Charlie: It's Not All About Us

It's been very strange watching some Irish responses online to the week's horrific events in Paris.

 

Following the murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and subsequent hostage-taking and killings elsewhere, far too many people have seen this as a suitable time to demand that Ireland's 'blasphemy laws' should be repealed, and to scorn as hypocritical the Irish Times' criticism of the murderers' attempts to silence debate, given how our self-proclaimed 'paper of reference' once removed a cartoon from its archives.

 

Now, you might just think this kind of behaviour is just cynical opportunism, or is typical of that clueless parochial narcissism that so often blights our national discourse, and you might well be right, but it's worth looking at both issues separately for a moment.

 

 

Comparing Like with Loike, Totally

Just to take one example, Ed Moloney, one of the finest analysts of the Northern Irish Troubles and Peace Process, for instance, tweeted last night, 'When Will The Irish Times Remember The Cartoon It Censored At The Behest Of Religious Fanatics?'

 

Writing about this on his blog, where after some reflection he changed his headline from one identical to the tweet to one saying, 'Irish Times Leads Nation’s Protest Over "Charlie" But Forgets About Cartoon It Censored At Behest Of The Bishops,' he quotes the Irish Times's comment that 'The right to offend must be defended with courage and vigour', before saying that it would have been more 'uplifting' if the Irish Times editorial had expressed regret for how it had removed from its archives a Martin Turner cartoon because, he said, it had offended senior members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy.

 

'It seems,' he concludes, 'that sauce for the Catholic goose is not sauce for the Islamic gander.'

 

Now. Moloney's a smart man, and on the face of it you might think he's making a fair point. It's worth taking a look at the cartoon, though, which we can easily do because, well, it's not 1904, and things tend to end up online about two minutes after newspapers remove them. 

 

(For instance, do you remember in October 2004 when the Guardian removed from its archives a Charlie Brooker 'Screen Burn' column that ended by lamenting the probability of George W. Bush being reelected president, and said 'John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald,  John Hinckley Jr -- where are you now that we need you?' No?

 

Well, perhaps you remember how in August 2013, the Irish Times ran a front page piece about a twin pregnancy being terminated at the National Maternity Hospital as the first termination conducted under the terms of the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act? Remember? You should: it was such an impressively detailed report that Peter Boylan, who was reportedly involved in the termination, spluttered about how the patient's confidentiality had been breached, and yet it was utterly revoked and wiped from the paper's archives a week later, with a small and inappropriately discreet page seven apology pointing out that the law was not yet in force, and claiming that 'The hospital has pointed out that the case described in the article did not happen.'

 

If you don't remember either of these peculiar episodes, well, don't worry, because this is 2015, and so I've kindly given you links to the missing stories. And then, if you really have an issue with censorship, go and write to the said papers to complain about their willingness to bow to, I dunno, angry politicians and embarrassing obstetricians. Or something.)

 

So, anyway, here's the Turner cartoon, the removal of which so irks Mr Moloney, because, of course, an Irish publication freely deciding to withdraw a cartoon while retaining the services of its cartoonist is comparable to a load of cartoonists and other magazine staff being butchered.

It is, we should start by conceding, not a very good cartoon. It's a leaden thing, where three priests, all rather surprisingly wearing what I presume are meant to be cassocks*, and one stepping out of a confessional box rather perplexingly wearing an alb as well as his stole, sing 'I would do anything for children (but I won't do that)'.

 

Presumably this is to the tune of Meatloaf's seminal return hit, 'I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)'**, though if you can get the priests' line to scan to the original tune you're a better man than I am.

 

In case you're too thick to realise that this was intended as a comment on Catholic opposition to one element in the child protection laws being introduced at the time, one of the priests -- presumably singing with his mouth closed -- is scowling down at a newspaper running the headline 'Children First Bill: Mandatory Reporting'. As an English friend pointed out the other day in a more general context, if you feel the need to include newspaper headlines to spell out what your cartoon is about, you've probably not done a very good cartoon.

And, of course, if you don't see the significance of Catholics taking issue with a particular proposal that might limit freedom of religion in return for nothing that would actually protect children, and if you're not willing to concede that the Church in Ireland has -- so, so, belatedly -- been pretty much the leader in Irish child protection over the last decade or so, and if you don't have a problem with government ministers crowing about this proposal while actual experts in child protection point out that the planned legislation wouldn't help anyone and was being conducted in tandem with policies that would endanger children, well, then you're probably not very bright, not very well informed, or just not really interested in protecting children at all.

 

The day after the cartoon appeared, there were two letters in the paper, both from priests, one describing the cartoon as 'bigoted, nasty and downright disgraceful', pointing out that given the Church has more stringent child protection guidelines than any other body in Ireland, it was a cheap shot and a betrayal of anti-Catholic bigotry to 'use the sins of the past as a stick to continue to beat the church of the present', while the other describe it as 'offensive in the extreme to every priest in the country', and required an editorial apology unless the paper was of the view that it was 'open season on priests'.

