The Fabulous Father Flannery

It’s depressing to see the Irish Times continuing to spin a line about the Redemptorist priest Tony Flannery that is less about simple facts than about perpetuating a narrative that the Catholic hierarchy, whether at home or in Rome, is out of step with Irish society and the modern world.

Today’s editorial, for instance, says that Tony Flannery and some of his colleagues are “under threat due to their insistence on the importance of personal conscience”. This could hardly be less true, not least because the Church is pretty big on conscience; Peter Kreeft puts it well, paraphrasing St Thomas Aquinas:

“if a Catholic comes to believe the Church is in error in some essential, officially defined doctrine, it is a mortal sin against conscience, a sin of hypocrisy, for him to remain in the Church and call himself a Catholic, but only a venial sin against knowledge for him to leave the Church in honest but partly culpable error.”

Tony Flannery can say what he likes; what he can’t do is say what he likes as a Catholic priest, giving the impression that it’s within the bounds of Catholicism. And as the head of Tony’s order stated today, Flannery’s comments involved “fundamental areas of Catholic doctrine, including the priesthood, the nature of the Church, and the Eucharist.”

How convenient...

Tony Flannery was one of a handful of priests who hit the headlines last year after being disciplined by Rome; Brian Darcy, whose ‘silencing’ was clearly nothing of the sort, was the most famous of this batch, but Tony Flannery, as one of the founders and leaders of the Association of Catholic Priests, may be even more important.

One of his brothers, Frank Flannery, is a close confidante and adviser of Enda Kenny; it’s been speculated that Enda’s line on Cloyne may have ultimately derived – perhaps by an indirect route – from Tony Flannery. Certainly, Tony Flannery welcomed the speech; I’m not quite sure why, given his own opposition to mandatory reporting of abuse allegations, which led Ian Elliott, the Irish Church’s chief child protection officer, to criticise him for what Elliott described as “an attempt at minimising the serious nature of clerical child abuse”.

This weekend, in the aftermath of the big Dublin pro-life vigil, the New York Times reported that Tony Flannery intended to break his silence about what he regards as an inquistition-style campaign against him by Rome because of his line on certain aspects of Church teaching.

The story seems to have broken at a rather inconvenient time for the Irish Church, just after having its new primate-to-be announced and fresh from helping rally 25,000 people onto the streets of Dublin in the biggest counter-government demonstration since Enda Kenny became Taoiseach. And isn’t that handy, given that Tony Flannery is brother to one of Enda Kenny’s right-hand men?

The dog that used to bark...

Anyway, the Irish Times ran a column similar to the New York Times one on their website on Sunday morning, it having come from the Press Association; shortly after running the piece, however, they redacted what was probably the most important part of it.

The redacted paragraphs were substantively identical to these three from the New York Times piece:

“In the letter, the Vatican objected in particular to an article published in 2010 in Reality, an Irish religious magazine. In the article, Father Flannery, a Redemptorist priest, wrote that he no longer believed that ‘the priesthood as we currently have it in the church originated with Jesus’ or that he designated ‘a special group of his followers as priests.’

Instead, he wrote, ‘It is more likely that some time after Jesus, a select and privileged group within the community who had abrogated power and authority to themselves, interpreted the occasion of the Last Supper in a manner that suited their own agenda.’

Father Flannery said the Vatican wanted him specifically to recant the statement, and affirm that Christ instituted the church with a permanent hierarchical structure and that bishops are divinely established successors to the apostles.”

With these removed, the Irish Times gives the impression that Tony Flannery got into trouble because of his openness to women priests and married priests, and his line on homosexuality, contraception, and communion for married divorcees. The reaction to this narrative has been utterly predictable, given how, as the Irish Times says, in connection with lastyear’s misconceived ACP survey, “Fr Flannery is correct when he speaks of a disconnect between the Irish laity and Rome.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure Rome’s not happy about any of that either, not least because there’s a duty on priests to try to bridge such disconnects, but that’s not what's caused this.

The heart of the matter...

Rather, the main issue here is that Tony Flannery rejected the very idea of a sacramental priesthood as founded by Christ. Leaving aside how this would have put him in a position as paradoxical as it would be untenable, it was clearly something that Rome couldn’t let go.

Rome didn’t have much choice in this. Its hands were tied. Indeed, if Father Flannery’s in danger of excommunication – and seemingly, despite his claims, he was never threatened with this, which the Irish Times could surely have discovered if it had bothered – it’s because he pretty much put himself out of communion by denying the sacramental reality of Holy Orders. That’s the way excommunication works: in practice you excommunicate yourself, and the Church only tells you what you’ve done.

I’d even wonder whether by claiming that the Last Supper has historically been misrepresented by the Church he implicitly cast doubt on the sacramental reality of the Eucharist, and indeed almost all the sacraments and the basic authority of the Church. I think that may be what the head of the Irish Redemptorists meant when he spoke of Tony Flannery being ambiguous on this point.

The CDF’s dealings with Tony Flannery will have been designed to help him realise the seriousness and implications of what he’s said so he can figure out in conscience where he stands, ideally with a view to him coming afresh to an acceptance of Church teaching

Now that's not quite true, is it, Tony?

Monday morning’s paper saw the misleading effect that the redacted article conveyed being heavily pushed. Despite being about a central, fundamental, and essentially internal Catholic issue, the entire story was presented as yet another piece in the long-running Irish Times storyline I call ‘Catholic Hierarchy out of step with modern life’.

Tony Flannery sulks in Monday’s paper that the CDF has never approached him directly, describing how he’d been summoned to Rome to answer to the head of his order. He shouldn’t have seen anything sinister in that, the Church being best understood not as a neat pyramid but as a loose network of largely autonomous organisations; a Redemptorist priest who’d taken a vow of obedience, Tony Flannery is subject to a line management system, for want of a better phrase, which Rome was respecting.

On meeting the head of his order, he was faced with a choice he said he found impossible:

“Either I sign a statement, for publication, stating that I accepted teachings that I could not accept, or I would remain permanently banned from priestly ministry, and maybe face more serious sanctions. It is important to state clearly that these issues were not matters of fundamental teaching, but rather of church governance.”

Of course, this is rather at odds with today’s statement from the head of the Irish Redemptorists, and it’s telling that Tony Flannery glosses over how he denied the very basis of the priesthood; this cannot be dismissed as a mere matter of Church governance, being quite clearly a matter of fundamental teaching.

Feed my lambs... tend my sheep... feed my sheep...

Remember: Tony Flannery had denied the sacramental nature of the priesthood, saying that he no longer believed it had been instituted by Christ, and that it was, in effect, the creation of an elite who usurped power in the Church. I have no idea what he means when he says the Creed and says he believes in an ‘apostolic Church’.

It is quite possible to argue this, of course: it’s a commonplace of Protestant theology, for instance, with Protestants generally rejecting the notion of a sacramental priesthood instituted by Christ, and tending to believe only in the broader ‘priesthood of all believers’. But that’s the thing: that’s a Protestant view, and one completely incompatible with Catholicism.

“Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in 1908, “but they are the walls of a playground.” Shepherds are meant to protect their sheep, and it’s the job of the Church to step in when one of its priests teaches something that is utterly contrary to Catholic teaching. It’s not hasty about doing so, either: Tony Flannery’s spent years away from the Catholic mainstream, but in denying the sacramental basis of the priesthood he clearly went too far.

The Irish Times is putting forward a profoundly misleading narrative of what’s happened here, and sadly, where the Irish Times misleads, others tend to follow,. It may simply be that they think their readers wouldn’t care about issues of ecclesiology, but the fact remains that by stripping the story of its most important element they distort the story profoundly. So much for the ‘Story of Why?’.

Chesterton and Orwell: Reflections on 1984

“But among critics whose interest in Chesterton is extra-literary,” wrote Ian Boyd in John Sullivan’s 1974 work G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, “those who perhaps have done the most damage to his artistic reputation are a group who might be called the professional Catholics. For them, Chesterton is an institution to be defended rather than an author to be discussed.”

It’s an important point, and one I was reminded of yesterday when reading David Allen Green’s speculations that Orwell penned Nineteen Eighty-Four in response to Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I was tempted towards kneejerk reactions. They're rarely of use to anybody.

“Why did George Orwell call his last novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?” asks Green, “The usual explanation for the choice of title of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it was a play on the last two digits of 1948, the year the manuscript was finished. This has never convinced me. I think there may be a better explanation, which comes from George Orwell’s intellectual hostility to the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton.”

Afraid to come upon a blood red cup and the beating of the wings of an eagle...

Before observing that the action in Napoleon begins in 1984, Green concedes that the coincidence upon which his theory is based has been previously noticed, but says that he is unaware of any other attempt to assess the alternative explanation that he offers.

