Marginal Musings

2012: A Time for a Prophetic Peace?

2011-12-29T19:12:00.001Z

The following article by me has been published in the latest edition of The Tablet (31 December 2011), under the title 'Unconscionable and Unjustifiable'.

The year 2012 is likely to be a time of growing insecurity and risk in Europe. It also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, an event which still divides the Church between conservatives and liberals, traditionalists and reformers – although such labels fail to communicate the many nuanced positions that Catholics hold with regard to the meaning of the Council. Pope Benedict XVI has called for a hermeneutic of continuity which interprets the Council in the light of tradition and resists any attempt to portray it in more revolutionary terms.

Wherever one stands in this debate, it is true that some issues were more controversial than others during the Council sessions. Some of the issues that have most divided the post conciliar Church – contraception and homosexuality, for example – barely featured in the Council’s debates. Yet there was one question on which the Council marked a decisive shift in Church teaching which has received widespread support among many ordinary Catholics. That is the shift away from just war theory towards an almost exclusive emphasis on the imperative to find non-violent forms of conflict resolution through the authority of international law.

Gaudium et Spes includes a guarded acknowledgement that, in the absence of effective international authority, ‘governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defence, once all peace efforts have failed’. The rejection of war cannot therefore be interpreted as absolute, but it does seem as if the just war doctrine is gradually being abandoned in favour of a more pacifist ethos. Time and again since the Council popes and bishops have spoken out against war. In 1983 the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Conference published a pastoral letter called The Challenge of Peace, which is still widely regarded as a landmark document for its condemnation of the arms race, its caution regarding nuclear deterrence, and its insistence that just war theory must begin with a ‘presumption against war’. Pope John Paul II described war as ‘a defeat for humanity’, and he referred to the ‘absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remains standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.’ The opposition to war among Catholics today has the power to unite us despite our many disagreements on other issues. Only an influential but small minority of Catholics – many aligned with the American Republican Party – remains robustly committed to defending the just war doctrine. A decisive shift to a pacifist Church would be a radical way in which Benedict could make good his commitment to emulate Benedict XV, whom he described in his first general audience as ‘a true and courageous prophet of peace who struggled strenuously and bravely, first to avoid the drama of war and then to limit its terrible consequences.’ This gains added urgency in the light of current events.

Economic crises in Europe have time and again resulted in nationalism, revolutionary violence, war and various forms of totalitarianism. The earnest endeavours of European politicians to find a solution to the Euro crisis have been led by nations which experienced the catastrophic effects of war most directly in the twentieth century –perhaps that is why it was David Cameron and not Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozy who was able to turn his back and walk away. German and French politicians know that they have everything to lose if Europe fails. Benedict’s papacy so far has been characterised by his passionate commitment to the preservation of European identity rooted in a shared sense of Christian values. The present crisis may be a moment of opportunity for him to mark the anniversary of the Council and affirm his commitment to Europe by ensuring that never again will the Catholic Church sanction and support the wars that have been such a part of Europe’s history – wars in which the Catholic Church has always been deeply and messily embroiled.

To move from just war theory to pacifism would not be to judge and condemn the wars of the past, but to ask what our generation must do to safeguard the future. Pacifists are often challenged by those who ask whether or not we think it was right to fight against Hitler. At that time there were many Christians who, recognizing the threat posed by Nazism, reluctantly abandoned their commitment to pacifism. But if we go on justifying war by looking backwards rather than forwards, then paradoxically we hand the victory to the aggressors. We commit ourselves to war without end and so we remain trapped in a spiral of violence, creating the conditions of economic deprivation, social trauma and displacement which war produces, and which become a fertile breeding ground for new tyrants, violent ideologies and yet more wars.

The nature of warfare changed in the twentieth century, not only because of the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction but because modern military technology poses an unprecedented threat to civilian populations. In 2001, the International Red Cross estimated that, since the middle of the twentieth century, an estimated ten civilians have died for every soldier, whereas at the beginning of the last century nearly ninety percent of war deaths were combatants. For all the military newspeak about ‘smart bombs’ and ‘surgical strikes’, modern warfare unleashes indiscriminate slaughter on those caught up in its wake, and leaves many thousands of others bereaved and orphaned, homeless and exiled. The enduring shame of the Iraq war is intensified by the knowledge that the British and American governments refused to count the number of Iraqi dead. Moreover, the war industry is driven by corporate interests, including the arms trade and the growing use of private security firms to mop up the mess that remains when the western nations have dropped their bombs in the name of democracy and freedom. No humanitarian can afford to support war today, least of all those who believe in a God who accepted torture and death as the price to be paid for refusing to meet violence with violence - a God who holds out the promise of peace for those who are willing to follow his way.

For the Church to enshrine its emergent doctrine of non-violence at the heart of its practice as well as its teaching would be difficult but not impossible. For example, Catholic schools would have a significant role to play, both in peace education and in denying access to the military for the purposes of recruitment. Such schools could ensure that children were never presented with combatant roles in the armed forces as a career choice. To say this is not to suggest that Catholics should withdraw from their civic and political responsibilities into some utopian spiritual ghetto. It is simply to say that a Catholic’s loyalty to his or her country cannot include being willing to kill for that country, even if it might include a range of other non-combatant roles in the armed services.

Similarly, Catholics already employed as soldiers could be encouraged to seek alternative employment or non-combatant roles if possible, but this would necessarily be a gradual phasing out process. The same would be true for those employed in the arms manufacturing industries, so that gradually over one or two generations we might see a global transformation in Catholic ethics and politics.

Would Catholics still carry arms, fight wars and behave violently towards one another? Of course they would, for the gap between the Church’s moral teachings and the lives and practices of ordinary Catholics would remain as wide as it always has been. But a rejection of the just war doctrine would mean that, as the shadows once more lengthen across the European continent, Catholic bishops and popes would never again be in the business of signing concordats, taking sides and declaring their nations’ wars to be just even as Catholic citizens butchered one another. It would mean that to be in good faith with the Church a Catholic would have to resist all forms of violence and killing, rediscovering with St Martin of Tours that a soldier of Christ cannot fight in the wars of men.

That would be a hermeneutics of continuity, expressing the vision of the early Church through the life and practice of the postconciliar Church of the twenty first century. It would also ensure that the name of Benedict did indeed come to signify a prophet of peace amidst the crises and wars of Europe.

A Year of Wonders

2011-12-14T09:45:00.078Z

I have edited this blog so that it is now a more developed version of a recent contribution I made to the online journal Open Democracy, as part of a series of short reflections on 2011:

Maybe every generation believes that it lives in uniquely interesting and challenging times. The last year seems too to fit the description. European nations that have struggled for centuries to realise their visions of freedom are seeing them disappearing into the rubble of failed neo-liberalism, while nations in the middle east are just beginning that same epic struggle.

But while the political and economic rhetoric might change, there is nothing new about any of this. War and revolution, natural disasters, the rising and falling of nations, the inhumanity of the richest and the desperation of the poorest, do not mark us out as any different from the rest. However, there is one area in which we really are outstripping all previous generations, and that is in science and technology.

On 13 December 2011, the BBC2 television programme Newsnight devoted considerable time to a story about the Higgs Boson particle, which scientists think may have made an elusive appearance in experiments at the Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Geneva. It was impossible not to feel a sense of amazement as images that could have been lifted from Terence Malick’s film The Tree of Life floated across the screen, with a voice-over by the programme's science editor, Susan Watts: "We don't really know why everything around us exists, why the universe has form, why objects have mass. The fundamental question about why we're here remains unanswered. But today's announcement could change all of that."

When scientists talk about multiverses, a new cosmology and the meaning of life, they tap into an insatiable source of wonder which is the very essence of our humanity, and we do not have to understand the science to experience a sense of awe about the cosmos of which we are a part. Indeed, today at the furthest frontiers of modern physics, scientists still resort to the same terminology which inspired the earliest Greek philosophers in their reflections on the universe. When Susan Watts talks about existence, form and mass, she could as easily be reading from a pre-Socratic fragment as from a 21st-century science script.

But there is an important difference. Those ancient philosophers stood at the very beginning of the western philosophical quest for God, and today popular science has decided to close down that quest by claiming to be on the brink of discovering the answer. This ideological framing is regrettable, because it allows scientific genius to be held hostage by scientific fundamentalism. The question of whether or not one has faith in a creator God isn't a scientific question, and Watts is wrong when she suggests that discovery of the Higgs Boson particle could answer "the fundamental question about why we're here".

The quest for the Higgs Boson particle has been described many times as the Holy Grail of modern science, but the Holy Grail is a mythical symbol of a quest into the thickets of mystery and longing which make us truly human. Simone Weil once wrote: "In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail...belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralysed by the most painful wound: 'What are you going through?'" The quest for the Holy Grail is a quest for hope and compassion in a wounded world, beyond all the cures and answers that science can offer. Science has a part to play in that quest, but only when it allows its knowledge to be tempered by wisdom and its genius to be the servant rather than the master of our humanity. To say that is not to diminish in any way the achievements of modern science - it is simply to ask scientists to acknowledge the human limits of what they do.

Watts posed the following question: "With each of us facing our daily troubles, and with the world of finance and politics in turmoil all around us, why should it matter whether we find the Higgs, whether neutrinos go faster than the speed of light, if there's some deeper symmetry under the surface or not?" Professor Sergio Bertolucci, Director of Research at CERN, replied that the "very tiny amount of our wealth" invested in such research is an investment in the future, because without "curiosity-driven research ... we are doomed".

That word, 'curiosity', is surely the fundamental enigma that science itself will never be able to answer, because science is a consequence of our human curiosity - and a consequence can't study its own cause. It is of the very essence of what it means to be human to experience that curiosity, and to refuse to settle for less than a satisfactory answer. If science ever does provide an answer that satisfies our curiosity, it will do so not by discovering the secrets of the cosmos but by finding some way to manipulate the human brain to eliminate curiosity altogether - and in so doing, it will eliminate our human nature and the condition that makes science possible.

The Higgs Boson is not a God particle. It cannot tell us why there is something rather than nothing, it cannot tell us how consciousness is possible, and it cannot explain the curiosity that makes us ask such questions in the first place. But it is a wonder all the same, and something that might indeed make the year 2011 different from all the rest. GK Chesterton once said that "The world will starve not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder." This has been a year of wonders, but it is wonder itself that makes us human.

Are Religious Schools Bad for Society?

2011-10-19T22:26:00.005+01:00

This month's New Internationalist features a debate between Andrew Copson (Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association) and myself on faith schools. You can read it here - or see below.

Are religious schools bad for society?

Humanist Andrew Copson and feminist Catholic theologian Tina Beattie go head-to-head…

Andrew

Religious schools select pupils on the basis of their parents’ religion, which entrenches religious (and in some cases ethno-religious) divisions in society, as well as perpetuating socio-economic inequality. This is bad for social cohesion.

Religious schools are also permitted to select their staff – both teaching and non-teaching – on grounds of their religion, which is unfair on potential applicants and also hampers the efficiency of the school as a school. Headteacher posts in religious schools are three times more likely to have to be re-advertised than those in community schools.

Schools should be places where minds are opened and children encounter ideas they may never come across in the home or elsewhere, so I also think that the fact that religious schools are permitted to give religious instruction is bad for society. When I have visited religious schools and seen lessons I have encountered some good practice in teaching which is very open; but I have also seen lessons which are, frankly, designed to transmit an uncritical acceptance of one particular worldview. I believe in the right of every child to grow up with access to a variety of perspectives so she can arrive at her own conclusions; so I think this is wrong.

Tina

There’s a difference between religious schools (which teach religion) and faith schools (which teach the national curriculum). I support state funding for the latter. Religious parents pay taxes and are entitled to a reasonable choice in education.

Where is the evidence that religious instruction is ‘bad for society’? Secular society must accommodate a genuine plurality of beliefs and values in education, while guarding against extremism. Your main concern seems to be about safeguarding freedom of choice by protecting children from religious faith. Education is not simply about the consumption of ideas. It is about guiding young people in their search for wisdom, and religious traditions are well resourced for that task.

We should not judge religions by their most bigoted adherents. Religions are not homogeneous. They have long histories of intellectual debate and considerable internal diversity. Good state-funded faith schools can discourage bigotry, but secularism also produces bigots. Read atheist bloggers for evidence of that.

This debate about faith schools is a distraction. The challenges confronting us – including economic crisis and social unrest – have nothing to do with religion. That might even be the problem!

Andrew

I don’t think the argument of parental choice stacks up – education is not analogous to baked beans in the supermarket, where one consumer’s choice has consequences only for their own consumption. Schools are social institutions.

Repeated studies from universities, think-tanks and others have shown that state – or publicly funded – religious schools perpetuate social inequalities; there has never been evidence to the contrary.

I certainly do not believe that children should be denied access to information about religions in their schools. As I said, I think a child should have ‘access to a variety of perspectives so she can arrive at her own conclusions’ – of course that includes religions as well as non-religious worldviews. Religious schools by their nature are disinclined to take such an approach – be they Christian state-funded schools or Muslim madrasas – and I see no reason to believe that religious traditions are any better resourced than others to guide children.

You mention the possibility that a lack of religion has fuelled social dysfunction but I see no evidence for that. Very Christian societies have generated highly consumerist cultures across the world and there is no evidence that more religious societies have fewer socio-economic problems. There is certainly no evidence at all that religious schools are more likely to produce engaged and community-minded citizens than community schools. That utilitarian argument for religious schools is bogus.

Tina

Philip Wolmuth / reportdigital.co.uk

In Christianity, Judaism and Islam, giving to the poor is a religious duty. Charitable giving (zakat) is one of the five pillars of Islam. Many surveys show that religious believers are more likely to give to charity. Organizations such as Amnesty International, the World Development Movement and Traidcraft were started by Christians. Islamic Relief works with other religious NGOs such as Cafod and Christian Aid. Aung Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama all started their education in faith schools.

Research shows that people who practise religion have higher levels of life satisfaction than those who don’t. Other research shows that religious people cope better in times of social stress and crisis.

If we are concerned about religious extremism, the answer is to enable religious people to rediscover the intellectual riches within their own traditions and to work together with those of different faiths. Good education is about the good life, the quest for wisdom, and the capacity to discriminate in the positive sense of the word. Properly qualified religious teachers who can communicate, inspire and challenge are vital to this task.

You would use education to make everybody conform to your secular liberal ideals. Just as in the past missionaries believed Christianity was best for the world, so today secular liberals have taken over that imperializing zeal. In his book Black Mass, John Gray shows how many of the utopian visions of the post-Enlightenment West have dissolved into terror and genocide. Secular Westerners should be more humble in the face of our own historic and ongoing social failures and the catastrophes that Europe’s various anti-religious ideologies have unleashed upon the world in the last century.

Andrew

A utilitarian argument in favour of religious schools because they produced Aung Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama (whose parenting was from a humanist!) will not hold water. Religious schools also produced Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler and who is to say what is the most representative product?

Utilitarian arguments based on the claim that religion makes people happier, more mentally resilient and more likely to be engaged in community work are likewise dubious. Research that has examined the role of strong convictions and supportive communities has demonstrated that it is these factors – whether religious or non-religious – that generate mental resilience and personal wellbeing, rather than religion specifically.

In any case, doesn’t this type of argument assume that the purpose of religious schools is to make children religious – something you seemed to deny in your previous arguments?

There is no denying that many political movements with good intentions have spawned destruction, but so too have many religious ones – not least Christianity.

In any case, my argument remains that what is needed in education is not an ideology to dominate the ethos and learning of a school. I have no wish to use education as a means of making people conform to my ideals. My aim is for education to give reasonable freedom to young people in their personal and intellectual development, as well as the resources of knowledge and skills that they need to develop.

What we don’t need in education is for schools to see themselves as the transmitters of unquestioned and unquestionable precepts in place of intellectual freedom. Religious schools around the world are more likely to be led into that temptation than secular ones.

Tina

I agree that utilitarian arguments are not persuasive. This is about principles. We are debating in the context of an international magazine with readers from different cultural and religious contexts. In our globalized world, accommodating difference is not just a question of choice. It is learning to live with irreducible diversity in a way that requires a sustained endeavour to reason wisely and well in engagement with others about who we are and how we should live. The resources for this are found in many traditions, of which secular humanism is only one. It must take its place within and not over and above other traditions.

My defence of faith schools is not rooted in a belief that they are better than secular schools, but in the principle that no one worldview should be allowed to obliterate all others. Whether you admit it or not, yours is a worldview that is neither universal nor demonstrably better or worse than any other at fostering human happiness.

Good faith schools can teach students to think, to reason and to engage critically with a range of different ideas and beliefs, including their own. The answer is not to eliminate faith schools, but to ensure that both secular and faith schools have good resources, good teachers, a balanced curriculum, and a capacity to inspire love of learning, love of life, and respect for and responsibility to others in their students.

I’ve enjoyed this debate. My Catholic-educated adult children agree with you. Proves my point, doesn’t it?

Andrew Copson is chief executive of the British Humanist Association, a charity that represents the interests of ethically concerned non-religious people. He is a regular contributor to New Humanist magazine.

Tina Beattie is a feminist theologian and professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton, London. She has written several books and is now working on Nature, God and Gender After Postmodernity, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Fragments in a Shattered Screen - Reflections on 9/11

2011-09-11T14:46:00.000+01:00

This is an extract from an article by me published in Political Theology 12.5.

Towards the Future in Hope: Women Remaking the Church

2011-08-27T16:45:00.272+01:00

Last week I attended the summer school of Andante - the European Alliance of Catholic Women's Organisations. I was invited to give a paper on the theme of the future. I called it 'Towards the Future in Hope:Women Remaking the Church' - click on the link to read it.

The conference was held in a beautiful Franciscan retreat centre in Reute, Germany, and it brought together more than seventy women from all over wider Europe - defined not in terms of EU membership but in terms of a deeply rooted Catholicism which continues to melt and blur the boundaries of national identity across Europe, for better or worse. The group represented a broad spectrum of European Catholicism - from rich and poor communities, from eastern and western Europe. It included women who derive great security and reassurance from traditional Catholicism, as well as those who are frustrated and longing for change. There were young Albanian women - full of energy and conviction - who work with trafficked women and who mourn over the disintegration of their society, yet who brought an amazing vitality to our gathering. There were women from Slovakia, Latvia, Romania, Poland, Germany, France, Holland, England and Wales, holding in creative tension our many differences and our shared visions. We sometimes forget what a miracle modern Europe is. Who would have thought, thirty years ago, that such apparently impenetrable borders and divisions would have dissolved so quickly, and with far less violence than we might have anticipated with our nuclear stockpiles and cold war rhetoric?

The three official languages were German, French and English, and a group of dedicated interpreters made it possible for us to communicate across linguistic boundaries, from prepared interpretations of plenary papers, to ad hoc interpretations of the meaning of the dances we were taught by a light-footed young German nun whose habit swirled and billowed as she joyously taught us a theological language that has no need of words.

Here is something I learned from those intepreters. There's a difference between interpretation, which is about the spoken word, and translation, which is about the written word. Interpretation requires a capacity to translate gesture and intonation, to communicate the immediacy of what is being said in all its spontaneity. They were good-humoured but straightforward in complaining about my delivery of my paper. They had had the script in advance, but it was a dense paper and I hadn't realized that translating English into French and German requires more time, because the phrases and forms of expression are longer. Even although I spoke at what felt like a snail's pace in terms of my usual delivery, they complained loudly that I was much too fast! These small considerations need to be borne in mind, as we increasingly try to speak to one another across cultural, linguistic and theological differences.

We had dialogue groups of women from different countries, and every group was identified by a long velvet sash in a different colour of the rainbow. When we walked into the room every morning, the chairs had been arranged in circles, each with its sash in the middle, draped around a stone. When a woman wanted to speak in her group, she held the stone so that she couldn't be interrupted - perhaps a strategy one needs more with women's groups than men's! During the plenary sessions, the scarves were gathered up and spread in a rainbow in the centre of the room. I couldn't help comparing all this with the way men organise conferences when they are in charge. Are these aesthetic differences and preferences a mark of superficial differences between men and women, or are they simply the tip of an iceberg? Are women and men fundamentally alike in our desires, hopes, fears and ways of being in the world, or are we fundamentally different? We talked about these questions, but of course we have no answers. Only the men in the Vatican seem to have certain answers to such questions. The rest of us are more tentative and unsure.

On the last night of the conference, we had a cultural dinner to which everyone contributed something from her own country's cuisine. We had a wonderful musician to entertain us - an expert on regional musical instruments going back to the time of Christ and before, whose eclectic mix of instruments included a bicycle pump with a cork on the end, on which one of the participants accompanied him during a raucous song. He taught us a dance, and later we moved to another room where that young Franciscan sister led us in the most beautiful and serene circle dances. There was one man among us - the Franciscan priest who was celebrating Mass the next morning. I think he had a wonderful time.

One of the afternoons was set aside for activities, which included a choice of archery, dancing, pilgrimage, building a maze or preparing a liturgy. The retreat house had a maze in the grounds, and I discovered the quiet and subtle pleasure of coiling around one's thoughts, spiralling through pathways lined with fragrant shrubs and jewelled flowers, to enter into the heart of the maze with its encircling hedge, and then gradually to retrace one's path to the outer world.

I don't want to idealise or romanticise all this. There were moments of animosity and tension. There were clearly deep cultural and theological differences which sometimes spilled over into irritated exchanges. It was hard not to be aware of the economic differences which cut deep divisions within and between European states. But none of that detracted from the sense of having joined hands with Europe's Catholic women at this time of crisis and challenge, and of having discovered so many sources of wisdom, humour and hope, rooted in a faith which unites us in spite of our differences.

Riots, Reasons and Reconciliation

2011-08-24T06:59:00.001+01:00


Illustration: Gary Kempston

Here is a letter signed by a group of British academics and published in The Guardian today (Wednesday, 24th August):

After the recent riots and looting in London and elsewhere, it is vital that a sense of justice be restored to society. The courts have an important role to play in this and it may be that, for the worst offenders, there is no alternative but prison. However, justice must not be confused with vengeance. The threat to withdraw the benefits of looters and to evict their families from their council houses, the suspension of normal sentencing guidelines (Met plan to hold all riot suspects in custody, 23 August), and the passing of excessively harsh prison sentences to deter others go far beyond the demands of restorative justice.

When David Cameron explained his decision to employ Andy Coulson as his communications director, he expressed concern that Coulson was being punished twice for the same offence and said he was giving him a second chance. It is hard not to see this as one ethos for the rich and powerful and another for the marginalised and excluded. To sentence a lawbreaker and then evict their family is to punish people twice for the same offence, and some also deserve a second chance. Many arrested are first-time offenders who committed fairly minor offences. This does not justify what they did, but neither does it justify sending them to prison.

Cameron must resist the lure of knee-jerk populism to find a lasting and effective solution to the problems created by the social and economic policies of the past 30 years. These have been exacerbated by the present government inflicting punitive spending cuts which disproportionately affect the poorest in society, while doing little to ensure that those who created the economic crisis are also being made to pay the price.

