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Stuart Reid

The virtue of scepticism

Friday 12 March 2010

A souvenir shop at Medjugorje. The Bosnian shrine is said to trouble Pope Benedict XVI PA

Is the Vatican in the grip of a Satanic conspiracy? Have the Freemasons finally taken over? Is the world going to end on December 21, 2012? Are we going to have a nice summer?

Let’s leave the Freemasons out of this for the time being, and the end of the world, and even the weather, and let’s concentrate instead on the Satanism in the Vatican.

Last week we read that Italy’s best known exorcist, Fr Gabriele Amorth, had written a book of memoirs in which he claimed that there are Satanic sects in the Vatican, and that even some cardinals are implicated.

Another demonologist, however, the Spaniard Fr José Antonio Fortea Cucurull, said not to worry: Fr Amorth is misinformed; there are no Satanic sects in the Vatican.

Take your pick. My money’s on the Spaniard.

Also last week it was reported in the Italian media that the Pope had set up a special commission to investigate the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje. The reports have not been confirmed by the Vatican, but it is known that Benedict XVI is troubled by the Bosnian cult, as is the local bishop. In fact, the local bishop has condemned it.

Fr Amorth, on the other hand, regards Medjugorje as a “fortress against Satan” and a “continuation of Fatima”.

Where to turn, whom to trust, what to think? Maybe it is time to recall the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. To these we might perhaps add a fifth (though it is implicit in the first): scepticism.

Even such reputable shrines as Fatima come with added extras, and one needs to keep one’s wits about one. Fatima is “worthy of belief”, but it is not de fide. Nothing is gained, and much might be lost, by feeding on stories of apparitions, promises and secrets.

Many very good and holy people feed hungrily on these things, of course, but to me there is something rather spooky about wanting to be let in on secrets, to know what the future holds. That sort of thing is astrology, not Christianity.

I am not suggesting that there is anything spooky about the Catholics who will flock to Fatima on May 12 for the Pope’s visit – I should rather like to be there myself – but it never does any harm to recall that, when the “third secret” of Fatima was released by the Vatican in 2000, the then Cardinal Ratzinger, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, made this sobering point: “Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed. Fatima does not satisfy our curiosity in this way, just as Christian faith in general cannot be reduced to an object of mere curiosity.”

So what’s the message of Fatima? According to Joseph Ratzinger, Fatima is an “exhortation to prayer as the path of ‘salvation for souls’ and, likewise, the summons to penance and conversion”. The message, in other words, is the message of the Gospels.

But many people want more, and those who had been expecting exciting apocalyptic revelations did not conclude that they had been mistaken. Instead they developed new and more apocalyptic conspiracy theories – among them that Cardinal Ratzinger was covering up the true “third secret” – and spread them to the four corners of the world – and perhaps even as far as Mars – via the internet.

Maybe we should listen to Hilaire Belloc, who in his 1931 essay, “The Approach to the Sceptic” wrote: “We of the Faith do well to safeguard in ourselves this robust and healthy quality [scepticism]; for in the absence or weakness of it we may come to accept nonsense even in sacred things, and, what is worse, we shall weaken our reasoning faculty.”

Once we weaken reason we weaken the Faith, and move towards superstition. All that matters is Truth.

***

I yield to no one in my admiration for Andrew M Brown, but I cannot share his enthusiasm for this year’s Oscar winner, The Hurt Locker. I thought it was a dud.

The film, as even the most cloistered contemplative will know by now, was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and is about a US bomb disposal team in Iraq. The hero is a man so addicted to danger that he puts the lives of his comrades at risk.

There is a gritty realism about the film, they say, but Guy Marot, a former bomb disposal officer with the Royal Engineers, thought it was more gritty than real. He told the Guardian last September that the hero is “basically insane... he just rocks up near a device and puts on a bomb suit”.

“At one point,” observed Marot, “he is shown pulling five or six 155mm rounds out of the ground; each of those weighs 44kg, and he’s wearing a 40-50kg bomb suit as well. The fundamental stupidity is just staggering.

“If a bomb disposal officer started behaving like this, he or she would be shipped home in minutes.”

So why did it win the Oscar for best picture? Is it cos the director is a woman? Of course, but I sense there is another reason: the film is neutral about the war but very positive about the courage of American soldiers – not least when that courage manifests itself as gung-ho recklessness – and that will have allowed hawks and doves to unite in feel-good patriotism.

***

My local MP (Labour) turned up on our doorstep at the weekend. He and I had a full and frank exchange of views, which is to say that I went into a mad rant about... oh, you know, the usual stuff: the Iraq war, “life issues”, Kosovo, the Nazis.

As the MP was preparing to make his escape, Mary returned from the shops. She did not know who the man on the doorstep was, but nonetheless told him that she had not yet made her mind how she intended to vote.

In that case, he said... and gave her a leaflet. She glanced at it, and saw a name in big letters. “Oh,” she said. “Martin Linton. I don’t like him.”

“I’m Martin Linton,” said our MP. I think the Reids have been crossed off the Labour list.

Dave’s episcopal boost

Friday 5 March 2010

Internet addiction is fuelled by the idea that 'if I click on just one more link, everything will fall into place'

In their pre-election statement, Choosing the Common Good, the bishops give David Cameron a boost by implicitly supporting his policies on marriage and the family.

Whether this nod of approval will improve Mr Cameron’s chances of winning the election remains to be seen, but it does nothing to persuade me to vote Tory, or to feel that it would be other than a matter for Confession if I were to do so. (Venial or mortal? Tricky. Perhaps I should ask Fr Tim Finigan.)

Besides, the bishops also express sentiments in the document that will be read as pro-Labour, and it is only to be expected that they should back just about any policy that might protect marriage. In his speech in Brighton on Sunday Mr Cameron seemed to be doing the right thing when he again committed his party to recognising marriage in the tax system.

In terms of simple justice, that is a good thing, of course, but a bung of £20 a week won’t keep couples together, and the problem with Mr Cameron is that he is an agreeable cove but it is difficult to know what he means by marriage, or for that matter by the family. Sometimes it seems that any combination of bodies and babies will do. In a key passage in his Brighton speech Mr Cameron revealed more about himself and his attitudes than he perhaps intended. It is worth quoting the passage in full:

“I was on a radio phone-in in Kent the other day, and a young man rang up and said that he had got his girlfriend pregnant, and he wanted to move in with her, and together to bring up that child and give it the best start in life, but he had found out that if he moved in with his girlfriend, she would lose her benefits, and be much worse off, so he couldn’t do it. What sort of crazy country sends a signal like that to people who want to do the best for their families? That’s the change we’ve got to bring in this party, that’s the value that we aspire to.”

The real question is: what sort of crazy Tory leader can send out a signal like that to the people who want the best for families? Read the paragraph again. In the first place Mr Cameron, champion of marriage, is morally neutral about marriage. In the second place, however, he suggests that young men cannot be expected to look after their girlfriends and babies unless the state subsidises them.

In Mr Cameron’s view, that man on the phone-in simply “couldn’t” give his child what he regarded as the best start in life, because, if he joined his girlfriend in that enterprise, she would lose benefits (and, presumably, they would both be worse off).

There is no suggestion from Mr Cameron that the man might think it right to give his baby the best start in life by marrying the woman, even if that meant she had to give up her single mum allowance, or whatever, and he, in consequence, had to work harder. Are we really as venal as Mr Cameron apparently believes?

It is not just the Tories, however. Mr Cameron is a child of his times. Like all our politicians, he believes, with Roy Jenkins, that the permissive society is just another term for the civilised society, and that civilisation means gay adoption and gay “marriage”, non-judgmental sex education, and embryonic stem-cell research. In other words, it means moral relativism. That is not going to change whoever wins the election.

A lot of headbangers, not all of them Catholics, attended the Spectator debate on England and Catholicism on Tuesday night. When the floor was thrown open to questions, a Protestant stood up and declared that there was no priest but Christ and that the debate had been fixed. “The Protestant people of this country have not been heard tonight,” he said.

Maybe it was a Popish plot. Maybe the Jesuits had fed mind-altering substances into the air vents, and we’d all rolled over for Rome. Certainly the proceedings were odd, if only because the Catholic side won so handsomely.

The motion was that “England should be a Catholic country again”. Before the debate, the audience had divided as follows: 247 for the motion, 189 against, 226 undecided. After the debate, the figures were: 349 for, 227 against, 42 undecided.

I voted for the motion, but had not expected to be on the winning side. We were obviously helped – as the Protestant noticed – by the fact that one of the speakers against the motion, the Labour MP Stephen Pound, a Catholic, ended up speaking for it.

There had been a misunderstanding. Apparently, Mr Pound had thought that he was speaking against the idea that England should become a Catholic state. He didn’t want that, but he was all for England being Catholic.

The other two speakers against the motion were Lord Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, and Matthew Parris, the Times and Spectator columnist. For the motion were Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Dom Antony Sutch, the former headmaster of Downside, and the novelist Piers Paul Read. Matthew Parris, whom I know and admire, was pretty savage but was neither strident nor rude – to his audience at any rate. “Jesus of Nazareth is a colossal embarrassment to the Catholic Church,” he said; and vice-versa. “Can anyone see Jesus looking at the Vatican and saying that that was what he had come to found?”

“Yes!” shouted a headbanger. There were times when the evening began to sound like a revivalist tent meeting in Idaho.

Piers Paul Read, whom I also know and admire, was very brave. He did something many of us would rather not do in public: he courted the mockery of his peers by speaking up clearly for the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, the aspect of Catholicism most hated and derided by outsiders. He even defended the ban on artificial contraception, which is not something you often hear priests and bishops do.

It was a good-natured occasion, though, nothing like the waspish Intelligence Squared debate last November, when Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens persuaded the audience, by 1,862 votes to 268, that Catholicism was not a force for good in the world.

One all, then. Maybe someone will arrange some more fixtures. With a little good will on all sides, Catholics v the Rest could develop into an Olympic sport.

Help, I’m a web addict

Friday 26 February 2010

Internet addiction is fuelled by the idea that 'if I click on just one more link, everything will fall into place'

Much has been written this week about Tiger Woods’s alleged sex addiction, and I do not propose to add to the hundreds of thousands of words that have been devoted to the subject, save to say this: that sex addiction is a fraud. We are all sex “addicts” to one degree or another. The urge to procreate is as natural as the urge to eat. Without sex there is no life.

Tiger Woods went into therapy, as it seems to me, not because he has a true illness but in order to deal with his shame, and to protect future earnings. It’s the American way, or at least it is for multi-millionaires. “I am not a bad person, I am a sick person trying to get better. Hug me.”

Will someone please hug me? I am an internet addict and last Saturday evening my British Telecom broadband service crashed. I was forced to go cold turkey for 36 hours. At first I just stood there shivering and sneezing and shifting from one foot to the other. Then I did what just about everyone does on these occasions: I rang Calcutta.

Over the next 18 hours I spoke to perhaps four very agreeable and willing Indians on BT’s outsourced helpdesk. Alas, I sometimes find it hard to be civil to these charming people. They are often hard to understand, since they speak with accents that are somehow both thick and sing-song. Not only do I ask them to repeat themselves, as I would if I were doing business with any Scot or Taffy, but I become curt, clipped and sarcastic – “Let’s speak English, shall we?” – and, in consequence, sink into a slough of guilt and self-loathing. I then apologise madly for what I fear will be seen as racism, and assure my would-be helpers that my argument is not with them but with British Telecom (which is true).

In any case, my 36-hour ordeal reminded me of how addicted I am to the internet. I spend much of my waking life in front of my wide-bodied, high-spec, Starship Enterprise-style iMac. I tell myself that I am working, and some of the time I am. Most of the time, though, I am just distracting myself by looking at YouTube or seeing how my pension pot is holding up or checking the weather in Cape Town.

The computer does more than satisfy one’s – my – desire for entertainment, however. It’s better and worse than that. It makes you feel as though you can have everything for nothing. It offers knowledge without the discipline of learning. The computer is a cheat and a liar. My addiction is sometimes so bad that I become like a cargo-cultist staring longingly into the New Hebridean sky and waiting for the Americans to fly in more ping-pong balls and refrigerators. I stare longingly into the display screen, half thinking, like Fox Mulder, that the truth is out there, or, rather, in there. Perhaps if I click on just one more link, everything will fall into place, or maybe if I hit “send and receive” again, I’ll get an email that will change my life…

I can see that St John of the Cross would not have commended this attitude of mind. It’s shameful. Maybe, though, it goes with my “addictive personality”. A couple of months ago a friend in the United States – a recovering alcoholic – rang me about his computer games habit, and, in a gesture of solidarity with him, I made a (non-binding) resolution to stop looking at the two blogs I am most addicted to.

I have stuck to this resolution, more or less. In the course of my legitimate research, however, I have found myself looking at one or other of my forbidden blogs, after having been directed there by Google. Ooops! Still, I tell myself, that’s not the same thing as going directly to the blog.

But is talk of “legitimate” research what addiction therapists would call “denial”? Not quite. I do indeed need to use the net to look things up. On the other hand, legitimate research can soon become the equivalent of the first drink, the one that is too many.

I might look at a story in the Guardian, for example, or even in the Daily Telegraph, and then click on a link that takes me to something a little more sensational. After a few more clicks, hey presto!, I am reading about some woman in Saginaw, Michigan, who has been told by Our Lady that a chastisement is to be visited on the world next Tuesday week. It’s the first click that does it. I know that, but I persuade myself that I can control it. “Just the one,” I say as, like a great bore, I key into the Google window “anti-depressants nine first Fridays Vatican 2 freemasons invincible ignorance Archbishop Lefebvre”.

Pretty soon, it seems, state-funded Catholic schools will not be able to teach what Ed Balls calls “discrimination”. They will have to be non-judgmental when teaching their charges about sex, though at the same time, apparently, they will be free to teach them that the Church is judgmental in these matters.

You don’t need a postgraduate certificate in education to see that this will muck children up more thoroughly than ever their parents could. In fact, all sex education is bunk: the more there is the more sexually active and sexually diseased children become; and the more broken-hearted and confused. They asked for bread and we gave them condoms and clean needles.

The leaders of the Conservative Party believe just as strongly as the leaders of the Labour Party and the Lib Dems in a “non-discriminatory” approach to sex education. David Cameron has said that the Tories will recognise marriage as a union of man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, and soon enough, no doubt, he’ll come up with a fourth, even a fifth, permutation.

David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg are all men of their time, secular liberals, embarrassed, even disgusted, by traditional Catholic morality. Polite society has no room for what it regards as mean-spirited sexual reactionaries. That’s why I wrote last week that Peter Tatchell is “more respectable” than the Pope.

We get the politicians we deserve, and the policies we deserve.

Rebels without a cause

Friday 12 February 2010

The demo against the Pope's visit to Britain on Sunday was a non-event. One demonstrator carried a pink Union flag, but not even the Daily Mail was there to cover the outrage. I was, however.

Peter Tatchell and his pals in the secular and humanist communities convened outside Westminster Cathedral at one o'clock. If they hadn't been such layabouts, they would have convened at 11.30, to give the great and the good something to think about (and practise their charity on) as they emerged from High Mass.

I'd say that there were not many more than 100 demonstrators in the piazza at 1.30, but more apparently joined later. According to the Londonist, a London website: "Around 300 people (mostly, it seems, members of the LGBT community) faced the loveless streets of London on a wintry Valentine's Day afternoon to voice their opposition to the seemingly growing political interference of the Vatican and the Pope in European and British politics."

The ever-reliable and predictable Common Sluts of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence turned out for the march. It was all a bit clunking, in other words, a bit sad, a bit art school suburban. I was a bit disappointed.

A young man dressed as the Pope attracted the photographers. I spoke to him, and he told me what was wrong with the Pope and the Church. I suggested that Benedict XVI was not all bad: after all, he'd opposed the Iraq war.

"Even Hitler said some good things," he said.

I wrote it down. Uh-oh. The young man asked me not to, and then said that if I used the line I was to use it in context. Oklie doklie, I said. Here, on the basis of sketchy notes and failing memory, is the context.

First of all, though, let me say that the young man was awesomely articulate and even more awesomely free from doubt, and very courteous. If believers had the same certainties as non-believers and were as charming, we'd be able to move mountains.

The young man said he objected to British taxpayers having to pick up the £20 million bill for a visit by the head of an "artificial state". He was all for freedom of speech, but he did not want to extend that privilege, at the state's expense, to a man who, he maintained, preached bigotry, had covered up child abuse and who led a Church that was complicit in war and genocide (in Rwanda) and was about to canonise Pope Pius XII, a man who had colluded with the Nazis.

Blimey, O'Reilly. Everything was about as bad as bad could be. It was too much for me to cope with on a wintry winter's afternoon. I feared that my voice would break and my face would start to twitch if I tried to engage this man in serious dialogue. He was obviously not open to nuanced debate.

All the same, I managed to suggest that Rome could sometimes behave decently, and pointed out (as above) that Pope Benedict had opposed the war in Iraq. Wasn't that good? Well, said the young man, the Iraq war was a contested issue. He'd been against it himself, but appreciated that a lot of people had been for it.

Very well, I said, but not everybody agreed, for example, that Pius XII had been in collusion with the Nazis, and surely the Vatican's objection to the Iraq war was an indication that the Pope was perhaps not as cruel and reactionary as some people thought?

"Even Hitler said some good things," said the young man.

"And he was good with dogs," I said.

There you go: context.

I think the young man's issue was religion, really. He probably had a fairly low opinion of Islam and Orthodox Judaism, though I am not sure he would hang around outside the Finsbury Park mosque dressed as the one-eyed, hook-handed Sheikh Abu Hamza and damning Islam for not recognising the rights of homosexuals.

"All religions preach bigotry and lies," he said. "There is no place for them in the modern world."

What is the problem with these people?

There was a time when homosexuals were cruelly and unjustly treated - and we remember those days with shame - but they are now a rich and privileged minority, and often more equal than others. At any rate, as they gain rights (in the matter of adoption, for example) Christians lose them.

Civilised and educated people - some of them Catholics - take it for granted that the Catholic Church is as wrong in its approach to homosexuality as it is in its approach to embryonic stem-cell research and the use of artificial means of contraception.

Today Peter Tatchell - a brave and agreeable man, by the way - is more respectable than Benedict XVI.

So why all the anger?

Forgive me if I return to the subject of war like a dog returning to his own vomit, but once a single-issue fanatic always a single-issue fanatic.

In its coverage of Operation Moshtarak last weekend the Sunday Times carried a very odd caption with a picture of some American soldiers: "The battle to push the Taliban out of their last stronghold in Afghanistan also involves US troops." (My emphasis).

The truth is, of course, that the battle also involves British troops. The War against Terror is an American show. In Afghanistan there are approximately 100,000 US troops and 10,000 British. In Iraq at one point the Americans had 250,000 men. We never had more than 46,000.

We elected to join the United States in Afghanistan in 2001, and to begin with may have served our own interests. In Iraq it was different. George Bush told Tony Blair that the Americans could handle Iraq on their own and that, if it was going to be politically embarrassing for Blair to send troops, he should not feel obliged to.

But Tony wanted a piece of the action. Alongside Tonga and Eritrea and 47 other states, we were part of the "Coalition of the Willing".

By Monday Operation Moshtarak had resulted in the death of 17 civilians, one American soldier and one British. Accidents happen when you use high explosives, and even smart weapons do stupid things. It is because modern war kills more civilians than it does combatants that Rome is now borderline pacifist.

Lent is not that hard

Friday 12 February 2010

The soaring towers of Canary Wharf, where Archbishop Nichols will celebrate Mass on Ash Wednesday

Blimey. Can Lent really be upon us again? Yes, it can. How time flies when you are old and unemployable. The arrival of Lent has not caught commerce sleeping. Barclays has once again, and to its credit, given permission for its headquarters at Canary Wharf to be used for Ash Wednesday Mass, which this year is to be celebrated by Archbishop Vincent Nichols. About 500 people, not all of them Catholics, are expected to attend.

The supermarkets have been pretty pro-active, of course. My local Sainsbury's has been selling hot cross buns for about a month now - two packets of six buns for the price of one (89p) - and pretty soon its shelves will be groaning with multiplying Easter Bunnies.

To some tender souls, the six weeks of the penitential season seem like six months in chokey. I know that feeling, but Lent is not what it was. Within the memory of men still living - as I see from my 1952 Burns, Oates Small Missal - all the weekdays of Lent were days of fasting.

That may seem rather a tall order, but was it? Technically, as any Pharisee will tell you, fasting consists of taking one full meal a day and a couple of small meals or snacks as needed, which is what most people survive on these days anyway, often getting fat in the process.

Yet now the Church treats us as delicate children with uncertain tempers, and all that is required of us is that we fast and abstain on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. We can do as we please on all the other days of Lent.

Still, let's not get all fogey about this. There is, after all, nothing to stop me from fasting daily, and it could be that the emphasis nowadays on doing things rather than on not doing them encourages a positive attitude towards the Faith.

Accentuating the positive need not be the easy way out. Imagine, for example, that instead of foreswearing some good, you make it your Lenten project to be kind to the people you love. Easy peasy? No. After a week of smiling at your wife, your pets, your children, the strain may become so great that you will wish you'd decided to go on a diet of bread and water.

