaring,

'Turning to the motives of the poachers, here we find cause for real encouragement. The Roman Catholic Church is fast running out of priests. In Ireland in 2007, 160 Catholic priests died, while only nine new recruits were ordained. To say the least, those figures don't point towards sustainability. No wonder that disgusting institution, the Roman Catholic Church, is dragging its flowing skirts in the dirt and touting for business like a common pimp.'

Leaving aside how I'm not sure if Professor Dawkins understands what a pimp is -- they don't wear skirts, to my knowledge, though maybe he's more familiar with them than I am -- it's simply not true to say that the Church is running out of priests.

Sure, in Ireland the number of priests is indeed dropping, but so too are the numbers in the pews, unfortunately, and there were probably far too many priests anyway, even leaving aside the bad ones. Professor Dawkins's figures seem a bit out of date, anyway, given that it looks as though vocations may be on the rise in Ireland, where 38 seminarians started studying for the priesthood last month. As for England, two friends of mine have entered seminaries in the last year or so, so I think things may be healthier here than meets the eye too. Of course, the claim that the Roman Catholic Church is fast running out of priests is hopelessly Eurocentric anyway. Far from being in decline, the number of priests around the world is -- just about -- on the rise, as it has been for the last decade.

I know. You can prove anything with facts, can't you?

How to Draw Comics the Liefeld Way

There was a time when I used to want to be a comic artist, and among my inspirations was one Rob Liefeld. Don't get me wrong: I didn't think he was good. No, I was astonished even then by how bad his drawing was -- and I could tell this by just flicking through his 'work' before buying something a bit more credible in the Forbidden Planet -- and was convinced that if he could make a fortune from something so egregiously bad, well, surely I could make at least a living.

Obviously, things haven't worked out that way, and as the years have passed my scorn for Mr Liefeld has faded along with my ambitions towards being a comic artist. You forget, after all.

Until tonight.

There's a lovely post on Crooked Timber today entitled 'The Dark Depths of Comics History', pointing to the odd 1990s phenomenon of Marvel Comics swimsuit issues. Yeah, I know. Look, don't blame me. I'm an ardent admirer of Sturgeon's Law. It highlights a detail of a drawing in which lush inking and subtle colouring are cleverly deployed to disguise the fact that the actual drawing is terrible:

'Where exactly is either his left shoulder or the left side of his chest? Did his shoulder just sort of give up on becoming an arm and then the arm tried again, launching itself out, a bit below, where the intercostals should be? I could stare for hours. It’s like a cross between a Japanese sand garden and a fancy butcher shop.'

It's quite special, really, but the post itself is utterly trumped by the comment thread which leads, by some comic book variant of Godwin's law, to the pit of excrement that is Rob Liefeld's artwork.

Here, for instance, is Rob's take on Captain America -- and I hope both Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were dead by the time this was drawn, as this sort of thing just shouldn't be allowed. One of the commenters, Gareth Rees, sizes it up and drily remarks that 'Liefeld’s Captain America is the result of merging two different perspectives into one picture: his shoulder is seen side-on, and his chest at an oblique angle. It’s the same kind of distortion used to get the buttocks and breasts of female characters visible at the same time. It’s a technique that goes back at least to the cubists.'

This drew the response that 'It’s not just that, but part of his back is visible as part of the side-on angle, and his other shoulder is missing from where it should be given the chest angle. You’d have to tear his torso in half to force it into that pose.'

Good, eh? It gets better, though, as Gareth Rees has linked to a marvellous site dedicated to 'The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings'. Now, I'd say they're not so much the worst Liefeld drawings as a representative sample, but what the hell, they need to be studied. I've hardly been able to breathe for laughing since seeing them, and given how my life has been the last couple of months, that's quite an achievement.

It's still beyond me why anybody bought this stuff, let alone why they bought it in such massive quantities. Baffling.

Take this beauty, for instance, number 16 on the list, of which it is entirely fair to say:

'How many teeth are in a mouth? Like a billion, right? I’ll just draw a billion, all the same size and shape.

All of the characters on this page are in the same room. Not that you’d know that, given the way Liefeld draws the majority of his backgrounds. Where most artists would include, say, details of the room or an actual background, Rob uses groundbreaking techniques like, DAGWOOD’S HAIR! HORIZONTAL LINES! CURVES! And CROSSHATCHING!

Seriously, if that establishing shot weren’t there you’d think these people were all just kind of abstract concepts. What are they, in a wind tunnel? Who gives a shit, get back to people holding swords.'

I know, astonishing, eh? And this isn't even close to being the worst piece of Liefeld art there. No, you need to see his reluctance to draw feet, his inability to draw hands, his obsession with really big guns that rest on clenched fists, his tendency to draw women standing en pointe if their feet must be shown at all, his fetish for pouches, his perplexing theory of shadows, his prediliction for drawing freakishly endowed men, and his utter ignorance of female anatomy. The last point, apparently, is easily explained:

'The most important thing you need to know before reading about all the terrible things Rob Liefeld has drawn is that he has never seen or talked to a woman in his life and has no idea what they look like or how their bodies operate. If you asked Rob Liefeld to draw a diagram of the uterus he'd put on a pair of gauntlets and punch the shit out of your chalkboard. This is how the man operates, and though I know it sounds like a lot, you have to believe me. I don't want you looking at the stuff he's drawing and think he's a conscious adult male with a creative job who can and has influenced the minds of young artists. The man is a pair of blue jeans with a face. He has on a backwards cap, and when he turns it around, it's still backwards.'