Professor Tina Beattie University of Roehampton
Dr Sarah Jane Boss University of Roehampton
Professor John Eade University of Roehampton
George Ferzoco University of Bristol
Dr Alison Jasper Stirling University
Professor David Jasper University of Glasgow
Rev Dr Robert Kaggwa University of Roehampton
Dr Karen Kilby University of Nottingham
Professor Richard E King University of Glasgow
Professor Ursula King University of Bristol
Dr Michele Lamb University of Roehampton
Professor Gerard Loughlin Durham University
Professor Willy Maley University of Glasgow
Dr Michael Marten University of Stirling
Professor Paul D Murray Durham University
Rev Dr Vladimir Nikiforov Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr Darren O'Byrne University of Roehampton
Dr Marcus Pound Durham University
Dr Nina Power University of Roehampton
Dr Anna Rowlands Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge
Professor Yvonne Sherwood University of Glasgow
Dave Tinham University of Roehampton
Dr Anthony Towey St Mary's University College
Dr Heather Walton University of Glasgow

Sleepwalking towards fascism

2011-08-17T15:17:00.003+01:00

I spent most of my first thirty three years in Africa (Zambia, Kenya and Zimbabwe), so I've experienced several regime changes and I've lived through a number of colonial and postcolonial ideologies, although like many colonials I had no interest in politics when I was young. One usually has little to fear and little to protest about if one lives in complacent conformity within an affluent social milieu and enjoys the material benefits that it brings. And if occasionally the justice system seems too harsh or weighted against certain groups and individuals, best to look the other way and avoid getting into trouble.

More than 2,770 people have been arrested in connection with last week's riots

But in recent years, following African politics from a distance, and in particular seeing the tragic disintegration of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, I have come to appreciate that the independence of the judiciary is the sine qua non of a just society. That's why we should be terrified about what's happening in Britain's courts in the aftermath of the recent riots and looting.

It is the law, not the political establishment, which safeguards justice in a society. In the rat race of modern politics, most of those who succeed are career politicians. Political self-interest gets in the way of their commitment to the common good, and it limits their capacity to contribute to the sense of justice that a society needs if it is to flourish.

That's why we need an independent judiciary - to restrain the excesses of political ambition, and to ensure that our legal system does not fall prey to the kind of mob justice which results from populist politics and political short-termism. So why have so many judges and magistrates been compliant in translating David Cameron's brutal rhetoric into hurried judgements and punitive prison sentences which can only breed an even greater sense of fury and resentment among this increasingly alienated generation of British youth?

There were undoubtedly hardened criminals and repeat offenders who took advantage of the riots to rob and vandalise with impunity, and they should be brought to justice. But there were also many young, first time offenders, carried away by the mood of the moment, some of them probably drunk or drugged, whose slender hopes of a future worth struggling for will now be dashed by a prison sentence and a criminal record. England and Wales already has the highest per capita prison population in western Europe. To send gullible young people into our overcrowded, under-resourced prison regime because they stole a bottle of water or posted a stupid message on Facebook is incomprehensible and cannot in any meaningful sense be called just.

There has been much talk in the last couple of weeks about responsible parenting, but any parent knows that the teenage years are fraught with risks, challenges and failures, and we are not in control of our teenage children - nor should we be. Allowing our children to grow up means respecting their freedom, even if they abuse that freedom (and is there anybody out there who never abused their teenage freedom in some way or another?) It means allowing them to make mistakes and suffer the consequences, and being there to help them to pick up the pieces. Even those of us who have all the benefits and privileges of the mortgaged middle classes know that there are times when things fall apart, during those teenage and early adult years, and we usually depend on the good will of a wide social network to put them back together again - friends and family, churches and communities, schools and, sometimes, social services, the police and the law. Even Prime Ministers are not immune - remember when Tony Blair's sixteen-year-old son was found drunk and incapable?

But how does one help a foolish young adult to mend his or her life after an arbitrary prison sentence and a criminal record, inflicted upon them for no other reason than to make them serve as a warning to others? What's wrong with our politicians and our judiciary that they have so little imagination about the long-term damage they're doing to our children - because these are all our children? There's an African saying that it takes a whole village to raise a child, and we've seen in the last few weeks that, when the 'village' fails in its responsibility, its children become an awesome force to be reckoned with.

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges we face is to get over the attitude that a child is a commodity or a possession over which a parent has sole ownership and for which that parent has sole responsibility.There are few areas where individualism does so much damage as in the attitudes we have towards our own and other people's children. On the one hand there's the suffocating over-protectiveness of so many middle class parents, and on the other hand we veer between negligent neighbourly indifference and punitive state interference with regard to those who are not able to keep their problems locked out of sight behind their suburban front doors.

We are all responsible for all our young people. We have a duty of care to the children in our communities and neighbourhoods. We have a duty to pay taxes and to provide institutions of education, health care, sporting and cultural activities that make young people feel included, while ensuring that they have roles to play which allow them to contribute to society, not least through ensuring that they can find jobs which give them a sense of self-esteem. We cannot blame all the troubles of the last fortnight on cuts in social spending, but when youth clubs close down, universities suffer catastrophic funding cuts, financing for basic recreational activities and facilities is taken away, and the employment market dries up, we cannot completely ignore questions of cause and effect either. The message we've sent out to our young people over the last few years couldn't be clearer: as a society, we don't give a damn about your education, your well-being or your future. If you have wealthy parents, make them pay. If not, hard luck.

The teenage years are a volatile hormonal soup even before we add the pressures of a society in meltdown. We should not be surprised that violence has erupted on our streets. My generation had the best of the boom years, and people of David Cameron's class will always be able to buy their way out of the bust years in our class-ridden and economically divided society. But we owe our young people better than a prison sentence and a life of debt.

I fear we are sleep-walking into fascism, and if our judges don't take a stand, who will?

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." (George Orwell)

The Broken Society

2011-08-10T11:57:00.005+01:00

London’s South Bank is currently a postmodern pastiche of a British seaside resort, circa 1950s, as part of its ‘Festival of Britain’ extravaganza. An artificial beach has been created complete with beach huts, there are fake grassy banks, a holiday spirit prevails among the crowds, and on the façade of the Southbank Centre there are neon lights saying ‘Power to the People’. I don’t think this week is quite what they had in mind, but what an eloquent testimony to the vacuity of postmodernism. Read this blog if you want a flavour of what it’s about.

That slogan – ‘power to the people’ – is a retro joke. We’re not meant to take it any more seriously than the beach huts and the fake grassy banks. We’re not meant to take anything seriously any more. The only real thing in the poster above is the MasterCard logo. In this virtual world we’ve created, even the bullion bars which used to be the measure of the global economy have been reduced to digits on a computer-screen manipulated by geeks who seem unable to tell the difference between a computer game and the real world. (Sorry, what an anachronistic phrase – the real world – what’s that?) And presiding over this chaos are the markets, which like the gods of ancient Greece prove to be capricious, moody, demanding and narcissistic, with an insatiable appetite for human sacrifice.

There are three great myths of modern liberalism being exploded around us: laissez faire economics will ensure justice, the end of religion will ensure freedom, and the pursuit of science and reason will ensure progress. Wrong on all counts. Laissez faire economics has not brought justice but global economic meltdown and trauma and suffering for millions of people, probably for generations to come. The end of religion has not brought freedom but new forms of bondage. Substitute the word ‘God’ every time you hear ‘the markets’ and you’ll understand a fair bit about why Marx condemned capitalism as well as religion. And the pursuit of science and reason has nothing to do with progress because human beings are neither progressive nor consistently rational, and how much we know has very little to do with how we behave. Every human life is a complex, mysterious, interwoven and unpredictable phenomenon which bears the marks of its history, culture and experiences in ways that simply do not conform to the myth of progress.

We are by nature relational, interdependent and impressionable, and we learn by mimicry and example. Put us in a jungle to fend for ourselves under a creed of ‘each to his own’ and watch us prey on one another and everything else, when that jungle is governed by some hydra-headed ideological monster produced by the economics of Ayn Rand and the anthropology of Friedrich Nietzsche. Individualism is what we get when human individuals are cut off from one another by the combative dynamics of free market economics and unbridled competitiveness, fuelled by a liberal dogma that regards any attempt to hold one another accountable for our ethics and behaviour as an invasion of the right to privacy.

The relationship between the individual and the wider social context has been ruptured by a neo-liberal ideology which is now reaching its nadir. If there is no such thing as society, then there is no reason why one shouldn’t steal, cheat, loot, lie and bully one’s way to the top of the pile. Our shared cultural ethos becomes not ‘what should I do?’ but ‘how much can I get away with?’ Think of the MPs’ expenses scandal. Think of Tony Blair accumulating vast personal wealth on the back of his political career, despite his catastrophic legacy. Think of Enron, the Lehman Brothers, the banking crisis. Think of Rupert and James Murdoch brazening it out in front of their parliamentary interrogators. And then think of rioting adolescents rampaging through Britain’s streets and spot the difference if you can. I’ll tell you the difference: it’s the difference between power and despair, inclusion and exclusion, complacency and rage. Look at the faces, and you’ll see it’s also the difference between black and white, poverty and wealth. But let's be clear: those youths on the streets have learned by example, and they are expressing the values by which our society now operates at every level of the economic spectrum.

Broken society? Yes. Can we mend it? Maybe. Let those in the public domain set the example by which others might be expected to learn. Let the bankers give up their bonuses and start to pay for the mess they’ve created. Let Tony Blair give back some of his obscene wealth to the society he helped to destroy and say sorry to the British people for the slaughter he unleashed in our name. Get rid of those smug Etonians and career politicians in the House of Commons and give us real democracy, when those who stand for election are for and with the people and not over and above us.

But still, that’s not enough. Let each and every one of us start to see that there is such a thing as society, and there is no ‘me’ without ‘us’. Without society, individualism is anarchy. There is no private life in which my actions don’t have some social impact, and therefore there are no rights without responsibilities. Holding our leaders to account is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of this process of mending. If we agree to do it without them, we collude in masking their abdication of responsibility, but if we expect them to do it without us, we abdicate our own responsibility. The Big Society is a vacuous ideology which covers over fascist economics with the rhetoric of care. But if they stop squandering public finances on futile wars and buccaneering banks and put the resources where they should be – good schools and hospitals, socially responsible policing, funding for culture and the arts and for social and community projects – then we can begin to rebuild a real society, not in the name of progress but in the name of our lost humanity.

Click here to see what's happening in this video of a wounded boy being robbed. I think this is a very good analogy of what corporate power is doing to the most vulnerable people in our world. The corruption goes all the way from the very top to the very bottom of the social order.

As a P.S. to the above blog, I've found two sources which add an interesting commentary to what I've said above:

Camila Batmanghelidjh: 'Caring Costs - but so do riots'

And see this video interview with somebody on the street.

When is a Catholic Not a Catholic?

2011-08-05T08:47:00.003+01:00

Triptych of the Madonna della Misericordia (c.1415)

Jacobello del Fiore.

Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

The Madonna della Misericordia is an eloquent expression of the all-encompassing love of the maternal Church, spreading her cloak around the people of Christ but always with room to spare for more to join, and always open at the front to draw us in. In Piero's version, there's a hangman and a prostitute, for God welcomes us as lovers and sinners and not as heroes, champions or pillars of society, nor as academics, journalists, lawyers, mothers, fathers, housewives, politicians, priests, office cleaners or even theologians! "All that is left of us is love" (Philip Larkin). In the end, that's the only qualification we need in order to be there, and it's the love we give and receive that gives shape and form to our presence there. That's why, in this particular version of the painting, I love the image of Christ snuggled not in the womb but in the heart of his mother - her love encircles him in her heart, and his love radiates out through her to us. That is for me the meaning of the motherhood of the Church.

In the end, it matters very little whether we are progressives or traditionalists, conservatives or liberals, radicals or reactionaries, gay or straight. The hallmark of our faith is not the power of our intellect, the persuasiveness of our rhetoric, the depth of our conviction, the conventionality of our lives, nor even the number of people who folllow our blogs, but the love which holds us together within that encircling and open maternal canopy.

I don't regard myself as a progressive, although I see I've been described as one. My views on progressives, liberals and even on Polly Toynbee are readily available in my book, The New Atheists. (By the way, click on the image and see how much Fiore's Madonna looks like Polly Toynbee.) But these labels - progressive, liberal, conservative, etc. - fail to accommodate the complexity of what most of us actually think when we reflect on life, justice and meaning, and I believe that, whatever our political, ecclesiological or ideological differences, most of us are motivated by a quest for the good and the just. We all have to work out what that means in reasoned and informed debate, and that means we're a diverse and messy bunch gathered within that cloak, and our blogs reflect that. The Catholic blogosphere looks more like a pillow fight in a tent than like the faithful gathered within the enfolding robe of maternal love. It would take a brave soul to want to be part of it!

Nevertheless, the Catholic tradition also teaches that there are some aspects of faith which are revealed to us by God and not accessible to reason alone, even although it's not irrational to hold them. That's why there is a difference between the Church's moral teachings, in which through the use of reason we strive together with others in our cultures and communities to discover what it means to live well (which means there will inevitably be some disagreement), and the Church's doctrines, in which we hold shared beliefs that we do not reasonably expect everybody to understand, althought we can give a reasonable account of why we believe them. So, while Catholic theologians can and must be part of informed and reasoned public debate about matters of morals, politics and society, and while we can and must use mind as well as heart, study as well as prayer, to better understand the mysteries of our faith, I don't think those mysteries are themselves open to debate. We should not be in the business of counting the persons in the godhead to see if somebody made a mistake!

That's why this comment which I discovered out there on the blogosphere concerns me: "Her documented views about. e.g. the divinity of Jesus, which I will not repeat on here, show that she has some deeply seated mis-understandings about basic Catholic beliefs, despite her clear intelligence." I would ask if anybody shares those concerns, they let me know where exactly these documented views are which show my misunderstanding, since as far as I know I have never publicly said or written anything at all which would challenge Catholic orthodoxy with regard to the divinity of Jesus. I think if I were to do that, I might come to the conclusion that, beautiful and consoling though that sheltering cloak of the Catholic faith is, I would have to step out from under its warmth and face the infinite heavens without it.

'Our eyes should train our hearts': Alain de Botton on Christian Art

2011-06-20T14:11:00.000+01:00

BBC News - A Point of View: Why are museums so uninspiring?

This short essay by Alain de Botton provides further food for thought with regard to my earlier blog on art.

'Look at that picture of Mary
if you want to remember what tenderness is like.'
Roger van der Weyden, Virgin and Child (after 1454)

'Look at that painting of the cross
if you want a quick lesson in courage.'
Roger van der Weyden, Crucifixion (c. 1445)
Kunthistorisches Museum, Vienna

'Look at that Last Supper and train yourself not to be a coward and a liar.'
Leonardo da Vinci, Last Supper (restored) (1496-1498)

Art of the Day

2011-06-16T09:41:00.010+01:00

Krishna and Radha in a Pavilion
National Museum, New Delhi

If you use iGoogle, you can install a gadget called 'Art of the Day'. Every few minutes throughout the day, a different work of art appears in a box on your homepage.

It strikes me how many of these paintings have religious themes. In this most secularised of cultures, how can people relate to such art if they don't know the stories and the meanings behind them - if they can't see beyond the layers of pigment and colour to detect the shimmer of grace within?

There are many influential secularists who argue against teaching theology and religious studies in schools and universities. These subjects are not included in the new English Baccalaureate (read the discussion in the House of Lords here), and they certainly don't feature in the curriculum of AC Grayling's new university (see the discussion in The New Humanist). In an interview with the London Standard, Grayling acknowledges the atheist slant of those involved with his New College of the Humanities, but by way of justification he suggests that 'a higher education institution exists to teach how to think, not what to think. So the fact that there are a bunch of atheists involved in this doesn't mean anything.' Grayling, who likens faith in God to a belief in fairies, goes on to claim that 'people who do not unthinkingly adopt the religion of their culture, which 99 per cent of people do, are under a special duty to think harder about ethical questions'.

Filippo Lippi
Tobias and the Angel (1475-1480)

Would you trust somebody to educate you in the Humanities, if they showed such arrogance towards their religious counterparts, and such indifference with regard to what people of faith have contributed to the Humanities (philosophers and scientists as well as artists, musicians and writers)? Potential applicants beware - you might emerge from such a university with your head crammed with facts and your pockets emptied of cash, but along the way you will be shorn of wisdom.

A certain kind of consumerism is parasitic upon a certain kind of atheism. Read Thomas Aquinas or Jacques Lacan, and you'll see why the refusal to acknowledge our desire for God sets up in us an addictive and insatiable desire to possess and consume everything around us - from commodities to people - because nothing satisfies that God-shaped absence within. Our deepest and most restless desire is the compass needle which points to the true north of human existence, the homecoming we anticipate at the end of time, the eternal joy of a divine union beyond all the transient and fragile joys of mortal life. To ignore this yearning, to refuse to allow our lives to be drawn towards that mystery of desire, is to enslave ourselves to the fury of frustrated desires which consume everything - even ourselves. True happiness and a capacity to fully enjoy the world's goodness depends upon that wisdom which comes from understanding the nature of desire.

Caravaggio
Madonna di Loreto (1604-1606)

In Grayling's reactionary and conservative academic adventure, we see the perfect marriage of atheism and capitalist consumerism, a marriage whose offspring are ideally suited to a political ideology which requires avaricious and consumptive citizens who know 'the cost of everything and the value of nothing'. Marx was right about most things, but he was wrong about religion. Marxists such as Slavov Zizek, Alain Badiou and Terry Eagleton recognize that only a revived Christianity might have the resources to challenge the global tyranny of neo-liberal capitalism, but don't expect any of them to be on Grayling's curriculum either. (You can read Eagleton's damning indictment of Grayling and his 'money-grubbing dons' here).

George Steiner, literary critic and agnostic Jew, writes that great art is ‘touched by the fear and ice of God’, whether that arises from a sense of the presence of God or, in our own time, from the ‘overwhelming weight’ of the absence of God. Steiner writes,

where God’s presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. ... It is only when the question of the existence or non-existence of God will have lost all actuality, it is only when, as logical positivism teaches, it will have been recognized and felt to be strictly nonsensical, that we shall inhabit a scientific-secular world. Educated opinion has, to a greater or lesser degree, entered upon this new freedom. For it, emptiness is precisely and only that.

Peter Fuller, the atheist art critic who acknowledged a debt to Steiner, similarly insists that art is only possible before an open horizon of transcendent possibility. He writes of the ‘palpable and yet mysterious presence of art itself’ and of the crisis created for art and cultural life by the experience described in Matthew Arnold’s poem of ‘the long-withdrawing roar' of 'the Sea of Faith' and the exposure of 'the naked shingles of the world’.

So, enjoy the pictures on this page, all of which have recently appeared on 'Art of the Day', but if you want to know what they mean, don't for heaven's sake go to Grayling's university.

(To read more on this theme, please see my paper 'Cathedral and the Visual Arts', and Chapter 8 of my book, The New Atheists).

Filippo Lippi
Annunciation (c.1443-1450)

Tina's Updated Website

2011-06-14T09:02:00.000+01:00

I have updated my personal website so that you can now access most of my papers, lectures, presentations and published work there.

Prayer for the Day

2011-06-09T22:59:00.003+01:00

These are the scripts for my contribution to Prayer for the Day – BBC Radio 4, Saturday, June 4^th to Friday, June 10^th.(Please note that the scripts were lightly edited prior to recording, so they are not verbatim transcripts of the recorded programmes).

Saturday, June 4th

Good morning. Today marks two significant anniversaries in humanity’s ongoing struggle against tyranny. The Dunkirk evacuation of Allied troops from France ended on the 4^th of June, 1940, when the war against Nazi Germany looked close to failure. On the 4^th of June 1989, the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing were violently crushed. In each of these cases, the longing for justice and freedom inspired people to great acts of courage and sacrifice, even when there appeared to be little hope of immediate success. It’s that same spirit which is inspiring people across the Middle East today, to risk their lives in the name of freedom.

On the 4^th of June, 1957, Martin Luther King delivered a famous speech in which he referred to the ‘cosmic companionship’ that is possible if one believes that ‘the universe is on the side of justice.’

That belief has sustained many people through failure and persecution. Justice is the most indestructible of values, but it’s also elusive and easily betrayed. Power can be its greatest ally, when the powerful stand in solidarity with the oppressed. But too often power becomes the enemy of justice, when it muffles the voice of conscience and closes our hearts to suffering and need.

Each of us has to decide which side we’re on in the struggle for justice, however great or small our power might be. Justice is sometimes achieved by great heroic acts, but more often it presents itself as the myriad opportunities woven into our daily encounters and relationships. The quest for justice is discovered within the mosaic of all our human interactions. Today we pray in the words of the prophet Micah, that we might act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God. Amen.

Monday, June 6^th

Good morning. In 1979, the Boomtown Rats had a hit single with a song called ‘I don’t like Mondays’. Bob Geldof wrote the song after hearing an interview with a sixteen year old girl who had been on a shooting spree in a children’s playground. Asked why she did it, she said, ‘I don’t like Mondays; this livens up the day.’

Thankfully, few people are so extreme in their dislike of Mondays, but I suspect it’s the rare and lucky person who faces the start of another working week without some sense of apprehension. For some of us, the week crowds in with too many demands and expectations. For others, it yawns ahead, empty and tedious.

We live in a culture which has distorted our sense of what work is about. There is a dignity and beauty to human life which is never reducible to productivity and economics. Exploitation, forced unemployment and poor working conditions violate the dignity of the human made in the image of God. Through our work, paid or unpaid, we’re called to participate in the work of God’s creation, to become co-creators with God. That means balancing work and rest, doing and being. It means letting go of our anxieties, stresses and ambitions in order to live creatively and meaningfully in the here and now.

Jesus invites his followers to ‘consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Each one of us is a work of God, a work of infinite beauty and worth, before and beyond whatever work we do.

In the words of the psalmist, ‘I praise you God, because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. I know that full well. Amen.’

Tuesday, June 7th

Good morning. Today is the feast day of St. Robert of Newminster, a twelfth century English Cistercian monk and one of the founders of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. Robert’s biographers describe him as a kind and gentle man, merciful to others but strict in his personal regime of poverty.

Cistercian spirituality is based on the Rule of St. Benedict. It’s a weaving together of prayer, manual labour, and a life of austerity. The Cistercians made a significant contribution to agriculture and technology in medieval Europe, and they were known for the architectural beauty of their abbeys such as Tintern, Hailes and Fountains.

Today, these ruined buildings lend a haunting beauty to our countryside. They’re tranquil places to visit, their contours softened by time, with few reminders of the violence which destroyed them in the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth century.

Our quest for God expresses itself in sublimely creative ways, but it sometimes drives us to terrible acts of destruction. Religion encompasses both these aspects of the human spirit. The lives of saints such as Robert reflect the virtues of holiness, simplicity and creativity which all great religions seek to cultivate among their followers. But today also reminds us of the darker side of religion, because it marks the anniversary of the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem during the first crusade in 1099.