Green describes Napoleon as he understands it, and assembles an impressive litany of quotations from Orwell scornfully dismissing a host of Catholic writers for what he regarded as their intellectual dishonesty. Focusing on the preface to Napoleon, Green casts the book as a diatribe against progress and observes that:

“Taking the stories as a whole it is not too much of a strain to see Nineteen Eighty-Four as a riposte to The Napoleon of Notting Hill. There are many points of comparison. Both books show that a belief in revolution that appears to have gone wrong, and both focus on the frustrations of a sympathetic central character as he attempts to challenge the prevailing system. Both are utopian/dystopian visions, containing prophecies extrapolated from current trends.”

It’s an interesting thesis, but the more I look at it, the less I think it plausible, not least because it seems to me that although it's a commonplace among Chesterton fans that Orwell may have intended his title as a reference to Chesterton’s work, I think this unlikely; still less do I think Orwell's book a riposte to Chesterton's.

Wherever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow sunset, there my heart beats...
Even if we can dismiss as ahistorical the popular notion that Nineteen Eighty-Four was so named as a playful reference to 1948, the year in which Orwell finished writing it, we should at least recognise that there are other theories beyond the two Green cites.

“Orwell’s title remains a mystery,” wrote Robert McCrum in the Observer in 2009. “Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London’s novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984) or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton’s stories, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which is set in 1984.”

Well, only the opening sequence of Napoleon is set in 1984, the bulk of the book being set a decade later and the finale being set a further twenty years after that, and it’s rather stretching things to call Chesterton Orwell’s favourite writer, but still, McCrum’s general approach is sound; he doesn’t think the supposedly popular 1948-Nineteen Eighty-Four theory worth even a mention, and notes that there are several theories as why Orwell bestowed that now notorious date on the book. He could also have mentioned, for instance, the possibility that Orwell had been influenced by his late wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s poem ‘End of the Century, 1984’.

It seems at least as likely that the quest for what lay behind Orwell’s setting of his story in 1984 is a fool’s errand. Peter Davison’s note on the text of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of the novel notes that Orwell “first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness) that was changed to 1982, and, later, to 1984.”

There may, in short, be no special significance to the date.

That which is large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for the poor to defend...

That said, there’s much of value in the piece, not least the litany of quotations from Orwell’s writings which go some way to substantiating Randal Marlin’s observation in Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion that,

“Orwell had his baggage of prejudices, against Roman Catholics (Irish in particular) and gays, for example. G.K. Chesterton, who was not Irish, excited his great antipathy, perhaps because Chesterton was so adept at using words in defence of causes Orwell opposed and in ways that Orwell objected to, as explained in his essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’”.

Green's collection of quotations suggest that Orwell was less bothered by religious dishonesty than by Catholics. One thing that’s clear from them is that Orwell never really understood Chesterton, a failing which Greene seems to share. Green argues that the possibility that the title of Nineteen Eighty-Four was drawn from Napoleon “allows us to explore an often overlooked part of Orwell’s political outlook: the deep hostility of a decent and progressive liberal to the intellectual and moral dishonesty of religious conservatives.”

We’re into ‘begging the question’ territory there, but still…

A madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man...

One of Orwell’s earliest published writings appeared in Chesterton’s G.K.’s Weekly. Entitled ‘A Farthing Newspaper’, it dealt with corporate influence on public opinion through the news media, a concern which Chesterton shared and which has, of course, hardly become less relevant with the passing decades. John Rodden observes in George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation that – far from harbouring a deep hostility to a man who’d helped launch his career – Orwell generally admired Chesterton, who he resembled in many ways, notably in his patriotism and his love for the commonplace and the common man.

If Orwell developed an antipathy towards Chesterton, it was because he felt that in his later work he had sacrificed his talent and his intellectual honesty to propagandising for the Catholic Church; regardless of the merits or otherwise or Orwell’s analysis, it’s important to recognise that Orwell believed that the dishonesty he perceived was a hallmark only of “the last twenty years or so” of Chesterton’s life.

Most critics of Chesterton's work perceive a difference between his writing before December 1914 and his writing after his recovery from a rarely-broken coma that lasted for several months – Dudley Barker, surveying Chesterton’s oeuvre in Sullivan’s G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, observes that “not much needs to be said, indeed, about most of what Chesterton wrote after 1914”, and it’s this latter writing that Orwell so disparaged.

Napoleon, it should be pointed out, was not one of Chesterton’s later books; indeed, it was one of his earliest, published in 1904. Far from being “written from the point of view of a Catholic populist,” as Green says, Napoleon was written when Chesterton was an Anglican; indeed, Chesterton wouldn’t be accepted into the Catholic Church until 1922, eighteen years after Napoleon’s publication. Indeed, Napoleon is curious, as Christopher Hollis comments in his 1970 book The Mind of Chesterton, for being “alone among Chesterton's books,” almost devoid of references to religion.

Every man is dangerous ...  who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.

In truth, I’m not convinced that Green really understands Napoleon at all, not compared to, say, Terry Pratchett, who showed a sure understanding of the book’s engine when he said of Chesterton that:

“It’s worth pointing out that in The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill he gave us two of the most emotionally charged plots in the twentieth century: one being that both sides are actually the same side; it doesn’t matter which side we’re talking about, both sides are the same. This has been the motor of half the spy novels of the century. The other plot can’t be summarised so succinctly, but the basic plot of The Napoleon of Notting Hill is that someone takes seriously an idea that wasn’t intended to be taken seriously and gives it some kind of nobility by so doing.”

Consider Green's claim that the hero of the book is “Auberon Quin, an eccentric who suddenly becomes king.” Is this really accurate? I would have thought that insofar as Napoleon has a hero at all, it’s the ‘Napoleon’ of the title, the Adam Wayne who becomes Provost of Notting Hill and conqueror of London.

Does the book really focus on the frustrations of a sympathetic central character as he attempts to challenge the prevailing system? Hardly: Quin changes the system with ease, for a joke, and Wayne embraces the new system with a violent passion.

Can Napoleon really be described as either a utopian or a dystopian vision, containing prophecies extrapolated from current trends? Not really – Chesterton opens with a spread of the sort of predictions so common in his only day only to discard them and say that none of these prophecies or trends mean anything. People, he believes, don’t really change.

The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. ..

I’m not even convinced by the idea that Napoleon is best known nowadays for “its preface, entitled Introductory Remarks on the Art of Prophecy,” and supposedly a few hundred words long. The opening chapter bears that title, and it clocks in at 1,700 or so words, but I’m far from sold on the idea that this is why the book’s best known now, and I’m certain this isn’t “Chesterton’s clearest and best known statement against ‘progress’”, not least because it's not about progress so much as it is about prophecy, about whether the future can be predicted.

Chesterton isn't really interested in the prophecies of his contemporaries, after all; he needs his book to be set in places that he knows and loves, but cannot set it in his own day so casts his tale into the future, and needs to justify why it's not that different from the present.

What's more, if you take a look at the selected Chesterton quotations of ‘progress’ at the American Chesterton Society, you’ll see that not one is from Napoleon.

In any case, contrary to Orwell’s claim, Chesterton didn’t fear progress; what he was sceptical of was the cult of progress that was rife throughout the Edwardian era, before it was laid low in the trenches of the Western Front. And if Chesterton ever penned a definitive statement on that, it was in the second chapter of Heretics, published the year after Napoleon, and addressing themes he would return to again in 1908’s Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday.

I should stop, as I feel I’ve fallen into the trap of treating Chesterton as an institution to be defended rather than an author to be discussed. Boyd is probably right when he says that Orwell’s take on the later Chesterton as a violent propagandist is merely a hostile version of the caricatured portrait of Chesterton as Catholic champion so held forth by his Catholic supporters.

If you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time...

And there is something to be said for considering the idea that at some level Orwell might have written his work in response to Chesterton. That's what Christopher Hollis thought, at any rate:

“Chesterton wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill in 1904, proclaiming that he was narrating events that were to happen in eighty years time -- that is to say, in 1984. There is no exact evidence that Orwell had this coincidence in mind when he chose the title of his own book.

But, whether intentional or not, Orwell’s book, in which the death of freedom brought with it the death of every decency even down to the proverbial honour among thieves, was certainly a protest against the irresponsibility of Chesterton's forgetfulness of the great lesson: he who draws the sword will perish by the sword, and violence, when once employed, cannot easily be quenched. It is hard, as one looks at the tale of current violence, not to sympathise with Orwell's impatience.”

Chesterton, of course, wrote before the Great War in which his brother died, and the Spanish Civil War where Orwell witnessed the horrors of violence begetting violence.

Anyway, I may think utter bunkum the idea that Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 as a riposte to an intellectually dishonest Chesterton, but I’m glad I’ve been given food for thought. That original post is well worth the pondering, not least because it shows how a "decent and progressive liberal" can have an almost obsessive -- even bigoted -- antipathy towards Catholics.

Remembering Again

“Such was their burial of Hektor, breaker of horses.”

So, after the description of the funeral games in honour of Troy's greatest son, ends the Iliad, which began by reflecting on the carnage wrought by the wrath of the Greek forces' mightiest hero:

“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which puts pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.”

If the Iliad still speaks to us after almost three thousand years it does so not merely because it is beautiful, and not merely because life is -- among other things -- a battle in which how we conduct ourselves in the short time we have here matters profoundly; rather, it centres on our deep and abiding need to make sense of war.