Seriously, it's priceless. And that's just his drawing. Because he wrote too...

Premier League 2010-11: Survival of the Fittest?

It's been a pretty grim week to be an Everton supporter, what with losing 5-0 to Benfica last Thursday in a match we didn't need to win, succumbing 3-2 to Bolton in one we surely did, and then being knocked out of the Carling Cup by Spurs this evening, going down 2-0.

The reaction over on Toffeeweb is understandably grim, but strangely, most of anti-Moyes crowd are being unusually quiet at the minute. Relatively so, anyway. I'm not sure if it's because they think this is just because the results speak for themselves, or because they reckon this is all down to injuries.

Is that a cop out? I don't think so. If you go over to this remarkable site, you'll see that at the moment Everton is clearly the most battered side in the Premier League, with ten people out injured, eight of the ten being regular starters, and two being regular subs. To put that into context, all bar three sides currently have five or fewer men injured; indeed, Everton has more men out than Villa, Hull, Stoke, Sunderland, and Wigan combined. Add this to the fact that we have one of the Premier League's smallest squads, and fielding a team is proving increasingly tricky; Moyes seems to have little option but to play regulars out of position along with youngsters and lads that aren't fully match-fit. The subs benches have tended to be almost for show, given the inexperience of the players sitting on them; tactical substitution seems scarcely to be an option. It's not really surprising that we've been getting tonked.

The thing is, though, I can't help but wonder how next season's going to pan out. After all, the plan is that next season no Premier League side should have more than 25 players in its squad. Obviously, this is intended to stop absurdities like last year when Liverpool had 62 players on the books, while the average club had 41.

I think it's safe to say that if you reduced Everton's squad to 25 players, that 25 would include the injured 10. That'd leave us with 15 functioning players, those presumably being the eleven starters from tonight and four of the six subs.

The point being: next season could be very interesting, given that every side will have a squad smaller than Everton's current one. I'm not even sure it'll be possible for teams to compete meaningfully in four competitions, and I suspect utility players rather than positional specialists may become the norm. There's a serious chance that the League could well wind up being a simple campaign of attrition, with health rather than wealth being the deciding factor in who wins, in which case it may not be Manchester City's money that breaks the top four cartel -- it may all come down to who has the fewest injuries.

In terms of turning the Premier League into an actual competition, this can only be good, but I suspect it's not going to be pretty. Evolution is anything but elegant, after all.

Holy Crap! Look at these Guys!

It's kind of strange that after this week's Question Time, there are those in the BNP who are none too happy with their leader, feeling that he's not obnoxious enough. Something like that, anyway. According to the Guardian, the BNP's legal officer, Lee Barnes, has been far from discreet in his disapproval:

Barnes complained on his personal website that Griffin "should have stood up to these whining, middle-class hypocrites that use the race card for self-enrichment – and thrown the truth right back into their fat, sanctimonious, hypocritical, self-serving faces". He accused his party's leader of "failing to press the attack" on the "ethnic middle class" for "taking up the best jobs while still playing the bogus race card for every opportunity". And in a move that is likely to reinforce concerns that Griffin's appearance will spark violence, Barnes used his personal website to suggest that "perhaps there needs to be a few 'white riots' around the country a la the Brixton riots of the 1980s before the idiot white liberal middle class and their ethnic middle-class fellow travellers wake up".

Charming, eh? Of course, there are worse folk out there than the BNP... have you heard of the BPP? Yes, the British People's Party, who despise the BNP for its opposition to racism. No, really, they do.

These guys manage the curious feat of making the BNP look reasonable. Their spiritual leader seems to have been responsible for drawing up their 'eternal principles' that 'still hold good today'. It's nice to learn that eternal principles don't get outdated within a few decades, but I'm not sure on these, though. Adolf Hitler as a gift from god? As NMRBoy said to me last night, it probably gives these guys an instant advantage in internet flame wars. You can't really accuse them of falling victim to Godwin's Law, after all...

They fight, and fight, and fight and fight and fight

After a seminar the other day, I read the most extraordinary article from the new Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. I think the general thrust of it is generally right, but at times it crosses the line into -- well -- into rather unacademic language, which is particularly odd given that its occasionally deployed against a colleague.

I'm baffled by what's intended a complement to one academic, who is described as having 'took up his shillelagh for the soundness of the tradition.' A shillelagh? In the hands of one of the most English people imaginable? Frankly, it was difficult getting past that, but I'm glad I did because it brought me to this, and I'm changing names for the sake of discretion:

'Jeff and Geoff, as proper classicists, were acutely alert to anachronism: they called for one ancient genre, history, to be colonized by other ancient genres, rhetoric and drama. So the adoption of their theories by this cynical crew must inspire in Jeff and Geoff the same strange mixture of horror and pride that a father might feel upon learning that his fourteen-year old son has got a classmate with child.'

Good, eh? It gets better. Its finale is as follows:

'Finally, when history is cast out of the Latin historians, discarded also are the robust intellectual habits of the modern historian, to be replaced, if the restraint of stern philology fails, with the weak and whimsical instruments of the contemporary literary critic. A sense of argument, of proof, of scale, of proportion -- even of logic and coherent language -- all depart. Scholarship becomes indistinguishable from its parody, and the subject of inquiry shifts from the geysering fascination of antiquity to the dull, trend-obsessed, and self-obsessed mind of the critic. The result is like the diary of a fat teenager: riveting only to its creator, repellent to others, and illuminating to none.'