The following day there were four letters about the cartoon, one of which said the cartoon was below the belt, but that as a satirical cartoonist it was Turner's job to be offensive. The other three were less understanding. One described the cartoon as 'a new low in Irish journalism', reminiscent of the sectarian cartoons of the nineteenth-century American Thomas Nast. Another, from a long-time fan of Turner, said the cartoon was 'bigoted', 'nasty', and 'spectacularly unfunny', revealing a potent double standard where the paper's general 'zeal for anti-religious comment' was not being 'applied to critical analysis of current government scandals'. A third, from a reader of the 55 years, described the cartoon's publication as 'an error of judgement' that warranted an apology to Ireland's priests and the paper's readers.

 

That same day, speaking in Dublin's pro-Cathedral, Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, said 'I am a strong believer in freedom of speech and of the vital role of satire in social criticism, but I object to anything that would unjustly tarnish all good priests with the unpardonable actions of some.'
 

What was the problem? Well, if you look down in the cartoon's bottom corner, in very small writing, you'll see an authorial aside saying, 'But there is little else you can do for them... except stay away from them, of course.'

 

Bear that in mind, when you read the Irish Times editorial that made clear why the cartoon was removed. The editorial states that the paper is bound by the Irish Times Trust's principles which require that the paper is meant to ensure that comment and opinion should be 'informed and responsible', with 'special consideration ... given to the reasonable representation of minority interests and divergent views, and that and it should uphold  'the promotion of peace and tolerance and opposition to all forms of violence and hatred, so that each man may live in harmony with his neighbour, considerate for his cultural, material and spiritual needs.'

 

No, really. No laughing at the back there.

 

'That means, however, that there is no carte blanche,' the editorial explained, 'and that there are ground rules which we try to adhere to, mostly with no argument from those contributors. Civilised debate, we accept, requires the eschewing of ad hominem argument, playing the ball, not the man, and avoiding crude stereotyping.'

Turner's cartoon was described as having flown under the editorial radar, the editorial explained, picking up on the authorial aside about how priests should keep away from children. 'In making a legitimate argument about the debate over priestly responsibility for reporting child abuse and the concerns for the seal of the confessional, Turner also took an unfortunate and unjustified sideswipe at all priests, suggesting that none of them can be trusted with children. This has, unsurprisingly, caused considerable offence and we regret and apologise for the hurt caused by the cartoon whose use in that form, we acknowledge, reflected a regrettable editorial lapse.'

 

The Turner thing was very simple. The Irish Times has its own guidelines, Turner breached them by irresponsibly and ignorantly casting all priests as dangers to children -- and if you think this is a fair comment on the phenomenon of abuse in Ireland, you really should read more --  and so the paper pulled it. To make out that this has broader implications would be as outrageous as me saying that because my school magazine was once pulled from distribution because of a story I had done in it, so nobody at that school should ever be allowed to take issue with cartoonists being murdered.

 

It really is that simple.

Blas for me! Blas for you! Blas for everybody in the room!

Then there's the blasphemy law thing. It's probably worth starting with the fact that I don't much care either way about the blasphemy law, such as it is: it doesn't bother me, and it wouldn't bother me if it were removed. I don't know any Catholics who are fans of it, to be honest. Some are opposed to it, and many wouldn't even bother shrugging if it were removed.

Now, the standard line about the blasphemy law over the last few years that it should be removed because it encourages Muslim countries to introduce similar blasphemy laws has been tweaked in the last week to the effect that 'Because of Ireland's blasphemy law, Charlie Hebdo wouldn't even be allowed in Ireland!' As such, so fools argue, we should remove the blasphemy law as a mark of respect and as a way of championing real free speech.

It's worth bearing in mind where the blasphemy law came from. A constitutional quirk basically requires the state to have some kind of blasphemy law, but Ireland's politicians sat on this legal oddity for ages, without people jumping up and down and claiming that they had to give legislative force to a constitutional imperative. Eventually, though, when tidying up issues of libel and slander and such in 2009's Defamation Act, the issue of other limitations on speech came up. The result was the so-called 'blasphemy law', better known to those who read as section 36 of the Defamation Act.

Section 36 says that those who publish or utter blasphemous matter can be subject to a fine of up to €25,000. Matter should be deemed blasphemous, if says, if a) it is "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion" AND b) if the causing of such outrage is intended.

That bit about intent is crucial, and not just because it is half the definition of blasphemy, such that in Irish law you cannot blaspheme unless you have deliberately caused large-scale outrage. The law goes on to say that it is a defence to allegations of blasphemy for a reasonable person to find 'genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates'.

In other words, the law has a three-part test: has the matter under investigation caused outrage among a significant number of people of a particular religious line, was it intended to cause such outrage, and is it bereft of literary, artistic, scientific, academic, or political merit?

To all intents and purposes it's a deliberately toothless law, designed to tidy up a constitutional glitch in such a way that nobody is ever troubled by it, and surely pretty much unnecessary given how the actual crime here seems to be substantively covered by 1989's Incitement to Hatred law.  You might take issue with its symbolism, or feel it's anachronistic, but one thing you can't really do is say that it does any actual harm. Our laws are often merely aspirational; this isn't even that.