The first step in doing so, as a rule, lies in commemorating our dead, which is probably why it felt so cathartic last year when Britain's Queen Elizabeth II stood in silence in Ireland’s Garden of Remembrance, recognising all those who died fighting against Britain in the cause of Irish freedom, be that in 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, 1916, or the War of Independence. 

Here lie the dead of Marathon, as commemorated by the 192 horsemen of the Parthenon frieze.

As long as we've fought we have commemorated our dead, often giving our warrior dead special honours in death. Stephen Pinker argues that the high proportion of prehistoric skeletons showing evidence of violent trauma shows that we've become less violent over the millennia, but he glosses over how those who've died in battle are often specially honoured in death, such that their graves are more easily found than those of people who've died in more mundane ways. If anything, I suspect we've become far more violent over the centuries. 

It's not less violent to kill someone with guided drones than with a knife; it's just tidier. For us. 

As a war historian, and an Irishman who happens to be half-English and has lived in England for most of the last decade, I've long found Remembrance Sunday deeply problematic. Indeed, the first couple of weeks of November are always tricky for me. All Saints and All Souls are feasts of remembrance to which I unambiguously ally myself, but I dislike Guy Fawkes Night, and I'm always uncomfortable about Remembrance Sunday, though I think it important that Britain's war dead be properly honoured and that her veterans be properly supported; even now far too many of Britain's homeless are people who once served their country in arms.

I've had no shortage of family members who've fought in Britain's wars, whether in the Chitral Expedition, the Boer War, the Great War, World War II, or even Northern Ireland, but it wasn't until 2006 that I first wore a poppy, pinned onto my coat by a then recent ex-girlfriend one windy day in Liverpool as she managed the trick of firmly murmuring "I feel you should wear this". 

The first challenge is how to honour the dead without glorifying the wars in which they fought. We have to be honest and admit that plenty of Britain's wars have been far from honourable. The aforementioned Boer War, for instance, was a shameless land grab, and is hardly unique among Britain's wars in meriting such a description. I think most of us feel uncomfortable about the many wars Britain fought to deny people their independence, wherever they might be. And then, of course, there's the little matter of the invasion of Iraq nine years ago, justified at the time by the transparent fiction that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which he was refusing to surrender. 

The German cemetery at Langemarck. Because thousands of German children marched to war in 1914 too.

We can't deny this. An honest patriot cannot celebrate his countrymen’s heroism unless he also recognises their sins. "My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case," as G.K. Chesterton put it, "It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"

Of course, I don’t think we can or should blame soldiers for having fought in bad wars. War is often the continuation of political intercourse with the intermixing of other means, and as Kevin O’Higgins put it when putting down the Irish army mutiny in 1924, “those who take the pay and wear the uniform of the state, be they soldiers or police, must be non-political servants of the state.”

This has a correlative, however; if we’re not to shame soldiers for having had the misfortune to serve in bad wars, neither should we laud them for having been lucky enough to serve in good ones. We need to be careful too when indulging in the rhetoric of the ‘greatest generations’, not least because even the noblest of wars almost invariably encompass a multitude of sins. 

I firmly believe that we should honour our dead, and mourn those lives so brutally lost, and support those who've come home physically maimed or mentally scarred; I also believe that in doing so we should not forget how many wars were driven by cynicism, greed, and pride, and how there has been no shortage of soldiers over the years who've shamed the uniforms they wore. 

Remembrance Sunday, like I said, is complicated.

The second big problem, of course, lies in the fact that as the soldiers of the Great War have died, and those of the Second World War have grown fewer and more frail by the year, that Remembrance Sunday’s purpose seems to have changed, such that it’s in danger of excusing and even glorifying the shoddier wars of yesterday, today, and even tomorrow.

Much of the popularity of Harry Patch, Britain’s last surviving veteran of the First World War, was down to his impatience with those who tended to romanticise wars, and his bitter recognition that war was nothing more than ‘organised murder’. 

For him, Remembrance Sunday was ‘just showbusiness’.

When the reality represented by the likes of Harry Patch no longer exists to remind us of  soldiers hurrying to safety past their screaming, moaning, dying comrades, it’s easy for people to exploit their legends. There’s a simple level at which Remembrance Sunday is about recruiting as much as anything else – I was shocked a couple of years back when the build-up to coverage included an interview with a young Salford teenager  who was saying that he felt it was his duty to serve and that he’d always wanted to be a soldier. 

Of course, it’s always been like this at some level. The 1915 McCrae poem about the poppies of Flanders fields ends with an exhortation to fight on, and to scorn negotiated peace as a betrayal of those who have fallen:

“Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”

People fought on for three more years, and millions more died in the most horrible and pointless of ways. It’s hardly surprising that Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, damns this final verse as a stupid and even vicious propaganda argument.

Would a negotiated peace in 1916, preventing the Somme, really have betrayed the dead of Gallipoli?

We honour the dead, but we use them too, enlisting them as recruiting officers, summoning our children to serve and die in emulation of them. There’s nothing new in this. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek historian Polybius described how Roman funerals were used in just this way:

“By this constant renewal of the good report of brave men, the name of those who have performed any noble deed is made immortal, and the renown of those who have served their country well becomes a matter of common knowledge and a heritage for posterity. But the most important consequence of the ceremony is that it inspires young men to endure the extremes of suffering for the common good in the hope of winning the glory that waits upon the brave.”

It’s not just Remembrance Sunday that stirs these confused feelings within me. Being a military historian invites all sorts of questions, not least because time and again I’ve had to explain to people that being interested in war doesn’t entail liking it, and I’ve wrestled with these issues while visiting military cemeteries in Ireland and Belgium, Turkey and Greece, and as I’ve walked battlefields as diverse as Marathon, Thermopylae, Trasimene, Cannae, Hastings, Ypres, and Gallipoli.

How do we honour the dead without glorifying the wars? How do we honour them without luring thousands more to early graves? How do we make sense of war at all?

I have no idea. The more I learn, the less I feel I know.

Motorway Musings: Two Cultures and Traditional Halls

"We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour," wrote G.K. Chesterton in his 1905 book Heretics. In a chapter entitled 'On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family', cited approvingly by Stephen Fry's eponymous character in 1992's Peter's Friends, Chesterton points out how city life can have the paradoxical effect of narrowing our minds:

"It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us… 

There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.  

The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.”

I was thinking about this on the bus the other day, pondering differences between Ireland's and England's educational systems, and scientism, and the roads that lie before us. 

A Lesson Learnt Before a Sun-burning Day on a Crowded Black Beach

Many years ago, chatting to two smart and wonderful English girls in a Roman underground station I was struck by how, though they were clearly rather better versed in matters scientific than me, they seemed to lack the most basic knowledge of their own country's history or literature. 

Since moving to England, I’ve noticed this phenomenon time and again, as intelligent people with scientific or technical training all too often seemed to subsist on caricatures of history, geography, literature, and philosophy, while equally smart people educated in the humanities look embarrassed when their absolute ignorance of matters scientific is brought to light; some just shrug, and say they're not good with numbers.

That’s not to say that this phenomenon is alien to Ireland, but I’ve long found it to be far more pronounced in England. If Philip Larkin was right in saying that educated people should know three things – what words mean, where places are and when things happened – it rather looked as though there was something amiss with English education.

It doesn't really take a genius to see what's going wrong. English education tends towards early specialisation, such that first year history students – for example – in English universities generally tend to be slightly better than their Irish counterparts. I've known people to study three humanities A-Levels, and others to do four scientific ones. There's much to be said for this, of course, but specialisation has a price, and that price is all too often a rounded education.

In contrast, Irish students tend to study a range of subjects. People who start science degrees with Leaving Cert maths, physics, chemistry, and biology in the bag will also usually have studied English, Irish, and French or German. Those who start arts degrees with English, history, geography, and a couple of languages in their pocket will also have done maths and quite probably a science subject. And, of course, they'll all have done a whole medley of subjects right up to their Junior Cert.

Sometimes this knowledge can be pretty shallow, of course, but still, there's some sort of balance there, an attempt to educate children in a general way.

The more focused English system seems to lend itself far more than the Irish one to people seeing themselves as 'science people' or 'arts people'. It's as though the arts ones have persuaded themselves that they simply can't do science or handle numbers, and faced with this cowering ignorance, the science ones have become convinced that their type of knowledge is the only type that’s reliable.

People do make up lost ground as they get older, but too many years in the English education system have convinced me that though there are loads of well-rounded English people, intellectually speaking, they're seriously outnumbered by those at the extremes.

I remember being surprised and impressed back in the day to meet undergraduates who'd managed a mixture of science subjects and humanities in their A-Levels. They seemed a gloomily rare breed.

(I'd like to see the figures on this, of course, as my impressions might well be deeply unrepresentative, but still,  that's how it seems to me. And, well, I was on a bus while pondering this, so please forgive my broad-brush approach here. I don't know how many spreadsheets I could have summoned on my phone through a ropey connection.)