That's telling them.

Planet Narnia

Tom Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham, has a review in today's Times of Michael Ward's Planet Narnia: the Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis, a book which expounds on a theory I first heard of last year, and which the BBC devoted a show to at some point over the Easter.

It seems that at some point Dr Ward became intrigued by Lewis' penchant for games and puzzles and began wondering whether there might be another layer of meaning in the Narnia books, below the Christian allegory level which itself obvious underlies the fantasy adventure stories. After reading Lewis' 1935 poem 'The Planets', which features the influence of Jupiter in 'winter pass'd / and guilt forgiv'n', he started wondering whether the medieval understanding of the planets might have influenced Lewis's most famous works, and, after buckets of researched, has found that each of the Chronicles is thematically built around one of the seven medieval planets after which the days of the week are named.

This might sound a bit crazy, but the idea has some merit: Lewis was one of England's greatest scholars of medieval literature, and this sounds a perfectly medieval way of writing, drawing on astrology in this way. Lewis was indeed very fond of puzzles, and his science fiction trilogy, the Perelandra books, are explicitly built around the three planets of Mars, Venus, and Earth. And then if you think of how Eustace meets and chats with the resting star Ramandu in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, it does start to look more likely.

Allowing for this, then, Dawn Treader is clearly about the Sun, Prince Caspian draws on warlike Mars, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which deals with the banishing of winter and the forgiveness of guilt is naturally based upon Jupiter. The Silver Chair is apparently a lunar tale, while The Horse and his Boy seems to be a Mercurian work, with its emphasis on communication and its twins, reminiscent of Gemini who Mercury rules. The Magician's Nephew draws on Venus, it seems, and The Last Battle is built around Saturn, the darkest and most mysterious of planets, which could so easily go bad.

I know, it sounds like there's some crowbarring going on here to fit a theory, but I'd not be inclined to chuck the theory out straight away. Why wouldn't a devoted medievalist have embedded a medieval understanding of the universe in his books? It would just be another way, after all, of saying that the Universe was sacramental, created and redeemed by God, and that everything means something.

Wright, at any rate, is convinced by this, saying that 'This introduction to a masterpiece is something of a masterpiece in its own right,' and he's not alone in this, but I must confess to finding the whole idea very unlikely. Granted, I haven't read Ward's book, so I can't judge fairly, but it seems to me that in referring to the Chronicles as 'the Narniad', Wright identifies a fundamental problem with Ward's thesis.

Central to Ward's approach -- and Wright's review -- is the assumption that the seven books were planned as a seven-book set, and as such must be somehow unified, whether by connections to the seven virtues, the seven deadly sins, the seven sacraments, or - as in this theory - the seven planets. But the thing is, this assumption doesn't appear to hold any water whatsoever. Lewis wrote to a fan in 1957 saying that the Chronicles had never been intended as a seven-book set, but instead grew organically:

'The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last, but I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published.'

Even if he thought up a thematic link later, which is possible, you'd expect that the planetary themes would manifest themselves far more clearly in the books that were written last, with this connecting idea in mind, than in the early ones, where he had no such idea. And if anything, the opposite looks to have been the case. And he certainly didn't rework the early books with the intention of turning his spontaneous series into a single narrative, in the way that T.H. White did with his early Arthur ones when he wrote The Once and Future King around the same time.

Another problem, as far as I can see, is that there doesn't seem to be any clear proof that Lewis was hiding anything in the Narnia books. You'd expect that if he was being so clever-clever that there'd be some record of letters between him and Tolkien, say, where J.R.R. commends him on the underlying astrological stuff, while nonetheless repeating his view that the whole thing still looks like a mish mash, and besides, he hates allegory, Christian or otherwise. You'd at least expect that there'd have been letters to people or records of conversations where Lewis talks of an extra layer of meaning. And as far as I can tell, there's no trace of him ever having made such a claim.

This whole affair looks like a typical academic fantasy, where people want Lewis's books to be more complex than they are. They're Christian allegories, and they're children's stories, and they've a clunky style enlivened by dry authorial asides, and the fifth book begins with one of my favourite sentences ever, but one thing they're not is a unified work of art. We can call them the Narnia books, and we can probably call them the Chronicles of Narnia, but we certainly shouldn't call them the Narniad. That's asking for trouble, and invites questions that simply have no business being asked.

Stops WHAT in your Mouth?

On an entirely different note, are you aware of Imodium?

Well, until the other day, I wasn't. I was strolling down the aisle in a local supermarket, and I saw a load of packets of it hanging on a rack, each one bearing the legend 'Stops Diarrhoea Melts In Your Mouth'.

I don't mind telling you, I'm a bit concerned.

The product website is great, though. You can learn all the myths about diarrhoea -- probably stuff about Herakles and the Augean stables, and maybe about British soldiers with slashed shorts in Burma -- and there's a whole section to help you find toilets. I'm not sure if it links it with a gps-based iPhone application, but if not, Imodium are missing a trick.

Wrapping Up Relics

Right, so I was saying yesterday that although people tend to think of the veneration of relics as a peculiarly -- even a grotesquely -- Catholic thing, in many ways it's just a popular manifestation of normal human behaviour. Loads of us keep photos of loved ones, treasure keepsakes from special places, visit museums and exhibitions, and lay flowers at graves. There's hardly anyone among us who isn't appalled when graves are desecrated or when war memorials are treated as urinals. We don't think of graves as mere patches of ground, of gravestones and monuments as lumps of carved rock; of wreaths as dead plants or mass-produced paper decorations: these things matter to us, for reasons that go beyond sentiment, though we may find it hard to articulate what those reasons are.