Nor is self-denial is always selfless. Even pagans give up health hazards (smoking, drinking, rich foods) for Lent. When in my drinking days I gave up alcohol for Lent, I was really giving up getting drunk. I did not admit it, of course, even when I found myself celebrating Easter by drinking too much.

Being bad, in other words, was my reward for being good. What I'd done was to give up sin (or its occasion) for Lent. Come Easter and I could get back to "normal".

Soon the more flamboyant among us will be telling their friends what they are giving up for Lent. The one good thing I'd most like to give up for Lent is tobacco, but I can't. The sad truth is that I no longer smoke. If it did not make me feel ill, I am pretty sure I'd be smoking still. It was something that brought joy to my youth.

Hang on. Might it be virtuous of me to take up smoking for Lent - precisely because it makes me feel unwell? There's a thought. And who knows? Maybe if I persevered, I'd get the taste back...

***

Barack Obama's decision to end manned expeditions to the moon has upset some people, but I welcome it unreservedly. How could anyone object to this giant leap backwards for mankind?

(OK, the Chinese will take up the slack, but we have got to get used to that anyway...)

I remember watching the moon landing in Sydney in 1969, when I was working for Pacific Islands Monthly. Someone in the office, a Catholic who should have known better, said we were witnessing the greatest event in history.

Poppycock. What about the Incarnation and the Crucifixion? Come to think of it, if you will forgive the sudden jump from the sacred to the profane, what about the Beatles' first LP?

So far as I can make out, the moon landing brought us nothing but conspiracy theories - apparently if you look at the film carefully you will see that it was shot in a back lot at Universal Studios - and the Teflon frying pan. We could live without both.

***

When I was walking my dog on Tooting Common at the weekend I looked up at some green parakeets hopping about and screeching in the branches above me and wondered idly whether it was against the law to shoot these creatures.

Then I remembered how as a boy I used to shoot sparrows with my .177 air rifle, and my thoughts were no longer idle. My old pal Guilt popped up alongside me and said cheerfully: "Wotcha, cock! Haven't spoken to you since breakfast!" Shooting at tin cans was fun; shooting bottles was better; paper targets were a bit boring: nothing pinged or broke when you hit the target, nothing was destroyed. That's why sparrows were such a joy. You knew that you'd destroyed something when you shot a sparrow dead.

Obviously we liked a clean kill: we felt a bit squeamish if we winged a bird and it lay twiching and flapping on the path. When that happened, we had to reload the rifle, press the muzzle against the temple of the bird, and, thwack, kill it.

The horror, the shame. What savages we were.

"Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father."

***

A survey last week suggested that people who owned cats were cleverer than people who owned dogs, because cat-owners were more likely to have university degrees than dog-owners.

Well, OK, if you like. But even if they are a bit thick, dog people are obviously nicer than cat people, no? Just think of the dog people... er... well, me, Rod Liddle, Adolph Hitler. And the cat people? Benedict XVI, T S Eliot. Time for a rethink, I think.

Wearing a hat

Friday 29 January 2010

Actor Peter Bowles, who starred with Penelope Keith in the series To the Manor Born, wears a smart trilby

When you get old, you started do things that you would never have dreamt of doing when you were young and still had a bit of self-respect. Like wearing a hat.

I have a brown felt hat with a wide brim. You might call it a trilby that is too big for its boots, or maybe it is a fedora. I've had the hat for some time, but until fairly recently seldom wore it.

One reason was vanity: I feared that I looked more idiotic in a hat than out of one, and the fear was not entirely groundless. Once, when I was returning home by Tube from the office, a high-spirited young man indicated my hat to his companions and cried out: "Yee-haw!" My, the merriment...

This winter, however, I have been wearing my hat a lot, and I am now beginning to think that a hat might bring dignity and purpose to my declining years. If I am to be worthy of a hat, however, I really must learn how to use one.

Unfortunately, there are not many instructors left. Men stopped wearing hats in the Sixties, apparently under the influence of President Kennedy, who liked to go about uncovered.

Perhaps I can learn from my father's example. He wore a trilby in town and would raise it rather elaborately when approaching a woman. There was something theatrical about this gesture, even a bit ironic, but it was charming all the same. When he was a bit tight, he would take his hat off, press it to his chest, click his heels, and bow.

Until last week, I had never thought that I might one day do something of the sort myself. In the past few days, however, and very tentatively - you don't want to get into trouble with the police - I have started to raise my hat to women on the common.

I obviously still have much to learn. Should you, for example, doff your hat to strange women (as I do)? Or only to women you know, such as your wife or mother or case-worker? I am not absolutely sure.

In the course of researching this subject, however, I came across an article by Marian T Horvat, PhD entitled "Getting the Ball Rolling on Hats". The article was posted on "Tradition in Action", a website edited by Atila Sinke Guimarães, a Brazilian of German extraction.

In spite of its occasionally rather strident tone, the site appears to be sound on hats. At any rate I can detect nothing heretical or schismatic or unreasonably integrist in its approach. Here's what the good Dr Horvat has to say: "Besides protecting a man against the elements, a hat properly worn gives him dignity. It also permits him to practise a small ceremonial, that is, an act recognising the right condition or social status of others."

For example: "If a lady who is a stranger thanks [a man] for some service or assistance, he lifts his hat in acknowledgement.

"If he accidentally jostles or disturbs a lady in a crowd or in passing her in a tight space, he lifts his hat and excuses himself, saying 'I beg your pardon'."

Also: "A man habitually doffs his hat when he enters into a conversation with a lady or a group of ladies. If the conversation is more than a short greeting, the well-bred lady or ladies should invite him after a short while to return his hat to his head. The man also recovers his hat should he continued on his walk either alone or with one of the ladies."

Furthermore: "If the man stops to speak with a superior, after greeting him, he should remain with his feet together and with his hat in his hand until he is invited to cover his head."

Plus: "Keep your hat clean and free from dust, sweat, dirt, and fuzz. The fact that a hat belonged to your grandfather or has a sentimental value does not legitimise the use of a dirty, stained or tattered hat. Far from being considered a gentleman and a man of good taste, the wearer of such a hat makes himself a laughing stock in good society."

Way to go, Dr Horvat. Here's another tip: when you doff your hat you should keep the inside of it towards yourself, since no one wants to see the stained sweat band, the traces of Truefitt & Hill Hair Management Pomade, the white rabbit, etc.

Where does all this leave the priests who have lately taken to wearing soup-plate hats? It's not for me to say, but here's a rubric I have just made up: if a priest wearing a soup-plate hat meets a lady parishioner, he should smile encouragingly and extend his hand so that she may kiss it. Same applies to priests who wear a biretta outside.

It goes without saying that laymen must remove their hats before entering a church. Or does it? You will quite often see men in baseball caps in church, especially in the great churches of Tuscany, but they seem to have been born - and perhaps conceived - in baseball caps, and therefore do not know that they are wearing one.

Conversely, some women remove their baseball hats when entering a church, out of a misguided sense of respect, not knowing that women are still encouraged to cover their heads.

It would be a mistake to get too fogey about this. The old ways are best, of course, but that's no excuse for obscurantism. Not so long ago, according to Dr Seuss, the International Hat-Doffing Rules Committee met to revise Rule Number 196.

That rule, as Dr Seuss records, deals with the etiquette of doffing a top hat while carrying a cane, an umbrella, a bust of Catullus and a watermelon. Condemning the old way as too clumsy - but without describing it - the Committee now allows you to balance the watermelon on your left calf.

Sorted. Maybe I'll get the hang of hats after all.

Let Americans run Haiti

Friday 22 January 2010

Residents of Port-au-Prince walk past a body following the devastating earthquake in Haiti (Photo: CNS)

There is no end to the hideous stories coming out of Haiti, and it is often the little things that make most impact. I read on Tuesday, for example, that even at the best of times there are not many beggars in Haiti, because there is hardly anyone to beg from.

In Port-au-Prince at the beginning of the week bodies still lay bloated and unburied in the tropical sun. Some 50,000 corpses had been dumped in mass graves, because there was absolutely nothing else that could be done with them.

There were protests about the mass burials, however. Haiti's main Voodoo leader, Max Beauvoir, who was educated at City College of New York and the Sorbonne in Paris, objected on the grounds that they were not part of Haitian culture.

Maybe not, but Voodoo very much is: 50 per cent of Haiti's population of nine million is said to believe in Voodoo, and Voodoo is accompanied by fear of zombies - the sort of creatures, one imagines, that might emerge from mass graves.

In the meantime, Haiti's unspeakable misery is providing some commentators with the opportunity to make a bit of political capital on the side (and as you read on you might include me in their number).

Rush Limbaugh, the shock-jock hero of the Republican Right, has plumbed the depths of ill-bred cynicism by attributing base motives to the Administration's relief efforts. He told his 20 million listeners (approx) that the earthquake was "made to order" for President Barack Obama and his team because it would allow them to "burnish their, shall we say, 'credibility' with the black community..."

In fact, the President has responded magnificently to this crisis. There are many reasons for attacking Obama, but this is not one of them.

To be sure, food and supplies have been slow getting through, but that is not the result of stupidity or timidity or sloth. When an earthquake of the same magnitude as the one that devastated Haiti last week hit the Bay Area in Northern California in October 1989, 63 people were killed. The toll in Haiti may go as high as 200,000. Haiti suffered so grievously because Haiti is poor and corrupt, and superstitious, as much a victim state as a failed state.

"Things must change here," said John Paul II when he visited the country in 1983. Perhaps now they will, perhaps not. There is a strong case, it seems to me, for the US to re-colonise Haiti. I am not thinking here of George W Bush's silly notions of "global democratic revolution". What I have in mind would have nothing to do with democracy, and it would not be, in the usual Enlightenment sense, revolutionary. I am talking about good old-fashioned imperialism.

The rest of the world would have to share the burden - bail-outs have left America strapped for cash - and so eventually would the people of Haiti. There might even have to be taxation without representation. I am not sure the Americans have the stomach for a long-term job of this sort, however, and anyway it might well end in tears. A politically astute friend of mine in Washington suggests that full-frontal American intervention might improve life to such an extent that the Haitians could stand on their own two feet - at which point the they would start shooting Marines - or the Americans might make a mess of things and follow the Somali model by going home and leaving the locals to starve.

There are no easy answers, as leader-writers used to say. But there are prayers ... and there is money. We've got loadsamoney.

The response from Catholic agencies has been magnificent. Catholic Relief Services has collected $13.1 million (£8 million) in cash donations. What a pity that it takes tragedy to unite Catholics.

In the world of worship the divisions are as deep as ever. My friends at the Tablet last week published a piece by Fr Michael G Ryan, pastor of St James's Cathedral in Seattle, explaining why he is against the new translations of the liturgy.

Fr Ryan proposes that, "to avert catastrophe", the new translations, should be "road tested" before they are thrust down the throats of innocent lay people. Consultations should be conducted "in an adult manner that honours our intelligence and our baptismal birthright".

So far he has gained the backing of 10,000 concerned Catholics for his "what if we just say wait?" campaign. One should not be beastly, but my hunch is that any road test organised by Fr Ryan and his friends would result in a disapproval rate for the new translations of 100 per cent, if not higher.

What manner of man is Fr Ryan? If you read the National Catholic Reporter you will see that, according to Paul Wilkes, author of Excellent Catholic Parishes: The Guide to Best Places and Practices, "Fr Ryan is the ultimate parish priest, concerned about his people, offering them opportunities for service and providing them with some of the best liturgy I've seen".

So that's all right, then. Actually, I am sure Fr Ryan is a very nice chap. I just think he is absolutely wrong in clinging so tenaciously to the past. If I were uncharitable, I might suspect that he is nostalgic for the 1970s, the worst decade in recorded history.

***

Let us give thanks, meanwhile, for health and safety and the nanny state. Where would we be without them?

Once you become a dog owner you will see what I mean. It is thanks to health and safety regulations and to the municipal nannies at Wandsworth Borough Council that there are dog poo bins every couple of hundred yards on Tooting Common.

When I was small, dog litter was everywhere. It was not nice and it was not healthy. It got on your shoes and in your hair. Now, we have somewhere to put dog mess. Of course, before you can bin it you have to collect it, but that's not as bad as I had feared. In other words, it does not have to be women's work.

I never minded changing nappies, and cleaning up after a dog, as I am now discovering, is just as easy, and no less satisfying.

But take care when using the bins. It is easy to drop a glove in one. If that should happen to you, do not, on any account, try to retrieve it.

The beauty of the East

Friday 15 January 2010

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, right, conducts a Christmas service on January 7

Driven by a love of Orthodoxy based on nothing much more profound than the wedding scene in The Deer Hunter, I went to the Cathedral of the Dormition and All Saints in Ennismore Gardens on Thursday last week to attend Russian Orthodox Christmas liturgy. Since, according to the cathedral's website, the liturgy was to last for two and a half hours, I turned up an hour late. I wish I'd arrived earlier. The liturgy was lovely, the singing angelic.

The cathedral was crowded, though not packed, and there were lots of young people there. Some of the women were strikingly handsome. I am not absolutely sure what that means, but I do think it means something. Beauty is not truth, of course, nor truth beauty, but there was nobility in these faces, or so I chose to believe; the nobility, perhaps, of a people who have suffered and survived.

In any case, this was a joyful liturgical celebration, pious without being pietistic. Everyone seemed very cheerful, possibly because they were coming to the end of their 40-day pre-Christmas fast. Fathers held up their children to see the icons. One woman near me spent several minutes - maybe a quarter of an hour - gazing sweetly, longingly, at an icon of Our Lady. Then she pressed her forehead gently against it.

I cannot pretend that I understood what was going on. The altar was behind an iconostasis, of course, and all the bowing, though very impressive, was a bit bewildering. I decided not to bow or to cross myself, but instead occasionally touched the finger rosary I had taken with me in case of emergency. There was no emergency, and my experience has helped persuade me that the Orthodox have much to teach us. Since they never had a Second Vatican Council - the Sixties simply didn't happen in Russia - they worship as their forebears did, and perhaps in consequence have a devotion to the Blessed Sacrament that puts many Catholics (certainly me) to shame.

The Eucharistic fast is from midnight. Confession is necessary before going to Communion, too, either in the church immediately before receiving or within a very few days of doing so. It is not sufficient merely to have refrained from serious sin since you last went to confession two months (or even a week) ago.

To the 40 days fast that precedes Christmas, by the way, one must add other fasts, not least the extremely strict Lenten fast (no food at all on some days). In addition, Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year are fast days. You wonder where fat Russians come from.

I am not suggesting that we imitate the Orthodox in these things, but many of us will feel that their "liturgical patrimony" is more impressive than the Anglicans'. In his eccentric and splendid The Heresy of Formlessness the German author and journalist (and traditionalist) Martin Mosebach quotes a Russian Orthodox priest, Pavel Florensky, who was executed under Stalin: "Our liturgy is older than us and our parents, even older than the world. The liturgy was not invented, it was discovered, appropriated: it is something that always was, namely, the distillation of rational prayer, more or less."

That's not a sentiment you will often hear expressed at meetings of liturgical experts, either Catholic or Anglican, but its is worth noting, as Mosebach does, that Pope John Paul II kept a picture of Fr Florensky in his private chapel.

But let us not get carried away. Some observers feel that Orthodoxy, having once been associated with the KGB, is now too nationalist, and once again too close to the state, and that in consequence the smaller denominations are denied full religious rights.

It would certainly be naïve to believe that Orthodoxy is united in its admiration of Roman Catholicism (or vice versa). There has, after all, been a lot of bad blood between us, and there were of course tensions between East and West long before the Great Schism of 1054. All the same, things have improved a bit in the past 1,000 years - as things sometimes do - and there is now productive dialogue. It is surely a hopeful sign, furthermore, that last month Moscow and the Vatican opened full diplomatic relations for the first time since 1917.

There is much to play for. The Rev Canon Michael Bourdeaux, the Anglican who founded the Keston Institute and has long been a friend and qualified defender of Orthodoxy, told the Voice of America before Christmas: "If the Catholic and Orthodox Churches came closer together, they would form a huge beacon for conservatism in the world today. Conservatism in terms of theology which they share, and conservatism in terms of sexual morality, morality in society in general."

That's something to think about. Perhaps those Leonine prayers for the conversion of Russia, recited so fervently in the 1950s and then so unceremoniously dumped in 1965, are beginning to yield fruit. I do not see Russia becoming Roman Catholic, of course, but I do believe it reasonable to hope for close and productive ties between the two traditions.

If it's hysteria you are after, the Express is as good a place as any to go. Last Sunday its page-one headline was: "Freeze may kill 60,000". But don't blame the Express: everyone got hysterical about the snow, to the point where the Government was blamed for our misery. Very few people thought to pick up a spade, it seemed, or to sit back and enjoy the prettiness of everything.

Now the hysteria is focused on the poor Robinsons. And so are the jokes. It is not nice. Was Peter Robinson expected to sneak on his wife over the fixer's fee for the loan she secured for her teenage lover?

Is it not enough that he has been cuckolded in a most humiliating way? Is it not enough that his wife became suicidal? As Mr Robinson said: "I have forgiven her. More important, I know that she has sought and received God's forgiveness."

But you won't get much forgiveness from the Great British Public, and least of all from the secularists who set the agenda. Why, that woman is a hypocrite! Of course she is. Who in the name of all that is sane and decent is not a hypocrite?

The trouble with Harry

Friday 8 January 2010

Harry is a beautiful creature, with perfect manners. Just don't grab him by the collar

It's probably a bad idea to get a puppy for Christmas, so we waited until the Feast of the Holy Innocents and got an eight-year-old Springer Spaniel instead. His name is Harry and he is very young for his age, the Cliff Richard of the canine world, though, unlike the 69-year-old rock legend, he's had no work done, unless you count castration. Sir Cliff, of course, still has all his faculties intact.

As you will see from the picture, Harry is a beautiful creature. He has perfect manners. He sits, he stands, he stays, he lies down (and can obviously be taught to die for the Queen and, I hope, to kill squirrels). He does not so much bark to attract your attention as cough politely.

It couldn't be better, really, except for one thing: the trouble with Harry is that he tries to bite your face off if you grab him by the collar. OK, perhaps I exaggerate, but when last week I showed him off to my granddaughters, aged six and four, he suddenly turned on me like a pit bull from Peckham Rye. He snarled, barked, bared his teeth and jumped at my chest; and all I'd done was to seize him by the collar.

The commotion put a bit of a damper on things. Maybe we should not have taken the dog to see other members of the family so soon after picking him up from Battersea Dogs Home, where, as it happens, we'd been warned not to grab his collar. No doubt he needed time to adjust to Balham before being taken halfway across London to swinging Hampstead.

For the time being we have solved the collar problem by putting Harry in a harness, which we can pull on without his going berserk. (I left it to my wife to fit the harness. It seemed a dangerous job, and she clearly has a talent for these things. She is also very good at scooping up dog poo.)

My hunch is that a bit of cognitive behavioural therapy will help both me and Harry. I quite like the look of Cesar Millan, the Mexican-American who has a television show and is regarded by many as the best dog whisperer in the business. I am not sure if Cesar is his real name, or is just what the dogs call him, but he is very impressive. I picked up his book, Be The Pack Leader, in Pets At Home in Raynes Park at the weekend. As the title of the book proclaims, I must become the leader in my relationship with Harry: firm, just, decisive, adult. But does that mean I may not allow Harry to sleep on my bed at night? You can forget about it if it does.

Besides, one can overdo the tough-guy routine. I once worked on an Angora goat ranch north of Sydney, and my boss was a very tough guy. I was not allowed to call his dog by its name. It had only one master, one pack leader. The dog was a working animal, not some silly Pommy pet. At the time I was being trained to go and work on a cattle station in the far outback, and my boss recognised immediately that I was a moral and physical weakling, and would never make the grade. At dinner one night, with what might have been malice, he told me that I'd have to learn to kill a sheep.

"Oh, yes," I said. "I suppose one uses some kind of stun gun?" "No," said my boss, "one does not use some kind of stun gun. One hangs the sheep from a hook by its hind legs and then one slits its throat."

A couple of days later I made my excuses and left.

Tough guys? Who needs 'em? I much prefer the Dog People of Tooting Common. They are a splendid bunch, very English, very down-to-earth. "Mabel!" called one headscarfed woman to her feisty and flirtatious little Scottish border terrier on Sunday. "Mabel! Come here, you little tart!"

They love their dogs, these people, but they are not blinded by love, as some owners of show dogs seem to be. Many years ago, as a junior reporter on the Gloucestershire Echo, Cheltenham's evening newspaper - oh, how the memories are now coming back - I covered the West of England Ladies' Kennel Society Show at Boddington Manor. I went with a photographer, and after spending some time in the beer tent we picked up the results from the judge's enclosure.

When I got back to the office I noticed that the Best Bitch in Show was owned by a Cheltenham woman, so I had a news story. I'd not seen the contest, of course, but in the course of my piece, I wrote that the bitch won "easily" - since it seemed to be the polite thing to say.

Unfortunately, however, I named the woman herself, rather than her dog, as the Best Bitch in Show, and not long after the paper came out I got a telephone call from her. She was very angry. Miraculously, though, she had not noticed the mix-up in names and was simply furious that I had reported that the Best Bitch had had an easy win. How dare I say such a stupid thing? Why, the competition had been very fierce, she said.