Two Cultures

The current fashion for popular science books, and the elevation of reasonably articulate scientists to the status of public gurus are clear symptoms of this; it’s as though the arts people feel inadequate, but lacking the skills and experience to educate themselves about science, they settle for trusting those they see as better informed than themselves. And of course, without suitable training and extensive reading, they're hardly equipped to establish just how credible certain scientists are. They all seem impressive, talking about things largely alien to the innocent arts people...

It's hardly surprising then there are no shortage of science people who'll look down on their arts counterparts, given how much ground has been surrendered.

And contemporary information fetishes – without an appreciation of the skills needed to interpret that information – don't help in the slightest. Insofar as there are celebrity historians to rival the science gurus, people can think of them as mere fact-bearers, not really getting that history's as much about approaching, sifting, handling, and contextualising facts as it is about simply finding them out. The facts don't speak for themselves, after all. History and science aren't just about knowing things: they're about thinking historically and about thinking scientifically.

Things haven’t really improved since C.P. Snow banged on about the Two Cultures in 1959. Establishment Britain’s still ruled by those from humanities backgrounds – not one senior government minister has a third-level science qualification – but in terms of popular culture it’s as though things have swung from one unhealthy extreme to another. 

In 1967, G.R. Elton was able to say with a straight face that “Modern civilization […] rests upon the two intellectual pillars of natural science and analytical history,” but a lazy scientism is in the ascendant now; in a world where Oxford dons can describe philosophy as “a complete waste of time” we run the risk of kicking away the philosophical and theological foundations of both pillars, and smashing the historical one into rubble.

Threads Plucked from the Tapestry of our Common Culture

All of which leaves me depressed at the way that high university fees seem to be increasingly driving English students to try to study close to home rather than – as was often the way – as far from home as they could possibly get. 

The system of university halls of residence – especially traditional ones, modelled on Oxbridge colleges – has long struck me as one of the very best features of English education, its real value being in how it forced all sort of students to live side by side, and to learn from each other. It’s an arrangement that mitigates to some degree the English tendency towards a fragmented intellectual culture.

Hall life isn’t always smooth, but there’s something to be said for a system where people of different backgrounds, different worldviews, different interests are simply forced to get on with each other. It’s normal in halls to see people who might identify themselves as Christians, socialists, Muslims, liberals, Thatcherites, Scots, environmentalists, Jews, scientists, vegetarians, lesbians, Buddhists, northerners, communists, Hindus, atheists, nationalists, Arsenal fans, and all manner of other ways sitting down to dinner with each other, and talking into the night about what they have in common and where they differ.

  

That’s not to say that birds of a feather don’t tend to flock together, but in the confines of halls, people just have to get on. Students rarely have the option of sealing themselves off into like-minded cliques, and so firm friendships form between historians, microbiologists, linguists, psychologists, medical physicists, economists, oncologists, political scientists, embryologists, anthropologists. engineers, lawyers, physical chemists, theologians, botanists, philosophers, mathematicians… and do so across cultural, religious, and political divides.

I was lucky enough to live in halls for years, and think there’s a lot to be said for the kind of place that enables and promotes such interdisciplinary mingling; it’s a shame that it doesn’t happen more often, and it disheartens me that the more students stay at home, the fewer students will gain from the deep and diverse friendships that can be forged in traditional halls. The bridge that joins Britain's two cultures seems increasingly frail, and each brick that falls away weakens it further, impoverishing us all.

Or so I thought while slowly making my way up the M6 on Tuesday.

Reading into the Faith

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

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

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

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

Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morality

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary Catholic Perspectives: Reaping the Harvest

One of the most absurd features of Enda Kenny’s notorious Cloyne speech last July was his quoting from an obscure Vatican document, penned in 1990 by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, to create the false impression that the Pope believes that the Church is above the law.

Wondering how the Taoiseach had come across such a document, I speculated that the passage might have been drawn to his attention by his close adviser Frank Flannery, whose brother, Father Tony Flannery, was one of the founders of the Association of Catholic Priests, and is currently under investigation by the Vatican.

The relevant document, On the Ecclesiastical Vocation of the Theologian, describes the Church as a mystery of communion, in which we share a bond of faith with our fellow Christians throughout history.

As the faith of the Church today must remain essentially that of the earliest Christian community, polling public opinion to determine what to think or do and opposing the Church’s sacramental teaching authority on the basis of such polls is specifically warned against: we cannot impose our opinions on the truth.

Leading questions, dodgy answers, and shocking grammar...

It’s somewhat ironic then that this week the Association of Catholic Priests has published the results of an opinion poll assessing people’s opinions on such matters as ecclesiology, whether women can be priests, translation from Latin into English, and the Church’s teaching on sexuality.  It seems that the ACP either didn’t get Rome’s memo, or didn’t bother reading it.

As published, Contemporary Catholic Perspectives is a disappointing document, rife with grammatical errors* and revealing a readiness among Irish Catholics to embrace theological errors thus divorcing themselves from the fullness of Christian teaching, the wider Church, and their fellow Christians through history.

I can't help but wonder what the leaders of the Association of Catholic Priests  –  the leaders, now, not ordinary members who've joined out of a sense of frustration with the hierarchy  –  think when they pray the Nicene Creed and say they believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. 

• 'One' in what sense? Do they really believe the Irish Church should be united in faith with the Church everywhere else in the world, or indeed throughout history? The Irish Church and the Church in Ireland are one and the same, after all. There's no distinction between the two, much though some might want to wish there were, with their cries for Rome to keep out of our affairs and stop trying to tidy up the mess we've made. Don't they believe that the English translation of the Mass should say the same thing as the Irish, German, French, Spanish, and other translations of the Mass? Don't they think Irish Catholics and Filipino Catholics should pray the same prayers?
• What about 'holy'? 'Holiness' means a lot of things, but at its basic meaning is the notion of being set apart for a special purpose  –  should a Church that's to be set apart to serve God be bending over backwards to accommodate itself to the passing whims of  modern society, whether in one country or a batch of them?
• And 'Catholic'? Attested to as a way of describing the Church as far back as 107 AD when Saint Ignatius of Antioch was en route to his martyrdom in Rome, the word means 'universal' or 'according to the whole', but do people understand that their faith should be a comprehensive totality, and one that's to be found everywhere rather than being merely a modern Irish phenomenon? 
• And as for apostolic, don't they understand that the faith of the apostles and our connection with them through our bishops and especially our communion with Rome cannot be selected from according to our own arrogant desires without breaking that link? How important to they think our communion with the See of Peter is?

In what sense do the likes of the ACP see themselves as Catholic? I'm not saying they're not, of course, as sacramentally they'll be every bit as Catholic as, well, the Pope, but what do they understand the Creed to mean?

And yet...

Sloppy and depressing though it is, the survey is nonetheless far from useless. It shows just how right the Apostolic Visitation was when it observed a widespread tendency among Irish clergy to hold theological opinions contrary to the fundamental teachings of the Church, and stressed the desperate need in Ireland for deeper formation in the content of the faith for young people and adults. Of course, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knew this anyway, but it's good to have numbers. I trust numbers.

84 per cent of people living in Ireland, according to the latest census, self-identify as Catholic, but it seems most of these have little idea of what it is that Catholics are expected to believe and do, let alone why, while many of those who criticise the Church waste their energies raging against a phantom Church that exists only in their imaginations.

I always find it hard to supress a wry grin whenever people start to rant about children being indoctrinated in Catholic schools. If it’s indoctrination that Catholic schools are engaged in, then they’re obviously not very good at it. We’re reaping the harvest of decades of bad catechesis, and when we consider how we should rear our children in our faith, we need to face this fact.

Obligatory autobiographical bit, with comic anecdote...

My own experience of Irish religious education in the 1980s would have been typical of the era.

Preparation for my first Confession and first Holy Communion was clear and comprehensive, as was that for my Confirmation, but whatever I was taught in between was unsystematic and not the sort of thing to stick. In secondary school I only ever heard the word 'transubstantiation' in history class, with reference to Martin Luther and the Council of Trent, with me having picked up a smattering of other information from doing the likes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in English class. 

My abiding memories of religious education in secondary school consisted of watching lots of films, raising money for Concern and the Simon Community, a school Mass or two, a couple of afternoons in the school oratory during one of which we all sniggered when someone broke wind, and one memorable visit from the local parish priest.

'Morning lads,' he said.

'Morning, Father,' we replied.

'What are you doing in religion now, lads?'

'Gandhi, Father,' we said.

A look of utter confusion waltzed across his baffled face. 'Oh,' he said, after a moment. 'That’s good. Because Gandhi was a good man. Now he wasn’t a Catholic, mind, but he was a good man.'

And, to be fair, he was. We weren't learning about Gandhi because he was a Hindu, mind, or because his actions had deep roots in his religious faith, though they very definitely did. We were learning about him because he was nice. 

My teachers were talented and dedicated people who meant well, and I’ve fond memories of them, but the fact remains that in a good Catholic school, run by brothers, religious education boiled down to five years of well-meaning agnosticism with a hint of Catholic seasoning.