In historical Christianity, as George Weigel keeps saying, 'stuff matters'. The baptismal water actually counts. The holy oils used at baptism, in confirmation, in ordination, and in extreme unction all count. At communion, the bread and the wine really mean something. Ashes, blessed fire, holy water, baptismal salt, incense, candles, palm leaves, flowers, vestments, food -- they all mean something. But what? And how? What does the Church mean when it says that there is scarcely any proper use of material things which cannot be directed toward the sanctification of men and the praise of God?

One of my favourite statues is a piece just off Trafalgar Square, in the porch of the Anglican church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Called 'In the Beginning', it's by Mike Chapman, and is a big squared off block on the top of which is carved a newborn baby, with unbilical cord still attached, and around which are the words, taken from the first and fourteenth verses of the first chapter of St John's gospel, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh and lived among us.'

The Catholic Church makes a point of not ripping Biblical passages out of context and resting whole arguments on individual 'proof passages', but I don't think it's going too far to say that this first part of John's first chapter is absolutely central to Catholic theology. John uses the word sarx - flesh - thirteen times in his gospel, and every time he does so he does so in a brutally physical sense. He goes out of his way to show that flesh and spirit are utterly distinct, but he doesn't do this in a Neo-Platonist or Manichean sense; for John flesh may be distinct from spirit, but even so, the Word became flesh! God, who is pure spirit, did not merely veil himself in flesh, as in the popular carol, but he became flesh, and by doing so he sanctified the material world, a world he had already created and recognised as good.*

This incarnational and sacramental understanding of the material world underpins the whole theology of relics, and has done so -- albeit not in a carefully worked out way -- from the time of Our Lord himself. Think of the story of the woman who thought to herself 'If I only touch his garment, I shall be made well,' and who reached out from behind Jesus and touched the fringe of his garment and was healed (Matt. 9.20-22). Her humility alone is striking, as she deliberately doesn't approach Jesus, instead tentatively stretching out merely to touch something he had touched, but even putting aside her indirect approach which Jesus fully validates by saying that her faith has healed her, it's worth asking why she thought this would make a difference. Why did she think that she could be healed simply by touching a thing?

Well, this sacramental understanding of the world had long been a part of Judaism. Look at the stories of Elijah and Elisha. I'm not sure whether we should regard the story of the waters being parted after being struck by the cloak of Elijah (2 Kings 2.8, 13-14) as an example of this, but given how the mechanics of this appear to contrast with Moses' more famous parting of the Red Sea (Exodus 14.21-29), it may well be so. Perhaps more instructive is the tale of the bones of Elisha:

'So Elisha died, and they buried him. Now bands of Moabites used to invade the land in the spring of the year. And as a man was being buried, lo, a marauding band was seen and the man was cast into the grave of Elisha; and as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood on his feet.' (2 Kings 13.20-21)

I don't think it does any good to talk here of a measure of the Holy Spirit having stayed with the decaying corpse of the prophet in such a way that a fresh corpse could be revived on contact with Elisha's bones; I'd be very much inclined to doubt that Divine power is a finite resource, or that it gradually fades away, like Carbon-14. I think we simply have to talk here of God choosing to act through physical matter, that matter being the bones -- the physical remains -- of one of his most devoted servants.

The belief that God could -- and did -- act through physical things associated with the most distinguished of his servants was clearly common in the early Church. Think of how, in the months after Pentecost, believers 'even carried out their sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and pallets, that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them,' and how years later, when Paul was at Corinth, 'God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them' (Acts 5.15, 9.11-12).

The last pagan emperor of Rome, Julian the Apostate, in a notorious anti-Christian diatribe, Against the Galileans, seems to indicate that the two apostles' tombs were being venerated even during the time of the apostle John: he says that John only explicitly identified Jesus as God, something the earlier evangelists had refrained from doing, after he had heard that the tombs of Peter and Paul were being worshipped. Indeed, he regarded the tendency of contemporary Christians to 'grovel among tombs and pay them honour' as one of the more ridiculous Christian practices.

It's worth taking a look at the Martyrdom of Polycarp, an account of the execution of the second-century bishop of Smyrna in modern Turkey. St Polycarp, of whom St Irenaeus of Lyons was a disciple, had himself been a disciple of St John, and thus a younger contemporary of St Clement of Rome and St Ignatius of Antioch. He was burned at the stake for refusing to burn incense in honour of the Roman Emperor, and afterwards the Christians of Smyrna gathered up his bones which they treasured and used to call to mind his heroic example:

'And so we afterwards took up his bones which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and laid them in a suitable place, where the Lord will permit us to gather ourselves together, as we are able, in gladness and joy, and to celebrate the birth-day of his martyrdom for the commemoration of those that have already fought in the contest, and for the training and preparation of those that shall do so hereafter.' (Martyrdom of Polycarp, 18.2-3)

Relics, then, and the veneration of them, have been a feature of Christianity from earliest times, long before the Bible was definitively shaped into the form we currently have it. There's no denying that at times this practice got out of hand, and was abused, but while it may occasionally have veered towards idolatry, far more often it is best viewed simply as instances of ordinary people, believing absolutely in Jesus but too humble to approach him directly, reaching out to touch those who he himself had touched.