Michael Nugent and his friends in Atheist Ireland disagree, of course, and regard it as a great betrayal that the government doesn't see its removal from the statute books asap as a massive priority. But then, of course, Atheist Ireland has never really understood the law. When the law was first instituted, they ran a list of 25 supposedly blasphemous quotations, daring the State to prosecute them. Of course, leaving aside now many of the quotations could be said to have had literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value, and that their publication in 2009 did not provoke large-scale outrage -- nobody cared -- the simple fact of the list having been published to make a political point about free speech meant it was clearly safe from prosecution.

Could Charlie be published in Ireland? Well, put it this way: was it intended to provoke anger among Muslims or Catholics or whoever or was it intended to make people think? To take a non-religious example***, is the accompanying cartoon a homophobic or racist piece designed to anger gay people or black people, or is its aim to get people to think about the socio-economic realities surrogacy can entail, with poor women, often from developing countries, being paid to serve as vessels for others' children?

'Surrogacy is two parents... and one slave.'

No, I think, Charlie certainly could be published in Ireland. Whether shops would want to stock it, or people would want to buy it... that's a different matter.

 

There's no getting away from the fact that the intentional provocation of large scale outrage is a central element in Ireland's blasphemy law; it's a law less about offending God, as in other blasphemy laws, as about deliberately angering people. This matters if we want to think about the trope that Muslim countries, especially Pakistan, like using Ireland's blasphemy law to justify their own similar laws.

Do they really do this?

 

Now, I might be wrong, I've only ever really heard of one instance of this happening, and even then it's a pretty dubious instance. At an October 2009 meeting of the UN's Human Rights Council, discussing discrimination, Pakistan entered a six-part proposal to oppose discrimination based on religion and belief. The first of these six propositions was clearly modelled on part of the Irish definition of legal blasphemy: 'State parties shall prohibit by law the uttering of matters that are grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents to that religion.'

So, yes, clearly based in part on the Irish one. And yet also spectacularly different from the toothless Irish law, because it utterly omits the role of intent in Ireland's law, that crucial point which means that you cannot blaspheme accidentally or inadvertently, that blasphemy must not merely be offensive, but must deliberately cause large-scale outrage, and that even should large-scale outrage deliberately be caused, there are a range of legitimate defences, including 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I was engaged in scholarly research and was telling the truth', and 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I did so in an aesthetically pleasing way', and 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I was making a point about free speech'.

The Pakistani proposal entailed using a truncated version of the Irish definition, and tried to promote that. It did not explicitly acknowledge the Irish law, and its proposal was crucially different from the Irish reality, except as misrepresented by, for instance, Atheist Ireland, which falsely states on its Blasphemy.ie website that 'The law defines blasphemy as publishing or saying something "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matter held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion."'

No it doesn't, you buffoons. Please learn to read.

It is disappointing that oafs and otherwise smart people like Ed Moloney have tried to draw links between a responsible editorial decision and brutal acts of murder, just as it is disappointing that others claim Pakistan uses Ireland's blasphemy law to push for blasphemy laws elsewhere and present part of Ireland's legal definition of blasphemy as though it's the whole definition.

 

But that's the thing about free speech: it allows people to say stupid things.

 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.

 

 

 

* It looks rather as though they're wearing mysterious black night-shirts over lighter-coloured shirts with clerical collars. It's almost as though Turner has never seen a cassock and doesn't actually know what one looks like. Whether such basic ignorance might somehow undermine his point I leave to you to decide.

** Yeah, I know that's not the actual video. Watch it anyway, though. It may prove an education.

*** Because I don't see much virtue in republishing things I know many people would be upset by for the sake of making a broader, if somewhat self-aggrandising, point about the importance of free speech. That strikes me as doing something bad in the hope of achieving something good, and, well, there are forbidden weapons.

Triumph and Disaster: The Crucifixion in Christian Art

Ever since Lenny Bruce quipped that had Jesus been killed in the middle of the last century, Catholic school children would wear little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses, it’s been a staple of lazy comedians to sneer and ask what kind of a religion chooses an instrument of torture for its symbol. The answer, writes Francis Spufford in 2012’s Unapologetic, is “one that takes the existence of suffering seriously.”

The Cross, says John O’Donohue in Eternal Echoes, is a unique axis in time, where time and timelessness intersect. All past, present, and future pain was physically carried up the hill of Calvary in the Cross, so that it could be transfigured in the new dawn of the Resurrection. This, he says, is the mystery of the Eucharist, which embraces Calvary and the Resurrection in the one circle:

“In Christian terms there is no way to light or glory except through the sore ground under the dark weight of the Cross.”

Detail of a fifth-century ivory miniature of the Crucifixion, held by the British Museum.

Lonely

O’Donohue describes the Cross as a lonely, forsaken symbol, the most terrifying image in Christian theology being a state of absolute abandonment, immortalised in the Passion narratives when Jesus cries out “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” – My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

This, according to the second volume of Joseph Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth, was no ordinary cry of abandonment. Misheard and misunderstood by some nearby, the faithful recognised this as a truly Messianic cry, the opening verse of the twenty-second psalm.

“Jesus is praying the great psalm of suffering Israel, and so he is taking upon himself all the tribulation, not just of Israel, but of all those in this world who suffer from God’s concealment. He brings the world’s anguished cry at God’s absence before the heart of God himself. He identifies himself with suffering Israel, with all those who suffer under ‘God’s darkness’; he takes their cry, their anguish, all their helplessness upon himself – and in so doing he transforms it.”