I always think folk should be wary of meddling in things they don't understand...

That Catholic education in Ireland is in need of a comprehensive review is something the Visitation highlighted, but such an urgent project seems to have been pre-empted, at least for now, by the Government’s drive to encourage schools to be divested from Church patronage.

Ruairí Quinn’s ambition that half of Ireland’s Catholic schools be so divested looks set to be neutered by the report of the advisory group to the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector. The group has recommended, not that 50 per cent of schools should be transferred from diocesan patronage, but that fewer that one school in 50 should.

More worrying, however, is the advisory group’s recommendation that rule 68 of the Rules for National Schools, requiring teachers to inculcate Christian values throughout their teaching, should be abolished, and that each faith-based school should be obliged to display images reflecting all the school’s students’ religious traditions.

While I’d disagree with those theologians who’ve described these proposals as a frontal assault on faith-based education, I’d certainly agree that they could prove a devastating flank attack with the potential to deal a mortal wound to Catholic education in Ireland.

In his 1919 book Irish Impressions, G.K. Chesterton commented on the sincere assurances given by English socialists to Irish Catholics in 1913 that they would care for Irish children in England and would refrain from interfering with the children’s religion:

'Those who offer such a reassurance have never thought about what a religion is. They entertain the extraordinary idea that religion is a topic. They think religion is a thing like radishes, which can be avoided throughout a particular conversation with a particular person, whom the mention of a radish may convulse with anger or agony. But a religion is simply the world a man inhabits. In practice, a Socialist living in Liverpool would not know when he was, or was not tampering with the religion of a child born in Louth. 

If I were given the complete control of an infant Parsee (which is fortunately unlikely) I should not have the remotest notion of when I was most vitally reflecting on the Parsee system. But common sense, and a comprehension of the meaning of a coherent philosophy, would lead me to suspect that I was reflecting on it every other minute'

There is the little matter of the Constitution, not to mention the ECHR etc...

Religion is a holistic thing, and the right of Irish parents to have their children raised in their faith – whatever that might be – is something that should not be lightly disregarded.

It might be argued that this is not the job of the State, but the Constitution recognises that the family is the primary educator of the child; if economic reality requires parents to outsource education to the State, then it is only reasonable that they should exercise their democratic right to influence the State to educate their children as they would wish. 

Our right to observe, practice, teach, and otherwise manifest our beliefs – save when it's necessary that that right be curtailed – is enshrined in the Constitution and the European Convention of Human Rights. That doesn't  –  indeed, it mustn't  –  mean imposing their faith on others, but it does mean having the confidence to stand up and say 'no' when people representing a small minority of the population try to reform the national education system as though their views were normative for Ireland as a whole, rather than, say, just 6 per cent of people. 

Ruairí Quinn believes that the requirement that Irish national schools inculcate Christian values in their students is at the core of what’s wrong with the current system.  Perhaps, though, in a country which is 84 per cent Catholic and more than 90 per cent Christian of one sort or another, the problem is not that Irish schools are too Christian; it’s that they’re not Christian enough.

_____________________________________________________________

* I'd list them, but that might be a bit off-topic. There are four on the first page alone, though. And in case you're wondering what I'm doing posting at such a crazy time of night, I've been on a boat, and am currently sitting in a rather jolly ferry terminal, waiting on a train. It's a couple of hours away yet.

Terry Pratchett and the Right-to-Die Debate

A.S. Byatt caused a stir some years back when she publicly disparaged the phenomenal success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, describing them as little more than a comfortable patchwork of clichés, unworthy of comparison with the writings of such fantasists as Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, or Terry Pratchett. Pratchett, she felt, was an author unfairly neglected, notable for – among other things – his amazing sentences, his metaphysical wit, and the startling originality with which he dealt with death.

I’ve long agreed with her. Pratchett’s books fill a shelf at home, many if not most of them graced with his signature, mementos of all the times in Dublin and Manchester I’d queued for hours to thank him for the joy he’d given me, to describe playing a parade of characters in an amateur production based on his Wyrd Sisters, and to talk of another of Beaconsfield’s great authors, G.K. Chesterton.

Pratchett had largely been responsible for leading me to Chesterton, whose writings had in turn been instrumental in drawing me back to the Faith, so I’ve always felt I owe him a great debt.

Pratchett’s books regularly strike a Chestertonian note. We might think of the clear debt Monstrous Regiment owes to The Man Who Was Thursday, the philosophical outlook that sees the most tired of preconceptions turned on their head, or snippets of wisdom that recognise that life is a gift, with human life being perhaps the most precious gift of all, and that there can be no true standard by which things can be judged moral in a wholly material universe.

The profundity of Pratchett’s writing demonstrates how right Chesterton was when he explained how foolish it is to assume funniness and seriousness are incompatible.

In 1998’s Carpe Jugulam, for instance, right after dismissing the question of how many angels could dance on the end of a pin by airily saying that if the pin in question is a typical household pin then the answer is ‘sixteen’, Pratchett’s hard-headed witch Granny Weatherwax addresses her priestly travelling companion in a far more pointed fashion:

‘And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’

‘It’s a lot more complicated than that--’

‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.’

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better working definition of sin.

I was horrified to learn in December 2007 that Pratchett was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, though I applauded how he subsequently used his plight to campaign for increased research into Alzheimer’s and to help people understand the condition, all the while continuing to write books to delight and enrich us.

Within two years of disclosing his condition, however, Pratchett announced that he had no intention of dying naturally and hoped to be helped to end his life when he felt the time was right; since then he has become Britain’s most prominent advocate of assisted suicide, despite the fact that he believes that his wife would like to look after him through his illness until the very end.

This advocacy bore fruit some weeks ago with the publication in Britain of the findings of the privately-appointed ‘Commission on Assisted Dying’, which argued that adults diagnosed with less than a year to live should be allowed to request and receive medication to help end their lives, and which scorned the current status of assisted suicide in British law as inadequate and incoherent.

Wrongly and all-too-frequently presented as an independent body, the Commission was independent only in the sense that a lynch mob could be described as an independent jury; unofficial but by no means impartial, it was proposed by the lobby group known until 2005 as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, and was largely funded by Terry Pratchett.

While it may be too easy to sneer that whoever pays the piper calls the tune, it can hardly be accidental that the Commission’s chair, Lord Falconer, and nine of the eleven other commissioners began their work as known supporters of assisted suicide.

More than fifty organizations boycotted the Commission in response to its blatant bias; the British Medical Association publicly questioned the Commission’s independence and impartiality. This had not been the case with the House of Lords’ 1994 Select Committee on Medical Ethics or its comprehensive and wide-ranging 2004-5 Select Committee on Assisted Dying, which received more than 14,000 submissions from the public and took evidence from more than 140 expert witnesses in four countries before recommending that there should be no change in the law on this matter.

None of Ireland’s national broadsheets saw fit to mention any of this in their scant coverage of the private commission’s findings, just as they neglected to report that the vast majority of Britain’s healthcare professionals are opposed to assisted suicide, and that among the most prominent opponents of assisted suicide are all the UK’s major disability rights organizations.

That such bodies should oppose the legalisation of assisted suicide shouldn’t surprise us; they recognise that a right to die, once enshrined in law, could all too easily become a duty to die, especially for the most vulnerable and least obviously productive among us.

We should remember how the hugely influential Baroness Warnock, Britain’s leading moral philosopher, argued in 2008 that dementia sufferers should consider taking their own lives rather than inconveniencing others and wasting taxpayers’ money, an argument that was roundly condemned by, among others, leading figures in the Alzheimer’s Society and the Alzheimer’s Research Trust.

Tragic though cases such as Terry Pratchett’s are, it’s worth keeping in mind how it has been at least a decade -- perhaps longer -- since anyone has been prosecuted for helping a loved one take their own life. Hard cases make bad law, and as Peter Smith, Archbishop of Southwark, has said, we cannot change laws that are there to protect the vulnerable without grave long term consequences. Campaigns to legalise assisted suicide distract from our need to put our efforts into improving palliative care, so that when we die, we can do so with real dignity.

In his controversial 2011 documentary, Choosing to Die, Pratchett said that ‘When I can no longer write my books, I'm not sure that I will want to go on living’.

The idea that some lives aren’t worth living ran through the programme, but we are more than our abilities. We matter because of our humanity; only things have value merely because of what they can do.

People as things, that’s where it starts.

-- from The Irish Catholic, 26 January 2012

Behind the Curtain

Or, a very long post attempting to explain how I wrestled through a complex issue; apologies if it seems rather stream-of-consciousness, not to mention long, but you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to...

Perched at the top of my Amazon wishlist, as it's been for some time, is Ian Ker's recent biography of G.K. Chesterton. To anyone who knows me, of course, this'll hardly be a surprise, given that my shelves are buoyed up with eighty or so books by the great man and more than a dozen books about him.