Never before has it been so urgent for us to go beyond the violence and conflict of religious differences, to discover a shared vision of peace. With its rich diversity of peoples and faiths, society today offers us unique opportunities for dialogue and understanding. We ask Robert of Newminster and all the saints to pray with us, as we seek a more simple, peaceful and creative way of being together in the world. Amen.

Wednesday, June 8^th

Good morning. Today is World Oceans Day, when we’re invited to reflect on the oceans on which life depends. Over-fishing and pollution are threatening the world’s water resources, and some say that population growth is bringing us to the brink of a catastrophic water shortage.

These are challenging realities, but the oceans are more than a resource for human exploitation. Beyond any usefulness to us, they have intrinsic meaning and value. We experience that deeper reality when we take time to be at rest within nature, when we stand on the beach or walk along a cliff top and marvel at the beauty of creation.

But the oceans also have the power to overwhelm us. In the Japanese tsunami, we were reminded of how small and vulnerable we are in relation to the majesty of the cosmos. In the nuclear crisis which followed, we discovered yet again how destructive our modern technology can be, unless knowledge and power are tempered by wisdom and love. Too often we confuse knowledge about the world with power over the world. Wisdom is that form of knowledge which teaches us to love the world and to live creatively within it. To quote scientist and theologian Guy Consolmagno, ‘Science gives us answers about how the universe works; it doesn’t explain why we are so delighted to find those answers. God doesn’t make the tides. God makes them awesome. We learn that from prayer; and from any surfer.’

Only when we rediscover a sense of awe and wonder in relation to nature, might we learn how to flourish in harmony with the seasons, tides and species of the natural world. Then we might rediscover what it means to say with the psalmist, ‘Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures, and all the ocean depths.’ Amen.

Thursday, June 9^th

Good morning. At the dawn of history, when something in the evolutionary process jumped the tracks of consciousness, the human emerged as a dreaming ape. Deep in the caves of the world, creatures began to paint. A species had evolved that could imagine the world other than it is, and from that imaginative leap came the very essence of what it means to be human. Werner Herzog’s latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, takes us inside those caves and enables us to gaze on wondrous images through thirty thousand years of our time on earth, bringing us face to face with the most mysterious and haunting questions about the origins and meaning of human life. Some say those were the earliest expressions of religious art.

In the Middle Ages, the Gothic cathedrals of Europe were home to some of the world’s greatest art. On the 9^th of June, 1311, Duccio’s altarpiece, the Maesta, was installed in Siena Cathedral amidst great ceremony. An eyewitness account tells of how the whole city came together for the procession, and the poor received many alms. The centre panel of the altarpiece shows the Virgin enthroned in majesty, holding the infant Christ, surrounded by angels and saints. It’s an image of astonishing serenity, gazing out at us across the centuries with an infinite peace.

Art is powerless to change the world, but great art changes us. It sets us free, and that enables us to imagine a better world. That’s why tyrants and dictators always wage war on the freedom of art. It remains the most primal and creative expression of human freedom. Without it, we’re less than human. Today, we pray for the gift to see the mystery of God in the beauty of creation, and to reflect that beauty and mystery in all our artistic endeavours. Amen.

Friday, June 10^th

Good morning. What kind of structure do you like best? I love bridges. Unlike many other large engineering projects, bridges add beauty and interest to a landscape or a city. It’s hard to imagine San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge, Sydney without the Harbour Bridge, or Edinburgh without the Forth Bridge. In Bristol where I live, Brunel’s bridge spans the Avon Gorge as a marvel of Victorian engineering.

The Millennium Bridge in London opened on the 10^th of June, 2000. It’s sometimes known as the wobbly bridge, because it began to sway as crowds of people crossed it. They all unconsciously adjusted their movements to fit with one another and with the bridge, so that the swaying increased. In engineering terms that was a significant problem, but it shows how powerful we humans can be when, consciously or unconsciously, we walk in harmony with one another.

No wonder that we so often use the language of bridges as a metaphor. Bridges unite communities, they allow communication instead of separation, and for people living in remote regions they can make the difference between poverty and prosperity, isolation and integration. When we speak of building, crossing and burning bridges, we use those physical structures to create imagined worlds of meaning.

Christians sometimes speak of Christ as a bridge between the human and God. A bridge is not a resting place, but a space of movement, connection and purpose. That’s why the life of faith is so often described as a journey. In the words of St. Augustine, ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’ Amen.

Prayer for the Day

2011-06-04T13:04:00.003+01:00

I am doing Prayer for the Day on BBC Radio 4 for the next week. You can listen again by clicking here.

I have also uploaded all my Tablet articles onto a separate page - see sidebar for the link.

A Change of Perspective

2011-06-01T20:31:00.001+01:00

"Reflection"

I've spent some time reflecting on whether or not blogging is a creative and meaningful way to spend one's time, and I remain undecided. Perhaps it depends not only on the quality of the blog itself, but also on the quality of conversation and dialogue that it inspires. Clearly, with spontaneous blogging the quality is bound to vary, and so is the level of dialogue.

With all this in mind, I've decided to revive this blog as a space for sharing some of my lectures, talks and articles, rather than posting spontaneous blogs on issues that immediately catch my attention. So this is to some extent a substitute for my personal website, and a place for posting links to various materials which I'm working on or have published. In the case of lectures and work in progress, these are 'raw': references are incomplete and ideas are in development, so please bear that in mind when reading.

It will take some time to put links to all the material I'd like to publish here, but I'm starting with my latest pieces and I'll gradually work backwards through the archive.

One positive use of a blog could be for the purposes of interactive research and conversation around 'big ideas'. I hope to get organised enough to put some of my current research up here, with a request for engagement and debate. Comments on all the material here are welcome, but I've decided to be more discriminating than I was before about which comments I publish. I hope that doesn't inhibit robust debate, but it is intended to inhibit some of the less helpful advice I've received through comments on my previous blogs.

And, because spaces should be used creatively, I shall also post poems, photos, links etc. Here is Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. This was the Poem of the Day today, on a great gadget you can download here for your personalised iGoogle page. I don't know if Angelou was thinking of William Blake's Auguries of Innocence poem when she wrote this, but I recommend reading them together, in the realm of possibility:

A free bird leaps on the back
Of the wind and floats downstream
Till the current ends and dips his wing
In the orange suns rays
And dares to claim the sky.

But a BIRD that stalks down his narrow cage
Can seldom see through his bars of rage
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
Of things unknown but longed for still
And his tune is heard on the distant hill for
The caged bird sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
And the trade winds soft through
The sighing trees
And the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright
Lawn and he names the sky his own.

But a caged BIRD stands on the grave of dreams
His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with
A fearful trill of things unknown
But longed for still and his
Tune is heard on the distant hill
For the caged bird sings of freedom.

Lenten Silence

2011-03-07T13:46:00.001Z

I have decided not to blog during Lent. I remain unconvinced that the conversations generated on the blog add to our understanding or insight, or that the time spent here might not be better spent elsewhere. This is food for thought which requires a period of withdrawal and inner silence away from the ever-intrusive demands of the Web. I leave you all with a poem by R.S. Thomas, and wish you a Lenten period of wisdom, hope and joy. From Wednesday, I shall no longer be posting comments but I shall post an update after Easter.

Tina.

R.S. Thomas - The Coming

And God held in his hand

A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.

On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The Sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

Embattled Caritas head insists: 'Dialogue is a two-way street'

2011-03-03T20:17:00.000Z

Embattled Caritas head insists: 'Dialogue is a two-way street'

On Friendship and Politics

2011-02-25T09:20:00.002Z

Dear friends,

Over the last few days, watching events in the Middle East, I've been wondering if this blog is turning into a bit of unholy smoke that distracts us from the events we should really be reflecting on and praying about. Toby observed yesterday in a separate message that "A problem with blogs is that it can make you focus on difference, when nobody would be reading a Catholic blog if they didn't have so much more in common". I really like to believe that's true.

One of the points that most divides us is between the so-called liberals who want to make the Church look a bit like the Coalition Government at its most bland and boring (only with more women in the top jobs), and the so-called conservatives who would seem to want Gadaffi for pope. But I do think that we Catholics increasingly share a sense that, whatever our politics or ecclesial convictions, there are issues of non-violence and human solidarity that unite us. If we can't gather together undivided around Humanae Vitae, can we do so around Pacem in Terris and Caritas in Veritate?

I ask these questions because of the krisis through which we are living. The Greek word krisis is far less negative than our English word 'crisis', for it implies a time of radical and unexpected change which is about opportunities and new beginnings as well as about lost hopes and endings. In that sense, the biblical concept of kairos, which suggests an opening in chronological time to a new configuration of time which is pregnant with urgency and promise, may also be related to krisis.

As the people of the Middle East rise up in the name of freedom, risking their lives for some human possibility that they have briefly glimpsed in the promises of democracy, I wonder why we are so complacent. The loss of British democracy has been compared to the gradual heating of a lobster. Plunge it into boiling water and it screams. Heat it gently and it will fall asleep and die more quietly. (I've never tried this, so don't know if it's true). As Samantha Cameron promotes London fashion week, her husband is off in the Middle East peddling arms. This government is introducing policies that were not in either manifesto, which are clearly aimed at the dismantling of public services and the welfare state, handing over control to the neo-liberal ideologues who got us into this mess in the first place. Both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas agreed with Cicero that 'pestilential statutes ... no more deserve to be called laws than the rules a band of robbers might pass in their assembly'. Augustine referred to the unjust state as 'a band of robbers', and Aquinas argued that 'a law that is not just, seems to be no law at all.' When will we realize that we are now governed by a band of robbers?

The West's friends in the Middle East are being toppled one by one as true democracy struggles to emerge, exposing the fact that far from being the friends of worldwide democracy, we are its most subtle and dangerous enemies. And where is our globe-trotting Middle East peacekeeper, Tony Blair, in all this? Perhaps we should be thankful for one small mercy - that he is nowhere to be seen or heard. (Perhaps nobody was willing to pay enough for his opinion).

I have a genuine question: what should Christians do in a time like this? How can our prayers translate into an active presence for freedom and truth in our shattered country and our troubled world? How can we use this krisis and recognise that it is also kairos time?

In the meantime, here is part of today's reading from the Book of Sirach. I recommend it to Colonel Gadaffi,
former President Hosni Mubarak, and Sheikh Nasser of Kuwait, and I dedicate it to Tony Blair and David Cameron:

When you gain a friend, first test him,

and be not too ready to trust him.
For one sort is a friend when it suits him,
but he will not be with you in time of distress.

Another is a friend who becomes an enemy,

and tells of the quarrel to your shame.

Another is a friend, a boon companion,

who will not be with you when sorrow comes.

When things go well, he is your other self,

and lords it over your servants;

But if you are brought low, he turns against you

and avoids meeting you.

Keep away from your enemies;

be on your guard with your friends.

A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter;

he who finds one finds a treasure.

A faithful friend is beyond price,

no sum can balance his worth.

A faithful friend is a life-saving remedy,

such as he who fears God finds;

For he who fears God behaves accordingly,

and his friend will be like himself.

A priest reflects

2011-02-23T13:55:00.001Z

I'm posting a link to this reflection by an Australian priest, Fr. Eric Hodgens, on the occasion of the golden anniversary of his ordination. (It dates back to late last year, but I've only just discovered it). Undoubtedly some followers of this blog will condemn it out of hand, but it must have taken great courage to write it. It's further evidence that, for a growing number of faithful Catholics, there is a need to speak out even at the risk of being abused and attacked. After all, Christ did warn us that this might be the cost of faithfulness to him.

Many, indeed the majority of Catholics today, choose to leave the Church rather than deplete themselves in the struggle for acceptance and change. But love asks something different of us - a sustained and loyal commitment inspired by our faith in the fundamental goodness of the Catholic faith and all that it means, but an intelligent recognition that that does not mean passive and uncritical acceptance of all that is done in its name. The Christian faith has always valued freedom above all else. 'If the Son shall set you free, you shall be free indeed.' Of course, our understanding of freedom and our ability to use it wisely needs to be matured and reflected upon, but it is also part of the expression of freedom that we must risk being wrong. Is it really free if we only express our freedom when we are sure that it is both safe and right to do so? As we see so many people today rising up against dictatorial regimes, often risking their lives for freedom, we should ask ourselves why, of all people, Catholic priests and bishops have become the least willing to stand up and defend the freedom that our faith offers us.

Pacifism is not passivity. To long for peace in the Church is not to be complacent in the face of abuse, nor is it to remain indifferent or even hostile to those who are driven away by a yoke that is too heavy to bear.

Fr. Eric Hodgens is an example of loyal criticism and visionary faith. Let's pray for him on his golden anniversary, and thank God for priests like him - priests who affirm the joy and meaning of their vocations, but who still have the courage to speak out when called upon to do so. Happy anniversary, Fr. Hodgens!

(P.S. The petition initiated by German-speaking theologians now has over 23,000 signatories. I realize from recent comments on my last blog that there's some question about the legitimacy of online petitions, but sometimes they have great symbolic power even if they have no legal status. You can sign the petition here.)

The Church and Poverty

2011-02-18T13:47:00.004Z

Pressure of work means I haven't been able to write anything for the blog recently. However, two recent news items about the Church and poverty caught my attention - one interesting and hope-inspiring, the other deeply depressing. So, first for the good news.

I've said several times in the past that the Ordinariate will enrich Catholic life if it brings with it some of the beauty and breadth of the Anglican communion. Rather than narrowing down our understanding of what it means to be Catholic, it could introduce new perspectives and insights. Here is evidence that this might indeed be the case:

The first Ordinary of the recently-established Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, Father Keith Newton, has a strong belief in the importance of working for social justice, insisting that you cannot be a Christian without working for Kingdom values while on earth.

Speaking from his home in Woodford Green, East London this week, Father Newton said he believes the Anglican and Catholic Churches have a lot of common ground in their approach to issues like abortion. But he was also keen to stress the importance of interpreting pro-life in its broadest sense of from cradle to grave. “Third world debt is equally as important as abortion,” said Fr Newton, who sees confronting poverty in the world as key priority for Christians.

(To read more, go to this link).

And now for the bad news - this is from this week's Tablet:

Vatican blocks re-election of Caritas Internationalis chief

Robert Mickens19 February 2011

The global Catholic development agency Caritas Internationalis (CI) is reeling after the Vatican took the highly unusual step of officially blocking Lesley-Anne Knight from running for a second four-year term as CI secretary general.

The Tablet has learned that three weeks ago the Vatican’s Secretariat of State refused to grant Dr Knight the necessary nihil obstat required for all candidates for the key position. The CI bureau – which includes the international president, secretary general, treasurer and seven regional presidents – has asked the Vatican to “reconsider the decision”. Elections for the 2011-2015 posts of secretary general and international president – currently held respectively by Dr Knight and Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga SDB of Honduras – are to take place during the CI general assembly in late May in Rome.

Cardinal Rodríguez wrote to all directors of the 165-member international confederation on 5 February to inform them of the Vatican’s decision. The letter, which was seen by The Tablet, notes that Secretariat of State officials met a CI delegation on that same day and gave only a verbal account of why the Vatican refused to approve Dr Knight’s candidacy. The cardinal does not mention those reasons in his letter, but does say that the CI bureau, in an extraordinary meeting, “expressed their incomprehension at the reasons provided” and “reaffirmed their positive view of Lesley-Anne Knight’s work for Caritas and the Church”.

An official at a national Caritas member agency who spoke on condition of anonymity opined that Dr Knight may have been rejected because she been “critical of the Vatican machine, has made no secret of it and has failed to be discreet”. But the official praised her for “professionalising” the Rome headquarters, tackling debt and reforming financial operations. Another Caritas source said there is a sense among some Vatican officials that Dr Knight has not done enough to instil a specifically Catholic identity and sense of evangelisation into the confederation’s mission and activities.

“It is true that she is yet to receive the nihil obstat,” Caritas Internationalis said in an official statement given to The Tablet on Wednesday. The statement confirmed that, nonetheless, “Lesley-Anne Knight has submitted her candidacy for secretary general.”
Caritas Internationalis has had periodic difficulties with some Vatican officials, especially at the pontifical human development council Cor Unum, during the past several decades. But last year tensions came to a head after Cor Unum’s president, Cardinal Paul Cordes, designated a CI confederation member to coordinate the Catholic Church’s relief efforts in Haiti (see The Tablet, 30 January 2010). He never consulted with Dr Knight or her office over the move and the CI secretary general made no secret of her displeasure.

Cardinal Cordes, a German close to Pope Benedict, retired as Cor Unum president last October. But before doing so he gave Vatican backing to a new organisation called “Caritas in Veritatis Internationalis”, which looks uncannily like a group specifically designed to replicate the Caritas confederation.

Read about the work of Caritas here.

Some who claim to love the Church will welcome this example of strong leadership crushing the opposition. I also love the Church, and I think the present leaders should look to the Middle East to see what happens when authoritarian regimes seek to retain power by silencing and bullying their most loyal critics. Authoritarianism takes over when genuine authority is lacking, and genuine authority has to be earned through a process of trust, transparency and respect.

Scandal comes in many forms. It seems that certain members of the Catholic hierarchy have mastered most of them.

Saint Scholastica's Feast Day

2011-02-10T15:06:00.000Z

Today (10th February) is the Feast Day of Saint Scholastica (c.480-c.543), twin sister of Saint Benedict. Nearly everything we know about her comes from the writings of Saint Gregory, who gives an account of what was to be the last meeting between Scholastica and Benedict. Here is a summary of Gregory's account. Follow the link to read the full account in Gregory's Dialogues and for more information about St. Scholastica.

Saint Gregory tells the charming story of the last meeting of the two saints on earth. Scholastica and Benedict had spent the day in the 'mutual comfort of heavenly talk' and with nightfall approaching, Benedict prepared to leave. Scholastica, having a presentiment that it would be their last opportunity to see each other alive, asked him to spend the evening in conversation. Benedict sternly refused because he did not wish to break his own rule by spending a night away from Monte Cassino. Thereupon, Scholastica cried openly, laid her head upon the table, and prayed that God would intercede for her. As she did so, a sudden storm arose. The violent rain and hail came in such a torrential downpour that Benedict and his companions were unable to depart.

'May Almighty God forgive you, sister' said Benedict, 'for what you have done.'

'I asked a favor of you,' Scholastica replied simply, 'and you refused it. I asked it of God, and He has granted it!'

Just after his return to Monte Cassino, Benedict saw a vision of Scholastica's soul departing her body, ascending to heaven in the form of a dove. She died three days after their last meeting. He placed her body in the tomb he had prepared for himself, and arranged for his own to be placed there after his death.

Dear friends, there is nothing new about women's prayers and God's love conspiring to thwart men's rules.

Saint Scholastica, pray for us.

European Theologians' statement: 'The Church in 2011 - a necessary departure'

2011-02-06T14:19:00.002Z

Dispute over the Immaculate Conception – Disputation of the Doctors
Giovanni Antonio Sogliani (c. 1530), Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence

(This painting reminds us that there is nothing new about theological controversy).

On 3rd February, 'Toby' posted a number of questions about Catholic formation and the context in which one studies and teaches theology. By way of a response, I'm sharing a link to a translation of a statement titled 'The Church in 2011 - a necessary departure', published in German and signed by 143 European theologians (more signatories are being added daily). This is a moderate and reasoned plea for a more open and participatory Church. My reason for linking to it here is not only because I think it's worth reading but because, taken alongside 'Toby's' quite different understanding of Catholic formation and theology, it is evidence of considerable debate and diversity among Roman Catholic theologians today, including those who are licensed - as many of these signatories are.

I've cut and pasted the opening paragraphs of the statement here:

It is over a year since cases of sexual abuse of children and youth by priests and religious at the Canisius School in Berlin were made public. Thereupon followed a year that plunged the Catholic Church in Germany into an unequaled crisis. Today, a split image is projected. Much has been undertaken to do justice to the victims, to come to terms with the wrong done, and to search out the causes of abuse, cover-up, and double standards within the Church’s own ranks. Many responsible Christians, women and men, in office and unofficially, have come to realize, after their initial disgust, that deep-reaching reforms are necessary. The appeal for an open dialogue on structures of power and communication, the form of official church offices, and the participation of the faithful in taking responsibility for morality and sexuality have aroused expectations, but also fears. This might be the last chance for departure from paralysis and resignation. Will this chance be missed by sitting out or minimizing the crisis? Not everyone is threatened by the unrest of an open dialogue without taboos – especially since the papal visit [to Germany] will soon take place. The alternative simply cannot be accepted: the “rest of the dead” because the last hopes have been destroyed.

The deep crisis of our Church demands that we address even those problems which, at first glance, do not have anything directly to do with the abuse scandal and its decades-long cover-up. As theology professors, women and men, we can keep silence no longer. We consider ourselves responsible for contributing to a true new beginning: 2011 must be a Year of Departure for the Church. In the past year, more Christians than ever before have withdrawn from the Catholic Church. They have officially terminated their legal membership, or they have privatized their spiritual life in order to protect it from the institution. The Church must understand these signs and pull itself from ossified structures in order to recover new vitality and credibility.

The renewal of church structures will succeed, not with anxious withdrawal from society, but only with the courage for self-criticism and the acceptance of critical impulses – including those from the outside. This is one of the lessons of the last year: the abuse crisis would not have been dealt with so decisively without the critical accompaniment of the larger public. Only through open communication can the Church win back trust. The Church will become credible when only its image of itself is not removed so far from the image others have of the Church. We turn to all those who have not yet given up hope for a new beginning in the Church and who work for this. We build upon the signals of departure and dialogue which some bishops have given in recent months in speeches, homilies, and interviews.

The Church does not exist for its own sake. The church has the mission to announce the liberating and loving God of Jesus Christ to all people. The Church can do this only when it is itself a place and a credible witness of the good news of the Gospel. The Church’s speaking and acting, its rules and structures – its entire engagement with people within and outside the Church – is under the standard of acknowledging and promoting the freedom of people as God’s creation. Absolute respect for every person, regard for freedom of conscience, commitment to justice and rights, solidarity with the poor and oppressed: these are the theological foundational standards which arise from the Church’s obligation to the Gospel. Through these, love of God and neighbor become tangible.

Finding our orientation in the biblical Good News implies a differentiated relationship to modern society. When it comes to acknowledgement of each person’s freedom, maturity, and responsibility, modern society surpasses the Church in many respects. As the Second Vatican Council emphasized, the Church can learn from this. In other respects, critique of modern society from the spirit of the Gospel is indispensable, as when people are judged only by their productivity, when mutual solidarity disintegrates, or when the dignity of the person is violated.

This holds true in every case: the Good News of the Gospel is the standard for a credible Church, for its action and its presence in society. The concrete demands which the Church must face are by no means new. And yet, we see hardly any trace of reform-oriented reforms. Open dialogue on these questions must take place in the following spheres of action.

Heresy, Heaven and Hope - a few thoughts

2011-02-01T09:59:00.001Z

This may be more of a rambling than a musing, but let me try to gather a few random thoughts.

It's interesting, and not a little unsettling, to be called a heretic, but at least blogging has taken the place of burning at the stake as a way for orthodoxy to assert itself - for that I am more than a little thankful.