Suffering

Given the suffering that’s ever-present in our world, and how at times we seem awash in a sea of tragedies, it’s remarkable how rarely this precise moment of divine agony and isolation is ever expressed in art.  Theology isn’t just a matter of technical jargon in obscure journals, but is ever present in the preaching, the liturgy, and the iconography of the Church; art matters, as it reflects how we think about things, and shows us how we might do so.

The sixteenth-century Isenheim Altarpiece

For the last thousand years or so, most renderings of the Crucifixion have been variations on the theme of a dead Christ, his head resting on his right shoulder, his body sagging, his side bleeding from the spear driven into it by the Roman soldier to make sure he was dead.  These pictures and sculptures serve to express a truth – that God became Man and gave his life for us – that though all-important nonetheless omits something that was central to earlier Christian thought.

Kenneth Clark, in BBC’s 1969 Civilisation, went too far when he said it was the tenth century that “made the Crucifixion into a moving symbol of the Christian faith,” but it is true that before then it was relatively rare to see crucifixes on which Christ was not depicted alive and looking ahead, his eyes wide open.

Triumph

Such iconography expressed an understanding of the Cross prominent in all sermons on salvation in Acts and reflected the early Church’s dominant understanding of the Crucifixion: that the Cross was less a defeat than the path to resurrection and God’s supreme triumph over sin, death, and the Devil.

Fifth-century crucifixion from the door of Santa Sabina, Rome

Although he oversimplified the range of early medieval iconography, the Swedish Lutheran bishop Gustav Aulén hit on something very important when he wrote in his 1931 Christus Victor of how things changed during the Middle Ages.

“What was lost was the note of triumph, which is as much absent in the contemplation of the Sacred Wounds as in the theory of the satisfaction of God’s justice. This is reflected very significantly in later medieval art. The triumph-crucifix of an earlier period is now ousted by the crucifix which depicts the human Sufferer.”

Of course, the sacrifice of the Cross is a mystery, and one that cannot be dismissed with a single neat theory. Tom Wright, the former Anglican bishop of Durham, has rightly observed that “when Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.”

Mystery
It is through the mystery of the Eucharist that we actively participate in the memory of God; this was brought home to me with great force when I attended Mass in the chapel of Leeds Trinity University in late 2011.

Too rarely in my life have I had more than the driest and most academic understanding of what the Mass meant, but when the Eucharist was held up before the most remarkable crucifix I have ever seen on that November Saturday, I understood.

Made from bronze and fibreglass and modelled upon the sculptor himself, Charles I’Anson’s crucifix was completed in October 1971, after eighteen months of work. It depicts neither a Christ looking forward in confidence nor one in gentle repose after having given up his spirit.

Act of Will
Instead, I’Anson’s crucifix depicts Our Lord pushing himself away from the Cross, driving himself upward and forward and crying out. It portrays a dying man’s supreme act of will, showing Jesus forcing his limbs to support him so he can gather the air to cry out, whether to ask why his Father had forsaken him, or to commend his spirit into his Father’s hands.

People often don’t grasp just how agonising crucifixion was, or how it killed. It was a slow and degrading punishment which killed – in most cases – by suffocation. The crucified needed to stay as erect as possible in order to breathe, and as legs and arms gave out, pressure gradually built on the chest, forcing victims of the cross to inhale constant shallow breaths simply to stay alive, until eventually even the shallowest of breaths proved too much.

The contorted spine, strained limbs, and taut muscles of I’Anson’s crucifix make explicit Christ’s pain in a way I have never seen, but although it is a representation of agony, it is no mere representation of defeat.

On the contrary, it is a magnificent, gritty, idealised rendering of the greatest triumph there has ever been, that moment when history and eternity were as one, when God overturned our human understandings of triumph and disaster and reclaimed us for himself.


-- The Irish Catholic, 28 March 2013.

Violence and Islam

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

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

Aggressive

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

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

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

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

Spiritual Warfare

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

warfare.

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

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

Coping Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justify

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

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

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

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

Honouring a Europe at Peace

When the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize is presented to the European Union in Oslo this Monday it will no doubt be met with as much derision as was the original October announcement that the Union would be this year’s recipient.

Much of this scorn has been directed at the idea that the prize could be awarded to an institution rather than an individual, but this is hardly unprecedented; the Institute of International Law received the prize in 1904, the International Committee of the Red Cross has won it three times, and recent institutional laureates include Médecins Sans Frontières and the United Nations.

Others claim the decision discredits the prize altogether, insisting that the Union has only existed since 1993, and arguing that its main predecessor, the European Economic Community, was primarily a trading organisation, unworthy of being credited as the preeminent source of human rights and peace in Europe since the Second World War.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s press release announcing the decision comprehensively addressed these issues, however, explaining that, “The Union and its forerunners have for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.”

Democracy

Summarising the history of European integration, the committee cited how Germany and France have grown together since 1945, how the introduction of democracy was a precondition for the accession of Spain and Portugal to the EEC in the 1980s, and how the inclusion of countries from the former Eastern Bloc into the Union since the 1990s has buttressed human rights and democracy in those areas.