I've not always been a Chesterton fan; my first encounter with Kensington's greatest son was an unpromising taste of 'The Queer Feet' when I was fourteen or thereabouts, but when I was twenty-one, prompted by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, I drank deeply from The Complete Father Brown, had my mind prized open and my horizons expanded by The Man Who Was Thursday, and fell in love with the man described so ably in Joseph Pearce's Wisdom and Innocence. Whatever appearances may have suggested, I'd fallen far from the Catholic tree in my teenage years, but it was Gilbert who brought me back to the faith; his impact on me hasn't paled as the years have passed.

His combination of goodness and good sense is something that I've long loved, and I've taken to heart the radical difference between Chesterton and his good friend Hilaire Belloc; if Belloc roared like a vengeful bull, Chesterton smiled in charity and seems never to have lost a friend. Pearce's book says quite a bit on the subject, quoting the two writers' contemporary Frank Swinnerton to good effect:

'One reason for the love of Chesterton was that while he fought he sang lays of chivalry and in spite of all his seriousness warred against wickedness rather than a fleshly opponent, while Belloc sang only after the battle and warred against men as well as ideas.'

Belloc, curiously -- and I think wrongly -- felt that Chesterton's gentleness would do little for his legacy as a writer, but recognised that mere longetivity on the page matters nothing compared to the eternal reward that could be won through the preservation of his soul from the cancer of hatred.

Whatever about that, he's certainly had an enormous impact on this blog. My tagline here is adapted from one of his finest epigrams, my description in the sidebar draws from four others, and I'm pretty sure that were you to trawl through the archives here you'd find them echoing loudly with his words and ideas, perhaps most frequently his astute observation that 'it is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.' That my words should echo his is hardly surprising, really, given how much of his work I've absorbed over the years, such that I've internalised huge amounts of it, perhaps most profoundly his deeply counter-intuitive recognition that 'if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly'.

One of the most recent -- and most interesting -- books I've read about Chesterton is William Oddie's fascinating 2008 study, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908; very much an intellectual biography, it charts Chesterton's own philosophical growth and the development of his religious and other ideas, taking him from his youth through the superficially ephemeral but truly timeless Heretics to 1908, the year of Orthodoxy and its fictional alter-ego, The Man Who Was Thursday. Oddie's book is, frankly, a masterpiece in its own right, and is one I think I'll treasure for a long time; I'm looking forward to Oddie following Gilbert's inky fingerprints as he writes his way into the Catholic Church, and have been glad to see him making a case for Gilbert being recognised among the saints of the Church.

(I'm convinced Chesterton's among them already, and like to think of the signed book by him I acquired some years back, resting beside me as I type, as a second-class relic of the man who brought me back to the Faith.)


Enter the Controversy
Oddie, who edited the Catholic Herald for several years and regularly contributes to it even now, is a journalist who I've long respected; I don't always agree with him, by any means, but I do think he's worth listening to. As such, I was startled a few weeks back to read a piece by him on the Catholic Herald website in which he took issue with recent comments by Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, in support of civil partnerships. Arguing that Nichols's comments appeared to be at odds with Rome and with the English bishops' previously-stated position, Oddie wondered whether Nichols was also in favour of adoption by same-sex couples, and if so, why the Catholic adoption agencies had been forced to close down, rather than be obliged to facilitate such adoptions. The ultimate question in this matter, he concluded, was ‘what does he believe? Just what is he saying, on behalf of his brother bishops and presumably the rest of us?’

Clearly these were serious questions, and though Nichols twice attempted to clarify his position, his explanations didn't convince Oddie, who nonetheless has since dropped the matter, aghast at the hornets' nest he'd stirred up and the sheer venom being expressed about bishops such as Nichols. 

I tried to follow the story as best I could at the time, chatting to friends about it and thinking pretty carefully about what Rome and the bishops of England and Wales had said back in 2003. As I put my thoughts in an email to a friend a couple of weeks back:

'... I've been trying to figure it out. In the main it all seems very clear, but there is one issue that does trouble me a bit.

I've just read the bishops' own 2004 [sic] submission where they opposed civil partnerships, something I'd not been aware they'd done, and how the submission had cited the 2003 CDF document. It seems to me that the current stance is a complete about turn. As it happens, the current stance doesn't bother me; I believe it's coherent, clear, and fully in line with the CDF document once one looks at how the Civil Partnership Act has been phrased. I also think that it's better to change one's mind so that one becomes right rather than to remain obstinately wrong.

That said, I'm having trouble figuring out whether that's been what exactly has happened. Presumably the 2004 submission was in response to a draft of the act, rather than the act itself, so was the final version different enough that we could accept it, on reflection? Or were we, straightforwardly, wrong? And if we were wrong, wouldn't it be better, if need be, to admit that?'

Such were my tentative thoughts a couple of weeks back, before I was forced to think about things rather more carefully...


Catholic Voices
Like a lot of people a couple of years back, it was with horror that I watched the October 2009 Intelligence Squared debate on the topic 'The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world'. I'd read about it before seeing it online, but even then I wasn't prepared: I ought to have been, given that it was obvious that the combined forces of Anne Widdecombe and the Nigerian Archbishop John Onaiyekan were never going to have been a match for a crowdpleasing power of a Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry double-act, and given how I'd read of how comprehensively the crowd rejected the motion, but even so, it was painful viewing. And yet it oughtn't to have been: Hitchens and Fry's predictable arguments were riddled with errors and couched in sophistry; they could have been countered at almost every point.

Describing the debate to a friend of mine who is a priest, I looked downcast as I related just how inevitable it all seemed, and how it ought not to have been. My friend nodded, and said that while Anne Widdecombe does valiant work in putting forward the Catholic case, and deserves our gratitude for that, he often feels she doesn’t help things very much. I agreed, but we were both at a loss to think of anybody else who would have taken her place. The Telegraph's Andrew M. Brown evidently had taken a similar view, ending his piece on the debate with a desperate appeal:

'It was a gripping evening’s entertainment but a little discouraging for those of us who are Catholics. I found myself wishing, one, that the Catholic debaters would for once not content themselves with offering pettifogging excuses but instead actually own up to some of the charges, and, two, I wished that there still existed a great Catholic apologist like Chesterton or Belloc, someone who was not only brave and prepared to square up to the Hitch, but was his intellectual equal. Surely there is someone today who could do that?'

I'm glad to say that not every Catholic who watched the debate simply contented themselves with wishing, as the group called Catholic Voices grew out of that debacle, in anticipation of the Pope's then impending visit to the UK. Jack Valero and Austen Ivereigh's idea was a straightforward one, that being, simply, that a team of young -- or youngish! -- Catholics could be given some basic media training, so that they could articulate the case for the Church on television or radio. I liked the idea, and had I been based in London last year I'd probably have applied to join, though given the rather peculiar directions my life took in 2010, it might well be for the best that I didn't do so. Anyway, they did a good job during the Papal visit, and played their part in ensuring that that visit turned out to be far more successful than anyone had expected.

And no, despite the shriekings of the likes of Terry Sanderson, they weren't Vatican-trained propagandists, taught to obscure, distort, and contradict arguments; they were simply ordinary Catholics, informed of the issues and confident in their faith, able to explain complicated issues in simple language. I thought this was a good thing, and if they weren't always quite as good as people might have wished, or if they made some missteps in the organisation phase, well, if a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing badly, as the man said. The point is, this was worth doing.

I suspect Terry was upset mainly because the whole Papal visit left him looking rather foolish, with his hysterical claims that the visit would cost the taxpayer £100 million pounds, rather than less than a fifth of that, being soundly refuted by common sense, not to mention evidence.


And then there's me...
Well, a few months ago I received an email from my aforementioned priestly friend, informing me that Catholic Voices were looking to train a second batch of people, and asking whether I'd been interested. I said I'd been interested the previous year, and so happily applied on -- as it so happened -- the very day that a letter from me appeared in the Irish Times challenging the Taoiseach for having made false statements to the Dáil about the Vatican.

Eventually, after thinking I'd not been selected at all -- something about which I was rather put out, though I still wished the project well as I thought it important -- I was called to come for an interview, and I was interviewed, and a couple of days later was told I'd been chosen; within a fortnight or so of that I met up with the others for our first weekend together in Yorkshire, bumping into one of the others on the train there.

I'm not going to go into how the weekends went, since this sort of thing can only work if we can speak and act in confidence -- one of my closest friends, to whom I've described them in rather more detail than I'll go into here, has said that they sound to her to be akin to retreats in certain ways, and I think she's right.

Still, what I can say is that the weekends have been profoundly transformative affairs: each weekend was an ordeal in its own right, and collectively they've affected me in ways that I'm still trying to grapple with; indeed, there were moments of almost transcendent clarity in Mass last Sunday and the Saturday of the previous weekend, moments which left me lost for words and that unsettle me even now. It's been a privilege and a joy to get to know the other trainees, all of whom have dazzled me with their intelligence, their integrity, their independence, and their fidelity.

That honest harmony of independence and fidelity, I think, is probably essential if we're to be able to speak with any kind of authority on these issues; it'd be utterly wrong for us to say things which we didn't believe, just as it'd be wrong for us to speak as Catholics while saying things that the Church doesn't teach. We're not drones, sent out there to push a line; on the contrary, we're trusted to do our own thing, but that trust is largely rooted in the belief that we're faithful Catholics.