St Roch and St Francis, pray that Harry gets over his collar rage. I sense that he has already, actually, but I am not quite ready yet to find out. I'll wait a few days and then have my wife grab him by the neck to see what happens.

Counter-Reformation corner: this year the absurdity of transferring of the Epiphany (January 6) to the nearest Sunday really hit home. The nearest Sunday was January 3, so we marked the Twelfth Day of Christmas on the Ninth Day of Christmas.

Should we have chucked out our Christmas trees? Will the day come when Christmas Day itself is transferred to the nearest Sunday? (No, because the High Street wouldn't stand for it.)

Our bishops obviously believed they were doing the right thing when they transferred the Epiphany - plus the Ascension and the "Body and Blood of Christ" ("Corpus Christi" for short) - to the nearest Sunday, but the majority of lay people, on whose behalf the bishops were acting, were against the changes. So who gains?

How do you say Mass?

Friday 18 December 2009

Holy Mass at Westminster Cathedral - or should that be Holy Marce? (Mazur/catholicchurch.org.uk)

Are you going to midnight Mass with a short A (as in ass and crass) or to midnight Mass with a long "a" (as in class and pass). In other words, do you say "Mass" or "Marce"?

No fibbing, please, and no conferring.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne says "Marce". "It's a vaguely class thing," he tells me. "It's what the grand families, the Howards and so on, used to say."

Brian Sewell, however, says "Mass": "My Latin tutor was an unfrocked monk from Ampleforth [or 'Armpleforth', as Sewell chooses to call it on this occasion] and he said 'Marce', but I think my generation has always said 'Mass'. 'Marce' seems affected, like 'Trafflegar' for 'Trafalgar'. It belongs to the 'don'tcher know?' generation."

Piers Paul Read says Mass, and so does Robert Gray (whose book on Manning I plugged last week without mentioning that he is a friend of mine), but Mgr Alfred Gilbey always said "Marce", as you might perhaps expect from a man who went about in shovel hat, flyless breeches, double-waisted waistcoat and frock coat.

The Oxford Dictionary gives both pronunciations, but the short A first. My friend Dot Wordsworth, who writes about language for the Spectator, tell me that a quick look at the etymological tables will reveal that the Venerable Bede (673-735) said Mass with a short "a"; and I have never known her to be wrong about anything.

I am not sure what happened in the late Middle Ages, or even in Edwardian times, but I have heard it suggested that the long A is "rather an Oxford Movement thing".

Whatever the case, when I was at school in the Fifties, we used the short "a", and I don't think I can recall hearing anyone say "Marce" before the Second Vatican Council.

But I hear it now, and I associate it with the more extravagant reaches of the traditionalist movement (though absolutely not with the SSPX). If it did not seem so hideously frivolous, I might be tempted to suggest that if a priest wears a biretta and soutane when going to the betting shop or off-licence, he is likely to say "Marce".

But it seems that "Marce" is not quite grand enough for some. The late Deryck Hanshell SJ, sometime assistant editor of The Month, always said "Marce", but he once confided in my very good friend the lay prison chaplain and former chairman of the Latin Mass Society that he secretly yearned to go the extra recusant mile and say, or drawl, "Morce", or maybe "Mawss".

Television may have something to do with all this, of course, since it has something to do with just about everything else.

"Marce" was the pronunciation used in the TV series Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh's beautiful but sentimental tale of high-born Catholics.

Anthony Sampson in his Anatomy of Britain (1962) noted: "The great majority [of British Catholics] are working-class, from poor Irish immigrants; many are upper-class, but there is no great middle-class core of Catholicism. (Upper-class Catholics are said to talk about mass to rhyme with pass, middle class rhyme it with lass, working class rhyme it with fuss.)"

Muss? I don't think so, but there is clearly a regional factor here.

I know one splendidly traditionalist priest, a man of sonorous delivery and Scotch extraction, who not only says "Marce" but, perhaps to keep us on our toes, pronounces the word "food" with a short vowel sound, as in "should" and "good".

Little has been written about this matter, perhaps because it is too trivial for words, but Google did turn up this interesting snippet: that Lord Hutton referred to "weapons of marce destruction" when in January, 2004, he delivered his report on his inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly.

Lord Hutton is from Northern Ireland, and it was suggested at the time that he might have been trying a bit too hard to sound English.

At any rate, J Gordon Bonnyman, of Sevenoaks in Kent, addressed the issue in the letters page of the Daily Telegraph: "... it is very common among aspiring Scots and Irish to use the long 'a' where the correct pronunciation should in fact be the short 'a'. This is done in the belief that the long 'a' sounds more English and that the Celt in question is therefore part of the English Establishment...

"If there is any recorded instance of Lord Hutton pronouncing the word 'gather', it's a fair bet that he will pronounce it in the same way as the word 'rather'."

Actually, there is a recorded instance of something similar, and my former colleague the late Frank Johnson recorded it for posterity in the Daily Telegraph on January 29, 2004: "[Hutton] pronounced the 'Charing' in 'Charing Cross Hotel' to rhyme with "sparring". This gave rise [on the press benches] to speculation among us as to what pronunciation he used when ordering a glass of Bass."

Cheers, or "chiz", as the working classes say. I don't think we should worry overmuch about any of this. In the end, after all, it is the Mass that matters, no matter how you pronounce it.

Happy Christmass, or, if you prefer, Happy Christmarce.

***

What to make of the ongoing Tiger Woods "car crash"? I just can't work up a sweat over this one. The only interesting thing about it to my mind is that people find it interesting.

My conspiracy-theory sister-in-law in Albuquerque is very cross. "What are they not telling us?" she asks darkly. "We are sick of Tiger Woods. We want to know what's going on in some place that's not Tiger Woods's bedroom."

The Pope, too, while not talking directly of Tiger Woods, expressed his misgivings about media hype when he marked the feast of the Immaculate Conception in Rome last week: "The mass media tend to make us feel as if we are spectators, as if evil only concerned others, and that certain things could never happen to us.

"Whereas we are all 'actors' and, in evil as in good, our behaviour has an effect on others."

In some ways it is worse for unknown people than for stars. The Pope spoke of the "invisible men and women" who "now and again appear on the front pages or on television screens, and are exploited to the last drop for as long as their news and image attract attention. This is a perverse mechanism which unfortunately we find difficult to resist."

It's the story of our times.

A true saint for our age

Friday 11 December 2009

A portrait of Cardinal Manning, who was famous for his ascetism and engagement in social issues

A couple of weeks ago I visited Cardinal Manning’s tomb in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral, and about time, too. I have been devoted to Manning for quite a little while now, thanks to Robert Gray’s masterly biography, but I have been tardy about paying my respects.

The tomb is in St Edmund’s chapel, the only Gothic part of the otherwise Byzantine cathedral. Above it hangs Manning’s fading, tassled cardinal’s hat; alongside it, and directly beneath the high altar, is the tomb of Cardinal Wiseman, Manning’s predecessor and the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. It was said of Wiseman (but never of the ascetic Manning) that he had a “lobster salad side”, and kept a good table.

I knelt at Manning’s tomb and kissed it. I placed a small crucifix against the marble, so that I now have what I think is known as a tertiary relic; and I prayed after a fashion. Later I felt a bit embarrassed by my conduct; it is not the sort of thing that comes naturally to me. Still, since Manning was above all else a Roman, I thought it appropriate to go through what I take to be Roman – or anyway Irish – motions of piety.

Henry Edward Manning has the distinction of being the first, and only, Cardinal Archbishops of Westminster to have had a wife. He married in 1833 when he was an Anglican rector, but his wife died four years later. Manning’s love for his wife never deserted him. Even after he converted in 1851 and became a Catholic priest he apparently kept her prayer book beneath his pillow and a locket of her hair on a chain about his neck.

To the outside world, however, he seemed a cold fish, and he has never had an especially large fan club among the great and the good. Hilaire Belloc regarded him as “much the greatest Englishman of his time”, but many of his contemporaries had misgivings about his ultramontane convictions.

He and Cardinal Newman, his fellow convert, were not not always on the best of terms. Both were great English Catholics, but Newman was Mary to Manning’s Martha, and each man was capable of being unkind about the other. It is hardly surprising therefore that a taste for Manning is not always accompanied by a taste for Newman.

All the same, one wonders whether Manning may not one day be raised to our altars alongside Newman. There is no sign of it yet. Perhaps the Lytton Strachey hatchet job in Eminent Victorians is so firmly lodged in the national psyche that many find it hard to shake the feeling that Manning was a nasty piece of work. All the more reason to press his case, then. Manning had a very keen social conscience, and was a great champion of Catholic social teaching. He was loved by poor Londoners for the part he played in ending the dockers’ strike in 1889 – on terms favourable to the dockers.

When he died in January 1892 hundreds of thousands of mourners lined the route his coffin took from the Brompton Oratory to Kensal Rise cemetery. It was the biggest funeral London had ever witnessed, and this only 63 years after Catholic Emancipation.

What an example he was, and what an inspiring saint for our age he might make. At a time when Catholic social teaching is being challenged on the Right as well as on the Left, Manning reminds us that at the heart of that teaching is the conviction that life is sacred. In a world in which death and destruction are the staple of television news – and of television entertainment – that teaching has never been more important.

To be sure, Manning was not perfect, but as Robert Gray says in his biography, “if Henry Manning is not saved 70 times seven times, God help the rest of us”. I might add here that Gray is no hagiographer. On the contrary. His elegant, engaging and witty book is often waspish about the cardinal, and even occasionally about our Holy Religion (Gray is not a Catholic), but the Manning who emerges from its pages is all the same a hero.

The biography is out of print, but you can find it, as I did, on Amazon. My copy comes from the Calcasieu Pubic Library, Lake Charles, Louisiania, and was last borrowed on July 2 1992.

Because I am becoming forgetful, I often make a note of my sins before going into the confessional. You usually have ample time for that sort of thing on the penitents’ bench at Westminster Cathedral, especially if you find yourself behind a holy woman. (Is she never going to finish? It must be 10 minutes now. Why do I always find myself behind these people? Uh-oh. “Contempt for others / lack of charity / impatience”, I write in the margin of the Guardian op-ed page.) But common sense suggests that it is not very wise to put stuff down in writing. In my case, it is made sillier by the fact that I can’t always remember where I have left my notes. If I were to leave them on the London Underground, they might invite ribald speculation, and of course inviting such speculation is itself a sin… something, in other words, to make a note of.

So it goes. Perhaps I should just get over myself and do my best, like Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, whose autobiography, The Long Loneliness, begins with the best description I know of what we might call the “confession experience” ...

“When you go to confession on a Saturday night, you go into a warm, dimly lit vastness, with a smell of wax and incense in the air, the smell of burning candles, and if it is a hot summer night there is the sound of a great electric fan, and the noise of the streets coming in to emphasise the stillness. There is another sound, too, besides that of the quiet movements of the people from pew to confession to altar rail; there is the sliding of the shutters of the little window between you and the priest...”

Charity is not cheap

Friday 4 December 2009

A Big Issue seller watches shoppers on Oxford Street, London (PA)

One sentence - a quotation from the Oratory's Cardinal Baronius - jumped straight out at me from Fr McHardy's excellent and very moving essay on charity in last week's Catholic Herald Advent magazine: "It is better to relieve some who are not deserving than to refuse one who is in real need, for in this case the error would be on the right side."

Oh dear. I'd rather banished such thoughts from my mind, but now they have returned. What to do? Must I give indiscriminately? Fr McHardy, being of sound mind, says no: there may be "just cause" for not giving. But how can you be sure that your cause is just? Suppose you just don't feel like giving? Suppose you are just sick of the bums?

I am reminded of a friend who decided as a young man that he would never pass a beggar without tossing him at least a few coins. "That means," as he later said, "that I make a lot of detours when I walk through a city."

Perhaps in future I'll have to take the detour option. For example, it might be wiser to approach the Oratory from Knightsbridge rather than from South Kensington. If you make your final approach from South Ken, you run the risk of having to pass the street people who assemble at what I think of as the beggar's gate - the one on your left if you stand in front of the church with your back to Harrods.

There are often two young men at the beggar's gate, and one of them has a habit of scrawling a rather irritating greeting on a piece of cardboard: "God bless." You rather want to put your boot through it.

Just recently at any rate I have been turning a deaf ear to their entreaties, because they are not nice people to do business with. If, for example, you place a pound in front of one of them, he will immediately remove it and leave a couple of pennies and a tanner in place - to give the impression that business is not good. This weekend I went to Spanish Place, not to the Oratory, but I still found myself running a gauntlet of street people; and this time, with Cardinal Baronius's words before me, I found it hard to turn a deaf ear or a blind eye.

Fact file: in my hip pocket - there is a hole in the side pocket - I had a £5 note, a £2 coin, a £1 coin, two 50p pieces, two 20p pieces, a five pence piece and a few pennies.

On the pavement outside Spanish Place a man was selling The Big Issue. My heart sank. He had a foam cup in front of him, which suggested that if one did not want the Big Issue he would accept contributions. Moved by guilt and fear, I gave him the two 50p pieces.

As I left the church (where I'd placed my fiver in the collection pouch), I encountered another beggar, this one sitting on the steps, in defiance, I imagined, of health and safety regulations. He had a blotchy, resentful, self-pitying face - he reminded me rather of myself - and I spoke to him piously about alcoholism. Then, grudgingly, I gave him £1.

It wasn't over yet. Walking up Oxford Street, I saw a man playing the mouth organ. He played badly, but had hooked himself up to a loudhailer like the ones used by those terrifying evangelicals outside Oxford Circus Tube station, so he obviously knew what he was playing at.

For a moment I hesitated. I was on my way to the cathedral to see an Australian intellectual - I am not in the habit of going to Mass twice on Sunday, by the way - and reflected that I might need money for the collection. I had the two-pound coin left, the two 20p pieces, the five pence and the pennies.

What would Fr McHardy do? I dug into my hip pocket and fished out the small change - 48 pence - and approached the man. He did not stop playing but jerked his head in the direction of his wheelie shopping bag. I dropped the coins in and they disappeared into piles of derelict's junk.

I was relieved when I arrived at the cathedral to find that there was no Big Issue salesman outside. Inside, I put my last two quid in the collection. After Mass, a friend asked me to join him for coffee. Now I was the recipient of charity. My friend paid for me, since I was skint.

Still, this is a serious matter, and I glad Fr McHardy pricked my shifty and evasive conscience by reminding me of the corporal works of mercy.

On the other hand, many of the corporal works are now undertaken by the state, which is why in his essay Fr McHardy rightly placed special emphasis on the spiritual works of mercy. You don't need money to be spiritually merciful.

Perhaps, meanwhile, I am the sort of Englishman the great Cardinal Manning - whose tomb is in the crypt of the cathedral - was thinking of when he observed: 'The Jews are taking better care of the people in the East End than we are. What are our people doing? Oh, I forgot; they have no time. They are examining their consciences or praying ... for success in finding a really satisfactory maid."

***

Fundamentalist believers in freedom and democracy - among them people who supported the bombing of Muslim Arabs in 2003 - were this week quick to express shock and dismay when the Swiss voted to ban minarets.

On Monday the Times huffed and puffed and, invoking Thomas Jefferson, spoke fearlessly for the centre-Left and the centre-Right: "Removing ... religiously divisive symbols from public life is an important principle. Attempting to banish religious observance from private life is a democratic outrage. Yet that is the only rational interpretation of the perverse judgment of the Swiss electorate."

Define rational. In their referendum the Swiss did not attempt to banish religious observance from private life. On the contrary. They did, however, vote to remove religiously divisive symbols from public life. The four existing minarets in Switzerland - which will remain - are not used to call the faithful to prayer and are therefore nothing more than symbols, and they are obviously religiously divisive. Why the outrage?

I suppose we'd better ask Tony Blair.

Defenders of the faith

Friday 27 November 2009

Archbishop Nichols, pictured at The Sacred Made Real exhibition at the National Gallery (PA Photos)

Most Englishmen with a taste for the Mediterranean are either Italians or Spaniards. Spaniards are fierce and brave and scrupulously honest, and - if you will forgive an unforgivable generalisation - the Italians are not. I am an Italian.

What I dislike about Spain, after bullfighting, Spanish "food" and the socialist terror of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is Spanish religious (or sacred) art, much of which seems to me to me to be cruel and sentimental (a bit like bullfighting, in fact).

I was therefore half expecting to be just a bit disgusted when last week we went to The Sacred Made Real exhibition at the National Gallery. But no. The hauntingly realistic sculptures - painted wood carvings, actually - moved me almost to tears, especially Gregorio Fernandez's Ecce Homo. Christ's submissive but reproachful eyes leave you with your soul in your boots.

The only thing I did not like was the painting known as the Miracle of the Lactation, by Alonso Cano. It shows Our Lady squirting milk into the open mouth of St Bernard of Clairvaux. Call me a lace-curtain Presbyterian sissy if you like, but I found this ... well, troubling.

Still, this is not the place for art criticism. What interests me here is the fact of the exhibition. A few weeks ago Intelligence Squared packed Westminster Central Hall for what turned out to be a violent attack on the Catholic religion by Stephen Fry (soon to be Lord Fry of Whimsy) and Sir Christopher Hitchens. Now the National Gallery is packing them in for an exhibition showing Catholicism at its most unapologetic and explicit, at its most religious.

At the very least this suggests that there is something Janus-faced about our secular civilisation.

According to the gallery, visitor numbers have so far exceeded targets. The exhibition had good reviews, of course, not just in the Catholic press (as, for example, by Alan Caine in these pages) but in the secular press too. In the Observer Laura Cumming wrote: "This is the most powerful show the National Gallery is ever likely to hold... It is not common for people to weep at a press view, nor to fall silent with awe, but both happened this week at the National Gallery."

There have been dissenting voices, naturally. My friend Miriam Gross, the gentlest and most civilised of people, did not care for the show. In the Spectator she wrote that "these graphic three-dimensional representations ... seem to me of no more aesthetic value than the brilliantly realistic dolls you can buy in Hamleys. This may be because I'm not a Catholic and indeed I find the preoccupation with death and physical suffering in so much Catholic imagery truly morbid."

You can see what she means. Those preoccupied with death can be pretty deadly, and are best avoided. But it is pity the exhibition evokes and invites, surely, not morbid introspection. These representations of the Passion go beyond mere art. You can look at, say, Caravaggio's religious work and think of it solely in terms of art, but The Sacred Made Real claims to be, and is, something more. The Guardian's Adrian Searle, a non-believer, said he had been "devastated" by what he'd seen. ¡Viva España!

***

We went to the gallery with a friend who was received into the Church at Easter. This was his second visit. As we stood in the queue at Pret after leaving the National Gallery, he suggested to me that things were going well for the Church, that perhaps we lived in an age of miracles. How so? Well, there was this exhibition, for starters, plus the tour by St Thérèse, Cardinal Newman's upcoming beatification, the visit of the Pope next year, and the overtures to disaffected members of the C of E. It was looking good.

Maybe he is right. What a contrast, anyway, to my own negativity and to the negativity of the paranoid Catholic Right, especially in the United States. Our friend says of his conversion: "I jumped. I was not pushed." Much as he rejoices in the Pope's outreach to Anglo-Catholics, he was never himself an Anglo-Catholic and does not miss his so-called liturgical patrimony. The Catholic liturgy now dominates his life - he hungers for the Eucharist and goes almost daily to Mass - and he has no intention of signing up with the Anglos when they start coming over next year. He is not a "traditionalist" (though I have seen to it that he has a 1962 missal).

Had there been a downside to his conversion? Yes, he'd developed "convert's knee". He was not used to all the kneeling and the strain had induced pain in his right knee. He'd been talking about this on a bus one day - in a mobile call to a friend - and a young black evangelical sitting near him asked whether he might help.

My friend said he'd like any help that was going. So the young evangelical placed his hand on my friend's knee - please, no giggling at the back of the class - and prayed. Hey presto! The pain went immediately.

There is a simple faith here that puts me to shame. When a couple of days later, my friend and I went to see Into Great Silence at the National Gallery (shown free in conjunction with The Sacred Made Real), I asked him whether he thought he could live the life of a Carthusian monk. Without any hint of piety, he said that a better question might be whether he was called to that life. If ever he were called, he said, he would certainly be able to live the life.

***

'CHRISTMAS SORTED" shouted the Sunday Times on its front page at the weekend, alongside a picture of a naked woman clutching a handbag in what can only be described as an attitude of sexual ecstasy. Readers were invited to consult the Style magazine for "112 pages of brilliant gift ideas". Happy Advent, people.

The only way to get through the next month with anything like dignity is to approach the Christmas festivities in a mood of disapproving, wintery ascetism. Do not drink, do not eat, do not laugh at jokes, which are bound to be off-colour. Make people at parties feel uncomfortable, vaguely guilty. That at any rate was my policy last year and it will be my policy this.

Not that I've been invited to any Christmas parties this year...

A nation of cold puritans

Friday 20 November 2009

Aylesbury Young Offenders’ Institution in Buckinghamshire, where Kelly-Anne McDade worked PA

Not a lot of people know this, but it is Prisons Week. Most of us have better things to do than think about the people banged up in our overcrowded jails. I certainly do. Sometimes, though, my defences slip and I allow myself a moment or two of reflection.