We too easily nowadays take for granted friendship between France and Germany, but this foundational relationship once seemed so profoundly improbable that in 1961 Margaret Thatcher held it forth as an ideal to which the British should aspire, saying, “France and Germany have attempted to sink their political differences and work for a united Europe. If France can do this so can we.”

Given France and Germany’s acrimonious history ever since Bismarck sought German unification through blood and iron, it was remarkable that they could stand together in the ash and rubble of the Second World War and seek to “make war unthinkable and materially impossible”, as French foreign minister Robert Schuman put it in May 1950.

The Schuman Declaration led to the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, with Italy and the Benelux countries joining France and Germany to pool the resources most necessary for warfare, effectively barring them from waging war against each other. The Treaty of Paris, establishing the ECSC, began by speaking of the need to work for peace worldwide, the importance of a stable Europe for this, and the necessity of building such a Europe through “concrete actions which create a real solidarity”.

These “concrete actions” can seem slow and even trivial – the comedian Eddie Izzard has described the EU as “the cutting edge of politics, in an incredibly boring way” – but they have built and sustained peace within the European Union and its forerunners over more than 60 years.

Nuclear umbrellaThis was long facilitated by NATO’s nuclear umbrella, and both the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights have helped ensure that European institutions operate in line with agreed standards of human rights, but neither of these required ordinary Europeans to work side-by-side, day-in-day-out on projects that bind us together.

It would be a shame if we in Ireland were to adopt the characteristically English error of putting the institutional cart before the aspirational horse by painting the European Union as an economic organisation with delusions of grandeur.

We miss the point of the ‘Common Market’ if we forget that it was an economic means directed towards social and political ends, aimed above all else at establishing and sustaining peace within Europe.

Security

Strange though it may now seem, Margaret Thatcher explained this with remarkable clarity in the lead-up to Britain’s 1975 European referendum, pointing out that “security is a matter not only of defence, but of working together in peacetime on economic issues which concern us and working closely together on trade, work and other social matters which affect all our peoples”.

Peace does not keep itself, and John Hume stressed the importance of Europe’s pragmatic, piecemeal, and indirect way of working for peace in his own 1998 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, observing that the “European Union is the best example in the history of the world of conflict resolution and it is the duty of everyone, particularly those who live in areas of conflict, to study how it was done and to apply its principles to their own conflict resolution”.

Visionaries

Hume went on to describe how the European visionaries, understanding the importance of recognising difference, created institutions which enabled and required people who differed from each other in all sorts of ways to work together in their common interest.

During Britain’s 1975 referendum campaign, Shirley Williams argued that the application of Catholic social teaching would be a major factor in Europe’s everyday political and economic life, and although this sadly hasn’t always been the case, it’s no accident that the European project sought from the first to embody such principles of CST as subsidiarity, solidarity, and the common good.

Several of Hume’s ‘visionaries’ - notably Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gaspari – were devout Catholics who aimed to create a peaceful and prosperous Europe, respectful of diversity and conscious of its Christian roots. Schuman, for instance, declared in 1958 while President of the European Parliamentary Assembly – now the European Parliament – that: “All the European countries are permeated by Christian civilisation. It is the soul of Europe which must be restored to it.”

Danger

The danger now, of course, as that we risk forgetting the point of European integration, and it is apt that the Nobel Committee ended its October press release on a note of admonition, recognising that the Union is currently experiencing economic turmoil which in turn is leading to social unrest.

Like so much else in Europe, the single currency was always intended as an economic means towards the political end of greater European unity. It is, therefore, all the more ironic that current efforts to preserve the Euro are placing such strains on the likes of Ireland, Spain, and most especially Greece that extremist parties are on the rise and the entire project looks more precarious than ever.

The Nobel Committee’s decision should be regarded not as an overdue and now irrelevant accolade, but as a stern warning to the politicians and peoples of Europe to remember why we originally chose to come together, and to remind us of what we stand to lose.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 6 December 2012.

Holding Anglicanism Together

Some years ago in Brighton I sheltered from a storm in the porch of an enormous Anglican church, locally reputed to have been built to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark. As I marvelled at how the church interior looked indistinguishable from a Catholic church, a lady whispered that girls wouldn’t normally act as servers there.

“We’re an A, B, and C church,” she said, adding, “It means we don’t have women priests, and we stick to the old traditions.” I asked what A, B, and C stood for, and she explained, “Well, it just means that we stick to the old traditions, really. If it’s not broken, why fix it?”

The following day, Anglican friends at a Cambridge theological college explained that ‘A, B, and C’ were resolutions passed by the Church of England’s General Synod in the aftermath of the 1992 decision that women could be ordained to Anglican ministry. The resolutions allowed parochial councils to refuse to have women serve as priests in their parishes and even to request that their pastoral and sacramental care be reserved for a bishop who had never ordained women; parishes whose diocesan bishops had ordained women could seek special ‘flying bishops’ to care for them.

Women clergy

The Church of England’s struggles over women clergy are in a defining phase at the moment, so it seemed apt that the first thing Justin Welby, bishop of Durham, should have posted on Twitter after the Prime Minister’s office announced his selection as the next Archbishop of Canterbury was, “Just heard of protest call to Lambeth at appointment of a woman as ABC. Am spelt Justin, not Justine. No agenda, just a matter of fact.”