In case you're wondering, no, I didn't go to see the relics of St Thérèse, whether in Liverpool, in Salford, or in Manchester. I'm afraid I've been stuck here trying to work.

I missed them in Ireland a few years ago too. I think I was in Greece at the time. Mind, I often wonder how many people in Ireland did go to see them. Lots, surely, but hardly the three million I keep reading in the press nowadays. Three quarters of the population? Really? And yet I've never heard anyone once mention having gone to see them. I know we can be oddly quiet about things, but that quiet? I'm pretty sure that loads of people went to see the relics more than once, and that the count was a tad on the high side at every venue and at every mass, with people who'd queued to see the relics getting counted afresh if there were masses there too. It wouldn't take much to massively inflate the numbers.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that huge numbers of Irish people didn't go to see the relics last time out, just that I very much doubt that the numbers were quite so huge as are being made out. Mind, I'm an ancient military historian -- I always think big numbers are inflated, and I'm always suspicious of big multiples of three.

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* Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons I'm very fond of the sentiment expressed, however scornfully, in the Monty Python song 'All Things Dull and Ugly'. He didn't just make the things that are bright and beautiful; he made everything, including a huge amount of ugly things, and he never made anything to last.

Haunted by the Reformation

Well, the European qualifiers for next year's World Cup are over, and I doubt there are many people out there who would have predicted at the start of this campaign that when the qualifiers came to an end, only five of the 53 countries would remain unbeaten, those five being Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and, um, Ireland. Of course, this doesn't give us a huge amount to crow about: of the eight second-place teams that go through to the play-offs, Ireland earned the fewest points over the campaign. Still, fingers crossed for the next match...


So yes, yesterday I was talking about the visit of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux to England and Wales, and about how one Sophia Deboick, writing in The Guardian, seems to think it remarkable that the Catholic Church should use a saint to promote Catholicism. I know, astonishing, eh? In this day and age...

Anyway, the gist of the article is as follows: when Thérèse died in 1897, her sisters set about moulding her image and building a cult around her, and were supported in this by Rome, where Thérèse was seen as a useful modern example of meek female purity. She was canonised in 1925, and in the 1960s was presented as a great theologian and as a proto-feminist. Nowadays, when the Church supposedly regards virginity and motherhood as the only acceptable female conditions, she is a perfect example of the former, while her mother, whose cult is growing, stands as a useful example of the latter.

I'd like to have seen a lot more of this, because as it stands it's just a handful of sweeping statements, hardly substantiated at all. The stuff about her autobiograph having been creatively edited by her sisters is fascinating, and I'd like to learn more about that. The idea that photos of her were suppressed in favour of sentimentalised paintings is almost as interesting, but it rather clashes with what I've read elsewhere about how much of her early popularity was due to the novelty of a saint - and long before canonisation we was widely regarded as a saint - having been photographed. Claims about virginity and motherhood being the only acceptable female conditions in the eyes of the Church are utter bunkum, as I said yesterday, and indeed I don't think I've ever heard Thérèse being singled out as a virgin: as a thinker, yes, as a saint, certainly, as someone who struggled on a daily basis to live for Christ, absolutely,but as a virgin? No. It's always kind of gone without saying, as a rule, her having been a nun. It was never something to specifically focus on. Until reading Ms Deboick's article, I'd never heard of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the Holy Virgin, though I'd heard time and again of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower.

Still, the comments on the article are well worth a read, not least for how they gxpress a discomfort with this kind of stuff. I don't mean the usual tribalism of most of my fellow Guardian readers - or at least most of those who leave comments - which tends to manifest itself as a kind of unthinking pack atheism; I'm talking about a straightforward unease, of the kind that Basil Hume was so concerned about in 1997, when the idea was first proposed that the relics should be brought to England. He felt the time wasn't yet right, as the old English view of Catholicism as superstitious, idolatrous, and 'other' was still too powerful.

Taking some of the comments, and stitching them together, you get the following:

'I do find the whole spectacle rather gruesome. I thought the dead were supposed to be allowed to rest in peace not go on world tours... All seems rather medieval and macabre. Can't they just let Thérèse rest in peace... I love Ellis Peters' Cadfael books. I just never thought that people would take them so seriously and decide to promenade St Winifried's - sorry, that should be St Therese's - bones all over the place in such a bizarre Dark Ages fashion... Cardinal Hume, an intellectual giant compared to his infantile British successors, refused to allow what he saw as a display of superstitious idolatry... I have to say that I just do not get this relics thing... This Dead People's Bones Worship Cult thing seems to me to bear no resemblance to the Christianity described in the Bible or practiced by other mainstream faiths... Can anybody explain to me why these pitiful tubercular bones are being hawked round the country rather than been given a decent Christian burial. It couldn't be a cynical ploy to make loads of dosh for the Catholic church could it? I thought we had a reformation in this country... Anyone starting today to dig up the body of a dead person, cut it up and cart it round for other weirdos to goggle at would have a net thrown over them and be invited to some heavyweight counselling... It is really hard to understand the hold that a few bones from, at the time of her death, an unknown Carmelite nun can still have over so many people (I guess more women that men, which is rather strange in itself) And they all have the vote!