I'd rather come before the seat of judgement and mercy as an honest heretic than as a dishonest conformist, and only then will we know who the heretics are, for only then will the goats be separated from the sheep. I ask myself in what ways might I be a heretic, given that I believe in all the core doctrines of the Catholic faith. Is one a heretic for criticising the Pope? Then I am happy to be in the good company of Catherine of Siena. In fact, I can think of few happier fates than to share a corner of heaven in the company of erstwhile heretics. Imagine an eternal conversation at the heavenly banquet with confirmed heretics Origen, Tertullian, Meister Eckhart, Peter Abelard, Joan of Arc, Galileo, Marguerite Porete and Martin Luther (the Church changed its mind about some of these, eventually), and with those who have at various times been suspected if not accused of heresy (John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Karl Rahner, John Sobrino .... an unfinished list).

Absolute faith is not something I can lay claim to, but this I will say: I have absolute faith that, if the Kingdom of God exists, it is more forgiving, compassionate and wise than the Catholic blogosphere, so one way or the other, I'm happy to take my chances.

I have said all I intend to say about the Ordinariate (for now). I believe it's right to create space for a variety of views, concerns and hopes to emerge at the beginning of the process, but now we must allow ourselves time to adjust and get to know one another. I'm sure we're all in for some surprises.

So here's a change of perspective. Yesterday evening, I stopped to take a photograph of the sunset over the Thames at Richmond. From a distance, this is a scene of perfect tranquillity - it seemed like a moment when the windows of heaven were flung open and the light of God's glory streamed through. But this is earth, not heaven, and that glorious sunset in all its serenity expresses a seething ebullience of life: every atom and cell, every creature and life-form, is caught up in a jostling, exuberant expression of being in which to live is to struggle and to give up is to die.

From a distance, the earth is a jewelled orb suspended in the glitter of space - beautiful, serene and timeless. But zoom in, and today especially zoom in on Egypt, and one sees that this beauty is home to such urgency of hope, such inspiration and vision, such fragility and vulnerability. Thomas Aquinas says that all of creation participates in God and bears a trinitarian likeness. The sunset, the earth, the Church - ultimately, the struggle, the beauty and life itself are inseparable.

God's creation, like the new creation of the Church, is struggling in birth pangs to bring the future into being. We don't know the fullness of truth, and when we do it will astonish and overwhelm us in its unexpected and unimaginable possibilities. But until then, we can be truthful, we can be honest, we can be penitent, we can be prayerful, and we can keep our sense of humour and solidarity. We're all in this together. Look again at what a small and wondrous planet we share with all those other jostling life forms. Last night, a pair of swans folded in their necks and slept outside the window of my houseboat, and this morning the geese and the ducks squawked and quacked their greetings to the dawn. How amazing this world is, and our human squawking and quacking is part of that wonder.

Let me give the last word to Cardinal Newman. This is from his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Perhaps it's a fitting comment on which to close my own contribution to the debate about the Ordinariate, for the time being:

But whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. Nor does it escape the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, nor does it remain truer to itself, and with a better claim to be considered one and the same, though externally protected from vicissitude and change. It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become wore vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

Update - Radio 4 and the Ordinariate

2011-01-29T13:25:00.000Z

Welcome to the Catholic Church - Resisting or Celebrating Diversity?

Westminster Cathedral Mass, January 2010

Lourdes HCPT Mass, Easter 2008

Mass in Kibera, Nairobi, 2007

Roehampton University Leavers' Mass, 2008

The interview that was cancelled last Sunday has been rescheduled for tomorrow, so all being well I'll be talking about the Ordinariate and what it means for Catholics just after 7.30 am tomorrow morning on BBC Radio 4.

Writing in this week's Tablet, Peter Cornwell, a former Anglican priest who has been a Catholic priest for 25 years, questions the impact of the Ordinariate on Christian unity and suggests that it is not a helpful arrangement for any of those involved. Here is what he writes:

I have said it before and I say it again - yes, welcome unreservedly to all who seek a home in Catholic unity. After all, 25 years ago I knew that welcome and found that home. But, is it really being offered a home if you are invited to set up, with your fellow refugees, in a sort of semi-detached granny flat, with your own special Masses and your own special leadership? It is like being invited to a party and then, instead of joining in the fun, slipping off with a few chosen friends to play bridge in an upstairs room.

The fact is that these Anglican dissidents have, for some years, lived rather unhappily on the edges of Church of England life. What surely they now need, for their souls' health and happiness, is not to be parked on the edge of another Church, but to come into the crowded fug of the living room to muck in with the rest of the family. Although outsiders imagine that Catholics are like a well-drilled army, we are in truth an untidy mixed bunch. As Inspector Morse used to say: "It's all a bit of a shambles!"

As I said in an earlier blog, quoting Gerard Manley-Hopkins, "Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet." I've chosen the pictures above to suggest what might be at stake, if a narrow conservatism triumphs over the creative exuberance of our Catholic faith and liturgies.

Followers of this blog might be interested in a Web discussion forum on Christianity and Evolution at 7.00 pm our time this evening. Go to the link here to find out more. Participants include Nobel prize-winning scientists and theologian Richard Rohr in conversation about the compatibility between their Christian beliefs and the theory of evolution.

The Ordinariate - tomorrow's discussion has been cancelled

2011-01-22T19:01:00.000Z

Just to say to those of you who were setting the alarm to listen to the discussions on the Ordinariate - they've changed the programme and they've cancelled that part of it. Good news for me - I can have a lie in! They say they might still do it at some future stage, and I did point out that it's a perspective they ought to include in their coverage.

Speaking out and keeping quiet - an update

2011-01-21T17:29:00.002Z

Whereof one can speak, thereof one must not be silent.

I think maybe that's a necessary corollary to Wittgenstein's counsel.

Our Lady of Walsingham

I've been asked by BBC Radio 4 to take part in a live discussion on the Ordinariate on Sunday morning, which will follow immediately after an interview with Keith Newton, who goes by the grand title of 'the first Ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.' (I hope Our Lady has a sense of humour). Early birds who want to listen to both discussions should tune in at about 7.20 am.

In the meantime, I've reposted the earlier blog with slight amendments. I've found this a very interesting process, which suggests to me that there really is a desire for informed Catholic debate on the blog. Thank you to all who have persuaded me to keep going.

Of blogs, hats, ordinariates and Wittgenstein

2011-01-19T09:47:00.001Z

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Wittgenstein)

Thank you to all who took time to comment on my last blog on the ordinariate. After much thought, I've decided to withdraw that posting because I think it was untimely and yes, I admit it was a tad bitchy about the bishops' wives (it really was a very nice hat).

Blogging is an ephemeral and spontaneous medium. Those of us who do it shouldn't take ourselves too seriously and we need thick skins, but I don't think we should expect others to be equally thick-skinned, and we should avoid being unkind. I think I was unkind, and I'd rather write a more considered piece when time allows.

But there's something else. Those looking in from the outside tend to see the Catholic Church as more authoritarian and homogenous than it actually is. For some this is undoubtedly an attraction. But in reality, there's a chaotic abundance to Catholic life, and the mystery of the Church is surely bound up in that capacity to hold together so many millions of human beings across time and space in a shared communion that far exceeds all niceties of association and like-mindedness. If you can't cope with human mess and contradiction, this isn't the church for you.

But of course, one doesn't preserve that inclusive spirit by being mean and unwelcoming to those who want to join, whatever their reasons. There's room enough for all of us in this vast Catholic world, and we don't preserve our threatened and cherished diversity by refusing to accommodate those who think differently. The issues remain and the debates must go on, but for now, I've decided to take a quiet step back from it all.

Here are a few lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, 'Inversnaid'. Maybe they can serve as a prayerful metaphor for the continuing fecundity of Mother Church:

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Difference is the very essence of God's creation. What abundant jubilation of life there is all around us, and how easily we funnel our own minds and spirits into claustrophobic tunnels of bigotry and judgement.

The Anglican Ordinariate (deleted blog restored after editing)

2011-01-17T00:06:00.004Z

And deliver us from women. Amen.

Except maybe these three ...

And of course these three.

Last Sunday, three former Anglican bishops were ordained as priests in the Roman Catholic Church by Archbishop Vincent Nichols. Writing in last week's Tablet, Allen Brent explains that men like himself, former Anglican priests who have been received into the Catholic Church and are now awaiting ordination in the ordinariate, are concerned not primarily about the ordination of women nor about gay issues but about the principle of unity enshrined in the concept of 'koinonia'. In other words, it is the breaching of unity brought about by the ordination of women and the consecration of gay unions that has created this mass deflection, and not 'misogynist and homophobic prejudices'. That may be true, and indeed I can remember when feminist author Sara Maitland became a Roman Catholic in the early 1990s, she offered a similar argument - and she is most certainly not a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. However, the onus is on the ordinariate, and most particularly on its priests, to allay any such suspicions in their practice and preaching.

But I must admit I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness about this ordinariate and what it means for both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. Not ony does it feel like a monumental rebuff to Catholic women campaigning for greater visibility and influence in the Church, but there is one issue in particular which has hardly been mentioned in the news coverage, but which seems to me to be one of the most important human aspects of this story. That is the situation of those Roman Catholic priests for whom compulsory celibacy is an almost impossible demand, and a monumental daily sacrifice that they are asked to make in order to be priests. What does this mean for those men, some of whom have served the Church faithfully for all their adult lives?

We hear so much about abusive and failed priests, and we should not underestimate the hugely destructive impact these men have had on the lives of their victims and on the reputation of the church. But we also need to bear in mind that the majority of Roman Catholic priests are ordinary men living what are, by modern standards, extraordinary lives of commitment and dedication, sometimes working in situations of considerable risk and hardship to minister to society's most unwanted and excluded members.

There are many Roman Catholic priests who have a vocation to the celibate life, and who insist that they are given the grace for what would otherwise be an impossible demand in the interests of their priesthood. I believe that celibacy is an indispensable gift to the Roman Catholic Church, not just for priests but for all who witness to an alternative way of channelling one's erotic energies in these sex-obsessed times, in lives of radical commitment to contemplation and prayer, and of active dedication to the poor and the outcast. But there are many, many priests who feel torn between their desire for marriage and family life and their vocation to the priesthood, and who do not experience the gift of celibacy in that way. What about those men, and why is it that the Catholic Church is willing to ordain former Anglican priests who are married, while still refusing to allIow its own priests to marry? I believe this constitutes a form of betrayal amounting to pastoral negligence, although in the present times it might be well nigh impossible for priests to come out and speak openly about the intensification of loneliness and conflict that this must produce.

For some Roman Catholic priests, the celebrations accompanying yet another influx of married men to the priesthood, this time with even fewer restraints and conditions than before, must be salt in a painful wound, particularly when they have to work on a daily basis with some of these priests. In these days of dwindling vocations and diminishing congregations, presbyteries can be lonely places. To go home to such a place every evening knowing that one's fellow priest is going home to his wife and children, must for some of our priests be almost unbearable. There is something inhuman about these double standards that now prevail in the Catholic priesthood.

There is no doubt that the decision to leave the Anglican communion has entailed a considerable sacrifice in terms of income, housing and long-term security for priests and bishops who are making the move. But I suspect that, for some of their Catholic priestly brethren, these sacrifices must pale into insignificance compared to that most basic sacrifice of all - the demand that they choose between priesthood and marriage. That is one choice that these new priests have never been asked to make.

Let's Abolish War

2011-01-05T10:48:00.000Z

The abolition of the slave trade and the abolition of the death penalty had to overcome strenuous political opposition and apparently well-reasoned arguments as to why these were essential to the well-being, prosperity and security of society, but in the end the voice of reason and human decency prevailed (except of course in those barbaric states and nations that still have the death penalty).

Modern warfare is state-sponsored slaughter on an industrial scale, and 90% of the casualties are civilians. One senior British military official said it is now safer to be a soldier than a woman in a war zone. Isn't it time we said enough? Britain spends £45 billion per year on the military. Wouldn't we rather have funding for our hospitals, schools and universities, and our art galleries, libraries and museums? And wouldn't we rather not be a nation mired in shame because of the murderous consequences of our military escapades?

If you're not convinced, have a look at the following:

Simon Jenkins, 'Does Britain Really Need the Military?', The Guardian, 5th November, 2010
John Pilger, 'The War You Don't See', available to view for UK viewers on the ITV website until 14th January.

Jenkins argues that the British military establishment is maintained because of powerful corporate and political interests, and not because it provides any effective security for the British people in an era when conventional warfare is an increasingly remote possibility, and crime is a much greater threat to our security and well-being. Pilger argues convincingly that the media have been duped by politicians into presenting the public with a sanitised version of war, including the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that we have no idea of the true human cost. The film opens with a quote from General David Lloyd George, speaking to CP Snow, Editor of the Manchester Guardian, in December 1917: 'If people really knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know.' Today, we do know and we can know. If we choose not to, we are culpably ignorant.

So, how about it? If we want happier new years for ourselves, our children and our neighbours in this global village, let's abolish war. Who and what are we fighting for? See the website of the Movement for the Abolition of War.

The Beattie Blog - Christmas 2010

2010-12-11T19:20:00.072Z

Before you start, click here for a warm Christmas greeting.

Writing circular Christmas letters has always defeated me. I've never been able to work out what kind of news would be equally interesting and relevant for the wondrous diversity of people whom we've come to know through different stages of life and in many countries and contexts. So I have always given up, intending to write a personal note in every card, but usually just scrawling a signature at the last minute and posting the cards several days after the final posting date.

There's another reason for my sense of defeat. With some notable exceptions, many of the Christmas letters we've received over the years suggest we have an astonishingly fortunate range of distant acquaintances. We only know of them from the annual Christmas letter, but what super-humans most of them seem to be. Their annual holidays never disintegrate into package tour nightmares, family rows and teenage angst. Every holiday is the holiday of a lifetime and merits several paragraphs of detailed reminiscing. Not for them the rueful observation, 'We went on the holiday of a lifetime this year. Never again.' Their home improvements range from conservatories and bathrooms to fitted kitchens and extensions, garden ponds, greenhouses and new lounge curtains, and are equally and of course justifiably worthy of detailed description. In the course of growing up, their offspring have accumulated a vast array of certificates, trophies and accolades which have launched them on the path to stellar academic performances and brilliant careers, and along the way these gifted and amenable progeny have learned to play musical instruments with accomplished skill, have participated enthusiastically in said annual holidays, and have in due course married thoroughly suitable partners and produced a clutch of grandchildren. To achieve all this, and to write an annual Christmas letter as well, leaves me dumbstruck with awe and admiration.

But I've decided that a blog at least leaves you the option not to read it if you don't want to. I also thought that after thirty five years of marriage (thirty six if we count the illegal year, which my mother asked us not to do), it may be time for a bit of catching up. I'm pleased to say that the children have been potty-trained and educated after a fashion, are variously employed (some more gainfully than others), and have more or less vacated the family home. They have yet to recolonise it with hordes of grandchildren (although Daniel's girlfriend's cat has served that role quite well over the past couple of years), and I have not yet had to buy a pale blue wedding hat with a wide brim and a fetching satin flower on the side.

Still reading? If you're getting bored, click here. It's a short video clip about an old-fashioned typist which is highly amusing for those of us who are old enough to remember.

We have also, in the many years since I wrote a letter to anybody, refitted the kitchen several times, built a loft conversion, acquired a wide variety of garden sheds in all shapes and sizes, installed a garden pond and inherited a greenhouse in which Dave now happily potters with his tomatoes and seedlings, having retired this year (see below for more). We've been through several pairs of new lounge curtains, and done a fair bit of decorating. We've had numerous holidays, some more successful than others, and have recently bought a houseboat and a camper van, which is perhaps the western consumerist equivalent to the wandering asceticism of elderly Hindus.

Here is another diversion to keep you reading. It's a highly athletic version of Swan Lake by the China State Circus, and this four minute clip is a wonder to behold.

The slideshow accompanying this blog give a brief visual survey of the year, with a little chronological licence. Some of the photos were taken at a farewell party for Daniel in February, before he headed off to train as a safari guide in a game park on the edge of the Kruger in South Africa - hence the African theme. On 14th December, we're flying off to his graduation ceremony to enjoy a brief escape from snowy England, before returning to Bristol for Christmas.

So, meet the Beatties, 2010:

(Anyone who has read this more than once will realize that it is in a continuous process of metamorphosis, as those mentioned herein eventually decided to read it and listed numerous sins of omission and commission which demanded immediate correction and penance. Having thus brought our family to the brink of disintegration and ruin through my blog, I must sadly revert to best wishes and signatures next year. In the meantime, we're off for our appointment with family mediation).

The greater and the lesser David

After spending most of his adult life in not quite continuous employment with Ove Arup and Partners, Dave retired in May to spend more time with his cabbages. I'm happy to say that so far they are proving more entertaining than an office full of engineers, and his allotment has become an all-engrossing pastime, with lots of soup to make and beans to freeze on rainy days. He is the not quite single occupant of Cranbrook Road most of the time, although Daniel's girlfriend Morven and her cat lodge with us, I go home at weekends, and our niece Shaina has discovered it's warmer than her student flat in Bristol and the food's better, so I think she's quietly staking her claim to the spare room.[This is uncensored, even although a feeble protest was made in defence of engineers].

Breakfast on the houseboat

I have swapped my studio flat in Putney for a houseboat on the River Thames in Twickenham where I stay during the week. Roehampton University is a short bus ride away or, when I'm feeling energetic, a cycle ride along the river and through Richmond deer park, but I'm discovering that feeding the ducks and gazing out of the window at the river is so much more fun than writing theology books and marking students' essays. However, given that Dave hasn't yet managed to feed us, pay the mortgage and fund the annual holidays, extensions and home improvements with the proceeds from the allotment, I hope to carry on being a wage-earning feminist theologian until cuts in the university funding system drive me to join him in the cabbage patch.

This cartoon tells you all you need to know about Dylan's transition to adulthood:

And here, in his own words, is what else he has been doing:

Dylan's still in London, building websites for actors and actresses. This year's adventures include skiing his first red run (by mistake!), scuba-diving with manta rays and reef sharks, playing bass in a pub blues jam, and giving talks on time travel, web stylesheets and the physics of the electric guitar. Right now he's juggling about thirty ideas and projects, from a zombie chorus rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to a stop-motion animated short film about bass guitars to a remarkable new version of the London Underground map, and his new years' resolution will be the same as it has been for the last four years - to actually finish one of them.

My request for Joanna to provide a similar paragraph has met with a resounding silence, although her last family e-mail gives eloquent testimony to the extent to which she is suffering for her art:

(This section has been censored by Joanna. She said I could keep in the bit about the pumpkin, so let me resume at that point):

Musn't grumble though, it could be worse, I could be the poor pumpkin...

The pumpkin in question was lovingly grown by Dave only to spend a brief but (I hope) happy life as a Halloween mask before rolling under the settee and being forgotten about until slime began oozing across the floor and alerted us to its presence.

When not living a La Boheme existence, Jo has appeared in several plays in the London and Edinburgh fringe, most recently in a play called Burst in Edinburgh in August, which gave us an excuse to spend a few days sampling the city's thespian delights. This is the precursor to that future Christmas letter when I may modestly have to mention that my daughter has recently appeared in the West End and Broadway. Until then, as you can see, she swigs a glass or two of Prosecco with my sister, and tries to ignore her fraying clothes.

Daniel eventually provided a paragraph, although I think it was ghost-written by Dylan. I have lightly edited it to make it safe for Great Aunt Maud to read:

Dan has spent most of the last year learning to identify various kinds of animals from the noises and smells they make - areas in which he already has a wealth of experience after living with his brothers for so many years.

After passing all his noisy-smell exams, Dan is now working as a safari guide at Ezulwini, a lodge in South Africa. He wakes up each morning and goes driving in the bush with a s..t load of maps, a hangover and a group of loud Americans. When he's not leading Americans around the bush, he spends time "practising his Shangaan" and working incredibly hard to prepare for tomorrow's hangover.

(I should add, of course, that some of our best friends are American).

David graduated from his postgraduate degree in Law, is now in full-time gainful employment and pays his own rent (although not, for some reason, his mobile phone bill, which still mysteriously appears on my bank statement every month). He remains in a close relationship with Seren, who is a doctor from Wales. At the time of writing this would seem to be the closest we are to the blue hat and the grandchild, but I guess good mothers steer clear of such minefields of speculation. It wouldn't be the first time I'd furtively contemplated what one might wear on such an occasion. I think when the time comes I shall wear purple, with a red hat that doesn't go. (See Jenny Joseph's poem here). David too was asked for a contribution in his own words, but the lure of the pub on a Friday night was clearly more enticing.

And finally, dear friends, let me leave you with another video clip - food for thought and inspiration in these confusing and violent times. This is an interview with Holocaust survivor and pianist Alice Herz Sommer, now over a hundred years old and still playing the piano and speaking of love, beauty and hope.
Alice Herz Sommer interview Part 1
Alice Herz Sommer interview Part 2

Our Christmas card image this year is a Madonna and Child sculpture in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. We went there last year when the surrounding park was a snowy wonderland, and this mother and child spoke to me on many levels: the curiosity of the infant nudging away from his mother's breast, the tenderness of her gaze as she watches over him, and the long journey that lies ahead into those tangled forests of human life, where he will one day transform the dead wood into the tree of life.

MAY THE PEACE, HOPE AND JOY OF THIS FRAGILE AND WONDROUS WORLD BE WITH YOU AND THOSE WHOM YOU LOVE.

SEASON'S GREETINGS FROM THE BEATTIES

Face to Faith - The Changing Church

2010-11-27T14:57:00.001Z

I have written the Face to Face column in today's Guardian, exploring the relationship between the Church's teachings on social and moral issues, which are subject to reason and can and do change, and its core beliefs which are matters of faith and cannot be known by reason alone: Can the Church Change its Mind?

As always, some level of informed debate is struggling to emerge from the tirades of the bigots. Most but not all of them are anti-Catholic - there's at least one Catholic bigot in there too.

Feast of the Archangels

2010-09-29T08:45:00.001+01:00

Sculptor Edward Robinson argues that "demythologisation" was an academic trend which deprived Christianity of its imaginative and creative forms of expression. He argues that we need a "remythologisation" of the Gospels, if faith is once again to become vibrant with a sense of mystery and spirituality.

Today is the Feast of the Archangels, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. They are the only angels named in the Bible. Michael appears in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, as the one who leads the armies of God against the forces of evil. Devotion to the Archangel Michael and the angels originated in the East in the fourth century and spread to the West in the fifth. Gabriel appears in the Book of Daniel, but he is best known as the angel of the Annunciation, who appeared to both Zechariah and Mary in Luke's Gospel, announcing the birth of John the Baptist and Jesus respectively. The story of the angel Raphael can be found in the Book of Tobit in the Old Testament, but for a truly delightful encounter with Raphael I'd encourage you to read Sally Vickers' novel, Miss Garnet's Angel.