That alone signalled that the Eton- and Cambridge-educated erstwhile oil executive would be an archbishop for a soundbite age, possessed of a lightness of touch and a gift for brevity that has often seemed to elude Rowan Williams, whose ruminative and nuanced style has struck many as more suited to academic debate than to ecclesial leadership.

Divisions

Rowan’s time in office has been marked by divisions over women bishops and gay clergy, such that some have characterised the last decade as a disaster for the Church of England. This seems unfair; Rowan is clearly a brave, intelligent, and genuinely holy man who has made a point of speaking up for Britain’s most vulnerable and engaging seriously with public opponents of Christianity whilst trying to hold together a fractious and disparate Anglican Communion, despite not having any real executive power.

Justin Welby may have more luck, not least because his background makes it difficult to pigeonhole him as a partisan of any particular Anglican faction. An Evangelical by background, Welby worshipped and was a lay leader during the 1980s at Holy Trinity Brompton, mothership of the Alpha Course and totemic headquarters for the most dynamic and youthful movement within the Church of England. His spirituality has broadened since then, however, and nowadays his spiritual director is a Benedictine monk, which should give comfort to those Anglicans of an Anglo-Catholic persuasion.

Welby’s Catholic connections shouldn’t give false hope to those who look forward to a restoration of unity between the Church of England and the Catholic Church any time soon, however. For the last 20 years, ever since Welby was ordained a deacon, the issue of women priests has been an insuperable obstacle to unity, not merely between Canterbury and Rome, but between the Church of England and the various Orthodox Churches.

Vote

The debate within the Church of England about women clergy has moved on from whether women can be ordained priests to whether they can be ordained bishops, and though the debate has been acrimonious for some time, Welby has been firm in his support for women bishops. The General Synod, the Church of England’s parliament, votes this week on whether women should be allowed become bishops, and Welby has unambiguously stated that “I will be voting in favour, and join my voice to many others in urging the synod to go forward with this change.”

Although the measure is widely supported within the Church of England, there is no guarantee that this measure shall pass; resolute opponents of the change are not numerous enough to block the proposals in any of three ‘houses’ – bishops, clergy, or laity – of the synod, but it is quite possible that those who believe the bishops’ proposal utterly unacceptable may be have their numbers bolstered by those who believe it hopelessly inadequate.

Traditionalist

In July the synod rejected legislation which would have given traditionalist parishes significant exemptions from serving under a woman bishop, similar to the current ‘A,B, and C’ arrangement regarding women priests, notably an allowance for traditionalist parishes to request a male bishop who shared their beliefs about the ordination of women. The proposal would give women bishops more control in selecting ‘flying bishops’ for parishes in their dioceses, and would limit the obligations they would be obliged to respect.

For traditionalists, this goes too far, imposing a vision of the Church upon them which they feel is theologically unsustainable; for liberals, it doesn’t go nearly far enough, enshrining discrimination in the law of the Church. Despite their disagreements, it is all too easy to imagine these groups combining to form the necessary ‘blocking third’ to prevent synod from legislating for this. Should this happen it could be as many as seven years before the issue is voted on again.

Whatever happens, the pragmatic Welby seems prepared for such deep divisions to persist in the Church of England, the Anglican Communion as a whole, and even the general Christian world, saying recently that he did not want Christians to agree with one another, “but to love one another and to demonstrate to the world around us a better way of disagreeing”.

Constructive 

Certainly, Welby seems a man well used to disagreeing in constructive and loving ways. After becoming a canon at Coventry Cathedral in 2002, he became co-director of the International Centre for Reconciliation, helping mediate and build peace in war-torn regions around the world, notably in Africa where he once narrowly avoided being kidnapped. 

Negotiation and conflict resolution skills honed in such dramatic environments could prove invaluable in his new job, and his experience in Africa will give him credibility as he tries to hold the Anglican Communion together.

Henry Kissinger is often said to have asked: “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” It might just be that in Justin Welby, the Pope will know exactly who to call if he wants to call the Anglican Communion.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 22 November 2012.

Confronting Abuse: Sailing Between Scylla and Charbydis

The seemingly unending sequence of increasingly grotesque revelations about Jimmy Savile that have followed in the wake of ITV’s 3 October broadcast of Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy has been sickening, but distressing though these stories have been, they give us an opportunity to face the reality of abuse that we would be foolish to surrender.  

Confronting abuse must be done honestly and calmly, however; it is too easy to set up lazy scapegoats or succumb to a witch-hunting mentality. 

Serious questions have, rightly, been asked of the BBC and other institutions with which Savile was linked. The question of whether Savile’s behaviour was deliberately ignored and even concealed is, as in the case of abusive clergy, perhaps the biggest question. “Monsters exist,” wrote the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are… the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.” 

Savile

Some, with axes to grind against the BBC, have been eager to believe Savile’s behaviour was deliberately concealed, rather than being facilitated by a wish to believe the best of people and a refusal to face reality. Unfortunately, the media’s natural narrative dynamics contribute to this approach. “The trouble is that the media hates cock-ups as they dilute guilt,” observed Simon Jenkins in The Guardian last week, explaining “a mistake must be rendered a lie, a cover-up and a crisis, so that the cry can go up for heads to roll.”