There's standard anti-Christian stuff as well, of course, but this is more specific. It is, in effect, Calvin's anti-Catholic legacy in its current incarnation, a strand in modern English anti-religious thinking which tends not merely to identify religion in general as a mental disorder, but to pick out Catholicism as a particularly pernicious and sinister variety of such, drawing on all the old clichés and myths to do so.


Relics, I think it has to be said, are probably one of the things about Catholicism that most non-Catholics are uncomfortable with. Even when they're not dismissed as fakes they're seen as weird, grotesque, superstitious, idolatrous, and even pagan. What's more, they even leave a lot of Catholics cold, or at any rate engender mixed feelings. One of the more considered and informative comments on the Deboick article is from a fellow who identifies himself as 'a Catholic who does not do relics and was never particularly keen on St Theresa's style of spirituality'; he's far from alone in this, though it's interesting that even so he found himself going up to Aylesford out of curiosity last weekend, where he was particularly taken by the homily at the mass.


I tend to think of myself as not being a relics person, but if I'm totally honest with myself, that's nonsense. While I may laugh at the dubious provenance of such oddities as, say, St Thomas's finger, and while I stop short of kissing the feet of statues, that hasn't stopped me from kneeling in the Church at Calvary or by the tombs of St Peter and of St Francis of Assisi. I think the fact that whenever I'm in London I pray by the grave of Basil Hume is largely accidental, though; he just happens to be interred in a chapel that I love.

But still, if I think about it's pretty obvious that I've a thing for relics, and secular ones as much as religious ones. I've thrilled to see in Olympia the helmet that Miltiades wore at Marathon, and stood with a lump in my throat at the hill of Thermopylae, drank in one of Dickens and Chesterton's favourite haunts, ate in the Place du Forum in Arles, and been speechless at Dachau and Auschwitz. Arrayed along my shelves are a medley of keepsakes - a pebble from the Dead Sea and another from the Wadi Rum, a meaningless shard from Petra, a lump of rock from Mount Vesuvius, a chunk of bog oak from Mayo, the plastercast of a Carthaginian coin. Most of all, I keep all sorts of things because people who've meant something to me have touched them: letters written and cards made by friends, a ribbon that was once wrapped round a birthday present, old photographs, books signed by favourite authors. I'm hardly queasy about human remains, either: a few years back I spent a summer in Greece digging up ancient graves and carefully cleaning skeletons with toothbrushes and souvlaki sticks, and even now a medieval human skull grins down at my from my bookshelves.

The veneration of relics -- and it's veneration, not worship, so just respect and honour rather than adoration -- is a perfectly normal human instinct, drawing on the same characteristics that lead us to visit graves and museums. It's more than this, though; it's not just a combination of curiosity and sentiment. I'll explain tomorrow. For now, my bed calls.

Watching from the Touchline

I was glad to see today that Carter-Ruck backed down from their absurd attempt to prevent the Guardian reporting on a parliamentary question. I'm no wiser, though, as to what their ridiculous behaviour was intended to achieve; it was surely contrary to the British Constitution, it clearly wouldn't withstand a legal challenge, the question and answer would be recorded in Hansard no matter what, and this was guaranteed to draw bad publicity to their client Trafigura. And yes, there's such a thing as bad publicity.


Speaking of the Guardian, there's a piece in it today about St Thérèse of Lisieux, by one Sophia Deboick, who is currently conducting research into Thérèse's cult. The article, while not nearly as comprehensive or as fair-minded as Joanna Moorhead's Independent piece of a couple of months back, is well worth pondering. It's quite interesting in its way, though it makes me think of the bit in the introduction to Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, where he says:

'The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plain clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle; though they do not call an editor's office a coward's castle. It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it would be much truer of journalist. The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him. They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press about why the churches are empty, without even going there to find out if they are empty, or which of them are empty.

[...]

It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.'

I'm not saying that Sophia Deboick is theologically illiterate by any means, but it does seem that she comes across as someone studying religion from the doorway, neither in nor out. In amongst the useful historical stuff, explaining the way in which Thérèse's cult was initially fostered by her sisters, you get half-truths like this:

'Named a Doctor of the church on the centenary of her death in 1997, Rome now uses the radical, intellectual Thérèse to pay lip-service to calls for reform in the church's social attitudes. The current pope has made it abundantly clear that, for the church, virginity or motherhood are still the only acceptable states of female existence. While Thérèse represents the former, her own mother, Zélie Martin, who was beatified alongside Thérèse's father in October 2008, has become the church's poster-girl for ideal Catholic motherhood.'

If you think for a moment you'll realise it's nonsense to claim that the Church regards virginity and motherhood as 'the only acceptable states of female existence', let alone that the current Pope said this back in 2004.

One might respond to this, as one of the commenters does, that 'The alternatives are contraception, abortion, or infertility. The first two are sins, the last considered a misfortune rather than something to aspire to. This also applies to men. Men may aspire to be virgins or fathers of families.' These points are all good, albeit somewhat inconvenient for those who are determined to bash the Church, but despite being spot-on, they don't go far enough.

Look at what the article says: for the Catholic Church the only acceptable states of female existence are virginity and motherhood. In other words, if a girl has even once had sex, whether of her volition or not, she has no option, in the eyes of the Church, except to become a mother; once deprived of virginity, failure to achieve motherhood is unacceptable. What's more, by this reading, married women -- even widowed ones -- must become mothers; failure to achieve motherhood is unacceptable. Does anyone really think the Church believes this? Does anyone think it ever believed this?