Gregory the Great says of the word "angel" that "it denotes a function rather than a nature. Those holy spirits of heaven have indeed always been spirits. They can only be called angels when they deliver some message." Like Thomas Aquinas's God then, an angel's being is synonymous with its doing, for just as God's being is the doing of God (and therefore the doing of the world), so an angel's being is to be discovered in what it does. (The sex of angels has been the subject of much serious theological debate, but I like to think of them as occupying the in-between spaces).

If you Google the word angel together with quantum physics, you'll find there are a lot of people out there speculating about the relationship between the two. Some of it is highly esoteric, and some of it pedantically academic. Yet let me admit that, since reading Aquinas on angels, I find myself more amazed than before at what quantum physics reveals to us about the sensory world. There is something about that shimmering illusion of the density of matter which might just be the message of the angels, communicating not above and beyond the material world but within it and through it. What are they telling us?

The work of the young artist Mila Furstova is very exciting. Here is one of her Annunciations:

Annunciation I (2008), Mila Furstova

You can see more of her work on her website: Mila Furstova Etching.

Here is Hildegard of Bingen's "Antiphon for the Angels":

Spirited light! on the edge

of the Presence your yearning

burns in the secret darkness,

O angels, insatiably

into God's gaze.

Perversity

could not touch your beauty;

you are essential joy.

But your lost companion,

angel of the crooked

wings - he sought the summit,

shot down the depths of God

and plummeted past Adam -

that a mud-bound spirit might soar.

And here is Maya Angelou's poem, "Touched by an Angel":

We, unaccustomed to courage

exiles from delight

live coiled in shells of loneliness

until love leaves its high holy temple

and comes into our sight

to liberate us into life.

Love arrives

and in its train come ecstasies

old memories of pleasure

ancient histories of pain.

Yet if we are bold,

love strikes away the chains of fear

from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity

In the flush of love's light

we dare to be brave

And suddenly we see

that love costs all we are

and will ever be.

Yet it is only love

which sets us free.

Triptych - a harvest of beans

2010-09-26T08:33:00.000+01:00

I've been working on a paper this week which I'm giving at a conference tomorrow. The conference is organised by the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England, and it's called Finding God in Holy Places. My paper is called 'Finding God in Empty Spaces - a Visual Theology of the In-Between'. I explore the capacity of art to express our desire for God through our sense of an elusive absence within the materiality of the world. (You can read the paper and see the Powerpoint presentation by following these links).

One of the artists I refer to is the sculptor Edward Robinson, whose work includes a series of carved triptychs. He uses the triptychs to explore themes of concealment and revelation, and to encourage us to reflect on those inner worlds which resist scrutiny and are meant to remain hidden, revealing their mysteries only occasionally to the contemplative gaze. He prefers his triptychs to remain closed most of the time, to remind those who see them of the mystery of God hidden within the world.

I took time out yesterday morning from an intense week of writing the paper and preparing for the start of the new academic year. It was a glorious day - with that early autumnal warmth and soft blue sky which rest like a benediction on the passing of summer. I went up to the allotment to pick the garlands of beans which have appeared in the last few weeks, and I decided to sit up there and shell them in the sunshine. As I worked, I reflected on Robinson's triptychs, and it occurred to me that these beautiful beans communicated the same kind of message. It was the toughest, most unattractive pods which contained a wondrous assortment of colours, gleaming in the sunshine and telling of the unseen beauty hidden within the most ordinary of appearances. What evolutionary grace deemed that these beans should develop in this way? For whose gaze were they intended, hidden away from the eyes of insects and birds? Is it possible that these were made only for God's delight and ours, nature's triptychs opening up to those who have eyes to see?

What a pity that their colours disappear when they're cooked, and yesterday's miracle is tomorrow's meal. But I hope you enjoy sharing them in all their ephemeral glory.

The Execution of Teresa Lewis

2010-09-24T08:40:00.000+01:00

I was one of many thousands of people around the world who e-mailed Governor Bob McDonnell in a last-minute appeal for clemency for Teresa Lewis. Our appeals were in vain:

Wearing prison-issue denim trousers and shirt, she walked the 10 steps from her cell to the execution chamber, where five warders strapped her to a hospital trolley. Witnesses said she looked terrified.

Kathy Clifton, Lewis's stepdaughter, was in an adjoining witness room, blocked from view by a two-way mirror. The families of the victims were also present.

A prison warder held up a phone to the governor's office, in case of a last-minute decision to offer clemency.

Asked if she wanted to make a last statement, Lewis said: "I want Kathy to know I love you and I am very sorry." The executioners, dressed in black, with all identifying tags removed and hidden behind a curtain, released a sedative and a lethal dose.

Lewis was pronounced dead within six minutes of delivering her final statement.

(You can read the rest of that article here).

Here are the texts of the messages I sent to Governor McDonnell:

Thursday, 23rd September

Dear Governor McDonnell,

I can understand that people are gravely concerned about the murder of Teresa Lewis's husband and stepson by Matthew Shallenberger and his associate. However, many of us following this case find it impossible to understand how this damaged and confused woman will be put to death for a crime for which it seems she is incapable of bearing full responsibility. The eyes of the world are on you today. I urge you Governor McDonnell, to show yourself a man who understands mercy as well as justice, and who even at this late hour is willing to ensure that a most grave injustice is not carried out in the state of Virginia. Many of us look to the United States as an example to inspire others. Please do not let us down. It is not too late.

Friday, 24th September

Like Teresa Lewis, you too will one day stand before the throne of judgement. I hope that God shows greater mercy than you yourself have done. In the meantime, the state of Virginia has brought shame on your country. Those of us who would never otherwise have heard of you at all, will now always remember you for this one thing. I pity you more than Lewis, for she has peace. I wonder if you will ever have real peace again?

Poetry and Prayer

2010-09-23T08:42:00.002+01:00

I have just come across this reflection on the relationship between poetry and prayer. I much appreciated it. I hope you do too:
Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ Is Poetry Prayer?

Blog for the Digby Stuart Research Centre

2010-09-12T16:06:00.000+01:00

I have now started a separate blog for the Digby Stuart Research Centre for Catholic Studies. This will be dedicated to comments, reflections and links to published articles and events relating to the Pope's visit for the next two weeks, after which it will become an open forum for discussion and dialogue. Please visit the blog, start following it and enter into the conversations.

Celibacy Debate in Central London

2010-09-10T16:31:00.003+01:00

Conspiracy of Silence - Directed by John Deery - Brenda Fricker - Hugh Bonneville - John Lynch - Sean McGinley - Jonathan Forbes and Jim Norton

This is a link to a website which gives more information about an event taking place in London at the Odeon Cinema, Leicester Square, on Tuesday, 14th September. After a screening of John Deery's film, Conspiracy of Silence, there will be a debate on the motion 'Celibacy should no longer be a compulsory requirement for the Roman Catholic priesthood'. Those debating for the motion will be Helena Kennedy QC, Fr. John McGowan and myself. Those debating against it will be Bishop Malcolm McMahon, Frank Skinner, Jack Valero and Fr. Stephen Wang. The debate will be chaired by Ernie Rea.

Understanding Pope Benedict XVI

2010-09-09T17:01:00.000+01:00

I'm posting Rupert Shortt's interesting review of Tracey Rowland's book on Benedict XVI. It offers excellent insights as to how we might understand more about this enigmatic churchman as we await his arrival in Britain.

From THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (TLS)

September 8, 2010

A layman's guide to the Pope

Help and hindrance to understanding Benedict XVI on his visit to Britain

~Rupert Shortt

Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927, the son of a policeman stationed in rural Bavaria. A priestly calling took root in him before he was out of short trousers: Catholicism ministered to the boy’s intellect and emotions in equal measure. The other core impulse that shaped Ratzinger during his childhood was a horror of extremism. Press-ganged into the Hitler Youth, he later joined the Wehrmacht on reaching call-up age in 1944. But both the reluctant conscript and other members of his family had long feared that the Nazis were taking Germany over a precipice.

The story is engagingly told by the future Pope in his memoir Milestones (2000), an account of the first five decades of his life that ends with his appointment as Archbishop of Munich in 1977. This book leaves a sour taste in the mouth all the same, because it fails to mention either the Jews or the Holocaust a single time. Given an ideal chance to deplore a catastrophe in which he had been a blameless bystander, the then Cardinal chose instead to emphasize Hitler’s persecution of Catholics. Ratzinger compounded his error in at least two respects. In the first place, his discussion ignored the largely supine response to the Nazis of both clergy and laity. Secondly, he drew the highly contentious lesson that the Church can only resist dictatorships effectively when run as a very tight ship. Alert reviewers of Milestones pointed out that on the contrary, German Catholics were hamstrung by a tradition of docile obedience to authority during the 1930s, and that only Protestant Denmark provided a largely unsullied record of anti-Nazi resistance.

The unintended impression given by Milestones is that its author, though urbane and intelligent, still lacks common sense. The book also tells us much about Benedict XVI’s agenda. He was elected to the most influential post on earth three days after his seventy-eighth birthday. No one of his age (or perhaps of any age) in their right mind could welcome the colossal burdens of papal office. In that sense the man who emerged victorious from the conclave of 2005 was not personally ambitious. But he is nevertheless a very ambitious promoter of his own model for church government. Milestones goes on to give a partisan reading of Catholic history during the second half of the twentieth century, and draws a veil over the dissenting impulses that the author displayed as a reform-minded young theologian. His attempt to present his thinking as a seamless garment probably constitutes the greatest piece of legerdemain in the memoir. It also forms the background against which Tracey Rowland’s portrait of the Pope should be judged – and found wanting.

Benedict XVI: A guide for the perplexed does not include a detailed discussion of Milestones. Rowland, a conservative Melbourne-based theologian, also subscribes to the fantasy that her subject has been fully consistent. This feeds the impression that she is more cheerleader than analyst. Not that she is a lightweight: it is her erudition that makes her project a missed opportunity.

The author’s knowledge of intellectual history gives her book – the latest in T&T Clark’s series on individual figures and major religious themes – at least one solid foundation. The same could be said for Ratzinger’s Faith (2008), Rowland’s other study of the Pope’s thought, which covers similar ground. Anyone who has advanced beyond the hackneyed view of Benedict XVI as a latter-day Grand Inquisitor will know that he is the first pope in centuries to be a thinker of the first rank. A summary of his intellectual importance might begin with the age-old question encapsulating the tension between philosophy and theology – “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” – cited as much by Christians protective of their faith-based turf as by unbelievers who see religion as a matter of wish fulfilment or worse.

Ratzinger would query the terms in which the question is usually framed. Significant parts of his large oeuvre are premissed on a sense that ancient Athens and Jerusalem were different zones within an intellectual ellipse, and thus that reason and faith are complementary strands in our mental make-ups. He would justify this claim by arguing that secular reason is not wholly reasonable, because it fails to reckon with the fundamental and inclusive context of meaning that only religion supplies. He would add that no naturalistic framework of explanation can do justice to the full range of our experience as beings motivated by conscience, intuition and a vision of the good, as well as by analytic reason. Ratzinger’s bestselling Introduction to Christianity (1969), written in his intellectual prime, is studded with gnomic insights into what might be termed the phenomenology of faith. We are told that belief in God has much in common with love: if you never give yourself to it, you will never understand it. If we do embrace the Christian creed, though, then we shall encounter a new dimension of reality not available to others. Ratzinger moves from an efficient attack on the invalidity of crude scientism (“knowledge of the functional aspect of the world, as procured for us so splendidly by present-day . . . scientific thinking, brings with it no understanding of the world and of being. Understanding grows only out of belief”) to insist on the unavoidable character of spiritual questing: “Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident”.

Elsewhere, the book presents a detailed genealogy chronicling the birth of empiricism – Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) is named as chief midwife – and a resulting contraction of intellectually acceptable fields of discourse during the Enlightenment. Rowland is a reliable guide to Ratzinger’s work in this field, as well as to his theories about the false theological turns during the late Renaissance and early modern periods which he holds to have sown some of modern atheism’s most fertile seeds. In our own time, the attenuated character of much analytic philosophy suggests that the greater gulf lies between Athens and Oxford. There is no shortage of other scholars sharing Ratzinger’s conviction that Plato and the authors of the Bible were advancing along parallel tracks after all, even if, from a Christian standpoint, the former was guided by the moon rather than by full sunlight.

As a student of outstanding ability, Ratzinger showed a strong interest in ancient Greek philosophy, Plato especially, but his first loyalty was to St Augustine, who transposed Platonic ideas into a Christian key by insisting on the beauty and goodness of creation, and on the Church’s role in making available to all such Platonic goals as the purification of the soul. Rowland also locates Ratzinger in the context of the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, a strategy with much to commend it. Tübingen University in Swabia (where Ratzinger went on to teach in the late 1960s) formed one of the foremost centres of Catholic engagement with Romanticism. The main figures in this loose school of thought rejected Kant’s bid to strip Christianity of its very concrete historical claims, and present the faith instead as a timeless matter of reason and ethics. To Romantically minded Catholics, Kant and his armies of nineteenth-century followers peddled far too arid a conception of the human person. German theologians such as Johann Sebastian Drey, Johann Adam Möhler and Johannes Evangelist von Kuhn drew inspiration from across the Channel – from Blake, Wordsworth and especially from John Henry Newman.

Ratzinger would be among the first to argue that “Romantic” Catholicism was no nineteenth-century innovation, but simply a local tributary of theology’s largest river. This was always clear to those with a sure grasp of history. Coleridge, for example, was not only speaking as a Romantic, but also echoing Augustine, when he declared that Christianity is “the substantiating principle of all true wisdom, the satisfactory solution of all the contradictions of human nature, of the whole riddle of the world. This alone belongs to and speaks intelligibly to all alike, the learned and the ignorant, if but the heart listens”.

The key point, though, is that those ignorant of the classical Christian tradition included many senior nineteenth- and early twentieth-century clerics. It is well known that the Catholic Church pulled up its drawbridge on the world for 200 years after the Enlightenment, condemning democracy, feminism, biblical scholarship and scientific developments. (This contrasted with the much greater levels of intellectual openness often displayed by Catholic leaders of earlier eras.) A less familiar calamity unfolded internally, with the imposition of tight boundaries on theological study. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) designated the work of St Thomas Aquinas, read in one tight-reined way, as the chief intellectual weapon in the battle against the Church’s enemies. As Rowland explains, Enlightenment rationalism was now to be answered with a Catholic counter-rationalism.

This was the world that Joseph Ratzinger entered as he embarked on priestly training in 1945, and it turned him into a rebel. The first version of his Habilitationsschrift, or post-doctoral thesis, a word Rowland has misspelt in more than one way, was a study of St Bonaventure’s ecclesiology. Alarmed by the supposedly novel, “French” influence in this dissertation, the examiners failed it. Had they not later accepted a revised script, Ratzinger’s academic career would have been killed off at birth. And his rebellion was far from being purely intellectual. As a budding scholar, he famously complained that “what the Church needs today as always are not adulators to extol the status quo, but men whose humility and obedience are not less than their passion for the truth”. Instead, he went on, a monolithic institution was “entrenching herself behind exterior safeguards”.

These words reflect a thirst for structural reform. Ratzigner’s dream was realized at the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), the event at which the Catholic Church opened itself to the modern world, among other things acknowledging for the first time the sovereignty of conscience, the need for a more hospitable attitude to other Christians, and, on paper, a view of the Church as a community of pilgrims, rather than a pyramid dominated by the clerical establishment. Though still in his mid-thirties, Ratzinger played an important part in helping galvanize the forces of reform against the wrecking tactics of certain Vatican officials, because he served as aide and adviser to the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Josef Frings.

Why, then, has Benedict XVI long been a prime exhibit in the liberal Chamber of Horrors? The short answer is that although there are many continuities in his thought across the decades, he still changed his spots to a remarkable extent in mid-career. During the late 1960s, he decided that the Church had opened up to the world just as the world was heading in a very different direction. Outside Catholic ranks, les événements and other cases of student unrest were apparently demonstrating that Marxism now posed a chronic threat to Western civilization; while inside the Church, disagreement over official teaching on faith and morals was proving hugely divisive. His conclusion was that the liberal genie needed returning to the bottle. The faithful must pull together, shun the luxury of free thinking, and never forget that authentic Christianity is supposed to entail costly witness against what John’s Gospel terms the standards of “this world”.

Professor Ratzinger’s volte-face was matched by what struck many observers as a shift in his character. An earlier openness was supplanted by intolerance and gloom. The psychological element, wholly overlooked by Rowland, is revealing. While researching my biography of the Pope, I interviewed a Tübingen theologian who described the change that came about Ratzinger as follows:

"A young, friendly, communicative scholar turned in on himself and became very dogmatic. Some people, of course, continued to see him as a model of courtesy. This is because he seems to be the kind of person who will really open up to others if he feels they are on his wavelength, but finds it harder to get on with a larger range of characters."

Elements of Ratzinger’s new outlook were shared by Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II. Shortly after his own election in 1978, John Paul asked his ally to become Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, and thus to join his inner circle of advisers. Ratzinger rarely if ever behaved like the “God’s Rottweiler” of popular mythology after his move to the Vatican. On the contrary, he often displayed patience, charm and a sense of humour while investigating the work of theologians suspected of not toeing the line. Yet the Cardinal was high-handed on enough occasions to give ammunition to his critics. Fair-minded fellow clerics concluded that he was torn between two versions of himself. As Prefect, he should have exercised a quasi-judicial role, but more often acted like a player than a referee. Theologians supporting greater democracy in the Church, or a relaxation of teaching on sexual morality, faced especially tight curbs. Good men were denied preferment, and episcopal candidates often selected for their loyalty to the centre, rather than their pastoral and intellectual records.

The infamous conflict over liberation theology during the 1980s is harder to assess. Some leading members of this school of thought such as the Brazilian ex-Franciscan Leonardo Boff, over-indebted to Marxism and far more privileged than he cared to admit, were skilled at creating the impression that scarlet-clad prelates in Rome were stamping on innocent servants of the poor. Many such accusations were unfair, yet saintly figures like Archbishop Hélder Câmara of Recife, who lived in a slum and was guilty of nothing more than taking the gospel seriously, were certainly treated with disdain. Ratzinger bears heavy responsibility for this.

Other developments for which the Cardinal was directly or indirectly responsible included a hardline, plainly hypocritical attitude towards gay Catholics, and a tendency by Rome to micro-manage the delicate business of liturgical translation. Bishops in the anglophone world faced a particularly high level of interference by officials who rejected the use of inclusive language in principle, and did not understand the distinctive challenges of rendering Latin into idiomatic English. Benedict’s motu proprio (a special kind of papal document) of 2007, which authorized a greater use of the Tridentine rite, is symptomatic of his broader impulse to return Catholics to preconciliar times. The Church he leads is growing strongly in Asia and Africa, where it is a massive source of social capital, but has suffered steep decline in Europe, and a particularly heavy blow to its credibility in North America. Debate persists on Ratzinger’s role during the child abuse scandals of recent decades. Whatever the truth of this, it seems clear that the Vatican today still fails to address the subject with a due sense of contrition and urgency.

Supporters of the status quo regularly complain that the church authorities are portrayed in the worst possible light by a hostile media. The comment is not groundless, but it also reflects epic levels of self-deception. As recently as July of this year, the Vatican left “its goalmouth wide open, with its goalkeeper nowhere to be seen”, as one commentator put it, by issuing a statement detailing some changes in canon law that managed to connect in the public mind clerical paedophilia and the ordination of women as priests. This sort of example could be multiplied a hundredfold, and points towards an underlying malaise. The Church is damaged by rickety structures in general, and by its leader’s lack of savvy in particular. German-speaking observers have long complained that Ratzinger lacks Menschenkenntnis – the capacity to size people up.

Tracey Rowland ignores this sort of argument, because she lacks critical distance between herself and her subject. The unevenness of her prose also gives proof of carelessness or hurry: sometimes the book reads as though badly translated from German. Insofar as exposition leads to evaluation in her discussion, her verdicts are always positive, and further seasoned with idiosyncratic comments of her own. Early on, for instance, she writes that

"The emergence of a wealthy Catholic middle class in the US and the countries of the British Commonwealth, desperate for acceptance by Protestant elites and wanting to accommodate its faith to the culture of modernity, including the adoption of a decidedly modern attitude to sexuality, created numerous intellectual and pastoral challenges which were simply beyond the capacities of many of the clergy to address."

These comments deserve serious attention. Christians do often lack the fibre to swim against the tide. The Church teaches that real freedom is based on the education of desire. Liberalism, on this view, should not be based on the ability to do what you want, but on the right to do what you ought. In that sense the thoughtful believer will always be counter-cultural. One has only to look at corners of the Church of England, where the trendy vicar has long been a figure of fun and church attendance has declined in parallel with the sapping of Catholic congregations, to see that it is self-defeating to offer secular society less and less in which to disbelieve. Add together convictions about the truth of Christianity and the concealment of this truth by sin, and it is not hard to see the inference many might draw: that discipleship is more about duties than rights, and a global Church must be subject to strong central controls. Benedict’s views are buttressed by his longstanding worries about a cocktail of ills, including relativism, family breakdown, over-consumption and violence, which he sees as assorted manifestations of “neo-paganism”. The vocabulary may be different from that of secular political parties, but the sentiment is of course familiar. David Cameron’s Big Society idea, for example, owes a clear debt to Catholic Social Teaching.

The problem with the Pope’s one-sided condemnations is that they beg the question. A century ago, most women did not have the vote. Two centuries ago, four-fifths of humanity lived in dire poverty. There is no sense in denying that great material and moral strides have been made, or that many goods in the contemporary world derive from the Enlightenment, as well as from Judaeo-Christianity.

The irony, as we have seen, is that the Pope once saw things rather differently. Rowland rightly tells us that Catholic Romantics – including the younger Ratzinger – were fighting against a world-denying strand in their own tradition that was particularly evident in Ireland and the Irish diaspora during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which derives from Jansenism. The French have a phrase (as they often do) for this cast of mind and its effects: la maladie Catholique. Benedict now suffers from the disease he once sought to cure.

His sombre outlook bodes ill for various forms of bridge-building – intellectual, social and above all interfaith, at a time when relations between Christians and Muslims look pivotal to world stability. Some of the Pope’s pronouncements (he once declared that non-Christians and even non-Catholics are in grave spiritual peril) feed the impulse to remind him of what the Bible itself teaches: that all – including, by implication, Muslims, Hindus and atheists – are made in the image of God.

Battles among Christians, or between Christians and others, on topics ranging from interreligious dialogue to gay marriage ultimately hinge on the status of conscience and of those outside the visible Church, which is in turn a variation on the Athens–Jerusalem conundrum. Most people have never heard the Christian message, and many who have done so cannot accept it for well-considered reasons. Religious exclusivists have little to offer those outside their own loop. Christians with a more open sense of the Holy Spirit’s mission will see the subject in a broader light. Like their more conservative fellow believers, they believe that God not only made us, but has “spoken” to us as well. They are simply warier about spelling out what is Christian in the lives and attitudes of those who do not bear the name of Christ.