Investigation

Investigation is clearly needed, but it would be a tragedy if sensationalist storytelling made the BBC an institutional scapegoat, bearer not just of its own sins, but those of a whole society. Child abuse is no more the primary preserve of the British establishment than it was that of the Irish Church, and while concentrating on the past failures of the BBC might make us feel better, it would really be just a form of denial, draining valuable attention and energy away from where they're most needed to acknowledge and tackle abuse across Britain today. 

Sue Berelowitz, Britain’s deputy Children’s Commissioner, reported to the Commons Home Affairs committee in June that sexual exploitation of children is rife throughout urban and rural Britain. Describing in graphic detail the pack-raping of young girls by adolescent males, she insisted that “people need to lay aside their denial”, so that victims can muster the courage to come forward, trusting that they will be believed.

The numbers seem to support Berelowitz’s statement: abuse rates cannot be compared precisely between different countries, as surveys ask different questions and use different definitions and methodologies, but it seems that Britain’s abuse figures are no better than Ireland’s. 

Twenty seven per cent of Irish adults had been victims of childhood sexual abuse, according to the 2002 SAVI stud, which suggests that abuse must have peaked before the 1990s. The NSPCC’s 2011 study, Childhood Abuse and Neglect in the UK Today, found that 24.1pc of British adults between the ages of 18 and 24 had experienced sexual abuse during childhood or adolescence; 65.9pc of the contact sexual abuse reported by those aged 17 and under having been perpetrated by under 18s.  

While we need, therefore, to recognise how widespread abuse is, we need to do so responsibly; there’s a narrow path between denial and hysteria, and the victims of child abuse and our need to tackle abuse as the social pollution that it is will not be well served by a moral panic. 

Dismissive 

People have generally been dismissive of claims by clergy that right through to the 1990s they simply didn’t understand the reality of child sexual abuse. It therefore seemed somewhat disingenuous of Savile’s Radio 1 colleague Paul Gambaccini to say, as he did last week, that it “was considered so far beyond the pale that people didn’t believe it happened”. 

He’s not been alone in saying this, but rather than sneering about double standards and hypocrisy among media types, maybe we should welcome this as a belated recognition that the sexual revolution unleashed a maelstrom of confusion in a more naive world.

In December 2010, Pope Benedict provoked fury from Sinéad O’Connor and others when he told the Roman Curia that, “In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” but the evidence shows that Benedict was right.

Sexual liberation had been one of the great ambitions of the student revolutionaries of the late 1960s; a desire to banish sexual repression led to the establishment of several communes and kindergartens in Germany where sexual contact between adults and children was expected. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a prominent MEP, described himself in his 1975 book The Great Bazaar as engaging in sexual acts with very young children in one of these kindergartens.

Sexuality

In the mid-1980s, the German Greens’ state organisation in North Rhine-Westphalia argued that “nonviolent sexuality” between children and adults should generally be allowed, while a Green Party task force in Baden-Württemberg wrote in a position paper that “Consensual sexual relations between adults and children must be decriminalised”.

In Britain, on the other hand, the National Council for Civil Liberties – then headed by Britain’s eventual Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, argued in 1976 that “childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage… The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage.” 

The activist group called the Paedophile Information Exchange ubsequently became affiliated to the NCCL, campaigning for the age of consent to be lowered and opposing bans on child pornography. In the early 1980s the International Gay Association passed motions calling for an international solidarity campaign on behalf of the Paedophile Information Exchange and for the abolition of the age of consent.

Note that Peter says it may be impossible to condone paedophilia

Many of these would-be-liberators acted with sincere – if astonishingly naive – intentions.

The civil rights campaigner Peter Tatchell seems to be their natural heir, writing in 1997 that several of his friends had enjoyed having sex with adults when between the ages of 9 and 13; while not condoning paedophilia, he argued that society should acknowledge that “not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful”.*

He’s not alone in arguing that sexual contact between adults and children isn’t always intrinsically harmful; Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion that he found being molested “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”, and wonders whether it might be less damaging for children to be sexually abused than to be raised Catholic.

Attitudes to sexuality in the 1970s were chaotic, confused, and naive. Most of us have learned better, but although some of us have been slow to catch up, we need to remember that the past was indeed a different country, and they did things differently there. Blaming people for their historical naivety won’t help us fix today’s problems.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 1 November 2012.
___________________________________________________________________________
* In September 2010 Tatchell claimed that The Guardian edited his letter without his knowledge or consent, but I would be curious if he felt it was edited to a point where he felt that his views had been misrepresented, and if he can prove this. After all, it seems that he was willing to let thirteen years go by before he attempted to disown the letter as published. It's almost as though he was happy with it until people pointed out that he'd publicly said that for adults to have sex with children isn't always abusive, is sometimes wanted by the children, and can be utterly harmless and even enjoyable.

The Scourge of Abuse: Time to Face Facts

Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy, shown on ITV last Wednesday, will have horrified those for whom Jimmy Savile was a broadcasting institution. 

The programme alleged that the DJ and presenter of such shows as Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It, famous for his eccentric lifestyle and having raised more than £40million for charity, was a sexual predator who regularly abused girls in their early teens. 