Sure, Our Lady was both virgin and mother, but think of the popular western picture of St Mary Magdalene, apostle to the apostles, patron saint of sinners. Despite the fact that in the Bible she is described simply as someone from whom seven demons were cast, from the sixth century on she was conflated in the popular mind with Mary of Bethany and with the woman with the alabaster jar who anointed the feet of Jesus; as such she was regarded and venerated as a former sinner who had changed her ways and adopted a virtuous life, a reformed prostitute who was neither virgin nor mother, like St Paul someone who had gone and sinned no more. The saints are exemplars for us, but for the Church as imagined by Deboinck, such a change would be pointless: to her mind, once virginity is lost there is no salvation outside the maternity ward.

In the later Middle Ages, and you'll get this from even a cursory reading of The Canterbury Tales, it was clear that the Church back then tended to think of women as, in the main, virgins, wives, or widows. This was a bit of a caricature, but as a crude summary it has some merit. When I was an undergrad we used to make much of this, noting that medieval women were largely defined by what they were, whereas medieval men tended to be defined by what they did, though by Chaucer's day the classic division of men into oratores, bellatores, and laboratores had long faded into obsolescence, if it had ever been valid. Now, does anyone seriously think it's likely that the modern Church has an understanding of women that is markedly less nuanced than that of the medieval one?


The Guardian article had linked to a 2004 letter by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, saying that he had made it abundantly clear that virginity and motherhood were the only acceptable states of female existence. It's worth reading the letter, in which he says nothing of the sort. In the letter he expressly states that the 'feminine' values discussed in the letters are all, ultimately, human values, since the human condition of man and woman as created by God is one and indivisible. This means that both motherhood -- yes, motherhood -- and virginity are universal values, rather than exclusively female ones. How can this be?

'Although motherhood is a key element of women's identity, this does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation. In this area, there can be serious distortions, which extol biological fecundity in purely quantitative terms and are often accompanied by dangerous disrespect for women. The existence of the Christian vocation of virginity, radical with regard to both the Old Testament tradition and the demands made by many societies, is of the greatest importance in this regard.Virginity refutes any attempt to enclose women in mere biological destiny. Just as virginity receives from physical motherhood the insight that there is no Christian vocation except in the concrete gift of oneself to the other, so physical motherhood receives from virginity an insight into its fundamentally spiritual dimension: it is in not being content only to give physical life that the other truly comes into existence. This means that motherhood can find forms of full realization also where there is no physical procreation.'

I think this is one of those things we're meant to ponder and meditate upon, rather than to simply read and react to. The letter as a whole indeed sees motherhood -- or perhaps more importantly, the capacity for motherhood -- as the defining attribute of feminity, but uses both 'motherhood' and 'feminity' as codewords for 'the fundamental human value to live for the other and because of the other'. As for virginity, this is surely meant here not as a physical state which can be lost forever, but rather -- though it includes that -- as a synonym for celibacy, and thus as an ardent refusal to be defined purely by our bodies, a passionate determination to rise above our biological destiny. Heady stuff, you might think, and certainly not what might immediately grab you about it.

In thinking about this letter, it's important to remember to whom it was addressed: it was addressed to the bishops of the Church, who were probably assumed to be fairly clued in to the biblical and theological ideas underpinning the letter. If it might seem opaque to us, we shouldn't get annoyed; would we really expect a conference paper on astrophysics to be easily accessible to anybody who had just done science in school? Complex questions often require complex answers, after all.


Deboick's closing paragraph is a bit dodgy:

'The pilgrimage site of Lisieux is second only to Lourdes in terms of visitor numbers and many will feel they have derived genuine benefit from visiting the relics during this tour, but we must recognise this event as part of the agenda of a Catholic church whose social proscriptions have become obsolete and for whom political expediency comes before popular opinion.'

I had to go a-googling to decipher the first part of this: Lisieux is the second most popular pilgrimage site in France, receiving more than two million pilgrims every year. The rest of it is baffling, though, since although Deboick says we must recognise this, she never really says why. After all, all she has to say about the supposed political agenda of the Church in this affair is the unsubstantiated claim that the Church 'uses the radical, intellectual Thérèse to pay lip-service to calls for reform in the church's social attitudes'. Given that Deboick seems convinced that the supposedly obsolete social proscriptions of the Church include the belief that the only acceptable states of feminine existence are virginity and motherhood, which we know isn't true and has never been so, I think we should take her 'must' with a rather liberal dose of salt.


I was going to talk briefly about relics, and got sidetracked. Hmmm. Maybe tomorrow. Some more work now, though, and then bed.

Who Guards the Guardians?

Or 'who gags The Guardian?' at any rate. This is astonishing:

Guardian Gagged From reporting Parliament

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The Guardian has vowed urgently to go to court to overturn the gag on its reporting. The editor, Alan Rusbridger, said: "The media laws in this country increasingly place newspapers in a Kafkaesque world in which we cannot tell the public anything about information which is being suppressed, nor the proceedings which suppress it. It is doubly menacing when those restraints include the reporting of parliament itself."

The media lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said Lord Denning ruled in the 1970s that "whatever comments are made in parliament" can be reported in newspapers without fear of contempt.

He said: "Four rebel MPs asked questions giving the identity of 'Colonel B', granted anonymity by a judge on grounds of 'national security'. The DPP threatened the press might be prosecuted for contempt, but most published."