Last week Kelly-Anne McDade, 31, a prison officer, was jailed for 30 months for misconduct in public office: she had an affair with an 18-year-old prisoner by whom, in February, she had a child. She also tried to supply the prisoner with mobile phones, and cannabis was found in her home.

The judge said that what she had done was disgraceful, and so it was; scarcely believable, in fact, and she did not help herself by selling her story (for a measly £1,000) to the cheap and lewd Closer magazine.

So. The case for jailing her is strong. Her incarceration will no doubt deter others from engaging in serious breaches of security. But the case against jailing her is stronger. She is no danger to society and she is not going to reoffend.

Above all, though, she has a nine-month-old son, and mothers of babies obviously should not be jailed – except on the very rare occasions when they are serial killers or failed suicide bombers; in other words, when they are a danger to the public. There are other, less costly and more humane methods of punishing wrong-doers.

In any case, we live in a corrupt and cockeyed world. Why, for example, was Ms McDade allowed to act as turnkey for young male offenders? Why are such obviously risky arrangements tolerated? The answer, presumably, is that the prison service is required by law to observe the doctrine of gender equality.

It can’t be long before the Church is, too.

What heartless puritans we have become. We tolerate everything and forgive nothing, to paraphrase Cardinal George of Chicago. You can almost hear sensible people commenting on this latest case: “To be sure a baby should be with its mother, but Ms McDade should have thought of that before she decided not to have an abortion.” Counter-Reformation corner: I was at a weekday evening Mass at Westminster Cathedral not long ago and there were two queues for Communion. One led to the priest; the other to the three extraordinary ministers.

The queue for the priest was longer than the queue for the three women; and it got longer. At one point the poor women were standing there with their little sashes of office over their shoulders but with no one to serve. It was really rather sad.

From time to time the MC gestured to those waiting to receive from the priest – who, now I come to think of it, may have been a bishop – that they should swap lanes. A few did, but most remained where they were. This was no rad trad demonstration; rad trads, after all, do not go to Mass at the Cathedral. No, these were ordinary Catholics, and I assume they wanted to receive Communion from the anointed hands of a priest. They were voting with their feet, but without, as it were, making a song and dance about it.

The Devil can quote Scripture and I can quote Church documents. So far as I know, the last word on this subject was spoken five years ago by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in the Instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum.

Of lay participation in general, the instruction says: “Only out of true necessity is there to be recourse to the assistance of extraordinary ministers in the celebration of the Liturgy. Such recourse is not intended for the sake of a fuller participation of the laity but rather, by its very nature, is supplementary and provisional.”

Of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion: “… the extraordinary minister of Holy Communion may administer Communion only when the Priest and Deacon are lacking, when the Priest is prevented by weakness or advanced age or some other genuine reason, or when the number of faithful coming to Communion is so great that the very celebration of Mass would be unduly prolonged. This, however, is to be understood in such a way that a brief prolongation, considering the circumstances and culture of the place, is not at all a sufficient reason.”

No confusion there, then. Look, one hates to be a bossy-boots, an anorak, a geek, a nerd, a bore, a sneak, a rotter, a pedant; but I do think we might hope for reform. I mean no disrespect to the Cathedral or to its many fine priests – especially those who day after day hear our confessions without either sighing or sniggering – and I mean no disrespect to the new Archbishop, either, and none to the extraordinary ministers of Communion, who are clearly good women, but isn’t there something that’s not quite right here?

At any rate, it seems to me that in the light of Redemptionis Sacramentum there can be no justification for using extraordinary ministers except in cases where there are no other practical means of distributing Holy Communion, as perhaps at a Mass attended by thousands in the African bush.

Hatred of Gordon Brown has plumbed such depths of nastiness and insanity that I am now, for the first time in my life, tempted to vote Labour. The party is obviously sounder on the economy than the Tories are, and has no loopy, libertarian, Poujadist ideas about pulling out of Europe.

But I won’t vote Labour. Like the Tories and the Lib Dems, the Labour Party is profoundly anti-Catholic in its moral outlook. The vast majority of our MPs would have voted for Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens in that infamous debate.

How fortunate we are, therefore, in having the Christian Peoples Alliance – pro-life, anti-war, pro-Europe. At its weekend conference, delegates voted to oppose the extension of the Trident missile system, on the grounds that it is immoral and expensive (renewal will cost £20 billion).

The resolution did not bother to pull any punches: “To approve the use of nuclear weapons or to hold them in reserve is a form of blasphemy against God. It is a kind of idolatry. Like all idols, our weapons research programme, testing, maintenance and delivery mechanisms require continual payment. The Christian Peoples Alliance is saying we refuse to worship this false god and we choose to support investment in pursuing justice and tackling poverty, which cause much of global instability.”

A Bible for the Right

Friday 13 November 2009

Conservapedia, above, wants to eliminate 'liberal' and 'socialistic' distortations of the Good Book

Call me slow if you like, behind the curve, out of the loop, off the programme, but I have only just come across Conservapedia, the conservative "answer" to Wikipedia.

It has been in the news recently because the bright-eyed people who run it - among them, it seems, Catholics - are working on a new "conservative" translation of the Bible. They want to get rid of what they call the "liberal" and "socialistic" distortions and mistranslations that have crept into the Good Book over the years.

Read what the people at Conservapedia say about their Bible project and you will appreciate how wise our forebears were in resisting those first unsupervised attempts to translate the Bible.

Scripture can be dangerous, and if you don't look to the Church for guidance in understanding (and translating) it, you may well end up believing that God created the world 5,786 years ago at 6.30 in the morning of November 17.

In fact, Conservapedia is not, strictly speaking, a translation but a reworking and simplifying - and debugging - of the King James Version, with some input from scholars of Greek and Hebrew (though anyone is free to suggest improvements).

To give you an idea of the approach: where the King James has "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God", our evangelical friends propose the Yoda-like: "So truly blessed are the Makers of Peace. It is Children of God that they will be called." Again, where King James has "And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred", Conservapedia suggests: "And after having fasted for 40 days and nights, Jesus began to be hungry." "Began?" Conservapedia explains: "Greek and Syriac strongly imply that Jesus felt no hunger until the end of the 40 days and nights of fast."

Well, that's scholarship for you. The exegesis is at its most arresting, however, when it is politically inspired, as here:

The earliest, most authentic manuscripts of the Gospel According to Luke lack this verse fragment set forth at the start of Luke 23:34:

Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.'

Is this a corruption of the original, perhaps promoted by liberals without regard to its authenticity? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals, although it does not appear in the earliest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke. It should not appear in a conservative Bible, because in point of fact Jesus might never had said it at all.

Forgiveness is for wimps, clearly. Only a liberal could believe that our Redeemer was prepared to die for people who were so bad that they did not know they were bad. People like us, in other words.

Consider also this:

Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the "social justice" movement among Christians.

For example, the conservative word "volunteer" is mentioned only once in the ESV [English Standard Version], yet the socialistic word "comrade"_is used three times, "laborer(s)" is used 13 times, "labored" 15 times, and "fellow" (as in "fellow worker") is used 55 times.

It's the attention to detail that makes you weep and fidget...

Conservapedia has so far translated about a third of the New Testament, taking care at every stage to "identify pro-liberal terms used in existing Bible translations, such as 'government'"; to explain "the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning"; and to exclude "the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story".

What's liberal about the story of the woman taken in adultery? It's obvious when you think about it. Jesus stops the woman being stoned to death by suggesting that only those who are without sin have any right to kill her. See? Liberals grab hold of the story because they can use it to diss the death penalty and to justify a nonjudgmental approach to evil-doers.

Conservapedia puts us right: "Civilized society may not depend on stoning to deter immoral crimes, but it does depend on retribution enforced by people who are themselves sinners." Roger that.

Conservapedia was started in 2006 by a lawyer and social studies teacher called Andrew Schlafly, who may or may not be a Catholic. His Mom, Phyllis Schlafly, is a Catholic, however. She is also a fiercely anti-feminist constitutional lawyer who once called for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, citing (if I am to believe what I read in Wikipedia) Kennedy's deciding vote in abolishing the death penalty for crimes committed by minors. Justice Kennedy is also a Catholic.

It may be just my fancy, but it seems to me that the worst sort of Protestant evangelical thinking - vengeful, fundamentalist, humourless, and hostile to the social doctrine of the Church - is colonising the wilder shores of what we might call "ultradox" Catholicism. But let's be fair. If the hysteria of far Right is a turn-off, the relentless niceness of the religious Left is... well, not going to win any converts.

One morning last week I listened to Prayer for the Day. I'll not name the Reverend responsible because that would be unkind and anyway I have never heard of him, but here's what he said, and without a hint of irony:

"Shared laughter with friends is a great way to cheer ourselves up if we are feeling a bit down. Let's recognise that a sense of humour is one of God's great gifts to us and that those who make us laugh can also be God's messengers. Try thinking of Lionel Blue or Stephen Fry or even Alan Davies as angels. That'll bring a smile to your face."

Not to mine, brother.

Goodbye, Mr Philips

Friday 6 November 2009

Michael Philips: 'He treated us as adults but not, quite, as equals'

It's no use. I must resign myself to the fact that the Guardian weekend magazine is never going to ask me to take part in one of its Q&A features. You know the sort of thing: What was the worst job you've ever done? (Deputy editor, Ice Cream Industry.) What is your greatest fear? (Worldly success.) What is the trait you most deplore in others? (Worldly success.) What keeps you awake at night? (The reluctance of the NHS to prescribe sleeping pills, even to an old geezer, on the grounds that they are addictive.)

But the really big question, the best question, is: When were you happiest? One immediately abandons facetiousness and bursts into tears, no? There is anyway no time like the past, and on Monday, All Souls, I travelled back to the mid-Fifties when I attended a memorial Mass at Farm Street for Michael Philips, the founder and headmaster of Elston Hall, a small, rather chaotic and now defunct prep school in Nottinghamshire, where I spent two of the happiest years of my life.

Mr Philips died in September, aged 86, after a long and courageous battle with cancer.

There were about 100 of us at Farm Street. It was a sad and joyful occasion. Mark Philips, Mr Philips's older brother, spoke of the "blissfully happy" childhood he and Michael had shared. After Mass we went to the Cavalry and Guards Club in Piccadilly. Fifty years is a fairly long time, I suppose, and I did not recognise anyone there except for Rupert Allason (aka the spook writer Nigel West), probably the only celeb Elston ever produced - unless you count Michel Abney-Hastings, 14th Earl of Loudoun. He became briefly famous in 2004 when Channel 4 made a documentary claiming that he was the true King of England. The reasons are too complicated to go into here, and anyway I don't understand them, but they have to do with Michael's apparently being the senior descendant of George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence (1449-1478). None of this seems to matter much to my former school chum - we were in the same year - who is a republican and has lived in Australia since his teens.

So it goes. But someone at the Cavalry and Guards Club on Monday did recognise me, at least by name. "You were a prefect," he said "and had me beaten."

The shame! Can I really have been a collaborator? Alas, yes. There is no denying it. I was indeed a prefect. As a matter of fact, I peaked at Elston. By the time I left in 1957, I was head of school, captain of cricket, captain of soccer and school tennis doubles champion.

If I'd kept it up, I might have become Mayor of London. But things are never as they seem. There were only about three boys there when I arrived in 1955 - well, maybe 20 - and no more than 50 or so when I left. There was no competition.

Elston Hall was a quite ridiculously happy and privileged place, set in large grounds and with woods in which any boy with gumption soon learned to smoke. In my first term we ate in the hall at a long table, Mr Philips at one end and matron (or some person of equally irreproachable magnificence) at the other. We rotated, if memory serves, so that each of us in turn got the chance of talk to the headmaster (about the Goons, perhaps, or Euclid, or Denis Compton, or St Thomas Aquinas, or all of the above).

Mr Philips treated us as adults but not, quite, as equals. He'd listen and instruct, and he'd laugh at the same things we laughed at (very often his jokes). He was loved and admired, and sometimes feared. Some mornings he could seem a bit liverish. There was, as I recall, quite often a sound of revelry by night from the staff room.

What happy days. Things were about to change, but England in the mid-1950s was still much closer in spirit to Victorian England than it was to the England of Tony Blair and George W Bush, of Gordon Brown and David Cameron, of Britain's Got Talent and UKIP, of social mobility and geeky Tory think tanks.

We were a nation formed, most recently, by the Second World War. Those of us who grew up in London had used bomb sites as playgrounds. Mr Philips was at Eton when the war began. In 1941, when he was 18, he was offered a place at Magdalen, Oxford, but instead joined the Coldstream Guards. In 1943 he was shipped to Italy and served in the hideously grim campaign there until the end of the war.

He left the Army in 1947, and after a spell in the family cotton business in Manchester settled in London. He was a serious Anglican, and a serious Christian, and in 1950, without waiting for an invitation from the Pope, converted to Catholicism. Five years later, in 1955, he opened Elston, on the eve, as he later put it, of an "extraordinary social and moral revolution". Perhaps the revolution took its toll in the 1960s. Whatever the case, Elston was closed in 1972.

"I was getting so out of touch with the ideas of modern education and the increasing red tape," he later told Tim Coghlan, who was at the school from 1960 and 1961 and who now keeps old boys in touch with one another. "Also it was increasingly difficult to get good staff."

In some ways Elston had been a comic turn, with just a touch of distressed gentlefolks about it, a hint of Decline and Fall, but Mr Philips certainly had no trouble in getting good staff when I was there. The teaching was superb, the best I ever had. Mr Philips himself took maths, with (I think) RE on the side, and was inspiring. QED: Quite Easily Done! The argument from design... It's really not difficult, boys. The simple logic of it all was enchanting.

Perhaps Mr Philips was in some ways like Fr Paul Neville, who, as headmaster of Ampleforth, is supposed to have said that the purpose of his school was not so much to prepare boys for life as to prepare them for death. Mr Philips wanted his boys to know their numbers and letters, which is all the education most of us need, or can manage, but above all he wanted them to be Catholic. The faith he passed on to us was kind, tolerant, gentle, coherent, confident, Roman, English - and dogmatic.

Goodbye, Mr Philips. I hope to be for ever in your debt. RIP.

Let's ignore the BNP

Friday 30 October 2009

Riot police guard one of the entrances to the BBC during last week's protest against Nick Griffin

Many years ago I was seeing a young woman, who happened to be a normal human being, and one day I made a spiteful remark to her about the distinguished liberal journalist James Cameron. "That's quite enough of that," she said, "you 12-year-old knee-jerk fascist."

So I have to look where I am going when I write about the BNP. Perhaps the best way to begin is by saying that I agree with Peter Hain that Nick Griffin should not have been allowed to appear on Question Time. This is the first time that I have ever agreed with South African Welsh Secretary about anything, and I hope it will be the last.

Hain and I come at this from different ends of the political spectrum, of course. He is an enthusiastic secular liberal and I am not. I think the decision to have Griffin appear was an assertion of liberal principles; Hain no doubt believes it was a betrayal of those principles.

In the cant of our times, censorship is the ultimate obscenity, but we have seldom been more censorious. It was in the name of freedom and democracy (and ratings) that the BBC invited Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time last week, and it was in the name of freedom and democracy (and ratings) that it then had him beaten up. Sue MacGregor did not like it. Neither did I.

The BBC is proceeding, loosely, on the silliest principle ever enunciated: I may disagree with what you say but will defend with to the death your right to say it (especially if you have won a couple of seats in the Euro Parliament). That idea is not just silly but grotesque, and those who endorse it would never have applied it to, for example, Julius Streicher, and thank God for that.

My beef here, however, is not so much that Griffin took a beating - it's what he asked for, after all, what he wanted, and anyway he is himself not bad at administering verbal beatings. My beef is that we all took a beating. Even in the privacy of your own sitting room, where you can shout obscenities at the screen (if your wife has gone to bed), it is painful to have to behold the broadcasting and political establishment in one of its periodical fits of morality. (You could always have switched off your television, libertarians will say. No, I couldn't, I say.) The humbug oozed through the airwaves.

Jack Straw was in his element. At the best of times it is not possible to warm to Justice Secretary, but his goggle-eyed indignation last Thursday night was not a pretty sight. I remember when he was the Left-wing leader of the National Union of Students. Who would have thought then that he'd have grown up to become Foreign Secretary in a government which waged illegal war against a country that was no threat to Great Britain, or to any of our friends, including the United States? But none of the hoopla was necessary. The BNP should be ignored. It is a creepily nationalist and unChristian party, but it poses no threat the United Kingdom, which is more than can be said for the Tory and Labour parties. The BNP will go away if it is left alone. The British people do not have the fascist gene. This is, irrevocably, a multiracial, multicultural country.

***

The Pope copped it again last week. His generous outreach to dissenting Anglicans was denounced as an act of aggression. He was even accused of fishing in the Anglican pond. Wait a minute. Fishing is what popes do, isn't it? St Peter was a fisherman.

Liberals in both the Catholic and Anglican Church hate the thought of the new Anglican-RC arrangement because they want ecumenical dialogue to go on for ever. It's a living, after all. The only way of reaching a closure as far as these people are concerned is for the Catholic Church to recognise the Anglican Church, which is not going to happen.

All the same, some of us have misgivings about the forthcoming Apostolic Constitution, or at the very least are confused. Myself, I do not see the point of Anglo-Catholics. I have never understood how man who wears a soutane and a biretta, and has a picture of the Pope in his study, and hears Confession, and sometimes uses the TLM, how such a man can be an Anglican. I must be missing something, but anyway it does not matter. I rejoice that in Benedict XVI we have a Pope who is leading the drive for Christian unity.

***

Someone at Intelligence Squared told me that they had tried to get George Weigel, the biographer of John Paul II, to defend the Church in last week's big debate, but he was not available.

Weigel would not have won the day - given the audience, that was always impossible - but he would have made a far better defender of the faith than either the admirable and feisty Ann Widdecombe or the admirable and unhappy Archbishop Onaiyekan, of Abuja, Nigeria.

My feeling is that Intelligence Squared was embarrassed by the slaughter, but it's not easy to find someone to go up against Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry now that Torquemada and St Thomas Aquinas are dead.

If there had been a similar debate in the Twenties G K Chesterton would have appeared for the Church, or Hilaire Belloc. In the Fifties we might have imported Bishop Fulton Sheen to defend our interests.

But who is there today? The truth is that most of the clever people are on the other side. But not all of them. Here are some Catholics who might have made a fist of it last week: the aforementioned George Weigel, Fr Stephen Langridge (vocations director for Southwark diocese), Dr Edward Norman, Stephen Colbert, Mel Gibson, Fr John Zuhlsdorf (Fr Z of WDTPRS), Patrick Buchanan, Eamon Duffy, Andrew Bacevich (a brilliant anti-war American conservative, who would have badly unsettled the Trotskyite neocon Hitchens), Charles Moore, Brian Sewell, and our very own Damian Thompson, who is not one to take prisoners.

There must be many others, however. Any suggestions?

Don't expect to be loved

Friday 23 October 2009

Christopher Hitchens, right, wiped the floor with the Catholic speakers in Monday's debate in London

It was already a bumper year for Catholic-bashers, but this week it got better. On Monday night there was an extraordinary debate in London, organised by Intelligence Squared, on the motion: "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world." Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, opposing the motion, wiped the floor with Ann Widdecombe and Archbishop Onaiyekan (of Abuja, Nigeria), who supported it.

The final vote was: for the motion: 268, against: 1,862. Apparently it was the biggest No vote in the history of Intelligence Squared.

Ed West reports on the debate elsewhere. If it's the facts you are after, a coherent account of the evening, go there now. I want to dwell here on what the debate may tell us about anti-Catholicism in England today.

Fry and Hitchens were well-armed and well-prepared, and they deployed their WMD to great effect. Rockets rained down on the usual Catholic suspects: Hitler, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, the Crusades, Pius XII, Mussolini, the sack of Constantinople, the spread of HIV/Aids, Franco, Salazar, Bishop Richard Williamson - or "Roger" Williamson, as Hitchens called him, in what for me was the only light relief of the evening - and, to quote Hitchens again, the "institutionalisation of the rape and torture and maltreatment of children".

It was the same old song with the same old beat. The audience loved it. There was gleeful clapping. Hitchens and Fry sure know how to work a hall. On Monday they mixed stand-up comedy with a burning sense of their own moral righteousness. They did not have a doubt between them. There was nothing tentative in their approach, nothing nuanced; but there is no need for subtlety if your purpose is to trash religion. At one point Fry, who was the more passionate of the two, said: "I think of myself as one who is filled with love."

Ann Widdecombe gave a feisty performance, but it was not good enough. The archbishop was out of his league, and towards the end seemed shocked and upset.

The audience was made up for the most part of student types and of relaxed, charming, nicely dressed professional and media folk. They were the sort of people you'd like to invite to lunch if you had a nice enough house and weren't such a saddo.

These were nice people, in other words, anti-Catholic to be sure, but in a rather self-deprecating English way. You felt that they wanted to have their most cherished disbeliefs confirmed, without being too noisy about it, and they reminded one of what has become increasingly obvious in recent years: that many of the well-educated, high-income professionals who run the country think Christianity is absurd, and that unyielding Catholicism is doubly absurd, even if it gave us Tuscany.

But the times are changing, and the English may become less easy-going. It is possible that within 50 years, for example, it may be against the law for the Catholic Church to proclaim its teaching on sexual morality or to continue to bar women from the priesthood.