In her purplest passage of all, Rowland salutes Benedict and his predecessor for representing “a double act of Divine Providence, with a Pole being chosen to see off European Communism and a German succeeding him to begin healing the fractures of the sixteenth century and offer a sustained intellectual response to the nihilist wing of nineteenth-century Romanticism which reached its extreme in the Nazi death camps”.

Benedict rarely endears himself to Protestants, but he has certainly done much to see off the ghost of Nietzsche. His response to the father of contemporary atheism is easily summed up. Nietzsche’s descriptions of the human condition are basically right, but the inferences he draws from his data are fundamentally wrong. Either everything means something or nothing means anything. It is the first of these propositions that is correct.

The substance of this argument will seem convincing to many; the tone in which Benedict delivers it is too often rebarbative. A recent comment from a journalist with far less theology than Tracey Rowland, but a much clearer eye, brings us back down to earth. “Joseph Ratzinger may be behind his times or ahead of his times, but he is certainly not of them.” I don’t suppose the Pope could imagine a higher compliment. That is the problem shirked by this “guide for the perplexed”.

Tracey Rowland
BENEDICT XVI
A guide for the perplexed
202pp. T&T Clark. £14.99 (US $19.95).
978 0 567 03437 3

Rupert Shortt is Religion editor of the TLS. His books include Benedict XVI: Commander of the faith, 2005, and Rowan’s Rule: The biography of the Archbishop, 2008.

Boycott Mass - or wear a rainbow ribbon?

2010-09-02T14:05:00.001+01:00

I've borrowed a photograph of a rainbow over Bristol from Mary Colwell's blog, Reflections of a Curlew. Read on to find out why.

Jennifer Sleeman, an Irish grandmother, has called on Catholic women to boycott Mass on 26th September and to stay at home and pray for change instead. (She suggests that men who are sympathetic to the cause should also join the boycott). The call is receiving widespread publicity and support from around the world. Click here for Rose Marie Berger's blog which gives links to a number of others.

I must admit, I have mixed feelings about this and I wonder what other people think. I'm deeply sympathetic but also unconvinced. Let me try to explain why.

There is a deep and growing sense of frustration among many of us - not just women (and of course, not all women), about what's happening in the Church today. The refusal to allow women any meaningful recognition or role within church institutions, the creeping authoritarianism which leaves ever smaller spaces for informed, loyal and conscientious debate, the imposition of the new translation of the liturgy in a way which violates the most fundamental Vatican II principles of collegiality and subsidiarity, and of course the handling of the sex abuse crisis, are all symptoms of a deep malaise which needs more than policy statements, punitive actions and good intentions. It calls for the most profound process of examination of conscience, repentance and transformation at all levels of the Church's institutional and sacramental life. If the world's women boycotted Mass on 26th September that would be a form of protest which would be hard to ignore, for we continue to make up the majority of faithful Mass goers, and without the active support of lay and religious women in all walks of Catholic life (except of course the hierarchy), one wonders what would be left of the vitality and dynamism of the Church. If even a small minority of Catholics responded to Sleeman's call, that would be a most eloquent absence.

But sympathetic though I am to the proposal, I find myself concerned about the further politicisation of the Mass and its use as a means to an end. Many in the hierarchy and among conservative Catholics already try to use the Mass to defend ideological positions which have little to do with the dynamic and mystical love of Christ unfolding among us in time and space, and most particularly in the sacraments. There is a whole range of ways in which the Mass has become a way of policing Catholic life, rather than a way of celebrating the unfathomable mystery of God which reaches into all our human darkness, hunger and failure with an unconditional love, an unquenchable hope and a transforming grace. Don't we risk contributing towards this if we too begin to use the Mass as a way of imposing our own agendas on the life of the Church?

What I most love about the Church - and what feels most under threat today - is its abundant and irreducible plurality. The capacity of Catholicism to survive has always been largely thanks to its ability to accommodate a vast spectrum of human cultures, identities and beliefs within an organic form of sacramental life which pulses through history and is as vigorous and diverse today as it ever has been. With the tunnel vision of the contemporary Church and the closing down of its creative and imaginative horizons, the sacramental roots of Catholic life risk being destroyed, at a time when Catholic diversity is flourishing as never before.

The Church is a new creation, not in the sense of being divorced from or other than what God's creation has always been, but in the sense of a renewal of our human capacity to taste and see that the Lord is good. When our human vision is renewed, everything in the cosmos is renewed by the awakening of consciousness to the grace of creation and by our ability to stand in awe before its infinite diversity. Today, I'm sitting in my London flat looking out through a swirling shimmer of sunlit leaves, and as I focus my gaze I see that the air is alive with tiny flying creatures, and a fat contented pigeon struts proudly across the grass. I know that if I sit here a little longer a squirrel will shimmy down the ivy clad tree trunk, a blackbird will come singing outside the window, and a small, mangy fox will make her daily appearance. I love Annie Dillard's paean to the eternal within the material:

It is a fault of infinity to be too small to find. It is a fault of eternity to be crowded out by time. Before our eyes we see an unbroken sheath of colors. We live over a bulk of things. We walk amid a congeries of colored things that part before our steps to reveal more colored things. Above us hurtle more things, which fill the universe. There is no crack. Unbreakable seas lie flush on their beds. Under the Greenland icecap lies not so much as a bubble. Mountains and hills, lakes, deserts, forests, and plans fully occupy their continents. Where, then, is the gap through which eternity streams? (Annie Dillard, The Book of Luke)

The Mass is like that too, isn't it? Its revelatory wonder is not in its capacity to transcend who and what we are, but in the capacity of eternity to stream through the solid density of life in all its diversity. Black, white, yellow and brown, male and female, children, teenagers, the fertile young and the fragile old and the middle-aged in-betweens, 'liberals' and 'conservatives' and the middle-of-the-road in-betweens, married, single, widowed and divorced, gay and straight, lay and religious, priests and people, healthy and sick, rich and poor - no wonder James Joyce's cryptic allusion to 'here comes everybody' is often taken to refer to the Catholic Church. This is what the Church is - a community whose human diversity and creativity is an expression of the diversity and creativity of God's world. Maybe it's no coincidence that our destruction of biodiversity is finding an echo in the destruction of the biodiversity of the Church. Pope Benedict XVI links the earth's ecology to our human ecology, but if that's true, surely we should see our diversity as a mark of strength and sustainability and not as a symptom of 'relativism' which must be stamped out at all costs?

What does all this have to do with boycotting the Mass? Well, if that boycott really works, what a depleted Church it would be on 26th September - a Church lacking in so much of its sustaining life. But it would also mean that the Mass would not be what it should be - not a means to an end, not a political act, not an ideological statement, but a human community at play before our creator and redeemer with all the intensity of children at play. Play is an end in itself. It's what happens when we shake off our commitments and agendas and anxieties and politics, simply to revel in being. And in that letting go, we discover again the creative love which in every milli-second renews and sustains the creation of which we are a part.

Of course, for many of us the Mass isn't like that most of the time, which is why I'm sympathetic to the boycott. The use of exclusive language, the failure of imagination which makes so many homilies as tedious as they are insipid, the feeling of always being on the margins, sometimes being tolerated but never really being welcomed and wanted, is common to many, many Catholics who still try, week after week, to keep faith. This is more than simply the apathy and indifference which makes us all (or me at least) rather half-hearted in our participation sometimes. It's a dreary dampening down of something vital, week after week, year after year, which depletes the quiet passion of mystery and wonder which has through the centuries made the Mass a source of inspiration for some of the greatest art, architecture, poetry and music ever produced.That's why I hesitate to participate in yet a further narrowing down of its expressive possibilities, and I ask if we might find a way to participate differently, rather than to exclude ourselves voluntarily?

So, I have a suggestion. If you're sympathetic to the causes which the boycott wants to promote, but don't want to boycott Mass as a way of expressing that sympathy, why not pin a rainbow-coloured bunch of ribbons to your clothes that day? It would be a way of celebrating God's rainbow-coloured Church, a way of protesting against the spreading conformity and of showing to everyone around us that we're glad they are there, not because they think like us or look like us or agree with us, but because we are humans made in the image of God in whose diversity and difference all of creation is reflected and renewed, and we lament and protest the attempt to deny or close down that spacious sense of belonging by power masquerading as authority and fear masquerading as care.

Some of us long for the day when our human diversity is as present on the altar as it is among the people, and we may fear that a darkness is descending which makes that ever less likely. But let's not go gentle into that good night. Let's be the rainbow people of God, who wear a sign of hope that all shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well (Julian of Norwich).

This posting isn't intended to deter anyone who has already decided to boycott Mass. It's rather intended to suggest an alternative for those who share my reservations but want to express support for the causes which the boycott seeks to promote.

Twilight Reflections

2010-07-18T11:00:00.003+01:00

An updated photograph - because after the quiet of twilight comes the jubilation of morning

(This is the garden with the allotment behind)

Written late on Saturday evening:

Why am I a Catholic? Why don’t I leave the Church, join the Anglicans perhaps, because I struggle with so many aspects of the Catholic faith?

When I first approached a Catholic priest in Zimbabwe twenty four years ago with a view to converting from the Presbyterian faith of my childhood to Roman Catholicism, he began to expound about transubstantiation. I told him that wasn’t my problem – it never has been – one shouldn’t seek to rationalise or explain the mysteries of life, faith and God. My problems, I told him, were the Pope and the Virgin Mary. He laughed. ‘If you can attend the Mass and say the Creed in good conscience, you have the rest of eternity to sort out those lesser problems,’ he said. Thank God for that priest. Since that conversation (when I was 32), I’ve gained a degree in theology and a doctorate in the theology and symbolism of the Virgin Mary, and I sometimes say I now have only one problem. The Marian tradition is my guiding light and inspiration in my Catholic faith. The papacy remains a problem – as contributors to my blog will recognise.

But let me try to explain why I’m still a Catholic, albeit by way of an impressionistic explanation which won't satisfy doctrinal purists.

When I moved to Bristol in 1988, my four children were very young, I was a secretary turned mother, and I was frustrated, bored and dislocated - a brand new Catholic in an alien culture and an alien country (I'd spent most of my life in Africa). My only reference point was my local Catholic parish and the school associated with it, which my children attended. We still live in the house we moved into then, and when we climb up our steep back garden to the allotment beyond with Bristol spread out around us, we can see the school and the church which first offered me a place of belonging in England – a foreign country, for a Scottish Presbyterian ex-colonial.

Since those days of migration, life has moved on and so have our relationships. Many of those earliest friendships endure, from when the parish community was the focal point of our lives and the binding element that held us together. Yet, of that early group of Catholic mothers, very few of us remain within the Church.

This evening, my husband and I went up to our favourite place – a bench on the allotment, overlooking Bristol – with a bottle of wine. (So be warned – this is a wine-sodden blog). These last few weeks we’ve found ourselves mired in painful struggles with friends and family, whose suffering is not directly ours, but for whom we feel a deep sense of responsibility, care and involvement. There’s so much to be gleaned from these times when, as vulnerable human beings, we plunge into life in all its light and shade, and stand in awe before what it asks of us.

But tonight, as we sat in the quiet fading of a day rinsed clean with rain and glowing with the light of a summer evening, with the clouds of evening winging up towards infinity, I knew why my response to the God who created this wondrous, mysterious world is and must be Catholic. The gulls soared above us, squalling their lonely cries to the wind and the sea. The magpies chattered in the trees behind us – alarmed perhaps by the strange cat we’ve acquired, which is always with us but not with us, bestowing his company upon us as he follows us up the garden, but turning his back to us as if to assert his impenetrable otherness. I, a Cat, am created by God just as you, lowly humans, are. Together, we will celebrate the chorus of evening, but you will never know what I am thinking, for all your arrogant claims to be stewards of creation.

So, with the cat and the birds, my life's companion and I sat together, in all our ups and downs, muddles and misunderstandings, not even conjoined in a sacrament, although we've been married for thirty five years, because he was never baptised. I looked out over the rooftops of Bristol and the greening of summer. I thought of one of my favourite poems, by e.e. cummings (how lovely –that resistance to capital letters, how much lovelier if popes and bishops would follow his example):

i thank you God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any - lifted from the no

of all nothing - human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened).

It occurs to me that, for twenty two years, year in and year out, we’ve sat in this same spot above the city and watched the seasons revolve, the trees festoon themselves anew each year with the garlands of summer after the winter’s skeletal chill. Each year, our children have grown, our relationships have changed, we've measured our lives in losses and gains. Creation, incarnation, death and resurrection constitute the cycles of regeneration within a natural order which defies our litle human minds. What remains – apparently unchanging – are the bricks and mortar symbols of ownership and mortgages, their prim rows stretching away and melting into the edges of the city and the fading light. Houses do not shed their leaves in the winter and renew themselves in the summer (although perhaps the forgotten tradition of spring cleaning was a lingering echo of these cycles of nature). Only we humans are capable, year in and year out, of asserting our presence and proclaiming our success and progress without decay and regeneration, without going backwards as well as forwards in the cycles of life.

And yet, and yet ... when I look at these houses, they’re not unchanging. There is inconsolable grief in in the house next door – I know because, bad neighbour that I am, some stories penetrate even the impenetrable barriers of neighbourly distance. The suicide of a son refuses to be absorbed and normalised within our domestic facades, and the house still breathes an uncontainable sorrow. Two doors along, the old lady who finally moved into a home after years of raising her children and burying her husband has been replaced by an altogether different kind of family – although undoubtedly less different than they appear or want to be. All across the vista of the city, loft conversions sprout from red-tiled roofs (we have one too). What do they proclaim? Success? Economic growth? Or something more organic – a house that breathes and lives and grows with the people who inhabit it? All these, perhaps, and more, an essence of being that will never be captured in the language of property and home improvements.

I took the newspaper up to the allotment with me. (After thirty five years, one doesn't always have to be talking). The Guardian, of course – dear reader, what else? Polly Toynbee spells out in chilling details what this grotesque new government will mean in terms of social care – the NHS, the education system, the wondrous visions which have, in spite of ourselves, made we Brits more than a small and warring tribe on the fringes of Europe. Reading her, I felt a sense of deep sadness about the times we’re entering, and this week, watching a chronically ill friend trying and failing to gain support from the NHS, watching her despair as friends have had to step in to the chasm that politics and economics have created, I had a sense of the times to come. The state has failed. The rich are richer, the poor will become ever poorer. Every one of us who claims a different vision from that promulgated by the political classes will have to put our money where our mouths are and our hearts where our brains are – we’ll have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk, in order for the rich to remain rich and the poor to survive. Where is Marx when we need him? Benedict, will you listen and respond when you visit us? We are desperate for the wisdom you might offer, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear.

But sitting up there tonight, with the seagulls and the magpies and the loft conversions spread out around us, I thanked God that, because once upon a time I converted to Catholicism, I’ve felt obliged to struggle with this faith, day by day, moment by moment. And, because I have an intellectual hunger, I’ve read Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena, as well as Hans Urs Von Balthasar and papal encyclicals – but, I must admit, I’ve never read the Catechism cover to cover. Sometimes I feel like a make-believe Catholic and a bogus academic – I’m not nearly serious enough to be either a good Catholic or a good academic. I laugh too much, dance too much, drink too much. And, funnily enough, this seems to be a common failing of Catholics who are always so much more than the moral prescriptions and middle class preoccupations of some forms of Christianity, including much that passes for Anglicanism.

I glean what I can from the riches of this richest of rich traditions, and somewhere in the transition from my Scottish Presbyterian childhood to my Roman Catholic ‘now’, I’ve come to love the seagulls that soar, the magpies that chatter, the loft conversions that erupt across the city skyline, and the friend who today has been weeping in despair because why in God’s name would God ever inflict this multiplication of sorrows on a person? There are no answers, but Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have been guides along the way to accepting what we may never understand. My Presbyterian childhood never invited me to read and learn from these voices, but in reading and learning must I not also challenge and question?

My life is patterned by the Catholic faith, my mind is shaped by the Catholic faith, my quarrels are with the Catholic faith, and my hope is in the Catholic faith. Tell me now, why do you think I should leave?

An Appeal to Pope Benedict XVI

2010-07-16T14:01:00.006+01:00

Statue of Mary found in the Abbey of Tre Fontane in Rome

The image presents Mary as the Abbot of the monastery. She wears the robe of a Cistercian monk, but she also carries the paraphernalia of a bishop. The Episcopal sedilia, the crozier, the ring and even the keys of the Kingdom. (Taken from the website womenpriests.org)

Pope Benedict XVI gave a General Audience in St. Peter's Square on Wednesday, 7th July, during which he spoke about the legacy of medieval Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus. Here is part of what he said:

The People of God therefore precede theologians and this is all thanks to that supernatural sensus fidei, namely, that capacity infused by the Holy Spirit that qualifies us to embrace the reality of the faith with humility of heart and mind. In this sense, the People of God is the "teacher that goes first" and must then be more deeply examined and intellectually accepted by theology. May theologians always be ready to listen to this source of faith and retain the humility and simplicity of children!

Far be it from me to demand a hearing from the Holy Father, but let me indulge a little fantasy. The Tablet is currently running a column in which prominent Catholics are asked to record what they would say to the Pope if they had a private audience. If I were to meet the Pope today, here is what I might say:

Your Holiness,

I know that the press is often guilty of distortion when it comes to reporting on the Roman Catholic Church. There is a significant level of anti-Catholicism in British society which also infects the British media. That is why I have spent some time this morning trying to track down exactly what the Vatican is now saying in its latest directive on the treatment of abusive priests, which was reported in today's Daily Mail under the heading 'Vatican labels the ordination of women a "grave crime" to be dealt with in the same way as sex abuse'. Surely, I thought, this cannot be true. Finally, I settled on the Associated Press account, which reports a press briefing by Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican's sex crimes prosecutor. He told reporters that

including the two canonical crimes, sex abuse and ordination of women, in the same document was not equating them but was done to just codify the most serious canonical crimes against sacraments and morals that the congregation deals with.

For example, in addition to sex abuse, the document also includes crimes against the sacraments including desecrating the Eucharist, violating the seal of the confessional and for the first time, apostasy, heresy and schism. Attempting to ordain a woman violates the sacrament of holy orders and was therefore included, Scicluna said.

"They are grave, but on different levels," he said.

Your Holiness, I like to believe that you have been badly briefed, that you still do not understand the real nature of the crisis facing the Church, and that some of these statements are issued without your full knowledge or consent. This may be naive on my part, but I would urge you to shrug off your minders and find a way to listen to the voices of many thousands of ordinary Catholics when you visit Britain in September. If you are serious when you say that 'the People of God is the "teacher that goes first"', then in the name of God listen to the people and what they are trying to say to you.

First, you might discover that the greatest sense of outrage is not against abusive priests - shameful though that abuse has been - but against senior members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, bishops and cardinals alike, who have been engaged in a systematic process of deception, corruption and dissimulation, allowing for the proliferation of abuse by individuals whom they were capable of stopping. The real problem is not the sins of individual priests, but the structures of sin which have infected the institutions and governance of the Church. We do not want you to impose ever more punitive restrictions and condemnations on abusive priests, unless you are also willing to acknowledge and repent of the sins that go to the highest levels of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and to take accompanying action by way of a thorough-going overhaul of the Church's institutions and structures to initiate a new era of transparency, democratic participation, accountability and inclusivity - including the full inclusion of women in the sacramental, doctrinal and institutional life of the Church. This brings me to my second point.

If you opened your ears and your heart to the women of the British Catholic Church during your visit, you would hear many, many stories of women who love the Church, who have struggled to remain loyal, but who have finally been exhausted and defeated and have quietly left or gone elsewhere - many to the Church of England. Far from seeing the ordination of women as a grave crime and a violation of holy orders, you might find many welcome this as a great sacramental act of fulfilment in recognition of the dignity of all humans made in the image of God, and able to stand in the person of Christ who took human flesh (not male flesh) for the sake of all humans. The ordination of women is for some of us a significant doctrinal development, representing a coming of age in the sacramental life of the Church within the Anglican communion, and fully capable of being coherently supported within the Catholic theological and sacramental tradition.

To equate the 'grave crime' of priestly sexual abuse with the 'grave crime' of the ordination of women suggests a profound contempt for the sacramental significance of the female body, and it also means that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the majority of Anglican priests and bishops now stand accused by the Roman Catholic hierarchy of a crime equal in gravity to priestly sexual abuse. This of course may be arbitrary insofar as the Roman Catholic Church doesn't recognize Anglican orders anyway, but it does highlight just how ludicrous it is to try to equate the two. Sexual abuse violates the body of another human being in the most profound way, and it does not depend on codes of canon law to make it wrong. It is wrong in communities and societies which are not bound by canon law, and its objective wrong does not depend on whether the abusive adult is a Catholic priest, an Anglican priest or indeed any other adult. Holy orders are specific to one religious community's self-understanding, and the language of criminality is therefore entirely context-specific.If the curia is really saying that there is no objective moral difference between ordaining a woman and sexually abusing another human being, then we are indeed in the throes of a moral crisis of staggering immensity. I have been to Masses celebrated by Anglican women priests. I have often found them holy and beautiful occasions, more meaningful than so many Roman Catholic Masses I attend. Are you really asking me to believe that participating in these times of prayer and worship is the moral equivalent to standing by and watching a child being raped? I am outraged.

I received an e-mail today from a woman who laments that 'It’s becoming increasingly difficult to explain to others and even myself at times why, as an intelligent woman, I remain part of this hostile institution.' I share her feeling, but perhaps you are indifferent to our struggle. Perhaps you dream of a 'purer' Church - it seems our own archbishop shares your dream - in which people like us would simply disappear. Maybe by the People of God you don't mean those of us who struggle to attend Mass Sunday after Sunday despite a palpable sense of exclusion and marginalisation. Maybe you don't include those of us who try to speak up and defend the Church when she is unjustly accused, but who also feel called to criticise the hierarchy when we believe that grave errors are being perpetuated in our name, and in the name of the Chuch we love. Maybe, among the People of God, all people are equal, but some are more equal than others. Maybe the Church's shepherds would rather not wait until Judgement Day to separate the sheep from the goats, but would rather ask the goats to leave now, so that only the most docile sheep remain.

Today, I am ashamed to be Roman Catholic. It has become a Church blighted by ignorance, arrogance and the decadence of a dying regime mired in its own obsessive clinging to power. But I am not leaving for, along with Peter, I would have to ask, 'Lord, where else would we go?' The Church is and always has been more than the very great sum of her parts, and so much more than the sum of her leaders.

Shame-faced: Christopher Hitchens and pornography

2010-07-05T12:01:00.005+01:00

Why, I wonder, do the British intelligentsia continue to hero-worship such misogynistic prats?

Yesterday's Observer newspaper carried a profile article by Andrew Anthony on Christopher Hitchens, darling of that paradoxical coterie which brings together neocons and new atheists in a bilious marriage of state-sponsored terrorism and scientific rationalism. Explaining his reaction to what Anthony refers to as the 'vented spleen' of his critics, Hitchens said, "It washes off me like jizz off a porn star's face."