The right to report parliament was the subject of many struggles in the 18th century, with the MP and journalist John Wilkes fighting every authority – up to the king – over the right to keep the public informed. After Wilkes's battle, wrote the historian Robert Hargreaves, "it gradually became accepted that the public had a constitutional right to know what their elected representatives were up to".

So all The Guardian can reveal of this bizarre situation is that the case involves the London firm of solicitors Carter-Ruck. Guido Fawkes, clearly recalling events involving Trafigura last month, wonders whether the gagged question might be one from Paul Farrelly, MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme. It seems an obvious choice, given that the Trifagura story involved Carter-Ruck and was reported on by David Leigh, just like today's mysterious story, but it's hardly the only possibility. Of course, the next questions have to be whether the Guardian is the only paper to have received such a ban, and whether there are plans to sue half the internet for discussing this matter.

I just don't see the point anyway. After all, the question and the answer will both be a matter of record in Hansard in no time at all. Leaving aside the constiutional question, what are Carter-Ruck playing at?

Manchester, and the Indirect Route to Excellent Education

There was an article in Student Direct, Manchester's student newspaper, the other week, that got my proverbial goat. I don't have a real one, alas. Anyway, the guts of the article was that Alan Gilbert, current head honcho at the University of Manchester, has admitted that the undergraduate experience at Manchester isn't what it might be:

'Vice-Chancellor Alan Gilbert has publicly admitted that students at the University of Manchester do not receive a satisfactory student experience.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Beyond Westminster, Gilbert said: “I am not satisfied with the quality of undergraduate education in the University.”

He also branded it as “too impersonal” and not “sufficiently interactive”, adding that “the curriculum has been developed a little incrementally and has not been profoundly thought through.

“The student experience can be considerably improved.”

[...]

However, Gilbert implied that the main reason for the shortcomings was insufficient funding for the University, as the top-up fees introduced two years ago nation-wide to boost institutions’ finances were too low to actually achieve this.'

I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with things developing incrementally, that being the English way, but it's good that Alan G has recognised that things aren't what they might be in Manchester. He said this more than a year and a half ago too, of course, but still, it's nice that he's not forgotten.

In the 2009 National Student Survey, not merely does Manchester fall four percentage points below the national average for student satisfaction, but of the 154 institutions listed here, 120 do rather better than Manchester. For one of Britain's leading universities, this might strike you as shocking, but in a way it's not really surprising. Manchester tends to do extremely well in global research-based league tables, invariably being in the top handful of British universities on such lists, but its ranking in domestic league tables, which focus more on teaching and the actual educational experience at universities, is as a rule far less impressive: perhaps most dramatically, the Guardian's latest table has it at a feeble 32nd place!

What's going on? Is Alan Gilbert right to say that the University is insufficiently well-funded?

I don't think he is. In 2007, Manchester's income was around £637 million, more than that of any other University -- although to be fair, Oxford and Cambridge colleges have extra sources of income independent of the respective universities. In other words, Manchester has more money than almost any other educational institution in Britain. This shouldn't come as a surprise: Manchester is enormous, and probably, in real terms, the biggest university in the country. Even so, though, it sounds as though the system is under some strain.

Look, let's be fair. Manchester has made a strategic decision, which is to try to become one of the world's top 25 research-led institutions. It's throwing its resources into that, with the plan being to invest heavily in research and to do whatever it takes to recruit prominent academics so that other prominent academics will be drawn to Manchester. This seems to be working: Manchester is slowly working its way up the Shanghai Jiao Tong league table, which as far as Professor Gilbert is concerned, is the only ranking that matters.

The problem is that without limitless resources you can't cover everything. Frederick the Great put it well: he who defends everything defends nothing.

Elite universities may well be destinations of preference for many of the best students in the world, as Professor Gilbert said in outlining the University's 2015 strategy; they may well support excellence in teaching and provide students with a superb learning experience. It seems that Professor Gilbert really wants Manchester to become such a place. The thing is, that may not be possible just yet. It may simply be the case that there's not enough money to go round to do everything at once, and so a strategic decision has been taken to make teaching take a back seat. Professor Gilbert effectively admitted this back in February 2008, when he said there was a trend in most of Britain's leading institutions towards emphasising excellence in research at the cost of excellence in teaching. This, he conceded, was far from healthy:

'Whether you like it or not, universities are fundamentally about the education of students, both undergraduate and postgraduate ... it is clear that a university becomes non-viable unless it is a satisfactory destination for good students. There is a flaw in the business of a research university unless it is seen to be dedicated as much to the learning outcomes of students as to its research outcomes.'

Manchester, he said more than a year and a half ago, was taking steps to rectify this. Given dropping rankings in national league tables -- 24th to 32nd in the Guardian table and a drop from 81% to 77% in the National Student Survey -- it looks as though these steps might not be working, but maybe they will in time.

In the meantime, it'd probably be useful if the University honestly and openly defended its strategic decision to invest in research in order to join the ranks of the global academic elite, with a view to using that position and the wealth it hopes to generate through leadership in research to become a world-beater in teaching as well. If this means that the interests of Manchester's actual students of today are to come second to the interests of Manchester's imagined students of tomorrow, well, that's an unfortunate price that just needs to be paid. Sometimes you have to play a long game.

Seriously, this is a defensible position. I'm not sure I'd like to be defending it, given that students, parents, and taxpayers from all over the UK might have doubts about so much indirect long-term investment in the English north-west, but the case could be made, and probably should be.

Honesty's usually the best policy, after all.