Already it is against the law for adoption agencies to refuse to place children with homosexual couples. The time could be coming, too, when doctors and nurses will lose their jobs if they refuse to perform abortions. If I were an extremist I might be tempted to suggest that one day Catholics will not be allowed to appear on Question Time. In other words, unlike the racist BNP, the "homophobic" Church may eventually come to be regarded as beyond the pale by the BBC.

Happily, I am not an extremist, and I allow myself to hope that England will continue to bumble along in its cheerful, easy-going way, even though anti-Catholicism is increasingly the default setting of the society in which we live, as Monday's debate shows.

There is often much to be said for balance. The great danger today among orthodox Catholics is paranoia. There is a persecution complex in some Catholic quarters, and we are hearing again that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals. There is some truth in that, but if taken too much to heart it can lead to loopy thinking.

Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League in the US, denounced a recent vile attack on the Church by the entertainers Penn and Teller as "Nazi-like assault on Catholicism". Nazi, as in Holocaust. Elsewhere, anti-Catholic sentiment in the media is being compared with the sort of persecution suffered by the Jews in 1930s Germany.

This should stop now. Think about it. Even if Catholics were one day rounded up with other Christians and sent to extermination camps, there would still be one very big difference between anti-Catholicism anti-Semitism: anti-Semitism is about race, anti-Catholicism is about belief.

You can stop being a Catholic - indeed, there is no anti-Catholic like a Catholic anti-Catholic - but you can't stop being a Jew. Edith Stein is a great Christian saint, a Doctor of the Church, but she went to her death in Auschwitz because she was Jewish. She was convicted by her DNA.

Catholics should not muscle in on Jewish territory. Cries of "me too" are insulting to the Jews and demeaning to Christians. Not everything is about the Nazis. Nazism is not the only measure of evil. There may even be worse things to come, there may be persecution, we may be required to show our mettle, but for the time being the most heroic thing most of us are called on to do is to smile in the checkout queue at the supermarket, and to be civil to Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry if we bump into them in the pub.

Besides, if there were not quite a bit of anti-Catholicism about, the Church would be failing in its duty: you cannot oppose the spirit of the world and at the same time win the beauty contest. You cannot preach sacrificial love and expect to be loved.

In just over a week we celebrate All Saints' Day. The Gospel appointed to be read on the feast ends with these rather cheering words:

"Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for My sake: be glad and rejoice for your reward is very great in heaven."

A Little Way forward

Friday 16 October 2009

Pilgrims venerate the relics of St Thérèse during their stop in Notting Hill Carmel (Catholicrelics.co.uk)

'Moreover," declared the Council of Trent, having given the matter further thought, "in the invocation of saints, the veneration of relics, and the sacred use of images, every superstition shall be removed, all filthy lucre be abolished..." Not only that but "figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust; nor the celebration of the saints, and the visitation of relics be by any perverted into revellings and drunkenness..."

The Council Fathers would have been well chuffed with the people who turned up at the Carmelite monastery in North Kensington on Monday to pay their respects to St Thérèse of Lisieux. In place of a conga line there was an orderly queue. No one necked or mooned. Helpers served tea and biscuits. Someone handed out roses, though not to me. No money changed hands.

It was a perfect autumn day, too. High in the blue sky above the monastery hung a pale crescent moon.

Soon after I arrived a young woman in her late 20s joined me at the back of the queue. She wore a red top, dark grey slacks and Converse trainers, and turned out to be a seeker after truth. "I'm not Catholic," she said. "I'm sort of Protestant, but I am into religion." She'd turned up for St Thérèse, she explained, because "I am having a bit of trouble with my family and I wanted to hold on to something that is stable and normal."

Blimey, I thought. Stable and normal! That's not a very respectable way for a nice non-Catholic woman to talk about what secularists see as a manifestation of willful superstition, a piece of insolence that really ought not to be tolerated in this so-called day and age. Stable and normal, indeed!

"In what circumstance," demands an atheist blogger, "other than in the name of God, could dragging the decayed remains of a consumptive 24-year-old woman around the UK be considered socially acceptable?"

But I fancied that my friend was not one to worry about social acceptability. She was a free-thinker and a bit of an eccentric. "I don't go to church," she confessed to me. "All that talk about evil and sinning..." An older woman in front of us turned round. "You want to go to Farm Street," she said with a voice of authority. "You won't hear much talk about sinning there."

We queued for about an hour. It was worth the wait. Inside the monastery a priest was hearing confessions in a small room off a main corridor. A cheerful young Afro-Caribbean woman with ginger ringlets peeled off to be shriven. There were pictures of St Thérèse on the walls, and encouraging quotations from her writings alongside them. I was beginning to feel a bit excited.

The "sort of Protestant" woman was beginning to feel something, too. She felt she needed to extend her horizons, perhaps by reading Story of a Soul. She'd been leafing through the Daily Telegraph while waiting outside and had not been greatly impressed. "I don't need all this materialism and sensationalism," she said.

Suddenly the casket was in front of us. It was smaller than I had expected, and the reliquary itself less jewelled and imposing; less kitsch I suppose. I was not absolutely sure what the form was now, but I pressed a miraculous medal and a rosary to the glass casing, and forgot the prayer I had intended to say. I did not kiss anything.

On my way home, I started to wonder whether Story of a Soul is really suitable bedtime reading for a young woman who does not like talk of sin and evil. Actually, it might be. I checked the index and found to my surprise that very little is listed under "sin and sinners", and there is no "evil" at all in the index. "Suffering and trials", on the other hand, and "tears" have pretty big entries.

My own misgivings about St Thérèse returned, though, when I checked one of the entries on sin, and found this: "I remember the joy I had putting on some pretty sky-blue ribbons Aunt had given me for my hair; I also recall having confessed at Trouville even this childish pleasure which seemed to be a sin to me." Thérèse was 12 at the time.

Pascal says somewhere that the sinner is someone who thinks that nothing he does is wrong, and the saint someone who thinks that everything he does is wrong. Those with scrupulous inclinations will know exactly how Thérèse felt, and it is not a good way to feel.

But let me not whine. Thérèse is a saint not because she was a moral theologian but because she mapped out the Little Way, by which we seek to do ordinary things extraordinary well, and thus transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. The Little Way is not for wimps, which is why I have sometimes found it frightening.

Death is an ordinary thing and St Thérèse transformed it into an extraordinary thing by dying with such extraordinary courage. On the wall of the Carmelite monastery on Monday there was a greatly enlarged print of the famous picture taken of Thérèse immediately after she died. It is the picture of extraordinarily beautiful girl, a hauntingly beautiful girl, a distractingly beautiful girl. In death she had a beauty that she simply did not have in life. That picture is now on the wall above my desk, alongside the Pope, Joan of Arc and John Wayne.

***

On Monday evening I went to the piazza outside Westminster Cathedral. I spoke to an Afro-Caribbean woman from Enfield who was there to see St Thérèse with her teenage son. She was carrying a rose. He was carrying a bag of McDonald's chips.

Was she expecting a miracle? No, she was expecting, or hoping for, blessings. "The most important thing, though, is just to see the relics of St Thérèse. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity."

It's not every day that a young mum from Enfield gets the chance to stand a couple of feet away from a great saint. Nor an old man from Balham, come to that.

On Tuesday I went again to the Cathedral. Something has clicked. I am no longer frightened of St Thérèse of the Child Jesus.

Boris for EU president!

Friday 9 October 2009

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, was one of the stars of this week's Tory party conference (PA)

The party political season is now over, thank God. Each year I dread its onset almost as much as I dread the onset of winter and the return of Strictly Come Dancing. To be sure, you can occasionally get some satisfaction from the spectacle of politicians being publicly humiliated, but most decent people react to these things by following the example of the late John Junor and pulling their duvets over their heads and turning their faces to the wall.

Maybe this year the conferences have been especially boring, as Nick Thomas suggested last week. That's certainly my impression, though, to be fair, the Tories have this week had the edge on Labour and the Lib Dems. David Cameron's speech is still to come as I write, and it might provide us with a bit of a lift. There is something in the air. With the Sun on his side, who can now beat Mr Cameron?

In the days when I was an aggressive Thatcherite I might have been rather excited by all this, instead of depressed as I am now. I was easily excited in those days. In fact, the only time I ever developed a nervous tick was when, at a social gathering in Fulham in the early 1980s, I got into an argument about the miners' strike with a very calm, very focused, very reasonable Ulster socialist, and became so excited - or angry - that I completely lost control of my upper lip. It started to curl and jump all over the place. I was like Martyn Lewis on speed.

Spending cuts are of course the political fashion right now, and the Tories are doing quite well, but although there is plenty of room for anger about the economy, I can't get myself worked up. Perhaps that's because I can't take the so-called recession terribly seriously. Nor, by the way, can my accountant. Even though many people are suffering, most people have never had it so good. Public debt is more than £800 billion, and I suppose that is what one should call real money, but it's not like owing a pal £100 in the good old days. It's not as serious as that. It may, of course, be infinitely more more serious, indeed, calamitous, and we may all be doomed, but to most of us 800 billion is a meaningless figure.

Still, it is good that Europe is back on the agenda. The sceptics have been howling and yelping since the Irish voted yes in their referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. These people finished off that nice Mr Major, and they could finish off that nice Mr Cameron, too.

Will Cameron call a referendum or not? Tricky one. There is pressure on him. Boris Johnson, the most famous Tory in the world, wants a referendum, and so does Dan Hannan, the second most famous Tory in the world. But my guess is that, as usual, Cameron will not commit himself. If the Treaty is passed by the time of the next election, of course, there will be no point in a referendum, but that thought does not seem to trouble the wilder sceptics. But there is another, more important European question arising from the Irish yes vote: will Tony Blair become President of Europe? The awful possibility of a Blair presidency has been haunting the nation since the weekend, and mothers have been dosing their terrified little ones with gin to get them to sleep at night.

So what's the answer: will Blair get the job? No way, José, says conference star Boris Johnson. In his Telegraph column on Monday he wagered his readers a fiver - proceeds to charity - that Blair would not become the new Holy Roman Emperor.

Boris reasoned that Blair is too much of an Atlanticist to get the backing of his fellow European magnificoes. The Mayor may well be right, although Europeans are not as snobbishly anti-American as they were when George W Bush was in the White House. Indeed, now that Barack Obama is there they have themselves become Atlanticists, in some cases fawning Atlanticists.

Whatever the case, I have decided to take Boris's bet. I feel I owe it to him. Proceeds to go to Aid to the Church in Need.

If I win the bet, though, we are in for a grisly ride. Imagine it: Tony Baloney and his 500 million Europeans. Genghis Khan had nothing on this. It is enough to turn even a fanatical Europhile like me into a Eurosceptic.

Oh, wait. There is another way. Couldn't Brussels somehow co-opt Boris and install him as president? He'd be an instantly recognised figure, at least in New York and Beijing, and the comedy routines when Boris paid state visits to Barack, or Silvo Berlusconi, would make even a Romanian laugh.

Go on, Boris. Just say yes if you get the call. You speak the lingo - well, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Hungarian, Turkish, American and Serbo-Croat - and the presidency will give you something to do until you take over the Tory party.

***

Last week I mocked the Eucharistic fasting laws, and made the point that at school we observed the fast from midnight and no one to my knowledge ever fainted from hunger.

On Tuesday I received the following letter from a reader:

"I can assure you that I fainted on three occasions that I remember having fasted in fact from supper the previous evening. This was in the late 1930s and early 1940s and in an economically depressed area in the far North West of England.

"We had to go to the 9am Mass which was specifically for the schoolchildren and then go straight on to school - a walk of 20 minutes or so - where we were given a cup of hot malted milk to last us until lunch time, when we went home for lunch. I have no problem with this memory but would like to point out to you that not everyone - even in this day and age - has access to a Mass provided on school premises with the promise of a hearty breakfast to follow."

It's easy for some; it was easy for me. I apologise to that reader for my ignorance and insensitivity.

Welcome to the cafeteria

Friday 2 October 2009

An Iraqi girl looks on as the shadow of a US Army soldier falls on a wall with Arabic lettering (PA)

Is cafeteria Catholicism on the Right - that is, among people who often identify themselves as conservatives or even as traditionalists - now a greater a threat to orthodoxy than cafeteria Catholicism on the Left?

Maybe. The excellent Thaddeus Kozinski certainly believes it is. Kozinski is the young American philosopher who, as I reported a little while ago, identified "gnostic traditionalism" - the exclusivist and paranoid thinking that leads to a cult mentality among some traditionalists. (Some, please note, my dear brothers and sisters. You will find no blanket condemnations in Charterhouse.)

Now, in the latest issue of Social Justice Review, a Catholic bimonthly published in St Louis, Missouri, Kozinski argues that the false reasoning of Right-wing Catholics, at least on the subject of war, poses a more dangerous temptation to the pious, orthodox Catholic than the false reasoning of Left-liberal Catholics on abortion.

Kozinski does not actually use the term "cafeteria Catholicism". Instead he talks of "sophistry", and distinguishes between the sophistry of the Right and the sophistry of the Left, both inside and outside the Church. He dismisses the Right-wing Michael Novak, for example, as a "warmongering Catholic dissenter" and the Left-wing, ostensibly Christian Barack Obama as a leader whose policies and political rhetoric suggest that he is "practical atheist" with whom there can be no dialogue.

But why is the Right a greater threat to the pious, orthodox Catholic than the Left? The answer, says Kozinski, and this applies almost as much to Britain as it does to the United States, is that pious, orthodox Catholics are not fooled by the liberal Left; they accept Church teaching on, for example, abortion without reservation and are not tempted to abandon it. They might, however, be fooled into taking a thoroughly unCatholic view of the Iraq war by the sophists of the Right, not least because opposition to it has been presented as somehow liberal and subversive, perhaps even unpatriotic.

There is a lot of denial - in other words, of cafeteria Catholicism - on both sides. Just as the Left tempts the unwary to believe that no one really knows the status of the foetus, even though the position of the Church is absolutely clear, so the Right tempts the unwary into believing that no one really knows the status of the Bush-Blair war, even though the Church has decided against it, at least indirectly, in her general condemnation of preventive war (and of course the Pope, as Cardinal Ratzinger, held that it was unjust).

"The attempt to remain agnostic on the justice of a particular ongoing war," writes Kozinski, "especially one involving one's own country, is uncannily similar to the Catholic pro-choice sophistry; it is a manifestation of the 'Right-wing' version of the liberalism and Modernism that have seeped into the human element of the Church, especially in America." Think about it, says Kozinski: "We have an obligation to use our reason to evaluate morally acts of war as much as we do acts of abortion, and though with war, unlike abortion, we have to look at the particulars and judge the issue case-by-case, in the case of the Iraqi war the particulars are no longer so obscure. The evidence of systematic and deliberate lying about the war's origin and its purported motivation, of the non-existence of any imminent threat of violent danger to the US (ius ad bellum), and of the deliberate targeting of civilians and systematic use of torture in the war's execution (ius in bello) is there for all to see who wish to see."

I agree with much of what Kozinski says, and find it especially pleasing that he does not issue shrill or sarcastic condemnations. Myself, I'd get a bit bellicose here and describe the Catholic hawks as invincibly ignorant, perhaps because they were brought up on the legend of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, or, if they don't go back as far as the Fifties, on films like Independence Day; but Kozinski uses rather more sober language:

"I do not wish to imply that pro-life, pro-war Catholics were or are knowingly and deliberately defending an unjust war and thus murder; I shall also refrain from judging the 'pro-choice', anti-war Catholic in his support for what is objectively murder. For I think that both are victims of the sort of sophistry and propaganda that severely attenuates one's knowledge and hence one's culpability."

***

Counter-Reformation corner (first in an occasional series on ways to reform the reforms): The present fasting rules must go (with respect), and at the very least the three-hour fast must return, perhaps to begin with through local initiatives. The requirement that Catholics should refrain from food and drink for only one hour before receiving Communion - that is, for half an hour before Mass begins - is an insult. It calls into question the strength, determination and moral fibre of the people now known as the People of God.

At school we managed the fast from midnight by going to Mass before breakfast. This was not, of course, a voluntary act of piety on our part, and I can't say it was always an especially happy or holy experience. But I am pretty sure that none of us ever fainted from hunger.

There is no risk of anyone fainting from hunger at Mass these days, of course. Here's how it now works in the Church Militant: you must finish your 10-course meal, with 17 different wines, plus cigars, by 5.30 in the evening if you want to go to Communion at the six o'clock Saturday-for-Sunday Mass. Communion will not be distributed until at least 6.30, so you will have observed the fast. Provided that you are sober enough to reach the altar rails, or, depending on your parish, the "collection point" for Holy Communion, and have not been so gluttonous that you are in a state of mortal sin, you will be able to receive.

Fast? What fast? There is no fast. It's time there was one. Might we make an exception for tea, though? The older among us, I have been told, can't quite get off to a flying start without regular cups of tea in the morning.

A lesson in proportion

Friday 25 September 2009

A school blackboard: Two teachers have recently been convicted for sexual activity with pupils (PA Photos)

In the years since deregulation, as we now know to our cost, billions of pounds have been lost, wasted, gambled away, invested in yachts or tropical islands, or simply removed from the gullible and unwary by men and women - though usually by men - acting quite within the law. At times these people have conducted their affairs in a thoroughly unscrupulous way, but they have not done anything illegal. They will see out their years not just in comfort but in luxury, and with easy consciences.

What matters in society today is not whether something is right; what matters is whether it is legal. The law is the only measure, and woe betide you if you don't measure up. Our jails are dangerously overcrowded, but there is always room for one more sad and friendless soul.

Last week a 39-year-old woman in the north of England was convicted of "having sex" with one of her pupils, a boy aged 15, and she has been told that she will be jailed when she is sentenced on November 25, which will give her a chance to find her bearings in time for Christmas.

This is how the Daily Telegraph reported the case:

"The teacher, who is now estranged from her husband, stood with her head bowed in the dock at Manchester Crown Court as she pleaded guilty to 10 charges of sexual activity with a child under 16.

"She was asked to raise her voice as she whispered 'guilty' to each of the charges."

The offences occurred between February 9 and February 17 this year, not a long time in the life of a 39-year-old woman or, for that matter, in the life of a 15-year-old boy. One wonders who counted the number of offences...

The woman did not have any case to speak of. The court heard that she had been looking after her gravely ill sister and this had affected her state of mind, but you are expected to abide by the law even when you are unhappy because your sister is ill. What the woman did was wrong, and she deserved to be punished. She had betrayed the trust placed in her by the school and the parents of her pupils.

But does that mean she should go to jail? Has she not been suffered enough already? Her picture has been in the newspapers. She has been humiliated. She is to be registered as a sex offender and may be banned from working with children or vulnerable adults. Her marriage has broken up. She has lost her job, and of course her good name. The imposition of a jail sentence on top of all that strikes me as gratuitous; indeed, it strikes me as being cruel and unnecessary.

Here I should admit to what may seem, and what may be, a double standard by acknowledging that I would feel differently if the case had involved a girl pupil and a male teacher or a male pupil and a male teacher, and that I do in fact feel differently about the case in London this week involving a woman teacher and a girl pupil (though the 15 months given to that lesbian teacher seems cruel, especially since the relationship was consensual and apparently instigated by the pupil).

I should also say that I could be wrong in my reading of the case of the 39-year-old teacher and her 15-year-old pupil. It could be that the woman corrupted a totally innocent boy. Perhaps the boy was terrified into engaging in sexual acts with his teacher. Perhaps he has been badly traumatised as a result. But we don't know. There was no evidence in court from the boy, at any rate in the reports I saw, or about the circumstances in which the case was brought. Did the boy complain? Did his parents? We just don't know.

Of course minors must be protected and of course the law has to decide when a child reaches the age of consent, even if the decision will often seem arbitrary. In the United Kingdom the age of consent for any act of human sex is 16. (Bestiality, or zoophilia as it is more often called these days, is still against the law at any age, by the way, and so is animal pornography; we are not barbarians.) In England and Wales, in addition, the age of consent is sometimes raised by two years, since it is illegal for a teacher (or anyone else in a position of trust) to engage in sex with an individual under 18 for whom they are in any way responsible.

The woman in this case, however, was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, having sex with a child under 16. In terms of pure justice, surely, the question must be whether a boy of 15 can freely consent to sex acts with a teacher. Well, I may not know much about the law, but I do know a thing or two about 15-year-old schoolboys, having once been one myself, and my answer to that question is an unqualified Yes.

A sense of proportion would help here, and so would a sense of sin. The God to whom we confess our most grievous faults is always, through Jesus Christ and his agent the priest, more merciful than the state. The woman in this case was guilty of adultery and fornication, the boy of fornication, and my guess is that the Five Sorrowful Mysteries would cover it in the woman's case, and three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys in the boy's.

Adultery is still frowned on by the red tops, but it sells newspapers of course. You can't beat a "love cheat" on page one. Fornication, on the other hand, is more or less compulsory these days, provided you have reached your use-by date of 16. After 16, it's phwoar all the way.

What matters is not whether something is right; what matters is whether it is legal. So the nastier tabs feed their readers with lewd and amoral entertainment, which is of course legal, but at the same time - because they are on the side of law and order - howl for the scalps of evil sex pervs, among whom from time to time are weak, unhappy, foolish, and, yes, bad teachers.