It's interesting to read this in the light of a review article by Julie Bindell in Friday's Guardian, about anti-pornographer Gail Dines's new book, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Here's a paragraph from that article:

As a result of her research, Dines believes that pornography is driving men to commit particular acts of violence towards women. "I am not saying that a man reads porn and goes out to rape," she says, "but what I do know is that porn gives permission to its consumers to treat women as they are treated in porn." In a recent study, 80% of men said that the one sex act they would most like to perform is to ejaculate on a woman's face; in 2007, a comment stream on the website Jezebel.com included a number of women who said that, on a first date, they had, to their surprise, experienced their sexual partner ejaculating on their faces without asking.

I wonder if any of them had recently been dating Christopher Hitchens.

Maternal Mortality and Deepwater Horizon

2010-06-20T12:00:00.005+01:00

Naomi Klein wrote a brilliant article in yesterday's Guardian: 'Gulf Oil Spill: a hole in the world'. Here's a taste of what she says, in an article which acknowledges its debt to Carolyn Merchant's 1980 book, The Death of Nature:

Thankfully, many are standing not in wonder at humanity's power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us.
John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as "rainbow sheen", he observed what many had felt: "The Gulf seems to be bleeding." This imagery comes up again and again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an "oil spill" and instead says, "we are haemorrhaging". Others speak of the need to "make the bleeding stop". And I was personally struck, flying over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.
And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.

When I read that, I remembered what happened when I had a sudden haemorrhage late in my fourth pregnancy, and the strange feeling of helplessness as blood pumped from my body. I often reflect on the fact that, had I not been in a modern hospital equipped to perform an emergency caesarean, I would have lain there bleeding until my baby and I were both dead. Is that how Mother Earth feels right now, I wonder?

But there's an added twist. I was living in Zimbabwe, and my life was saved because I was a relatively rich expatriate who could afford to give birth in a private hospital. Although maternal mortality rates have improved significantly in the last decade, the most recent figures released by the World Health Organisation show that 343,000 women a year still die through causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, 99% of them in the world's poorest countries. Afghanistan is the most dangerous country in the world in which to give birth - a statistic which reflects shamefully on our military interventionists who after so many years of violent and incompetent meddling have done nothing to improve those women's lives. But apart from Afghanistan, it is African countries which cluster near the bottom. Zimbabwe is 164 out of 181.

So what's the connection with Deepwater Horizon? A few weeks ago, The Guardian carried a bleak report about environmental damage done by oil spills around the world as a result of the poor safety standards and exploitative policies of the major oil companies. In the Niger delta, the activities of the oil company Shell are estimated to have resulted in at least 2,000 sites requiring treatment because of oil pollution. Morever, 'Independent oil and environmental experts estimate that between 9m and 13m barrels of oil have been spilt in the delta area during the past 50 years – equivalent to an Exxon Valdez disaster every 12 months.'

In other words, 'Mother Earth' suffers in the same way that ordinary mothers suffer, in silent and ongoing anguish in the poorer countries where nobody knows and nobody cares, although her misery far outstrips the occasional well-publicised emergency in the richer countries. And yet rich mothers still sometimes die in childbirth, and sudden haemorrhage remains a significant cause of maternal mortality even in well-equipped hospitals. Sometimes, nature outstrips our best technology. That individual mothers sometimes die giving birth may be a fact of life, even if we smooth out every economic injustice and save many more than we do today. But if we destroy the maternal body upon which we all depend, if the Earth herself bleeds to death, what then? In this case, even as the people of the Gulf despair, perhaps the one small consolation is that this maternal crisis is happening in a country rich enough and powerful enough to take action.

It may be that it's not too late, but soon it will be. We have a placental relationship to the Earth, and if we poison that life-giving body or rip open its arteries, we too are doomed.

How long until a political leader emerges who is brave enough to acknowledge that it's not Britain that's broken - it's our very way of being human, and much of that has to do with our economic system and the capitalist ideology which underpins it. We are careering downhill on an ambulance that has lost its brakes, while the mechanics are fiddling with the dashboard trying to work out how to dim the lights.

Art, Mystery and Wonder

2010-06-10T08:05:00.001+01:00

On Monday, 7th June I gave the address at the annual Service for Artists of the Royal Academy of Arts, at St. James's Church, Piccadilly. I've pasted the text here, but for the formatted version with references and footnotes, please go to my website.

When Christianity was an emergent religion in the Roman Empire, some of its early theologians thought that there could be no possible conversation between the Bible and Greek philosophy. In the second century, Tertullian famously asked, ‘what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ The answer he expected was ‘nothing at all’. But he lost the argument, and as a result the Christian understanding of God owes as much to the philosophers of the ancient world as it does to the biblical authors.

This means that we in the West worship the God of reason, even when we no longer believe in God. Rationality became the defining characteristic of God and of the creature made in the image of God – the human. It’s little wonder that, when Immanuel Kant dispensed with the notion of a personal God, reason took the place of the divine as the guiding light of our being in the world.

That was the era known as the Enlightenment, when in the eighteenth century western Europe shrugged off its various religious identities – Christianity had by that time fractured into a multitude of warring parties, never having been terribly good at coalitions – and embarked upon the road of science, reason and progress. Today, many still put their faith in that dream of progress, believing that science will deliver us from evil and give us each day our daily bread, if only we can resist being led into temptation by religion with its ignorance, violence and fanaticism.

But as we count the cost of our dreams of progress, we might do well to wonder about this rational god in whose image we are made. Beneath the veneer of rationality, we are beginning to sense a terrifying madness in our way of being in the world.

Is it possible that we’ve got it all wrong? What if we are made in the image, not of the God of reason but of the God of creation? What if it’s not rationality but creativity that marks our species out as unique among the other animals with which we share this fragile and wonderful world? How might that change our understanding of humanity, and indeed of God?

If we set aside the God of reason and turn to the God of the Bible, we encounter a very different God – a God who creates and destroys, a God who thunders and cries out, a God who weeps and grieves, a God who loves with a tender love and who desires with a passionate desire, a God who speaks not in syllogisms, arguments, premises and propositions, but in music and psalms, in the unfolding of human history, in metaphors of feasting and hunger, of eroticism and mourning. In other words, we encounter a God who looks rather more like an artist at work in her studio than a philosopher at work in the university. So, without denying the importance of reason in enabling us to steer our way through this chiaroscuro world with its choices and decisions, what happens if we expand our idea of what it means to be made in the image of a God whose creative mystery far exceeds all our powers of reason and comprehension?

The Bible opens with God creating the world, with a spirit that broods over the darkness and kindles the cosmos into being, and it was very good. When Jesus seeks to reassure his followers, he directs their attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. When he laments over Jerusalem, he likens himself to a mother hen, brooding over her chicks. When the psalmist seeks the God his heart desires, he looks to the hills and he compares himself to the deer that pants for running water. When he sees the stars and the oceans, the forests and the mountains, his heart overflows with the wonder of God. And when God challenges Job in the midst of his anguish, he speaks out of the whirlwind and points to the grandeur of creation.

The Book of Job has inspired countless writers and artists, with its contemplation on the mystery of suffering and the impossibility of searching the mind of God. It offers us a disturbing picture of Job as a good man who loses everything he cherishes most – livelihood, family, health – because it seems he is the victim of a wager between Satan and God. Job’s friends are the philosophers who try to make him see reason, offering various spectacularly unhelpful suggestions and explanations as to why Job’s life has been plunged into chaos – as friends are wont to do, sometimes. Maybe God is teaching you a lesson, Job. Maybe you’ve brought it on yourself, Job. Are you sure you haven’t screwed up, Job? But that extract we heard in the reading is God’s response to Job. Look at creation, and accept the mystery that you are part of.

Surely, that is the vocation of the artist? To gaze in wonder on the world until that transcendent mystery begins to emerge in all its anguish and glory? To release from the forms and matter of nature that enigmatic other coiled within, to allow it to speak and to reveal itself through the textures and surfaces of canvas and oil, of marble and clay, of pigment and paint? To liberate it into the space between sight and silence, touch and absence, invoking the unspeakable, unnameable other and persuading it to come forth into the space of contemplation and insight, of wonder and terror?

If you go to Binham Priory Church in Norfolk, you’ll see a medieval wall painting of Christ the Man of Sorrows, partially obscured by the biblical texts which were painted over it in the Reformation. It’s a cliché to say that a picture paints a thousand words, but clichés are sometimes only truths that we’ve used too often. Let me read you Michael Begley’s description of the Binham image:

Christ is shown standing, holding a cross. A gold cape is fastened at the neck but falls back to reveal his wounds from which blood streams. Devotion to the five wounds of Christ was a huge cult throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages. ... It was the sinfulness of human beings that had inflicted those wounds, and yet it was by the same wounds that man was saved. The bleeding wounds were seen as wells of God's grace and mercy. The wound in Christ's side was particularly venerated as it gave access to His heart.

The image gives immediate access to the deepest doctrines of the Christian faith, and even the most eloquent words can only blunder in by way of explanation. This is particularly important when we remember that most people who participated in those medieval devotions were illiterate. To paint a text over an image is an act of high cultural elitism, in a society where only the few can read.

When the reformers turned their backs on art and sacramentality, when they denied to our human senses the capacity to touch, taste, see, hear and smell the grace of God shivering and shimmering in the created world, they unwittingly set us along a path of disgrace, a path which would lead to the ruination we are now unleashing on the natural world. In his poem, The Incarnate One, Edwin Muir expresses something of what was lost:

The windless northern surge, the sea-gull's scream,
And Calvin's kirk crowning the barren brae.
I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd's dream,
Christ, man and creature in their inner day.
How could our race betray
The Image, and the Incarnate One unmake
Who chose this form and fashion for our sake?

The Word made flesh here is made word again
A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.
See there King Calvin with his iron pen,
And God three angry letters in a book,
And there the logical hook
On which the Mystery is impaled and bent
Into an ideological argument.

Today, institutionalised Christianity is gaining ground only in its more extreme and dogmatic forms. It has largely lost the capacity to nurture sacramental visions of grace discovered in nature, art and creativity, although we should not underestimate how many artists, musicians and writers continue to draw water from the wells of the Christian faith. Indeed, if those wells were really to run dry, not only would much of our cultural heritage be lost, for we would lack the religious literacy to interpret it, but might the very sources of inspiration evaporate, burned off in the cold white blaze of rationality stripped of wonder, awe and mystery?

George Steiner, literary critic and agnostic Jew, refers to ‘the one question ineradicable in man: Is there or is there not God? Is there or is there not meaning to being?’ He writes of great art being ‘touched by the fire and the ice of God’, even in our own era of ‘vexed modernity’ when

it is not a forgetting which is instrumental, but a negative theism, a peculiarly vivid sense of God’s absence or, to be precise, of His recession. The ‘other’ has withdrawn from the incarnate, leaving either uncertain secular spoors or an emptiness which echoes still with the vibrance of departure.’

Peter Fuller, the atheist art critic who acknowledged a debt to Steiner, similarly insisted that art is only possible before an open horizon of transcendent possibility. He wrote of the ‘palpable and yet mysterious presence of art itself’ and of the crisis created for art and cultural life by the experience described in Matthew Arnold’s poem of ‘“the long-withdrawing roar” of “the Sea of Faith” and the exposure of the naked shingles of the world’.

In this wilderness of contemporary faith, might we seek a revival of meaning in art? As a society, we have lost our appetite for church-going, and yet religious art and music still attract vast crowds. One need only think of the Seeing Salvation exhibition at the National Gallery, or last year’s Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy. Can we discern the shadowy contours of an emergent artistic sensibility, capable of opening the postmodern mind to the mystery which is woven into the fabric of creation and expresses itself through the creativity of the artist open to the creative otherness of God? In asking this, I am suggesting that great art is sacramental in its capacity to overcome the dualism between spirit and body, creator and creation, by weaving a sense of transcendent and unknowable otherness into the materiality of the world, thus rendering opaque the density of objects and bodies so that a luminous eternity glistens within them.

Art has no power to change the world, for great art exerts a different kind of power – not the power of violence and revolution, but the potent vulnerability of imagination and memory, of mourning and of hope. To quote John Updike, ‘The artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. ... That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.’ Art is powerless in itself, and yet it stands as an obstacle in the path of every destructive and oppressive force. That is why every tyrant and ideologue has sought to silence or to control the artistic imagination.

Art is a form of expression in which the quest for truth breaks free of the struggle for domination. It opens up spaces for the exploration of truth in a different idiom, in which many visions and voices co-exist. The Czech writer Milan Kundera suggests that, ‘Applied to art, the notion of history has nothing to do with progress; it does not imply improvement, amelioration, an ascent; it resembles a journey undertaken to explore unknown lands and chart them.’

In these imaginary journeys to chart unknown lands, we can all be seekers after truth along the pathways of art. Of course, art alone will not feed the hungry nor clothe the naked, but it may answer to a deeper need than our basic physical needs. It may be of the very essence of our humanity that we hunger for beauty as much as we hunger for food, and those who seek to do good in the world must be providers of beauty as well as of food to those in need.

There is an extract from a diary in London’s Imperial War Museum, written by one of the first British soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen:

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived ... that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick.

I wish so much that I could discover who did it. It was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and in her hand was a piece of lipstick.

At last someone had done something to make them individuals again; they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. ...

That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Today, our humanity is under threat from many directions, as we are squeezed between the encroaching pressures of an inhumane technocracy on the one hand, and a looming natural catastrophe on the other. Religion becomes part of this dehumanising process, when it privileges dogma over mystery, truth over wonder, law over love. But the Christian religion, like many others, has always found its most expressive and eloquent voice, not through philosophy and theology but through art and music, poetry and literature. Perhaps it’s the vocation of the artist today to give us back our humanity, by reminding us that we are creatures of beauty and transcendence, capable of discerning the eternal within the ephemeral, the infinite within the finite, if only we know how to look.

Let me end with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ great poem to the grandeur of God, which has a prophetic poignancy for those of us who watch in helpless sorrow as nature drowns in torrents of oil:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Abortion, Tradition and Compassion

2010-06-04T12:30:00.002+01:00

The following article written by me appeared in today's Tablet, which carried three pieces on the controversy surrounding the excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride for her part in the decision to abort an eleven week foetus to save a mother's life:

The excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride has embroiled the Catholic Church in yet another scandal, at least in the American media. Sister Margaret, a senior administrator in St. Joseph’s Hospital, Phoenix, Arizona, was on a committee that agreed to the termination of an eleven week pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmsted, announced that Sister Margaret was automatically excommunicated for agreeing to an abortion. His Communications Office subsequently explained that ‘The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s’, and added that not only Sister Margaret but all those involved in the decision were automatically excommunicated.

Some would argue that these teachings are the necessary rigours of a Church which must oppose any deliberate ending of innocent human life. The ethical reasoning behind this is that one may not do evil that good might result, and it has its roots in the belief that the moral value of an action lies in its intention. That is why the Church’s teaching also supports the doctrine of double effect. An action with a good intention might have an unintended but unavoidable negative side effect, in which case it might be morally justified. So, a procedure could be performed with the intention of saving a mother’s life which indirectly caused the death of the foetus (for example, by removing the cancerous womb of a pregnant woman), but the direct, intentional killing of the foetus can never be condoned, even to save the mother’s life.

This kind of argument may appeal to those who value moral absolutes over ambiguity, but many of us regard dilemmas such as the one confronting Sister Margaret and her colleagues as being too complex for formulaic judgements. The intention in this case was not to kill the child but to save the mother, and some may regard the distinction between directly and indirectly destroying the foetus as of little ethical relevance in situations of such tragic complexity. Moreover, many of us are astounded that a hierarchy which has shown such incompetence and moral ambivalence in its handling of the sex abuse crisis, and which has shown greater concern for its own members than for the lives of young people in its care, can act with such ruthless decisiveness with regard to abortion.

But there are grounds for reconsidering the Catholic Church’s present position on abortion by appealing to the wisdom of its own tradition, which is less rigid than the present hierarchy would have us believe. The claim that all abortion is tantamount to murder finds little support in pre-modern theology. Until the late nineteenth century there was widespread debate as to the morality of early and late abortion, with a widespread consensus that early abortion was a less grave sin than late abortion. This was informed by the belief that ‘ensoulment’ was not simultaneous with conception, but that the early foetus went through various stages of pre-human development before it acquired a soul and became fully human. Moreover, while debates about the sinfulness of early abortion were sometimes concerned with the unborn child, they often focused more on the sexual morality of the pregnant woman.

The idea of ensoulment serves as a reminder that the coming into being of a human person is not an instantaneous event but a gradual process, not only in terms of the biological process of fertilisation, implantation and cellular division, but also in terms of the developing consciousness of the mother and her relationship to the child. Given that in Christian theology the understanding of personhood is fundamentally relational because it bears the image of the triune God, it is hard to see how an embryo can be deemed a person before even the mother enters into a rudimentary relationship with it. As many as one in four pregnancies may spontaneously abort during the first eight weeks of pregnancy, often without the woman knowing that she was pregnant. It is morally nonsensical to attribute personhood to the contents of the womb in such situations and, as some Catholic ethicists point out, the logical corollary of this position is that a woman should baptise every menstrual period – just in case.

As a result of abandoning the distinction between early and late abortion, modern Catholicism has become the most absolutist of the world’s religions on this issue. Both Islam and Judaism teach that the life of a woman always takes precedence over that of the unborn child. In less clear-cut situations, they adopt casuistic approaches in which principled opposition to abortion is weighed against particular circumstances, at least in the early stages of pregnancy. So, for example, a fatwa was issued which allowed Muslim victims of the Serbian rape camps to have early abortions. This casuistic method of moral reasoning has much in common with the pre-modern Catholic tradition.

It is right that the Church should be a voice of conscience which speaks out against the commodification of human life, and this must include a concern for abortion. Britain’s abortion rates remain unacceptably high – even although there has been a downward trend in recent years – and it is hard not to conclude that abortion is sometimes used as a form of contraception. This does not, however, lend support to those who argue that contraception is responsible for high abortion rates. Statistics show that, when women have ready access to contraception and abortion laws are liberal, as in northern and western Europe, abortion rates are lower than in the largely Catholic countries of Central and South America, despite the fact that abortion in such countries is often illegal and poses a significant risk to a woman’s life. If the Catholic hierarchy seeks to defend the dignity of all human life – including women’s lives – it would do well to pay more attention to what actually works and what does not work in terms of reducing the incidence of maternal mortality and abortion. In this respect, it is regrettable that Pope Benedict XVI’s most recent encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, refers repeatedly to issues of reproduction and abortion but it makes no mention at all of maternal mortality, despite the fact that nearly 350,000 women die every year of childbirth-related causes, 99% of them in the world’s poorest countries. An estimated 60,000 of these are abortion-related deaths. This suggests that outlawing abortion, far from saving lives, drives desperate women to risk their own lives rather than continuing with unwanted pregnancies.

These are complex issues and they do not lend themselves to easy answers. However, not least among the many challenges facing the Catholic hierarchy is the urgent need to respect the moral authority of women themselves in these areas. It is unacceptable in today’s world that a religious hierarchy made up exclusively of celibate men should claim the right to make authoritative decisions regarding these most intimate areas of women’s lives. If it is to have any moral credibility in the modern world, the magisterium must include women theologians and ethicists in the formulation of its teachings and doctrines.

To acknowledge that there are cases when early abortion is the lesser of two evils is not to be pro-abortion, any more than to acknowledge that sometimes war may be a necessary evil means that one is pro-war. There is a pro-life position which refuses all forms of violence, including abortion and war, and it finds near-unanimous support in the very early Christian tradition. If one really believes that the intentional taking of innocent life is never permitted, then surely one must be pacifist as well as anti-abortion, given that the methods of modern warfare mean that the vast majority of casualties of war are now civilians? This pro-life position also entails a commitment to martyrdom if necessary – the martyrdom of a woman who accepts a pregnancy which poses a potentially deadly threat to her own life, or the martyrdom of a person who chooses to die rather than kill when confronted by an aggressor. But martyrdom cannot be imposed, it has to be willingly accepted, and to insist that the life of a young mother of four existing children should be sacrificed to preserve an eleven week foetus would strike many as a particularly brutal form of imposed martyrdom. There has to be greater wisdom and compassion in the ways in which the Catholic hierarchy responds to the kind of moral dilemmas faced by Sister Margaret and her colleagues.

Gender confusion? - Whose Confusion?

2010-05-31T09:28:00.007+01:00

The following article appeared in yesterday's New York Times. If you're feeling in need of some comic relief after all the dismal news about oil spills and yet another money-grabbing politician, you should read the whole thing, but here's the bit that really made my day.

Candidates applying for the Catholic priesthood must apparently now answer a wide range of questions about their sexuality:

[M]ost candidates are likely to be asked not only about past sexual activities but also about masturbation fantasies, consumption of alcohol, relationships with parents and the causes of romantic breakups. All must take H.I.V. tests and complete written exams like the 567-question Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which screens for, among other things, depression, paranoia and gender confusion. In another test, candidates must submit sketches of anatomically correct human figures.

Wait - there's more. Rev. Kevin J. Sweeney, Dirctor of Vocations of the Brooklyn Diocese who is, according to the report, 'one of the more successful vocation directors in the country', has this to say:

Father Sweeney said the new rules were not the order of battle for a witch hunt. “We do not say that homosexuals are bad people,” he said. “And sure, homosexuals have been good priests.”
"But it has to do with our view of marriage,” he said. “A priest can only give his life to the church in the sense that a man gives his life to a female spouse. A homosexual man cannot have the same relationship. It’s not about condemning anybody. It’s about our world view.”

Not much gender confusion there then. But Father Sweeney, if I may be so bold, the idea of the priesthood being a marital gang bang sounds to me like a masturbation fantasy of the highest order. (And, er, haven't you noticed that there are men - not to mention children - in the church?)

May I suggest a few alternative questions?

Do you like women?
Do you believe that women and men are fully equal to one another?
Do you get on well with women?
How many women friends do you have?

________________________________________

The New York Times, May 30, 2010

Prospective Catholic Priests Face Sexuality Hurdles

By PAUL VITELLO

Every job interview has its awkward moments, but in recent years, the standard interview for men seeking a life in the Roman Catholic priesthood has made the awkward moment a requirement.

“When was the last time you had sex?” all candidates for the seminary are asked. (The preferred answer: not for three years or more.)

“What kind of sexual experiences have you had?” is another common question. “Do you like pornography?”

Depending on the replies, and the results of standardized psychological tests, the interview may proceed into deeper waters: “Do you like children?” and “Do you like children more than you like people your own age?”

It is part of a soul-baring obstacle course prospective seminarians are forced to run in the aftermath of a sexual abuse crisis that church leaders have decided to confront, in part, by scrubbing their academies of potential molesters, according to church officials and psychologists who screen candidates in New York and the rest of the country.

But many of the questions are also aimed at another, equally sensitive mission: deciding whether gay applicants should be denied admission under complex recent guidelines from the Vatican that do not explicitly bar all gay candidates but would exclude most of them, even some who are celibate.

Scientific studies have found no link between sexual orientation and abuse, and the church is careful to describe its two initiatives as more or less separate. One top adviser to American seminaries characterized them as “two circles that might overlap here and there.”