The first weekend focused on just one issue, which we explored in depth as a group in order to help us understand how we can approach these things, and the second saw us looking at two topics, but dealing with them individually in studio situations. For what it's worth, I was terrible on the radio -- almost certainly the weakest of us all -- but that didn't bother me too much. I expected there to be a learning curve. If I was going to be perfect from the offing, I wouldn't need training. And, as it happens, I was far better in the television interview later that day -- it was clear that feedback from the morning and the guidance of the co-ordinators had made a real difference.

Indeed, the training was excellent, and it was fascinating to listening to a couple of the others, after just those first two weekends, taking to the airwaves at short notice to discuss the recent Benetton campaign or the recent BPAS campaign to supply the morning-after pill for free after phone interviews; learning in public can be frightening, but they accredited themselves very well.


Preparing for the Third Weekend
For the third weekend, we were all asked to prepare presentations on various topics that had hit nerves in recent weeks or months; what we said on them was wholly up to us, the idea being that we'd give presentations on issues and the others would grill us on the subjects. Topics were generally well-matched to speakers: a doctor speaking on end-of-life issues, a barrister on employment law, or a female counsellor on Catholic women in public life, say.

My topic seemed a very odd fit, as I was asked to speak about the controversy over Archbishop Nichols's comments. This was a tricky one, partly because the topic was extremely complicated, and partly because insofar as Nichols's support for civil partnerships hits a nerve it does so far more within the Church than it does without. I can only think that I was asked to handle this because, as a historian, I'm trained to winnow through things with a view to figuring out what has happened, and to do so in a diagnostic rather than in an advocatory way. The only guidance I was given was to stay close to the bit of the controversy itself, as Caroline Farrow would be dealing with civil partnerships in a broader sense.

Deep down I'm an analogue sort of fella, the kind of man who thinks a fountain pen is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age, so I printed off Nichols's original comments and his subsequent clarifications, Oddie's articles, the original CDF guidance, and the bishops' 2003 statement so I could work through them all in silent solitude, pencil in hand. I also read the 2004 Civil Partnerships Act online, and read as widely as I could to try to figure out what different lawyers thought of civil partnerships, and how the issue had been discussed in parliament at the time.


Adoption, to start with
One of the first things I was able to figure out was that Oddie's concerns about children being adopted by same-sex couples were wholly misplaced; that issue, about which the Church has expressed serious concerns, was incidental to the civil partnerships debate, having been legislated for in 2002. Although I understand and fully share his distress at the Catholic adoption agencies having been forced to shut down in the face of the new legislation, I honestly can't see why Oddie thought this relevant to the issue of civil partnerships. I'm baffled that people are still conflating these two very separate issues.

(And, for what it's worth, I don't think the Catholic adoption agencies should have shut down; I think they'd have had a very strong case had they taken matters to Strasbourg, since the European Convention on Human Rights, with which the Human Rights Act requires all UK legislation to comply, guarantees freedom of religion and conscience save when the limitation of said freedom is not merely legal, but necessary. Given how many adoption agencies were already facilitating the adoption of children by same-sex couples, it was clear that there was no need for the Catholic ones to do so too. And, of course, since they’ve closed the number of children being adopted each year has fallen further. But that's by the by.)

That left the substantive matter of the civil partnership scheme.

Nichols's statements on the subject were entirely clear, when read in the context of how he was explaining the need to defend marriage as a unique institution, but the key questions related to consistency. Were Nichols's comments consistent with what the bishops had said eight years ago, and were they consistent with the CDF?


What did Rome say?
This forced me to read the CDF's 2003 statement very carefully, such that my copy of it soon developed rather busy margins, illuminated with arrows, circles, and annotations. Entitled Considerations regarding Proposals to give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons, it's an interestingly wide-ranging document, addressed not merely to Catholic bishops, say, but to all those -- Christian or otherwise -- who are committed to promoting and defending the common good of society.

At its heart is a tension between on the one hand the need to explain and defend the basic idea of marriage, and on the other the need to give true respect to people who are homosexual. This respect, it must be stressed, isn't a matter of charity in the modern sense that can seem so patronising, but of charity in the truest sense, that being love; it is also a simple matter of justice.

The CDF distinguished between three ways in which states could deal with homosexual unions: tolerance, legal recognition, and the bestowal of legal status equivalent to marriage. It has a bit to say on how we should deal with the first situation, and regarding the other situations it says:

'In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.'

It goes on to explain why such opposition should be necessary, but says very little on what such opposition should entail, and almost as little on what exactly would constitute a 'homosexual union', save to identify homosexual unions as grounded in 'homosexual behaviour'. This, I think, can't be glossed over; the CDF doesn't give a straightforward definition, really only nearing one when it says:

'In this area, one needs first to reflect on the difference between homosexual behaviour as a private phenomenon and the same behaviour as a relationship in society, foreseen and approved by the law, to the point where it becomes one of the institutions in the legal structure. '

This point is taken up again when the CDF document says:

'It is one thing to maintain that individual citizens may freely engage in those activities that interest them and that this falls within the common civil right to freedom; it is something quite different to hold that activities which do not represent a significant or positive contribution to the development of the human person in society can receive specific and categorical legal recognition by the State.'

It was clear that central to the CDF's argument was its understanding of a 'union' as something analogous to marriage, which as an institution is intrinsically sexual and uniquely valuable; as such, it seemed to me that it was exhorting people to oppose the specific and categorical legal recognition of unions that are rooted in homosexual behaviour; it was not exhorting people to oppose legal arrangements between homosexual persons, save where those arrangements included the legal status and rights belonging to marriage.

Somewhat unhelpfully, the CDF didn't outline what it believed the legal status and rights belonging to marriage to be. I realised that this almost inevitable: such rights must differ from country to country, after all, and the CDF document was not addressed specifically to the minority Catholic Church in the UK, say, but rather to the entire world.

I spent a bit of time wrestling with this, and came to the conclusion that if certain rights belong to marriage, then whatever rights these are they must transcend individual states and legal systems. As such, it hardly threatens marriage for rights which states merely happen to have been bestowed upon marriages to be likewise bestowed upon other legal arrangements, provided that these are not the more fundamental status and rights that belong to marriage alone and that are not the property of the state.

And so, with all these thoughts buzzing in my head, I turned to the bishops' 2003 submission...



What did the Bishops say then?
In June 2003, the Department of Trade and Industry published a consultation paper entitled Civil Partnerships: a framework for the legal recognition of same-sex couples, setting out proposals for what has become the civil partnership scheme. I couldn’t help but think the DTI seemed an unlikely department to be handling the subject, for what it’s worth, given the DTI’s remit, since it gave the impression that civil partnerships were basically business arrangements, but I’m sure there was a good reason for it at the time.

The Bishops’ Conference submitted its response in September 2003, drawing on the CDF's guidelines in making their case and stressing the simultaneous need for the State to defend both the institution of marriage and the fundamental human rights of every person.

They expressed concerns that the proposed scheme would elevate homosexual relationships to a legal status virtually equivalent to civil marriage, thereby giving a signal to society that the two states are equally deserving of public protection. Their central point, in this regard, was as follows:

'Marriage would be undermined because it would no longer hold a privileged place.  The signal the law would send to rising generations is that marriage as husband and wife, and a same sex relationship, are equally valid options, and an equally valid context for the upbringing of children.   By publicly elevating same-sex relationships to a legal status virtually equivalent to civil marriage, the signal given to society would be that these two states of life are equally deserving of public protection and respect, when in fact they are not.'

The bishops further argued that the proposed scheme was largely unnecessary given recent legal developments, that it was a distraction from the real problems undermining family life in modern Britain, and that in some respects the proposed scheme was inadequate in that it created anomalies with regard to other long-term loving relationships which were not sexual in nature. In this regard the bishops cited the example of two sisters who might have shared property over many years, but they could as easily have made the same point by citing disabled people and their carers, or simply two lifelong friends.

On balance, then, they felt the proposals would not promote the common good, and strongly opposed them.

There was more to their argument than this, of course, but what was clear was that they opposed the proposed Civil Partnership scheme and did so for several reasons, some of which drew on the CDF's own guidelines. Such was their opinion in 2003, before the Civil Partnership Act was debated and codified in Parliament, and before it was granted royal approval.

The 2003 submission was, in short, their opinion of what they feared might happen; it was not their opinion of what did happen.


So, looking at the law...
The Civil Partnerships Act came into law in November 2004, and was striking in a couple of major ways. Unlike civil marriages which require publicly-made promises in a civil ceremony, civil partnerships become legal solely through the signing of a civil partnership document. This isn't something that should be brushed aside as a mere technicality. If I can pluck Chesterton's The Superstition of Divorce from the shelf, we'll see that the great man saw the idea of promises as being essential to marriage:

'I shall therefore begin by asking, in an equally mystical manner, what in the name of God and the angels a man getting married supposes he is doing. I shall begin by asking what marriage is; and the mere question will probably reveal that the act itself, good or bad, wise or foolish, is of a certain kind; that it is not an inquiry or an experiment or an accident; it may probably dawn on us that it is a promise. It can be more fully defined by saying it is a vow.'