Blimey but we are a grim lot: at the same time licentious and prudish.

Greene's prophetic tale

Friday 18 September 2009

Michael Caine stars in the 2002 film version of Graham Greene's The Quiet American (Photo: CNS)

Graham Greene was a tricky customer, but at school 50 years ago we revered him, as we did Evelyn Waugh and G K Chesterton and Ronald Knox. He was a prize convert, a "good get", as people might say today, a walking advertisement for the faith of our fathers.

How happy and uncomplicated our lives were just before the Second Vatican Council. We had the best writers, the best history, the best arguments, the best liturgy - Latin was a universal language for a universal Church, our beaming priests told us - the best recusants, the best miracles, the best plainchant, the best saints, the best popes, and, to prove that we really were better than all the rest, we had integrity, too; that is, we had the ugliest churches and the kitschest plaster statues.

But things are seldom as they seem. Greene was not quite a walking advertisement for the faith. By the Sixties, as I later discovered, he had drifted away. Did he ever lose his faith completely? I do not know. Like everybody else, however, I do know that he was sexually promiscuous. There is no shortage of lurid tales.

In 1989, in an interview with John Cornwell, Greene described himself as a "Catholic agnostic". Yet he received the last rites on his deathbed in April 1991.

Graham Greene always gets a good showing in the arts pages and colour supplements, and no doubt he'll get a lot of ink when the remake of Brighton Rock, starring Helen Mirren and Pete Postlethwaite, is released. I should like to go Greene now, however, with one or two thoughts about The Quiet American, which I have just re-read.

My own first reaction to the book in the Sixties was one of horror and disgust, and I am sure many other Catholics of my generation felt the same way. Most of us were staunch supporters of America's anti-Communist foreign policy, especially in Vietnam. Greene's anti-Americanism and softness on Communism struck me as hateful.

But I can now see that The Quiet American is remarkably astute, even prophetic. The story will no doubt be familiar to some readers. It is set in Saigon in the early Fifties, during the French colonial war with the Communist insurgents. Alden Pyle, the quiet American of the title, is a bungling CIA agent attached to the US economic mission. He befriends Greene's narrator/alter ego, Thomas Fowler, a bitter, cynical, middle-aged God-denying (but God-bothered) English journalist.

Through his naivety and democratic idealism, through his determination to create a Vietnam that is neither colonialist nor Communist, Pyle causes mayhem, thus paving the way for the disastrous American intervention in Vietnam 10 years later. In due course Afghanistan and Iraq followed.

At the time of Vietnam was I was living in Sydney, and I supported the war noisily in pubs and in newspaper columns, but though I still believe that Communism was a more plausible enemy than Islamism, I have to concede that Greene was right and I was wrong about American imperialism. Forty years ago I would have booed Fowler in this encounter with Pyle. Now I cheer him:

***

"You and your like [says Fowler] are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested." "They don't want Communism."

"They want enough rice," I said. "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want white skins around telling them what they want."

Greene was no liberal anti-imperialist, however. On the contrary, liberalism was the enemy, and he had some sympathy with the honest colonialism of old Europe. "The French are dying every day," Fowler tells Pyle. "... They aren't leading these people on with half lies like your politicians - and ours. I've been in India, Pyle, and I know what harm liberals do. We haven't a liberal party any more - liberalism's infected all the other parties. We are all either liberal conservatives or liberal socialists..."

That's spot on, the story of our age. George W Bush was, of course, a liberal conservative, though his enemies on the far Right eventually saw him as a liberal socialist. No matter. Like Pyle, Bush wanted to make the world a better place, by making it more like America, and that was why he was dangerous. Unlike Saddam, he was not a bad or cruel man, but he did have weapons of mass destruction and he did do an awful lot of damage.

But we are all guilty and it is no good just blaming the Yanks, and maybe Greene was not quite as pathologically anti-American as some believe. There is at any rate a nice Gilbert Pinfold moment in The Quiet American, when Fowler/Greene recognises the absurdity of his sometimes obsessive prejudices: "I began - almost unconsciously - to run down everything that was American. My conversation was full of the poverty of American literature, the scandals of American politics, the beastliness of American children... Nothing that America could do was right. I became a bore on the subject, even with my French friends who were ready enough to share my antipathies..."

The book is not without its flaws; it is sentimental and self-pitying at times, even a bit juvenile. But it is a strong and in many ways a beautiful book, and also a subtle one. You feel more pity for the innocent villain Pyle than you do for corrupt anti-hero Fowler.

Is it a Catholic book? In some ways. Here I must mention the love interest, and introduce a spoiler (but then this is not a review). Fowler has a Vietnamese girlfriend, the beautiful Phuong. Pyle falls in love with her, and takes her away. Fowler - here comes the spoiler - betrays Pyle, who is murdered in consequence, and wins the girl back. The last sentence of the book is infinitely sad, and expresses the hopeless longing of a failed Catholic:

"Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry."

A new, improved Mass

Friday 11 September 2009

The website that US bishops have set up to inform Catholics about the new translation (CNS)

Have you looked up the new, improved New Mass on the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops? It's worth taking a peek. I am not saying you'll like what you see, but I can almost guarantee that you'll find it interesting. (Unless you happen to be married to me, in which case you'll find it very tiresome, another excuse for liturgy bores to bore for Britain, and might think of asking St Antony for help.)

What the bishops have posted does not amount to a "reform of the reforms", but it is, apparently for the first time, an authentic representation of those "reforms" - ie, the New Mass of 1970 - in English. The translations we have used these past 40 years have not been faithful to the original Latin text, but the new translation is.

The translators have taken note of what Pope John Paul II said in Liturgiam Authenticam (March, 2001): "The original [liturgical] text, insofar as possible, must be translated integrally and in the most exact manner, without omissions or additions in terms of their content, and without paraphrases or glosses."

It seems that the work has been done with scrupulous honesty. All the offensive constructions in the Ordinary of the Mass - and so far we have only the Ordinary on the bishops' website - have been abandoned in this text: multis now translates as "many" instead of "all", and Credo becomes "I believe" instead of "We believe". In the Gloria, "sin of the world" becomes (as in the Latin) "sins of the world". If you overlook one instance of (justified) gender neutrality, the new Gloria and the Creed have an almost Tridentine splendour.

The big surprise to me, though, is that in the Confiteor we now have "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault". At first I thought that this was value-added, something perhaps smuggled in by a traditionalist disguised as a normal human being, but looking at the original Latin text I see it was there all along. The translators of 40 years ago just omitted it. No doubt they thought it was "vain and repetitious prayer", and came over all bossy boots and Protestant.

But how peachy to have mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa back, if only in English. Every altar boy (and possibly his sister, too) loved that prayer: "Me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy."

But that's enough geeky stuff. Let's move on to the politics. Hard-line liberals won't like the new translations, because hard-line liberals are on the side of the new theology and of what we might call the creative interpretation of liturgical documents. Hard-line traditionalists won't like the new translations, either, since nothing less than the old rite will do for them.

There are some mid-strength traddies who don't like it either. They get angry and impatient and say we should just have the old Mass in English and be done with it. But that's not going to happen. Many of us want the traditional Latin Mass to be much more widely available, but who wants it in English? Come to that, who wants the new rite entirely in Latin? I don't. Latin for the sake of Latin is a bore.

None of this is to suggest, however, that Latin has no place in the new rite; of course it does. The Second Vatican Council was largely ignored by those responsible for its implementation, but let's remember what the Council said in its constitution on the liturgy: "...care must be taken to ensure that the faithful may also be able to say or sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them."

At sung Mass we ought all to sing the Kyrie, Gloria, the Creed, and the Agnus Dei in Latin (or Greek), preferably using the Missa de Angelis. Some traditionalists are snotty about that setting, but I can't imagine why. In fact, I'd require all parish priests to use it once a week for a year, on pain of mortal sin. There is no twitch on the thread as compelling as the sound of the Kyrie from the Missa de Angelis, and it is easy to sing.

Meantime, sursum corda. I am beginning to feel that there may be virtue in abandoning cynicism and despair. The new translation is not in itself a reform of the reforms, as I have said, but it could signal the end of the abuses. No one can perform a clown Mass with these new texts, especially if, as seems possible, priests are encouraged (even required?) to say the Eucharistic Prayer ad orientem.

Let's hope, meanwhile, that the new missal (to be published perhaps in 2011) is accompanied by robust rubrics. I'd like to see the return of the priest's double genuflection after the consecration and the congregation's single genuflection during the Creed. I'd also like to see Communion given on the tongue to people who are kneeling _- and for it to be administered by priests and not by extraordinary ministers.

Lay administration is, of course, sometimes necessary, however. My very good friend the lay prison chaplain and former chairman of the Latin Mass Society is an extraordinary minister, because there is no one else to give Communion to the prisoners.

There will presumably be further changes to the missal in the years ahead. Perhaps some of the old prayers will return. "I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of Thy House and the place where Thy glory dwelleth." Where was the harm in that? Where was the harm in the Offertory prayers that have been removed?

My feeling is, though, that the reform of the reforms will for the most part be accomplished by changes in rubrics, and in attitudes, customs and practices. The changes are occurring already. The religion of the Seventies has almost disappeared. When did you last see a priest with permed hair and Cuban heels?

Let's avoid triumphalism in the meantime. Let's be kind and Catholic. Let's go by the book, and not force the pace of change (or regression). Liberals are often criticised, and rightly, for improvising with the texts. Orthodox priests must now be encouraged not to add their own traditionalist touches to the revised Mass.

"One day at a time," as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, or "brick by brick", as Fr Zed says over at WDTPRS.

Dress code for the beach

Friday 4 September 2009

Thousands flocked to Brighton beach earlier this summer (PA)

Well, that was the summer. Now we can get down to the serious business of doing our tax returns, the summit and apex of the working year and an act of mortification that should be worth a plenary indulgence, at least.

But let's not be negative. There has been too much whining already this year, and when it's not been about the economy - over which we are powerless - it's been about the weather, over which we are also powerless.

The summer hasn't been that bad, however. It's not been cold. On the last day of summer, August Bank Holiday Monday, I went to Hampstead ponds for a swim. It was lovely. A couple of weeks ago, on that very hot Wednesday, I went with my family to West Wittering. That, too, was lovely, even though we had to share the beach with about 100,000 other people.

But wherever you go you take the world and its burdens with you, and at Wittering I began to wonder, again, whether there is, or ought to be, a dress code for swimmers.

We live in a time when people wear what they like: rich, educated and successful men wear open-necked shirts with suits. I have, to my shame, done it myself.

On the beach, however, if you'll allow me to be Mother Superior for a moment, people do not so much wear what they like as wear scarcely anything at all. As it happens, these things do not bother any more, and I am not sure that they ever did much, except at an aesthetic level.

But there is clearly a very pressing aesthetic problem. After looking around the beach at West Wittering I established one absolute socio-sexual rule, and now offer it to the world of fashion: no skimpy bikinis in the case of anorexic girls or women over 60. That can't be too much to ask, please.

***

In complete contrast, I saw a young Muslim girl - she was no more than 14 - playing on the beach with her brother. She was wearing a hijab, a long-sleeved shirt and jeans. Her brother was wearing bathing trunks. She seemed very happy.

No doubt she was too well covered for comfort, but at least she was not got up like a twentysomething bikini model, as so many pre-pubescent English girls are, often, I suspect, by their parents.

But had this young Muslim been got up by her parents, required, even forced, to wear a hijab? I have no means of knowing, though I do know that some Muslim women, feminists among them, choose to wear the hijab. Islam can of course be cruel, oppressive and intolerant, but I felt pity for the girl playing with her brother, and at the same time some sympathy for her and her family.

Perhaps the sun had gone to my head, perhaps I was being a rheumy-eyed old reactionary, automatically siding with those who seem to defy the modern world. It's difficult to be sure, let alone honest. What I do believe, however, is that the only sane approach to Islam is one of moral seriousness - the Pope's approach - and that Anglo-America has failed in this respect, too often descending into sentimentality and hysteria.

Sentimentality leads to false liberalism - in particular, to the absurd notion that we must never discriminate against any minority religion - while hysteria leads, or has led, to the slaughter of Arabs in the "war on terror".

It is still hard to see this war as a Catholic war. In its most egregious manifestation, in Iraq, it has been condemned both by John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

No Catholic is bound to accept a pope's view on whether a particular war is just, of course, but perhaps in the light of all that has happened since the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2003 - the scores of thousands of Muslim deaths, the terrible suffering of the Church in Iraq (see page four), the strengthening of the mullahs in Iran - hawkish Catholics might consider that they were wrong and Rome right.

Even on the right, there is cafeteria Catholicism.

In the meantime, as we mark the 70th anniversary of the Second World War - the so-called "Good War" - we might recall Benedict XVI's words in an interview he gave in August, 2006: "[W]ar is the worst solution for all sides. It brings no good to anyone, not even to the apparent victors. We understand this very well in Europe, after the two world wars."

***

As I walked past the Chapel of St George and the English Martyrs in Westminster Cathedral on Sunday, there was a small commotion behind me. A man I took to be an usher had apparently thrown open the priest's door/window of a confessional and was telling a young man inside to clear off. The man was making a telephone call, and seemed irritated by the interruption. He held his finger up in the way you do when you are on an important call. He did not budge. I was very excited, but felt it would not be appropriate to gawp. Later, I thought I saw the man taking - or faking - an interest in the body of St John Southworth.

It was disgraceful, but I have to admit that "I'm in the confessional" makes a pleasant change from "I'm on the train".

***

The other day, trying to fill an idle moment, I glanced through the personal (ie, the dating) ads in the New York Review of Books. Most of them had been placed by women of a certain age, all of whom were, by their own estimation, fabulously beautiful and brainy.

One of the most enjoyable (and terrifying) was from "a youthful attractive older woman, 85..."

Another I liked was from "THE REAL DEAL - classy, confident, and really cute Ph.D. Sensual and stylish, sweet and successful... Brains, looks, and a great sense of fun. Toned, fit romantic. Proactive, easygoing, generous, yet no tolerance for injustice or arrogance..."

This woman, who described herself as a fan of "political humor" and "legislative policy", was seeking a "bright active passionate man - 50 to early 70s".

Some people never give up, but perhaps these women can teach us something about the virtue of hope. OK. Perhaps not...

Tarantino, man of God

Friday 28 August 2009

Quentin Tarantino arrives at the premiere of Inglourious Basterds in Los Angeles (AP Photo/Matt Sayles)

This is not a film review. The excellent Andrew M Brown is your film critic, and I am not worthy to take the lead of his laptop and plug it into the nearest outlet. No, this is a howl of rage. On Monday I went to see Inglourious Basterds and almost wept with anger on the way home. It is a very nasty, very cruel film.

Oh, don't be so square, some will say, and of course I can see their point. I like slick trash as much as the next man and have in the past been entertained by Tarantino movies and I know, too, you should always take your irony pills before seeing anything made by him. But I chose not to take the pills on this occasion.

I am sick of Tarantino's game: the worship of cool, which of course depends on irony, since without irony cool would be so uncool. Cool is never having to be serious about anything. When cinema-goers take offence at, for example, gratuitous violence or rank stupidity, QT can say: hey, buddy where's your sense of humour?

Very well, but I propose to take Inglourious Basterds seriously, and to take offence (and to include a spoiler in the penultimate paragraph).

The film, to simplify, is a spaghetti Western set in the Second World War in France and featuring a gang of Jewish American soldiers who are dropped behind enemy lines, where they kill, scalp and torture German soldiers.

This is a revenge fantasy, or, as Eli Roth, who plays the most inglourious of the basterds, puts it "kosher porn". "It's something I dreamed since I was a kid," Roth has said. Roth himself, of course, is best known for the "torture porn" of his slash-and-rape Hostel movies, so one imagines he dreamt a lot as a child.

Yet one wonders what sort of people could possibly enjoy this porn, this depiction of Jews as heartless cut-throats. Well, last week the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish organisation, issued a statement commending the film for being "entertaining and thought-provoking".

That sort of thing is enough to make you think, that's for sure. IB opens with scene in which an SS officer visits a farm looking for Jews he suspects are hidden there. It is at one level a frightening and harrowing scene and one that elicits pity and fear, as the farmer, with tears in his eyes, is forced to reveal that the Jews are hidden beneath the floorboards.

But all that sympathy, all that potential goodness, is dissipated by Tarantino in a moment of slapstick, when the SS officer takes out a calabash pipe the size of small saxophone. Cool, huh?

In the next scene the inglourious basterds are seen scalping dead Germans. One German, not yet dead or even scalped, is asked by Lt Aldo Raine - a good ole boy from Tennessee played by a cheesy Brad Pitt - to point to the German positions on a map. He refuses to betray his comrades, and is told he will be beaten to death with a baseball bat by the "the Bear Jew", played by Roth. The German says: "---- you and your Jewish dogs." He is duly beaten to death with a baseball bat, and meets his fate without flinching. It is hard not to admire his courage. Are we supposed to?

I suppose not: the German is probably brave because he is a cruel fanatic. Tarantino is anyway not a Nazisymp. He's a Hollywood legend.

This stuff is demeaning, all the same. It trivialises the suffering not just of the Jews but of all the people who suffered under Hitler, and by having the Jewish commandos under the leadership of the non-Jewish Pitt suggests insultingly that the Jews were not men enough to lead themselves.

A Jewish friend, who lost uncles and aunts in the death camps, tells me she hates the whole idea of special Jewish outfits in the Second World War.

Her father fought in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. He did not go around with a bowie knife collecting scalps for a good old boy from Tennessee. But being in a Jewish outfit must have made him a marked man. If he'd been captured he would not have been sent to a prison camp but to a death camp. My friend believes that Jewish soldiers should always have been integrated, and she certainly does not take comfort from revenge fantasies.

Unlike his star Brad Pitt, by the way, Quentin Tarantino is a man of God. "I'm not going to tell you how I believe in God," he has said, "but I do believe in God."

He believes in Mel Gibson, too, and loved The Passion of the Christ, but all the same, according to our account, managed to laugh at the crucifixion scene.

So it goes. The tireless Fr Zee, who saw the film on Friday, remarked on his WDTPRS blog that it was "so tedious that even the pointless violence became tedious". That's just about the measure of it.

But perhaps its tediousness is its saving grace: perhaps the truth is that the only good thing about Inglourious Basterds - and its immensely complicated story about an ultimately successful plot to kill Hitler - is that it is boring. Ironically.

***

It is a measure of my age that when I heard the presenter on Radio 4 ask his reporter why Edward Kennedy had never become president, I had expected a one-word reply: Chappaquiddick. But no, Chappaquiddick is apparently no longer shorthand, except among baby-boomers. Instead the reporter quite rightly spoke of an incident in 1969 in which Kennedy had driven a car off a bridge in Martha's Vineyard and a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, had died. He did not even mention that the bridge was to Chappaquiddick Island.

Kennedy's conduct that night was disgraceful, to be sure, but after 40 years the finger-pointing had become tiresome. The Senator was in many ways a bad man - for whatever reason, he supported abortion rights - but we are all, in our different ways, bad men.

May Edward Kennedy rest in peace.

A hammer blow of guilt

Friday 21 August 2009

Pope Benedict XVI baptises a child. Will the godparents feel like failures when the baby grows up? (CNS)

Older readers may know what I mean when I say "guilt". From time to time, but especially when it is the Silly Season and I am sitting blamelessly in the bath listening to, say, The Moral Maze, or Fats Domino's greatest hits, guilt swoops down and hits me with a hammer blow.

A perennial source of guilt is my failure as a godfather. I have at least two godchildren, both of them married and in their 30s, and I have sent them, at a guess, a total of half a dozen cards - birthday or Christmas - since I stood at the font and renounced the Devil on their behalf.

My neglect is scarcely believable. Every time I have a guilt attack I resolve to do better in future, promise to myself that at the very least I'll check when their birthdays fall. Then I forget about it.

To be sure, I pray for my goddaughters, but otherwise I have never done anything tangible, other than attend their weddings, to contribute to their spiritual and material wellbeing. I have not even read to them from the penny catechism, and my feeling is that it would not now be appropriate to try.

What do atheist godparents do? The psychological burdens could be enormous, I suppose, but perhaps they just shrug and reflect that "it's all nonsense anyway", so why worry? Atheists are such innocents. They do not know the specific gravity of sin. In the matter of baptism, perhaps, their indifference is less heinous, subjectively speaking, than the believer's neglect (but then I'm no moral theologian).

I suppose I must have had more than one godparent myself, but I remember only one, Michael White. He was a great Yorkshiremen and a great bookseller. He sold books first in Bradford - when he tried to join the Army in 1939 (he failed) he put a notice in his shop window: "Gone to fight the war" - then in London, and later in Hay-on-Wye, where he became friends with Penelope Betjeman, who sometimes rode a horse to Mass.

He was around when I was small, but did not instruct me in the faith. He gave a deeply pessimistic speech at my 21st birthday. It was not in the least unfriendly, but was so laden with doom that all my guests found it very entertaining. Looking back, and reviewing my life, I think he struck the right note. No matter how fortunate we may be, and no matter how often we feast and laugh, we must all in the end acknowledge that we live in a vale of tears.