Savile, who died last October aged 84, obviously cannot defend himself against these allegations, but the programme’s presenter, former detective Mark Williams-Thomas, made a compelling case, interviewing a succession of middle-aged women who described how they’d been assaulted by Savile in their youth, as well as people who had witnessed Savile’s behaviour. 

Childline founder Esther Rantzen, a onetime BBC colleague of Savile, looked distraught as she said that she had no doubt that the women who had come forward to tell their stories were telling the truth. Admitting that people had blocked their ears to gossip about Savile, whose charity work had given him an almost saintly status, she said “In a funny way we all colluded in this… we in some way colluded with him as a child abuser.” 

BBC cover-up 

Some have been quick to speak of a BBC cover-up, and of a code of honour among ‘luvvies’, but neither gloating nor point-scoring will undo the harm that Savile did or prevent further abuse by others. 

The reality is that Savile hid in plain sight; colleagues, journalists, and even fans chose to turn a blind eye to his behaviour. 

His 1974 autobiography, As It Happens, describes how in the 1950s he had told a female police officer that if an attractive runaway from a remand home were to come to his club, he would return her to the police but only after keeping her overnight first as his ‘reward’. He did just that, and boasted that the officer’s colleagues had to dissuade her from bringing charges against him. 

Denial 

How could anybody have ignored this? Did they dismiss it as a laddish tall tale? It may simply have been that they didn’t want to believe it. Denial, sadly, is all too often our default response when faced with the reality of abuse. Our own history shows this all too bleakly. 

In 1930, W.T. Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal government appointed a committee under William Carrigan K.C. to consider if the Criminal Law Amendment Acts of 1880 and 1885 should be amended. The most shocking of the committee’s findings, submitted the following year, was that: 

“…there was an alarming amount of sexual crime increasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years downwards, including many cases of children under 10 years.” 

The police estimated that under 15pc of such cases were prosecuted, as it was difficult to establish guilt and parents felt it would be better for their children if such cases were kept secret. 

The Department of Justice recommended against the report’s publication, and Cosgrave’s government fell without having decided what to do; de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government set up an all-party committee to consider in confidence how to respond to the report’s findings, but nothing was done. 

It would be easy to dismiss the suppression of the Carrigan Report as emblematic of a less enlightened age, but things have scarcely improved over the last 80 years. Nowadays we don’t hide the truth; we just ignore it. 

In 2002 the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre published the findings of a massive study on sexual abuse and violence in Ireland. The SAVI Report found, among other things, that 27pc of Irish adults had been sexually abused as children, with half of these having never told anybody of their experiences. Of Ireland’s more than 780,000 adult survivors of childhood abuse, it seems that roughly 530,000 had experienced contact sexual abuse, about 120,000 having been raped. 

Family Circle 

SAVI also found that nearly 60pc of abuse survivors had been abused by people within the family circle including extended family, neighbours, and family friends, 4.6pc having been abused by their babysitters. Just under 1.7pc of abuse was committed by clergy, with a further 1.7pc by teachers who were members of religious orders. 

For every victim whose abuser had been convicted for their crimes, about 200 had never seen justice done. Almost two-thirds of abuse survivors had been abused while under twelve years old. 

So damning a report ought to have defined our national understanding of abuse, and shaped public policy for dealing with it, but instead SAVI’s impact has been negligible, Ireland’s media and politicians having averted their eyes from its findings. 

The current government has made loud noises about protecting children, but its actions have resembled those of generals fighting the last war. Much of the Children First Bill concentrates on abuse within organisations, when it seems that organisational abuse, while not a thing of the past, has already been greatly reduced. 

People generally recognise that most abuse takes place within the family circle, but few realise that relatively little contemporary abuse takes place elsewhere. In 2009 the Irish Times quoted a Garda Detective Sergeant fighting internet paedophiles with Interpol as saying that 85pc of child sexual abuse occurs within the family circle, and the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland revealed that 97pc of abuse survivors who had sought their help the previous year had been abused by people within their family circle. 

As much as a third of Ireland’s sexual abuse is committed by adolescents, but our popular narrative of abuse remains focused on the bogeyman figure of the ‘paedophile priest’, rather than on the teenage boy. 

People would rather believe that abusers are ‘out there’ rather than very close to home. Last September, Father Paddy Banville wrote in this paper that the problems of abuse and cover-up in the Irish Church reflected the problems of abuse and cover-up in Irish society; the ensuing furore was, in the words of the Irish Times critic at the time of the 1907 Playboy Riots, “as if a mirror were held up to our faces and we found ourselves hideous. We fear to face the thing.” 

It’s clear that people rationalise abusive behaviour,  believe that it’ll not happen again, play down the damage that was done, and say that whatever their loved ones may have done, they’re still their brothers, husbands, sons, or friends. Mercy, hope, loyalty, and trust conspire to drive our eyes from the crimes of those we love. 

We need to acknowledge this if we’re to have any hope of eradicating the scourge of abuse from Irish life. Addressing it in the Church has just been the beginning. It’s time to face facts. 

-- A version of this was originally published in The Irish Catholic, 11 October 2012.

Surveying the Faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Methodology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connotations

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

Outward Practice

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

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

Internal Realities

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

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


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

The Dark Knight Rises: Hope does not Disappoint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– from The Irish Catholic, 2 August 2012