Still, since the abuse crisis erupted in 2002, curtailing the entry of gay men into the priesthood has become one the church’s highest priorities. And that task has fallen to seminary directors and a cadre of psychologists who say that culling candidates has become an arduous process of testing, interviewing and making decisions — based on social science, church dogma and gut instinct.

“The best way I can put it, it’s not black and white,” said the adviser, the Rev. David Toups, the director of the secretariat of clergy, consecrated life and vocations of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “It’s more like one of those things where it’s hard to define, but ‘I know it when I see it.’ ”

Many church officials have been reluctant to discuss the screening process, and its details differ from diocese to diocese. In the densely populated Diocese of Brooklyn, officials are confident of their results in one respect.

“We have no gay men in our seminary at this time,” said Dr. Robert Palumbo, a psychologist who has screened seminary candidates at the diocese’s Cathedral Seminary Residence in Douglaston, Queens, for 10 years. “I’m pretty sure of it.” Whether that reflects rigorous vetting or the reluctance of gay men to apply, he could not say. “I’m just reporting what is,” he said.

Concern over gay men in the priesthood has simmered in the church for centuries, and has been heightened in recent years by claims from some Catholic scholars that 25 percent to 50 percent of priests in the United States are gay. The church has never conducted its own survey, but other experts have estimated the number to be far smaller.

The sexual abuse scandal has prompted some conservative bishops to lay blame for the crisis on a “homosexual subculture” in the priesthood. While no one has proposed expelling gay priests, the crisis has pitted those traditionalists against other Catholics who attribute the problem to priests, gay and straight, with dysfunctional personalities.

In 2005, the Vatican sidestepped that ideological debate, but seemed to appease conservatives by issuing guidelines that would strictly limit the admission of gay men to Catholic seminaries.

The guidelines, which bolstered existing rules that had been widely unenforced, defined homosexuality in both clear-cut and ambiguous ways: Men who actively “practice homosexuality” should be barred. But seminary rectors were left to discern the meaning of less obvious instructions to reject candidates who “show profoundly deep-rooted homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called gay culture.”

Though some Catholics saw room in that language for admitting celibate gay men, the Vatican followed up in 2008 with a clarification. “It is not enough to be sure that he is capable of abstaining from genital activity,” ruled the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education, which issued the initial guidelines. “It is also necessary to evaluate his sexual orientation.”

Some seminary directors were baffled by the word “orientation,” said Thomas G. Plante, a psychologist and the director of the Spirituality and Health Institute at Santa Clara University, who screens seminary candidates for several dioceses in California and nationwide.

Could a psychologically mature gay person, committed to celibacy, never become a priest? Dr. Plante said several admissions officers asked. Could the church afford to turn away good candidates in the midst of a critical priest shortage?

The Vatican permits every bishop and leader of a religious order to make those decisions, which vary from stricter to more liberal interpretations of the rules. But the methods of reaching them have become increasingly standard, experts say.

Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, a psychologist at Catholic University who has screened seminarians and once headed a treatment center for abusive priests, said the screening could be “very intrusive.” But he added, “We are looking for two basic qualities: the absence of pathology and the presence of health.”

To that end, most candidates are likely to be asked not only about past sexual activities but also about masturbation fantasies, consumption of alcohol, relationships with parents and the causes of romantic breakups. All must take H.I.V. tests and complete written exams like the 567-question Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which screens for, among other things, depression, paranoia and gender confusion. In another test, candidates must submit sketches of anatomically correct human figures.

In interviews by psychologists — who are usually selected because they are Catholic therapists with religious views matching those of the local church leadership — candidates are also likely to be asked about their strategies for managing sexual desire.

“Do you take cold showers? Do you take long runs?” said Dr. Plante, describing a typical barrage of questions intended both to gather information and to let screeners assess the candidate’s poise and self-awareness — or to observe the tics and eye-avoidance that may signal something else.

In seminaries that seek to hew closely to the Vatican rules, a candidate may be measured by the extent to which he defines himself as gay.

The church views gay sex as a sin and homosexual tendencies as a psychological disorder, but it does not bar chaste gay men from participating in the sacraments. That degree of acceptance does not extend to ordination.

“Whether he is celibate or not, the person who views himself as a ‘homosexual person,’ rather than as a person called to be a spiritual father — that person should not be a priest,” said Father Toups, of the bishops’ conference.

Beyond his assertion that “I know it when I see it,” no one interviewed for this article was able to describe exactly how screeners or seminary directors determine whether someone’s sexual orientation defines him. Some Catholics have expressed fear that such vagueness leads to bias and arbitrariness. Others call it a distraction from the more important objective of finding good, emotionally healthy priests.

“A criterion like this may not ensure that you are getting the best candidates,” said Mark D. Jordan, the R. R. Niebuhr professor at Harvard Divinity School, who has studied homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood. “Though it might get you people who lie or who are so confused they do not really know who they are.”

“And not the least irony here,” he added, “is that these new regulations are being enforced in many cases by seminary directors who are themselves gay.”

It is difficult to gauge reaction to the recent guidelines among seminary students and gay priests. Priests who once defended the work of gay men in the priesthood have become reluctant to speak publicly.

“It is impossible for them to come forward in this atmosphere,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, an advocacy group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics. “The bishops have scapegoated gay priests because gays are still an acceptable scapegoat in this society, particularly among weekly churchgoers.”

Seminary officials of the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Archdiocese of New York would not permit a reporter to interview seminarians. But the Brooklyn diocese did allow a reporter to talk to its psychologist, Dr. Palumbo, and its director of vocations, the Rev. Kevin J. Sweeney, whose incoming classes of three to five seminarians each year make him one of the more successful vocation directors in the country. Half of the nation’s seminaries have one or two new arrivals each a year, and one-quarter get none, according to a recent church study.

Father Sweeney said the new rules were not the order of battle for a witch hunt. “We do not say that homosexuals are bad people,” he said. “And sure, homosexuals have been good priests.”

“But it has to do with our view of marriage,” he said. “A priest can only give his life to the church in the sense that a man gives his life to a female spouse. A homosexual man cannot have the same relationship. It’s not about condemning anybody. It’s about our world view.”

The Excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride

2010-05-27T16:18:00.001+01:00

The Spectator - Nun's excommunication shows hypocrisy:

Sister Margaret McBride, the highest-ranking Catholic official at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Ariz., was excommunicated earlier this month.

The sin that earned her the most severe punishment the church can dole out?

McBride condoned a life-saving abortion for a patient.

A 27-year-old woman pregnant with her fifth child arrived at St. Joseph’s last November in critical condition. Doctors discovered she had pulmonary hypertension, a heart condition that would have almost certainly caused her to die if she had not aborted her 11-week pregnancy.

McBride, the hospital’s vice president of mission integration, consulted with a group of medical professionals. They approved the procedure to save the patient, who was already experiencing heart failure, according to hospital records.

See also 'Sister Margaret's Choice' by Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times.

What is Theology?

2010-05-24T15:24:00.000+01:00

There's a lively discussion happening over on The Guardian's "Comment is Free" website in the "Belief" section. I was asked to contribute a piece on the question "What is theology?" I love the fact that so many people who repudiate religion and theology spend so much time wrangling about them on the Web!

Being Catholic, Being Human - Pentecostal Musings

2010-05-24T10:38:00.005+01:00

I've dedicated much of this blog in recent months to criticising the Catholic Church in the light of the position of women and the sex abuse scandal, and I make no apologies for that. Yet there is sometimes a risk that legitimate criticisms obscure the vast canvas of goodness and hope against which they are daubed, and sometimes it's necessary to step back and celebrate the wider picture.

Twice this weekend I've been reminded of how vital and positive the Catholic faith is, and of how it reaches across all human boundaries to create a vast living organism made up of billions of people, living and dead, which spans eras, continents and cultures in its universality. These seem like appropriate reflections for the Feast of Pentecost.

First, I listened to a podcast of Desert Island Discs, broadcast on 26th March, which featured the writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce, whose film credits include Hilary and Jackie, Welcome to Sarajevo and 24 Hour Party People. DID is one of my favourite radio programmes (the other is In Our Time), and Cottrell-Boyce was one of the most joyful interviewees I've heard. He referred repeatedly (without any pious pretentiousness) to the centrality of Catholicism in his life, offering vivid reminiscences of a working class childhood in Liverpool where the church was the hub of the community, and of his own experience of family life as a husband and father of seven children, all of whom - remarkably - share their parents' commitment to their Catholic faith. It was a life-giving programme which made no mention of the Church's failings, but rather served as a reminder that the Catholic Church has been a great force for good in postwar Britain, in its provision of education and its capacity to hold together communities and families at times of social disintegration and growing economic disenfranchisement. I believe it still has that capacity, and it would be a great loss to our society if we allowed the failings of the Church to obscure its enduring strengths. Cottrell-Boyce's chosen record was Allegri's Miserere, his book was Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and his luxury was a ferris wheel!

The other experience which made me stop and think was reading an article by John Waters in Friday's Irish Times, reflecting on the pervasive antagonism towards the Catholic Church in the Irish media (which is of course also true of the British media). He refers to a speech by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin which encompassed a wide range of questions and insights about the Catholic faith in modern Ireland, but which the media reported very selectively only in the context of its relatively few references to the sex abuse scandal. You can follow the link to read the full article, but here are the paragraphs which most struck me, because they apply to any society in which a secularist ideology has triumphed over perennial questions of human existence which necessarily shade towards theological reflection:

[C]itizens now have no public forum – in the day-to-day public conversation that largely creates the culture in which they live – in which to encounter explorations of the fundamental questions relating to their humanity in its fullest dimensions. Each of us is, for example, mortal, and we must deal with this condition as perhaps the most defining aspect of our human condition. We are frail, fragile beings, mystified as to the origins of our consciousnesses and inner realities.

Ireland is a human community more than an economy political society or democracy. The vast majority of those who inhabit the civil realm also continue to perceive their essential humanity through the prism offered by Catholicism. We are all citizens, yes, but most of us are also embraced by that religious category, “the Catholic faithful”, and even those who are not betray the same human characteristics as those who are. Whether any particular individual elects to “believe” or not is beside the point: we are all subject to – and, perhaps more importantly, are collectively defined by – several ineluctable facts: we are creatures, we are dependent and we are mortal. No matter how effectively media-generated culture succeeds in shutting out the questions arising from these ineluctable human characteristics, they continue to assert themselves in our silent, solitary moments, in our dreams and nightmares, in moments of apprehension or ill-health. In a Christian society, only Christ answers these questions.

The first and most fundamental issue at stake in the crisis that besets the church, therefore, is not the “faith” of Irish citizens, but the capacity of the public conversation to accommodate discussion of the total humanity of Irish people. The threat is not to our Catholicism but to our humanity.

While I think the vitality of Catholicism is well-served by informed and trenchant criticism when necessary, I admit that reading that article made me ask myself if sometimes I too quickly allow the secular media to shape my perceptions of the Church. Catholics in today's world need to face both ways, not by being Janus-faced but by appreciating that our identities and values cannot but be shaped by secular and theological perspectives, and that the two must be held in creative tension. It's so easy to lose our balance, and tilt into defensive religiosity on the one hand or hostile critique on the other. Keeping one's balance is easier said than done, but perhaps this posting shows me picking myself up and dusting off my knees, preparing for the next fall (as a daughter of Eve must do)!

Save the foetus - let the mother die

2010-05-19T07:44:00.002+01:00

We have seen in recent months just how reluctant the Catholic hierarchy has been to take decisive action against abusive priests. Yet once again, we are reminded that no such prevarication afflicts its ability to act with ruthless efficiency when it comes to policing women's bodies by appealing to a form of moral absolutism which has little justification in the Catholic tradition. Until the last century, there has always been greater flexibility in the Church's understanding of early abortion than Bishop Olmsted's actions suggest - particularly in situations when the mother's life is at risk. Until the men who govern the Church become less intoxicated with their own power and more willing to listen to women who live and love in situations which sometimes create profound moral dilemmas, some of them will continue to behave as the most brutal and ignorant of moral dictators. Once again, the actions of a bishop bring shame upon the Church - and embarassment upon the many wise bishops and priests who know better than to reduce the profound complexities and tragedies of human life to black and white moral absolutes. Sometimes it seems as if it's better to be a foetus than a woman, if one wants the protection and love of the Church.

Published on National Catholic Reporter (http://ncronline.org)

________________________________________

Nun excommunicated for allowing abortion

May 18, 2010

By Michael Clancy

PHOENIX -- A Catholic nun, who was a member of a Phoenix Catholic hospital's ethics committee, was excommunicated and reassigned last week for her role in allowing an abortion to take place at the hospital. The surgery was considered necessary to save the life of a critically ill patient.

The surgery took place at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. The decision, involving Sister of Mercy Margaret McBride, physicians and the patient, drew a sharp rebuke from Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix diocese. He said abortion is not permissible under any circumstances.

A statement from the Phoenix diocese said, McBride was excommunicated because she "held a position of authority at the hospital and was frequently consulted on ethicalmatters. She gave her consent that the abortion was a morally good and allowable act according to church teaching. Furthermore, she admitted this directly to Bishop Olmsted. Since she gave her consent and encouraged an abortion she automatically excommunicated herself from the church."

The statement added that other Catholics McBride consulted "who gave their consent and encouraged this abortion were also excommunicated by that very action. So too is anyone else at St. Joseph’s who participated in the action; including doctors and nurses."

Neither Olmsted nor McBride would answer questions about the case. Nor would hospital administrators or officials of Catholic Healthcare West, St. Joseph’s parent company. St. Joseph’s is Phoenix’s first hospital, and one of the area’s most prominent.

The bishop does not have direct control of the hospital, but as bishop he carries authority on matters of faith and morals.

The surgery took place in late 2009 as the patient’s condition worsened. She had a rare and often fatal condition called pulmonary hypertension in which a pregnancy can make things much worse. She was 11 weeks pregnant, according to a statement from the hospital.

Pulmonary hypertension limits the ability of the heart and lungs to function properly, especially when confronted with the physical changes that accompany pregnancy.

McBride, who had been vice president of mission integration at the hospital, was on call as a member of the hospital's ethics committee when the surgery took place, hospital officials said. The committee is called in for circumstances such as these, but the nature of the group’s deliberations is unknown.

The patient was not identified, and details of her case cannot be revealed under federal privacy laws.

The hospital defended the ethics committee's decision.

In a statement, Suzanne Pfister, a hospital vice president, said that the facility adheres to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services. But, she argued, the directives leave some gray areas.

"In those instances where the Directives do not explicitly address a clinical situation -- such as when a pregnancy threatens a woman's life -- an Ethics Committee is convened to help our caregivers and their patients make the most life-affirming decision,” she said. "In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother's life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy.”

Pfister issued the statement on behalf of the hospital, its parent company Catholic Healthcare West, and the Sisters of Mercy, McBride's religious order.

According to the medical directives that the hospital follows, abortion is defined as the directly intended termination of pregnancy, and it is not permitted under any circumstances.

But a second directive allows conditions other than pregnancy to be treated, even if they result in termination of the pregnancy.

In a statement issued late Friday, May 14, the diocese confirmed that Olmsted learned of the case after the surgery.

"I am gravely concerned by the fact that an abortion was performed several months ago in a Catholic hospital in this diocese," Olmsted said. "I am further concerned by the hospital's statement that the termination of a human life was necessary to treat the mother's underlying medical condition.

"An unborn child is not a disease. While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother's life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means."

Olmsted added that if a Catholic "formally cooperates" in an abortion, he or she is automatically excommunicated.

“The Catholic church will continue to defend life and proclaim the evil of abortion without compromise, and must act to correct even her own members if they fail in this duty.”

Olmsted disputed Pfister on whether the health-care directives were vague, arguing that they are “very clear,” despite the details of the case.

Olmsted is known in the Phoenix Diocese for his strong advocacy of pro-life issues. He has led prayers in front of Planned Parenthood offices several times, has forbid Mass to take place at a Phoenix venue celebrating the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe because the venue previously had hosted Planned Parenthood, and criticized the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation for its links to the family-planning organization.

He has not refused Communion to politicians who have taken pro-choice positions.

A letter sent May 10 from Catholic Healthcare West, signed by Sr. Judith Carle, board chairwoman, and President and CEO Lloyd Dean, asks Olmsted to provide further clarification about the directives. Agreeing that in a healthy mother, pregnancy is "not a pathology," it says this case was different. The pregnancy, the letter says, carried a nearly certain risk of death for the mother.

"If there had been a way to save the pregnancy and still prevent the death of the mother, we would have done it," the letter says. "We are convinced there was not."

Fr. John Ehrich, head of Olmsted’s medical ethics committee, disagreed with that conclusion.

“In difficult situations when the mother’s life is threatened by an underlying condition, the solution can never be to directly kill her unborn child,” he wrote for the diocesan newspaper, the Catholic Sun. To do so is an abortion…. The reason for such a procedure never matters.”

McBride was the highest-ranking member of the Sisters of Mercy at the hospital, which the order founded in 1895. In an e-mail, Pfister said McBride has been transferred "to another position in the hospital to focus on a number of new strategic initiatives."

Catholic News Services reported that in a letter to the editor of The Arizona Republic May 18, Dr. John Garvie, chief of gastroenterology at St. Joseph's, called McBride "the moral conscience of the hospital" and said "there is no finer defender of life at our hospital."

"What she did was something very few are asked to do, namely, to make a life-and-death decision with the full recognition that in order to save one life, another life must be sacrificed," Garvie said. "People not involved in these situations should reflect and not criticize."

According to a brief biography posted on the hospital's website, McBride "has 34 years of health care experience in both for-profit and not-for-profit health care management." She holds a bachelor's degree in nursing and a master's in public administration, both from the University of San Francisco.

[Michael Clancy is a reporter for The Arizona Republic [2].]

More Information:

• Copies of Olmsted and Pfister’s complete statements are here [3].

• The Phoenix diocese put together a resources page on its newspaper's Web site: Resources and more information about the situation at St. Joseph's Hospital [4]

• On the U.S. bishops' conference Web site are the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services [5]

Time for a women's reformation?

2010-04-19T11:43:00.004+01:00

(When I first posted this, I described it as 'an extravagant polemical gush'. Several readers have persuaded me that I shouldn't be so apologetic, so I've deleted that description!)

With some admirable exceptions, the Catholic Church's leaders today are made up largely of authoritarians on the one hand and cowards and conformists on the other, and this has in no small measure contributed to the ongoing scandal of the sex abuse crisis. Cover-ups have been possible because the politics of the Vatican have been manipulated by a corrupted and collusive clique which has flourished in a culture of secrecy and unaccountability. (See, for example, Robert Mickens' article in this week's Tablet.) This has resulted in a culture of bullying and fear, in which the most aggressive conservatives seek to tyrannise those who dare to question the church's current position on important issues, particularly around issues of sexuality, the role of women, and the form of the liturgy.

Few bishops seem willing to speak up in defence of the silent and increasingly alienated majority. Marginalised and remote from the corridors of power, they too may feel alienated and silenced - but if they can't take a stand, who can? While Mass attendance plummets, those who leave are unacknowledged and unmourned, so that the Church risks becoming a small, self-referential clique of those who smugly congratulate themselves for staying, and the failure of bishops and priests to challenge that attitude makes them part of the problem. That's why Hans Kung's open letter to the bishops, published last week in several languages, is like a hand grenade tossed into the crisis. He is scathing about the leadership of his former friend and erstwhile persecutor, Pope Benedict XVI, and he calls upon the bishops to take a stand on a wide range of contested issues in defiance of the Vatican.

In my recent article publised on Open Democracy, I pointed out how much more zealous the church's leaders have been in hunting down dissenting theologians than sex abusers. Even today, in the midst of the worst crisis in modern history, women's religious orders in America are undergoing a process of enquiry by Rome to weed out feminists and secularists. Where are our leaders who would stand up and defend us? Where are the voices of those who might speak out in favour of a healthy theological and ethical climate of debate and freedom of speech? Do our bishops and priests really have so little confidence in the truth of the faith they proclaim, that they think they have to protect it by colluding with Rome's regimes of silencing and control?

The last time corruption on this scale became such an issue in the Church, it resulted in the Reformation. But still, throughout all these transformations and changes, Christianity was and is a religion made for and by men. Of course women have played a role, sometimes a significant role, in influencing its development, but in its doctrines, structures of leadership and practices of faith, it is a religion designed to meet men's expectations on earth as in heaven, and to satisfy their spiritual and intellectual desires. Thus we have a God made in the image of man, a religious elite which, whether in strident evangelicalism or corrupted Catholicism, still asserts its narrow-minded control over human desire and sexuality, and a religious ethos which causes people to expend far more energy on abortion, feminism and homosexuality than on war, poverty and the structural violence upon which neo-liberal capitalism depends. Meanwhile, like volcanic dust gathering in the stratosphere, the growing disillusionment of women forms an invisible miasma which might yet ground our ecclesiastical high fliers. Most of the time, when one mentions the discontentment of women to priests and male theologians, the response is blank incomprehension or denial. Feminists are dismissed as an anachronistic little clique of leftovers from the 1970s, who ought to shut up or get out. They don't hear the truth, because they don't ask and they don't listen.

It's time for a women's reformation, and we'll bring that about not by leaving (they ignore us if we leave, and the church is ours as much as it is theirs), but by staying in and speaking out. For the last forty years, women biblical scholars and theologians have built up a vast body of scholarship which is still largely ignored by those in power. Week after week, Christian priests and ministers bumble on with their lacklustre homilies and sermons, oblivious and indifferent to the energy, zest and dynamism of so many theological voices which challenge and renew our readings of the Bible and Christian doctrine: women, postcolonial Christians, gay and lesbian theologians, environmentalists, pacifists - academic theology is teeming as never before with voices of difference and newness of vision. But, when theologians do puncture public consciousness on a significant scale, it's weary old conservatism in radical orthodoxy guise that tends to get a hearing - Phillip Blond as religious advisor to the Tories, John Milbank as darling of the Vatican. Give us a break!

It might seem an odd time to experience a profound sense of hope, and yet that is what I feel. At last, cracks are appearing in the monolith. The bishops of England and Wales were quick to distance themselves from the suggestion by a senior member of the Vatican that the present crisis is attributable to homosexuality.

The shabby and shameful regime in Rome has lost its credibility and its authority. The Catholic Church is an astonishing historical, cultural and spiritual phenomenon - woven into the human story as no other religion or creed ever has been, extending across the globe and encompassing some of the greatest as well as the worst of human aspirations in our yearning and quest for God. Let's reclaim the church while the grip of these men is temporarily weakened. We need to speak out and keep speaking out, not in the name of an aggressive and hostile power struggle, but in order to ensure that the tyrannical minority is never again able to control the hearts and minds - not to mention the bodies - of the people of Christ.

Whew!

The Catholic Church and the Sex Abuse Scandal

2010-04-15T11:24:00.000+01:00

I have written an article on the sex abuse scandal which has been published in the online journal, Open Democracy: 'The Catholic Church's Scandal: Modern Crisis, Ancient Roots'