I got to know Michael at a spiritual level when I was in my 30s. We'd talk often about Vatican II and the new liturgy, and he was distressed by my decision to attend the Lefebvrist Masses in London. My godfather was not at all a liberal, on the contrary, but believed absolutely in obedience (as indeed do I).

In an attempt to help me, he gave me a book, Our Changing Liturgy, by C J McNaspy SJ, published here in 1967. I picked it up again the other day, and, all respect to the late Fr McNaspy, it is a truly silly book.

Writing about the liturgical transitional period in the mid-Sixties, Fr McNaspy wondered how a Catholic attending his first revised Mass might react, and described the scene that now followed the Introit thus: "[The priest] faced the people and joined them, singing or reciting, 'Lord have mercy' - which made the mysterious words Kyrie eleison come to life, in case our observer had ever noticed them before."

"...in case our observer had ever noticed them before..." Such twee and plodding and, if I may say so, clerical sarcasm. They certainly took us for eejits in those days.

I was not with Michael when he died some time in the early 1980s in a hospital in the Welsh marches. Did someone tell me heard that a nurse would hold him up in bed so that he could say the rosary in an attitude of prayer? Perhaps...

Intercede for us, Michael.

***

My note a fortnight ago about "Gnostic traditionalism" - roughly, the exclusivist approach that leads to a cult mentality among some traditionalists - caused a small rumpus in the United States, and I was depicted in some quarters as a bad egg.

One thing I did get wrong, alas, was "Gnosticism". It was not the right label, apparently, and should have been more careful. The excellent Thaddeus Kozinski, who wrote the article on which I based my column, now refers instead to "Catholic Phariseeism".

That seems much better, but I stand by my belief that some traditionalists are, in Archbishop Vincent Nichols's words, "distancing" themselves from the Church (just as some liberals are, of course).

I am happy to report in the meantime that my very good friend, the lay prison chaplain and former chairman of the Latin Mass Society, shares my views that there is something nutty about some trads. When I sent him Thaddeus Kozinski's original article on the subject, published in the New Oxford Review, he responded as follows:

"I recognise the old me in it, very clearly. The phrase that keeps coming to mind is Fr X's 'We are the ones, my dear brethren'...

"I thank God for calling me into the prison where there is no choice but to be in the thick of what really matters. There, there are many temptations which I inevitably encounter and succumb to, but not the temptation to think that I am one of an inner circle of 'true' Catholics... I am still devoted to the traditional liturgy. The priest who says Mass for us monthly is externally re-formed in the spirit of Vatican II, but he is a far holier man than I could ever hope to be."

You will perhaps want to know what became of Fr X. Here's what: he distanced himself from the Church by reverting to Anglicanism.

***

The vanity of old age (part one of what may turn out to be a continuing series): the other day I went to a new barber. He gave me a very good haircut and charged me the full whack (£9.50) instead of the cut rate (£7.50) for seniors like me. I was so delighted that he had assumed that I was not yet an OAP - in other words, that he took me to be younger than I was - that I paid the full price without demur. The wages of sin is £2.

Or hang on... Maybe he saw me coming. Maybe he could see I was a vain old fool and could therefore get away with charging me the full rate.

A sentimental journey

Friday 14 August 2009

Nuns prospered at Minister Abbey for 500 years before Henry VIII (Isle of Thanet Gazette/Mike Nichols)

Last Thursday, when it suddenly felt as though summer had arrived, I put myself and my bicycle on a train for Birchington-on-Sea in Thanet.

My mission: to make a sentimental journey, to retreat into my past, to bathe in the warm tears of nostalgia. It did not quite work out like that - perhaps I am too old for nostalgia - but something very good happened all the same: I met the lovely Benedictine nuns of Minster Abbey.

Thanet and I go back a long way. Fifty years ago we had a holiday cottage there, in the village of St Nicholas-at-Wade. My parents rented it for perhaps £10 a month, maybe less. Farm labourers got £5 a week in those days, and on pay day, as a treat, would spend an hour in the corridor bar of the pub with a pint of brown and mild and half an ounce of rolling tobacco.

They were very happy times, and I have always loved this superficially ugly corner of England. It is flat and full of cabbage fields, council houses, caravan parks and bouncy castles; but there is much that is lovely about it. There are orchards and lonely marshes and pretty little dells, and here and there a magnificent Georgian or Queen Anne house - or a crumbling art deco filling station - and by no means all the Tudor is mock. Furthermore, as every schoolboy knows, St Augustine landed near Ramsgate in 597, which makes Thanet one of the most hallowed parts of England.

Away from the penny arcades and the discarded nappies, the karma in these parts is Saxon, occasionally Norman, often (to me anyway) mid-20th century. There was nothing especially hallowed about my teenage years, alas. So far as I was concerned Margate was as up to date as Kansas City - all Buddy Holly and pretty Cockney girls and geeky but exotic airmen from the US airbase at Manston.

There were American officers, too, for the amusement of the middle classes. My parents made friends with a USAF colonel, who in real life was an architect and a chronic alcoholic. He lived in Herne Bay and drove to and from the base each day, from time to time stopping off at the Bell Inn in St Nicholas.

Just about every morning, apparently, he'd look out of his bedroom window to check that his car was in the drive, since he could seldom remember getting home. It was always was there, happily; but it is amusing (or sobering) to reflect that our dipsomaniac friend had some part to play in the forward defence of the Free World.

In the summer holidays we used to cycle to Mass either in Birchington or, less often, in Minster. Birchington last week did not melt my heart, however. A seagull pooed on me, and I was not moved by anything but irritation.

Minster was a little bit of heaven, though. The abbey there was founded in 670, and holiness has taken root in its lawns and vegetable gardens and ancient buildings - the oldest dating from 1027.

On the day of my visit the Prioress, Mother Nikola, was celebrating her silver jubilee. At None (mid-afternoon prayer) she was wearing a garland of flowers around the top of her veil. What I especially liked about the garland is that the flowers were artificial. It was an innocent and unassuming gesture, in keeping with the innocent and unassuming joy of the occasion.

***

On the lawn outside the chapel a child played chase with a white-robed Benedictine, who turned out to be Abbot Hugh Gilbert, of the Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland. Elsewhere two priests, one of them Mother Nikola's brother, smiled and talked to the Sisters, who also smiled (and talked). These people were happy, and deserved to be.

The abbey has a heroic history. Within a 100 years of its founding the Vikings started to make a nuisance of themselves, and continued to loot, burn and slaughter for some 200 years. From time to the nuns - and all the inhabitants of Minster - had to flee to the walled city of Canterbury.

For almost 500 years after the Norman Conquest, however, they abbey prospered. Then came Henry VIII, who in 1538 said enough was enough and suppressed the abbey. The chapel and other buildings were either pulled down or allowed to fall into ruin. Over the next 400 years Minster Abbey passed through several hands, all secular, but in the late 1930s, thanks to the local priest, Dom Bede Winslow, OSB, it was acquired by the Benedictine Abbey of St Walburga, in Eichstatt, Bavaria, whose abbess at the time was the clearly formidable Benedicta von Spiegel zu Peckelsheim.

Six choir nuns and three lay Sisters arrived in Minster from Germany in 1937. During the war, however, the abbey was requisitioned for a while by RAF Manston, and the nuns, by now in effect "enemy aliens", found refuge with the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration at Teignmouth in Devon. At least they were not banged up, but they were not allowed to travel outside the convent without a police escort.

It may seem odd that the authorities were jumpy about a few women religious, but these were paranoid times. There were rumours that German spies were being parachuted into England disguised as nuns. Being a nun had its drawbacks, therefore, especially if you spoke German and wore gumboots and happened to wander into a country pub at closing time.

The community was allowed back to Minster in 1944, this time under the leadership of Mother Emmanuel Drey, a Jewish convert, and the abbey has thrived since then. There are 13 nuns now and there is overnight accommodation for 17 guests. You can't book by phone or email; you must write. The suggested contribution is £35 per person a day, full board. No single males are allowed, so take a wife or a child with you.

I can't think of many better ways of spending the weekend than with the nuns of Minster. Vespers at six is in Latin, and there's a lot of good cycling locally, though the wind is sometimes strong.

The wind is also haunted. If you listen carefully, you may hear Benedictine monks singing plainchant and Buddy Holly singing "Peggy Sue", and, above them, perhaps, the roar of F86-D Sabre fighter interceptors taking off from Manston...

Get over yourself, Rupe

Friday 7 August 2009

Rupert Everett, pictured right on horseback, travels in southern Albania in the footsteps of Lord Byron

If I were an elderly nun, or even a halfway decent human being, I'd have rummaged in my purse or looked the other way, but I am not and I did not.

In W H Smith in Balham last Thursday I found myself standing in the check-out queue behind a chap with dyed blond hair, plucked eyebrows, butch stubble, purple Aladdin trousers, silver girl's sandals (and on each ankle a tattoo of Oriental design), thick silver belt, a brightly coloured rosary (blue?) with a silver crucifix around his neck, and on one of his fingers a dirty great big silver ring in the form of a cross.

Perhaps I should have flounced out of the shop without buying the New Statesman, but instead I stared at the young man. I wanted to ask him why he was wearing a rosary.

But that might have seemed provocative, and anyway why invite trouble? The fellow could have taken my eye out with that ring, and might also have given me the most fearful scolding.

Still, sexual orientation to one side, I just can't be doing with the fashion among celebrities and shop assistants for wearing rosaries as jewellery. My hunch is that many of them do it because they think it is a bit ethnic, like wearing a necklace of conch shells from the South Seas.

In the case of gays, however, I sense that it is sometimes an aggressive gesture aimed at the Catholic Church and her teaching. Let's not be narrow-minded, though. The same mindset exists among straight secularists too.

There is a lot of anti-Catholicism around these days because the Church is the only intellectually coherent body that opposes at one and the same time liberal capitalism, pre-emptive war, moral relativism, global warming, capital punishment, unfettered sexual freedom, abortion and the "reproductive" health industry. The hostility to the Church will get worse, of course, when euthanasia is legalised and Rome plays spoilsport by insisting once again that killing people is wrong and that doctors and nurses should not be jailed for refusing to take part in the putting to sleep of the old and the unwanted.

***

So it's not just the gays, and we must maintain a sense of proportion, no? Militant homophobes are so tiresome. You perhaps know the people I am thinking of - the ones who talk about "political correctness gone mad" and refuse to use the word "gay" and insist instead on the ugly "sodomite", perhaps because you can spit when you say it.

But what are we to make of Rupert Everett, the old Amplefordian pillar of the LGBT establishment and a man who on television in the past fortnight has been strutting his stuff and flaunting his taste for sodomy? His Channel 4 documentary on Lord Byron, which ended on Monday night, was a brutal exercise in camp shock-jockery, and will have upset many old women. At the same time, though, it was so relentlessly appalling, so hideously gauche, that you felt a bit sorry for Rupe, and wanted to give him a cuddle and say: "Oh, be nice."

There is, however, something rough trade about him, as he parades his sloping shoulders and muscled neck in a tight-fitting singlet. "You got problems, mate? Come here and I'll nut you." I am surprised he does not wear a rosary.

The documentary itself was embarrassingly banal, full of bogus self-deprecation. At one point, borrowing from Byron, Rupe said that he was looking forward to some sherbert and sodomy in Turkey, and then looked coyly at the camera and, to the great excitement of the Sun, apologised to his mum and his granny.

At another point he dropped his trousers and allowed himself to be inspected for syphilis by a nice young woman doctor. "The things I do for television," he smirked. No, Rupe: the things television does for you.

At yet another point, noticing a full-bosomed portrait of the Queen on the embassy wall in Istanbul, he said that Her Majesty was "well hung".

Oh, get over yourself, Rupe, you ill-mannered potty mouth. At least show some respect for Her Majesty, if not for yourself or your gran - or Lord Byron.

Maybe one should ignore this sort of thing, especially in a newspaper that is sold in church porches, but Rupert Everett is now saying that he'd like to make a documentary about Jesus. This may be no more than camp irony, another tease directed at the straight community, but he may genuinely harbour such an ambition.

After all, he must have learnt something from the Benedictines, and one imagines he still has vague religious yearnings. A few years ago, I was at a rather nice carol concert at a Catholic church in central London at which he read one of the lessons. He did the job well: didn't wink at the congregation once, and, as my wife recalls, kept his kit on.

Look, let's be reasonable. Let's be kind. Let's be ... Christian, no Catholic. If I were in Rupe's position I'd be inclined to model myself on Oscar Wilde rather than on Graham Norton, and to remember what Wilde said about the Catholic Church - that it was "for saints and sinners alone - for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do".

Rupert Everett is still only 50, so he's got bags of time to get it right, and he has at least risked the wrath of his peers by opposing gay adoption ("Can you imagine what it would be like... hearing those awful queeny rows while you are trying to get to sleep?") and denouncing surrogacy ("utterly hideous... egocentric... vain").

If he can overcome his extreme self-consciousness, if he can accept that you don't have to camp it up just because you are gay, if he can avoid the company of Episcopalian bishops, if he can kneel before the Blessed Sacrament, there is at least an outside chance that he could make a good documentary about Jesus.

Calm down now, dears

Friday 31 July 2009

John Ryan's 1975 cartoon

Let me throw caution to the wind and suggest that the Archbishop of Westminster was right last week when, in his interview with The Catholic Herald, he said that traditionalists who reject the ordinary form of the Mass are "inexorably distancing themselves from the Church".

One caveat, however. No one should supinely accept the ordinary form of Mass when it is used as a vehicle for liturgical abuse. But what is abuse? Now you are asking. One man's abuse is another man's caring outreach.

I myself am easily offended. I find it hard, for example, not to wave my stick when lay people (ie, women) distribute Communion, especially when I know there are enough priests at the back of the house to do the job without suffering from heat exhaustion, post-traumatic stress disorder or repetitive strain injury.

If the Oratory does not need to use lay ministers, why does the Cathedral?

But I digress. The interesting thing about what the Archbishop said last week is that it chimes with what some traditionalists have been thinking, and saying, for a little while now.

One such is Thaddeus Kozinski, a doctor in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. He believes that the old rite is vastly superior to the Novus Ordo, indeed that the NO represents a radical breach in liturgical tradition, but at the same time is convinced that many so-called traditionalists are as much children of Vatican II, and of the Enlightenment, as the liberals are. There is something about them, he contends, that is schismatic, even Protestant; perhaps even modernist. They are rebels.

Kozinski is not thinking here principally of Lefebvrists or sedevacantists, but of what we might call the far liturgical right in the mainstream Church, the people you sometimes find in the LMS and the FSSP and in parishes where the old rite is said regularly. Thaddeus calls these people "Gnostic traditionalists", and by Gnosticism he means "the attitude that leads one to believe he possesses an irrefutable insight into the truth of matters of great importance, whether natural or supernatural".

For some years, according to his account in the New Oxford Review, Kozinski attended nothing but indult Masses in the old rite. Then, two or three years ago, he moved with his young family to an area where such Masses were not available, and he was therefore obliged to attend the Novus Ordo again.

As he became familiar with his new surroundings - and found rich spiritual fruit in the new rite as celebrated by the Oblates of St Joseph - he saw that in his former unyielding traditionalism he had developed what he calls "an ideological and neurotic consciousness of being a 'traditionalist' ".

Kozinski believes that "traditionalism" can become an ideology that makes one spiritually sick, "as one becomes more attached to the traditionalist movement, its narratives, personages, publications, polemics, criticisms, etc than to the Church as a whole - and to Christ Himself". This ideology, he says, can manifest itself in paranoia, judgment, harshness, Jansenism, and lack of meekness.

That's me all right, but Kozinski clearly does not want to condemn all traditionalists, and I feel I should speak up here for the thousands of hardcore trads who are not at all Jansenist or harsh but are decent, well-balanced human beings. Among them I would include the Lefebvrist godfather of my youngest son.

Perhaps, meanwhile, I should add that Kosinski's article appeared two years ago, but under my management this column has never been at the cutting edge of news, and anyway I did not come across the article until May.

To make sure that Kozinski had not changed his mind, however, I got in touch with him last week. He has not changed his mind, but now believes that the Gnosticism of which he speaks is not confined to the traditionalist right but can be found among ultra-orthodox adherents of the Novus Ordo.

The Gnostics, in Kozinski's assessment, see orthodoxy (whether trad or NO) as the best protection against "the world". They do not fearlessly place their trust in Christ, but live in a "constrained, fearful, and spiritually suffocating world" of their own creation. There is among these people, he believes, "fanatical, unhealthy zeal" for religious purity.

So: calm down, dears. Let's be healthy zealots and follow the Pope. What he wants, obviously, is reform of the reforms. There's no getting rid of all the changes - that would cause even more confusion than the calamitous Pauline revolution of 1970 - but we must put the clock back.

Traditionalism is a new ism. What we want back is proper Catholicism.

If we get that back - and curb our tongues - the traditional Latin Mass will surely thrive alongside the upcoming revision of the liturgy: the new New Mass.

***

One of the many things I regret is that I did not know John Ryan better. He was so obviously a good man that it was foolish of me not to have stayed in touch with him when our professional association ended 34 years ago.

I got to know John, who died last week, when I edited this newspaper for three months in 1975, and I liked him a lot. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that he seemed to sympathise with my not entirely sober stand on behalf of Archbishop Lefebvre; but the most important thing about him was not that he agreed with me but that he was kind, funny, modest, tolerant and open-minded.

His jokes were intended to make people happy rather than miserable, but his stuff could have a sharp edge. He once did a daring cartoon in defence of the agreeable but perhaps rather extreme Fr Oswald Baker, the traditionalist priest who stuck his toes in at Downham Market in Norfolk, and was eventually sacked.

At this distance I can't quite remember the details, but I seem to recall that shortly before the turbulent priest was booted out of his parish the bishop visited Downham Market, perhaps to mount an inquiry. Fr Baker did not have the pleasure of meeting him, as John's cartoon, above, shows.

It caught the mood of those of us who felt we were being ill-used by agents of a new reformation. It should be said, however, that John was never part of the paranoid tendency. He was far too kind and funny for that sort of caper. RIP.

The alcoholism industry

Friday 24 July 2009

The table where the idea of Alcoholics Anonymous was born in Bedford Hills, New York (AP Photo)

If you want to take your mind off swine flu, sit down with the family this evening and have a good worry about "late-onset" alcohol misuse. According to a survey released last week by the Foundation66, one of the country's "largest alcohol-focused substance misuse service providers", heavy drinking in people over 60 is becoming a serious problem. One in eight of the oldies cross-examined on behalf of the foundation admitted to drinking more following retirement; one in five said they used alcohol because of depression; and one in eight, apparently, drank to deal with bereavement.

And? Where's the problem? It has been know since at least the days of Noah that a snifter or two comforts the old. At least these old folk have retained their dignity and are not running to their GPs demanding grief counselling, behavioural therapy and monkey-gland treatment.

Foundation66 also reported last week that pensioners accounted for 357,300 alcohol-related hospital admissions in England in 2007/8 - a 75 per cent rise in five years.

In other words, and to exaggerate only slightly, reckless and dangerous drinking among OAPs - or at the very least careless drinking - has almost doubled in the past five years.

You know what? I am inclined not to believe it. My hunch is that the definition of what is "alcohol-related" has been widened. It may include, for example, an ankle fracture sustained when an 82-year-old slips on a piece of cat food after having a shandy.

The bossy male nurse in A & E discovers that the old woman has had a shandy - "Had you been drinking, dear?" - and puts alcohol down as the cause of the fall.

Chronic drunkenness is no laughing matter, of course, and Foundation 66 is right to take it seriously. All the same, it is always a good idea to be sceptical when reading scare stories about booze. That's because "alcoholism" has become an industry.

At the heart of the industry is the understanding that addiction a disease. But is it? Are addicts sick people trying to get well, as many "recovering alcoholics" believe, or are they bad people trying to get good, as most Strict Baptists believe? Among the "experts" the consensus has long been that addiction is indeed a disease and that it needs to be treated in expensive rehab clinics run by those same experts.

But the disease consensus is being challenged. Gene Heyman, for example, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School last month published a book, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, in which he insists that addicts are not victims of an involuntary illness but on the contrary are quite capable of making their own decisions, and do so when they take drink or drugs - and also when they give them up, as in most cases, according to Heyman, they do. As a "recovering alcoholic" myself, I feel that Hayman is right. The fact that people can and do give up very serious drug and alcohol habits proves that drunks and druggies are not in the grip of an involuntary disease. You can't, after all, give up liver cancer.

That's not to say that alcoholics are in the peak of condition. Some are quite clearly barmy and many are in poor physical shape; sometimes in such poor shape that they die. Nor is it to say that addiction is not a terrible burden - to the addict and to his family.

Sometimes, of course, it is a burden to complete strangers. Many years ago I heard a big, sweet, gentle Ulsterman tell the story of how one day he woke up in a police cell after a night's drinking. Oh, blimey, he thought, not again; what's it this time?

A copper pulled back the peephole to his cell and asked him how he was.

"Not bad," said he said. "Why am I here? What did I do?"

"You killed someone," said the cop.

The Ulsterman did not drink again, or had not when I heard him tell his story more than 20 years ago. He put down the glass, and was greatly helped by Alcoholics Anonymous.

***

Nobody takes the AA policy of anonymity very seriously, alas, and I do not therefore scruple much about mentioning that I went to AA meetings for two years from 1982 to 1984.