And onward he goes to explain that the act of marriage is a vow analogous with vows of chivalry, poverty, and celibacy, just as he had twelve years earlier in Orthodoxy or seven years before that in 'A Defence of Rash Vows'. Marriages, unlike civil partnerships, entail promises; they're covenants, not contracts, and we should never forget this.

Furthermore, whatever its political objectives, the Act was not phrased in such a way that same-sex partnerships should intrinsically be understood as homosexual unions. The law never mentions sexuality or sexual acts in any respect, and does not cite anything analogous to adultery as grounds for dissolution of civil partnerships; fidelity, whether romantic or sexual, is not even implicitly identified as an assumed feature of civil partnerships. In principle, therefore, the scheme can be entered into by any two people of the same sex, other than family members or those who are already married, without any expectations that the partnership contains a sexual or romantic component.

It's worth going back to the 2003 CDF document on this. The document recognised that homosexual unions are a fact, and that civil authorities adopt three broad appoaches in deal with this fact: some authorities simply tolerate them, some advocate legal recognition of such unions, and some favour giving them legal equivalence to marriage.

As I’ve said, the bishops were originally opposed to the scheme as first proposed, and drew on the 2003 CDF document in making a case largely based on the need to defend and promote the traditional understanding of marriage. They were worried that the law of the land would be altered in such a way as to signal that that marriage and same sex relationships were equally valid options and equally valid contexts for the raising of children. In short, they were worried that the

As codified, however, the 2004 law – while not without shortcomings, particularly with reference to its exclusion of siblings from the arrangement, say – did not strike me as sending such a signal; as far as I could tell, it did not undermine the unique position of marriage in British law as it did not presuppose that civil partners are engaged in a homosexual relationship.

As I read, I understood that some have argued that it's only for technical reasons that offenses analogous to adultery aren't cited in the Civil Partnership Act as grounds for the dissolution of partnerships, but I wasn't convinced by this; the law is a technical thing, and it would hardly have been beyond the wit of Parliament to devise technical solutions to whatever difficulties might have faced them in that regard. The fact that sexuality and sexual behaviour are wholly absent from the Act is striking; it's as though Parliament went to a great deal of trouble to omit them.

Wholly silent on the issue of sexual behaviour, treating sexuality as a private phenomenon, the Civil Partnership Act did not enshrine homosexual unions as institutions within the legal structure of the United Kingdom. The Act did not give homosexual activities specific and categorical legal recognition, and it neither foresaw nor approved on homosexual behaviour. Homosexual unions exist as a fact in British life, of course, and these certainly can subsist within civil partnerships, just as they can without them, but civil partnerships should not, in themselves, be understood as homosexual unions.



But But But -
In the main I thought this worked, and I slept on it and it still made sense to me, but it left me with a few little problems to think through.

The first was that whatever about what the law says, as legislated, the nature of the English common law system meant that it would be interpreted in the field, with the courts possibly treating civil partnerships as analagous to marriage, or as being essentially homosexual unions. In ways this has already happened to a significant degree, but I don't think this is something that the bishops can ever comment on in any legitimate sense; whatever input they might have into the making of laws, they can hardly interfere in the interpretation of it.

And yes, I realise that judges will sometimes speak of parliamentary intent when interpreting laws, but that's a dangerous game, which can hardly be second-guessed; given how many hundreds of people vote to enact laws, the judges can hardly speculate on the intentions of all of them.

It was obviously true that the range of people barred from entering into civil partnerships with each other was, as far as I could tell, identical to those barred from entering into marriages with each other. This is clearly the case, and it’s something that – as far as I can tell – the bishops have always objected to. They ‘two maiden aunts’ scenario in their 2003 submission implicitly made this point, and I gather that’s still the bishops’ line now: they believe the civil partnership scheme should be expanded so that it could be entered into by a wider range of people.

I wondered too about the fact that whatever the law may say, it's very clear that lots of civil partnerships are accompanied by ceremonies and vows, and appear to take the form -- in effect -- of civil marriages for people of the same sex, such that they appear to be 'gay marriages' and are widely thought of as such. This is all true, but it is, strictly speaking, unrelated to the civil partnership registration itself; it may provide a context in which the civil partnership document is signed, but it is, ultimately, window dressing, and in any case, the bishops can hardly be expected to comment on individual partnerships. Regardless of whatever common practice may involve or common perception may be, it is important to stress that the CDF's guidance related to questions of legal recognition; the fact remains that the law does not foresee or approve homosexual behaviour, and that it does not give specific and categorical legal recognition to homosexual activities.

I really didn’t know what to make of the peculiar detail in the Civil Partnership Act that said a partnership was voidable if at the time of its formation one of the partners was pregnant by someone other than the other partner. On the face of it, this challenged my belief that the law was devoid of sexual references, but after further thought I concluded that that challenge was a feeble one, not least because it's oddly phrased: it would be impossible for one civil partner to become pregnant by the other; by definition civil partners are of the same sex!

More pertinently, in a world of contraception, IVF, and turkey basters, we surely have to acknowledge that sex and pregnancy have been divorced from each other; we cannot ever assume that a pregnant woman has become pregnant as the result of sexual intercourse. What the law seems to say is that one partner can have a partnership declared void if the other partner had been pregnant at the time the partnership had been formed, even if her pregnancy had followed an agreement between the partners and a third party, possibly not involving a sexual act, or even if it had followed a rape. It’s striking that this relates only to female civil partners; there’s nothing that says a civil partnership should be declared void if either partner should be found, at the time of the partnership, to have caused somebody else to become pregnant. Whatever this detail was meant to signify, it certainly says nothing whatsoever about sexual fidelity.

This, of course, forced me to think hard about the situations faced by those registrars who were opposed to their registering civil partnerships as they felt that by doing so they'd be approving of things which were, in effect, homosexual unions. I've talked about this in the past, actually, when trying to get my thoughts sorted on the issue of gay marriage, and my thinking is that individual registrars could probably differ on this; some might be able to live with presiding over the signing of a document that says nothing about what people do in their private lives, while others might feel that by presiding over registrations of partnerships they were facilitating things they felt they couldn't agree with. In such situations, they surely ought to be able to object to their involvement in such registration, though I think we can imagine such cases making their way -- eventually -- to Strasbourg.

Curiously, I wasn’t able to find any indication that the English or Welsh bishops had ever spoken on this topic; if they had been opposed to civil partnership as they were instituted in law, they should surely have argued that Catholic registrars would be obliged, in conscience, to refrain from registering civil partnerships. Granted, my research may have been lacking, but this seemed to be one of those ‘dog that didn’t bark’ moments. It really did look as there’s no evidence whatsoever that the bishops of England and Wales have ever opposed the civil partnership scheme as it exists in law.



So...?
Having ploughed through heaps of data on the subject, I ultimately came to the conclusion that it’s entirely consistent with Church teaching for Archbishop Nichols to say he supports the civil partnership scheme as an existing and legitimate mechanism to help give stability to committed couples of the same sex, given that the law refrains from granting homosexual unions any sort of parliamentary imprimatur and thereby does not undermine the unique position of marriage in UK law.

It would, of course, be a different matter if marriage itself were to be redefined; definitions are about limitations, after all, and things gain meaning from what they're not as much as from what they are. Nichols's main aim, as he's made clear on many occasions, is to defend marriage as it has always existed in British law.


The Weekend and the Blog
I pulled together my thoughts on the subject into a presentation of 1,400 words or so, and gave my presentation on Saturday afternoon; it went down rather better than I thought it would, given that I was arguing something rather counter-intuitive, which I hadn't believed myself only a few days earlier.  

There were precious few questions, though what there were homed in on the conflict between how the law existed in theory and worked out in practice. Afterwards a few of the others complimented me on the paper, saying there'd been so few questions because I'd explained the controversy so clearly, and later on -- indeed, it may well have been the next day -- I was asked whether I'd be willing to turn it into a post for the Catholic Voices blog.

I came home on Monday, and on Tuesday I finished streamlining my talk, losing a few hundred words so that it wouldn't be absurdly long and so that people could read it in one easy go to get a clear handle on the issue. Following a tiny bit of editorial tweaking, it was posted on the Catholic Voices site shortly afterwards.

There was nothing frantic about this. There was no rush to defend the bishops, whatever others might imagine. It just happened; I was asked to explore and explain an issue, and in the process of doing so, reached conclusions I hadn't expected to reach. Others agreed, and we thought it'd be helpful if we could shed some light on the issue.

I fully understand that others might disagree with the conclusions I've reached, and that my colleagues have come to share. That’s fine: this is a complicated issue, and I think we have to recognise that others might legitimately disagree with us. I've no plans to shout down those who disagree with me. Following Chesterton, I may be certain that I am right, but I’m not so bigoted that I’m unable to imagine how I might possibly be wrong.