At the heart of the Fellowship, as most people know, is the God-centred Twelve-Step Programme of Recovery. Strangely, though AA subscribes to the disease theory of alcoholism, the programme itself lays great emphasis on moral accountability.

One is required to admit to oneself, to God and to another human being the exact nature of one's wrongs, and to turn to God daily for help. There is something beautiful and very kind about it.

There have always been a lot of Catholics in the Fellowship, and it is perhaps worth recording here that Ampleforth was better represented than Eton at Chelsea meetings in the 1980s.

Catholics should remember, however, that AA is not the way, the truth and the light - as many recovering alcoholics believe it is - but is a non-denominational undertaking founded by Protestants, and it may tempt weak-willed Catholics to embrace a touchy-feely, relativistic approach to religion.

I absolutely loved AA, but I sensed there were dangers. I recall cycling to a meeting through Chelsea one night and thinking that AA was in conflict with my traditionalist Catholicism. I feared that if I kept on going to meetings I'd lose my faith, and that therefore I should abandon AA. I was very depressed at the prospect. When I got to the meeting, however, one of the first people I saw was a woman who regularly attended the Lefebvrist Mass at the Great Western Hotel. I was tremendously encouraged by what I took to be a sign. The woman became a strong support.

Within two years, however, I had lapsed from the practice of my religion.

But that was me. I was not at all mature. Many Catholics are strengthened in their faith by AA, and the Church has long endorsed the Fellowship. Calix, the Catholic organisation for alcoholics, urges its members to continue going to AA meetings.

Maybe my problem was that I never did "get with the programme", but at least I am a Catholic again now. And a sober one.

Pray for the President

Friday 17 July 2009

US President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama meet Pope Benedict last Friday (AP Photo)

You can't mix with normal human beings for long without hearing someone - often someone you like and admire - say what a thoroughly good egg Barack Obama is. Perhaps it is sickeningly pious of me, but I have set myself a rule for these occasions: no matter what the subject under discussion is, I always make it clear that I oppose the new Administration's policies on abortion.

The exchange may go something like this: "I thought that Obama's speech in Cairo was terrific, inspiring, a wake-up call to the world."

"If you say so, but I do not agree with Obama on abortion."

There is a sudden silence. You get a kind, slightly worried look - perhaps a good-natured laugh, possibly a forgiving hug - and then the talk continues, and you can behave like a normal human being again.

In my social circle it is more or less taken for granted that Barack Obama is a prince among men and that his enemies are narrow, uptight, venal - and possibly dangerous. A little while ago I was at a party in Islington when a much-admired political commentator - old-school Tory - said: "But of course the CIA will have Obama killed."

Perhaps there was an element of cynical swagger in that remark, but the sad fact is that assassination is always a possibility in the United States, and the chances of assassination rise when the possible target is black and beautiful and what Fox News calls "liberal".

These thoughts occur to me now because during Obama's visit to Rome last week I tuned in once again to the web chatter of Right-wing Catholics, even though I know it is an occasion of sin to do so. Let me say before I venture one syllable further that these people are absolutely right to keep up a barrage of protest against the President's policies on abortion.

It's not their core issue that troubles me but, as I have indicated here before, the language they use in making their case. In many cases it is chippy, ignorant and violent. On Monday evening, in the comment box of a blog I actually admire, someone wrote that the so-called "excellent relationship" between American Catholics and Obama reminded him of the "excellent relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and Stalin", thus in effect comparing Obama with Stalin. Is that brave? Is it funny? Is it what "Sister" would have wanted you to write in your exercise book? Will it persuade Obama that he is mistaken about abortion, or convince pro-choice "Catholics" that they are wrong?

Answer in every case: no.

In Rome, happily, the mood is strikingly different. The Pope was all smiles and solicitude when he met the US President in the Vatican last week. The two men were united, reports suggested, on such matters as immigration, foreign aid and the search for peace in the Middle East, but the Pope's chief concern at the meeting was to stress the Church's opposition to abortion and to embryonic stem-cell research.

Benedict gave the President a copy of Dignitas Personae, the latest "instruction" on these matters, and the President, we are told, said that he would read the document on the plane to Africa, he also reaffirmed his commitment to try to reduce the number of abortions in the US.

From where I was sitting in front of my 20-in iMac screen, it all seemed pretty dignified, though it is possible that I am a big girl's blouse. I have only one serious quibble: Obama should not have said to the Pope "God bless you". It was cheesy. If I'd been Pope - big if that - I'd have said: "Oi! Watch it, sunshine! I invoke the blessings round here."

The Vatican obviously sees good in Obama, and it is likely that Obama himself sees good in the Vatican, on the basis at any rate of Caritas in Veritate, which was published two days before the meeting. Ironically, many Right-wing bloggers are less than happy with Caritas - fidelity to Church doctrine on the right does not always extend social doctrine - but one imagines that Obama will be pleased by its calls for market regulation, respect for the environment, wealth redistribution, trades union power, etc, though obviously he will baulk at the passages - perhaps the most important - on abortion and bioethics.

Say, here's a thought: perhaps we should pray for Obama. That's what the Pope promised to do last Friday. "I'll pray for you," he told the President. "I'll pray for your work." (My emphasis.) It's also what a traditionalist friend has been saying for at least a year now. He has a lovely smile and seems to spend most of his time, when he is not writing poetry, in prayer. "We must pray for Obama, Stuart," he says whenever we meet at the Oratory. On Saturday, at the Cathedral, he told me he was very pleased by the meeting in Rome.

Obviously the US_Catholic bishops must keep up their pressure on the White House. It must be relentless, firm and courteous, perhaps sometimes coldly courteous. America is just about the only country in the world that takes abortion seriously. There is therefore a chance that pressure can bring about change there; and as goes America so goes the world.

But let's anyway cool the rhetoric. Let's stop having paranoid hissy fits in the virtual anonymity of cyberspace.

Meanwhile, in praying for Obama, we might use the lovely but neglected Prayer for the Conversion of England. However tangentially, Obama is a child of the British empire, and may therefore lay some claim to "Mary's dowry".

***

What do we want? Censorship! When do we want it? Now! I have not seen Lars von Trier's new film Antichrist, and I am not going to, but I am in complete agreement with Brian Appleyard who in last weekend's Sunday Times wrote that it should be banned. The grotesque and explicit sexual violence described by Appleyard strike me as demonic.

But Antichrist should just be the beginning. No, I am not saying that I am in favour of book-burning. I am in favour of not publishing offensive books - or making offensive films - in the first place.

Who is to decide what is offensive? ask adolescent clever-clogs of all ages. The answer is: not you.

Now where did I leave my rack and thumbscrew?

A local hero's wedding

Friday 10 July 2009

Nick Farrell finally arrives for his wedding by bicycle (Enrico Rondoni/La Voce di Romagna)

Last week I was in Predappio, in the Romagna, where Benito Mussolini was born and is buried. I was there as an observer, not as a pilgrim, you understand, but I thoroughly enjoyed my observer status. Predappio exists in a sort of twilight zone, and there is, besides, some impressive fascist architecture there.

Mussolini gets a bad press these days, but there was a time when some rather respectable Catholics spoke well of him. One thinks of Evelyn Waugh, G K Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Pope Pius XI, and Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII of Vatican II fame).

I am pretty sure that if I'd been around in the Twenties and Thirties I would have fallen for the vertically challenged romper stomper who ruled Italy from 1922 until 1943.

We were all fascists then; we are all liberals now. Political fashions (and perceptions) change. As my old friend and former colleague Nick Farrell notes in his acclaimed 2003 biography of Mussolini: "...history is written by the victors and once Mussolini became a loser his place as one of the very bad men of history was guaranteed".

Of course he was a lot more than a loser: he was a loser who had thrown in his lot with Hitler and had brought terrible suffering on his own people. All the same, not everyone accepts the verdict of history, and scores of thousands of admirers/ pilgrims descend on Mussolini's birthplace each year. Mussolini's crypt is a shrine.

Nick was my guide in Predappio. He knows the town well, having moved there in 1998 to research and write his book. Later he settled in nearby Forlì, the provincial capital, where last week he married Carla, the mother of his four lovely children.

I'll come to the wedding in a moment, but, first, the funeral, or at any rate the crypt. I was accompanied to Predappio not just by Nick but by Carla and the four children and my wife, Mary. We all went there on the day after the wedding in Farrell's chipped and scarred seven-seater Land Rover.

The crypt itself is a bit creepy. It is also rather sad. Opposite the tomb, behind bars, is an altar with a Tridentine Missal on it. The new Mass just wouldn't work here. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if you were to invite a bunch of fascists to "offer each other the sign of peace"? All those Roman salutes!

It was a family outing, and Nick's oldest children, Francesco, three, and Caterina, five, ran about squealing with merriment. They grabbed a couple of candles and lit them. Nick put money in the offertory box.

Caterina filched a posy of flowers - I think they may have been plastic - from the tomb and I made a disapproving noise. "Are you really worried about pinching flowers from Mussolini's grave?" asked Nick. "As a matter of fact, yes, I am," I said piously. Caterina replaced the flowers.

A couple entered the crypt, a serious pair in their 30s. The woman crossed herself and kissed her thumb, and then she and the man knelt in front of the tomb and bowed their heads. I was moved. I was also troubled.

Later, as we were leaving, we saw a group of very respectable-looking black people - Africans, I'd say - enter the crypt. Who were they? What were they doing there? They did not look like troublemakers, but neither did they look like casual tourists. All one can say for sure is that there's nowt so queer as folk.

The newly elected mayor of Predappio, the ex-Communist Giorgio Frassineti, has misgivings about some aspects of the Predappio Experience. Naturally, he does not want to discourage the tourists, but he has indicated that he wants to close down Predappio's two rather unsavoury gift shops.

Nick doubts he will do this, but you can rather see what bothers the mayor. The shops sell truncheons, swastika key rings, busts of Hitler and Mussolini, and everything you need for the well-stocked fascist library - Mein Kampf, The Lord of the Rings, St John Chrysostom's Homily Against the Jews.

When I was first in Predappio about six years ago and saw the Nazi memorabilia, I expressed my horror to Nick, who said: "I know what you mean. This sort of thing gives fascism a bad name."

***

Now, that marriage in full. I was there as an official witness, though I am not entirely sure what I signed my name to. It may have been a nuptual Mass, but again I am not entirely sure. It was slotted into the regular 6pm Sunday liturgy at the local parish church.

We gathered at Nick's and Carla's flat about an hour before the wedding. Nick was nowhere to be seen. Carla appeared for a moment in black, looking a bit goth, then disappeared.

By ten to six, however, she was wearing a low-slung white dress with veil, and saying: "We go now." She and Mary walked ahead, Mary pushing the pram, Carla occasionally holding her long white dress at the knees so that she did not trip.

Style pointer: the bride wore a rosary around her neck which had been given to her by Rita, a local healer who sees angels and has been a great help to the family though not, yet, to Nick.

Nick was still nowhere to be seen. "Where's Nick?" asked Mary. Carla shrugged. "I not know," she said. "I think he come." But she had other things on her mind.

"How you think I get Nick to see Rita, Mary? How you think I get him to become Catholic?" Mary said that she thought it would be a mistake to push him too hard. He needed space, she said.

Nick did turn up in the end, on a bicycle, and sweating. He and Carla knelt at a prie dieu before the altar. I sat to one side.

Nick wiped his face. Carla lifted her eyes heavenwards. The priest smiled. The children fidgeted. I brooded about my sciatica and tried not to scowl. Ought I to see Rita?

The following day the wedding got a full page in La Voce di Romagna, one of the newspapers for which Nick writes. The coverage was ironic but friendly. Nick is something of a local hero, and his pals are treated with droll respect too. I was described as "Stuard Reed, giornalista di fama".

At last...

Paul died for his men

Friday 26 June 2009

The coffins of Paul Mervis and Robert McLaren are driven through Wotton Bassett, Wiltshire (PA)

Almost every day now we hear that another British soldier - another boy - has been killed in Afghanistan. A picture of a shyly grinning Scouser or Geordie in dress uniform appears on the screen, and a somber newsreader says a few tasteful words. Then we see film of a tearful mother or wife or sweetheart, and, in the background, a confused, perhaps embarrassed, brother or father or mate - the faces of decent, patient, obedient, working-class England - and that's that.

"Over to John now at the weather centre..."

These deaths fill me with pity and anger: pity for the families and the dead soldiers, anger at what seems to me the waste.

But last week I heard that someone I knew had been killed in Helmand Province, and my view of these things, or at least of death in service, changed.

The dead man was Lt Paul Mervis, 27, and he'd been due to come home in three weeks. He was killed as a result of an explosion while on foot patrol near Sangin on the morning of June 12. Apparently, he went ahead of his platoon to check out a Taliban compound, and was blown up by an improvised explosive device.

I got to know Paul Mervis briefly when he did work experience at the Spectator in the autumn of 2005.

He was a remarkable young man: kind, funny, enthusiastic, clever, confident (without being arrogant), a good sport, thoroughly decent. He was also an intellectual, a voracious reader, a bit of a boho - not the sort of person you'd expect to become a soldier.

He was not a hawk, not a neocon, and he even seemed to share some of the Spectator's High Tory scepticism about the war on terror.

Whatever the case, his scepticism, if that's what it was, never descended into cynicism. He told us he believed he had a duty to give something back, and that he could best do that by serving in the Army, which he saw as an instrument of peace and justice in the Middle East. He spoke about all this with a rather apologetic smile. He was not at all gung-ho.

Paul joined the Spectator at a time when Iran was almost as much in the news as it is now. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had become president in August 2005 and in October had called for Israel to be wiped off the map. There was quite a bit of sabre-rattling in response, but Paul, though himself Jewish, reacted very calmly.

In an article in the Spectator - and very few work experience lads get to write for the magazine - he argued that any military action against Iran would be counterproductive, that the mullahs were probably going to get nukes anyway - Ahmadinejad himself was of little importance - and that the only sensible course of action for the West was to follow a policy of containment, while at the same time reaching out to the moderates.

What was especially charming about the piece was that Paul gave the readers rather more than a geopolitical analysis. Noting that Iranians were very fond of employing almost insane exaggeration, he gave a couple of examples - drawn from his extensive reading - of the sort of hyperbolic response you might expect from a well-brought-up Iranian wanting to make you feel you were really welcome in his house.

Instead of saying "Do come in", such a chap would say: "Please step on my eyeball." If you asked after his children, he would say: "My children are your slaves."

Paul was commissioned into the newly formed Rifles in April 2007. He was a very good officer by all accounts, loved by his men. According to Officer Commanding C Company, Major Alastair Field, he was "one in a trillion".

"I have never met a more passionate and engaging young officer in my 12 years in the Army," he said. "His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. You knew when 'Merv' was out of the mess when the periodicals and Amazon parcels he had ordered piled up on the post table."

Paul was buried at the Aldershot Royal Military Cemetery two days ago (Wednesday). On Sunday his mother, Margaret, sent me an email.

"He is being buried with full military honours," she wrote, "in a cemetery full of young men. He, a Jew, will lie beside a Buddhist Gurkha."

As one of his men, Lance Corporal Joe Ells, put it: "Rest in peace, Mr Mervis."

Even if, as I believe, the military war on terror is futile, Paul's death was not futile. A tragedy, yes, but not futile, and not a waste. Paul died doing his duty. He died for his men. Greater love...

***

There was a great fuss about Father's Day this year, but the message hardly got through to my family. No tray bearing smoked salmon and scrambled eggs and a single rose was brought to my room, and there were no cards or prezzies, either - no box of chocolates, no Black and Decker drill, not even a pinafore and a pair of leotards.

I am glad. Father's Day is just another Hallmark festival, and we should not encourage it. Yet some nice people now see it as an opportunity for outreach. This year St Stephen's C of E church in Barbourne, Worcester, decided to give bottles of beer to men who attended its church service on FD.

According to the Rt Rev John Inge, the Bishop of Worcester: "We give wine away every Sunday, so giving away beer could be said to going downmarket a bit, but it's an attempt to speak of God's generosity."

Ho, ho, I suppose, but even so one senses that Communion under both kinds has not led to a deeper understanding of the Eucharist Mystery among Anglicans.

On a happier note, since we are on the subject of booze and churches, I am reminded of a story told of the late Paul Jennings. Once, after attending 11am Mass one Sunday, he went for a drink. A rather picky and prickly acquaintance thought he detected inconsistency here, perhaps humbug. "I don't understand you Catholics," he said. "Straight out of church and into a pub. Why do you do it?"

"Easy, really," said Jennings. "They don't sell drinks in church."

A soft spot for the South

Friday 19 June 2009

Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) dance in Gone with the Wind in 1939

When I was a boy at school I used occasionally to accept my confessor's invitation to go to his room to discuss my doubts. Couldn't happen these days, of course. We'd have a couple of cigarettes (Player's, I think) and shoot the breeze, and I'd come away feeling confident, reassured, spiritually uplifted.

These encounters were a bit like a Chinese meal, though: before long one felt less than entirely satisfied; the doubts (or "difficulties", as the fastidious Cardinal Newman might have called them) returned.

Such was my lack of Faith, Hope and Charity.

These days I find that the American website Catholic Answers Forums, "the largest Catholic community on the web", can serve the same purpose as my confessor half a century ago. Here are some of subjects covered by the forums in the past two weeks:

The immaterial intellect, and anencephaly; Is it a sin not to take your meds?; Producing a morally problematic film; Hatred among in-laws; Is the Church returning to the Dark Ages?; Should guns be allowed in church?; Does eating oat cereal lower cholesterol?; When killing a pig undermines a way of life; The dog and the new baby; The confession cheat sheet; Practical aspects of wearing a habit.

All human life is there. It is very funny, and sometimes loopy, but much of it is also moving and edifying, and you learn stuff.

I think Evelyn Waugh once said of F Scott Fitzgerald that it was surprising what one drunken Yank could do with a typewriter. It is even more surprising what thousands of mostly sober and often unremarkable Yanks can do with their computers.

***

I mention the website now because one of the subjects covered last week - and with much feeling on both sides - was the American Civil War, a matter that has been on my mind lately, and for no better (or worse) reason than that a couple of weeks ago I saw Gone with the Wind from start to finish for the first time in my life.

In the past I have always fallen asleep before the end - the film usually comes on late at night on television - but this time I bought the DVD and sat down to watch it at six in the morning with a mug of tea and a bowl of Grape-Nuts (with chopped prunes).

Four hours later it was over, and I was blubbing buckets. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," says the caddishly handsome Clarke Gable/Rhet Butler. "Tomorrow is another day," says the pertly beautiful Vivien Leigh/Scarlet O'Hara. The theme music swells, the sky turns pink, the closing credit rolls. Great balls of fire. They don't makes pictures like that any more.

I cleared away my mug and my cereal bowl and gave the cat his thyroid pill ("as if..." says my wife), and began to meditate on the mysterious workings of providence. Margaret Mitchell, who wrote the book on which the film is based, was a Catholic, albeit a lapsed one, and there is an astonishing scene near the beginning of GWTW in which the heroic O'Hara family, gathered for family prayers, recite the old Confiteor in English.

It seems extraordinary that such a thing could have happened in what is now the Bible Belt, but until the middle of the 19th century the states south of the Mason-Dixon line were probably more Catholic than the states to the north: just think Louisiana and Maryland. Even well into the 20th century there was a strong Catholic culture in the South, which showed itself in the work of such writers Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy and the tragic John Kennedy Toole, who committed suicide and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for his comic masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces.

But can a Catholic think well of the Confederacy? What about slavery? The truth of the matter is that in the last century (as in the first century AD) people were not quite as sensitive as they are today, and that includes Church people.

In 1820 the Jesuits had almost 400 slaves on their plantations in Maryland, and Bishop John England, the first bishop of Charleston, South Carolina (from 1820 to 1840), was opposed to the slave trade, and indeed to slavery in general, but was against the abolitionist movement and felt that Catholics could in good conscience own slaves. Even the Pope in Rome - Pius IX - apparently had a soft spot for the Southern cause, and therefore could not have regarded slavery as the deciding moral factor in the conflict. He was at any rate the only European head of state to lend his support to what turned out to be the Lost Cause.

The author of the Syllabus of Errors (1864) corresponded with Southern leader, Jefferson Davis, addressing him as "His Excellency Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America".

In 1866, when Davis, having lost the war, was in jail, the Pope sent him a letter with which he enclosed a miniature Crown of Thorns that he had made with his own hands.

Pius IX's support of the Confederacy was de facto rather than formal, as the Vatican made clear, but it can be no coincidence, as the Marxists used to say, that the Pope did not correspond with Abraham Lincoln. In any case, you can see why Pius IX would have liked the South: it was agrarian, conservative, chivalrous, backward-looking, suspicious of centralising government, and no more inclined than His Holiness to come to terms with what had been anathematised in the Syllabus as "Progress, Liberalism and Modern Civilization".

But Progress, Liberalism and Modern Civilization won. It is hard to imagine any post-conciliar bishop defending Pio Nono on the Confederacy, or, for that matter, on another pressing concern of those times: religious freedom.

Pius was no fan of religious freedom. But at least he could see the funny side of the divide created by presumed religious freedom. He once greeted a party of Anglican churchmen with the blessing reserved for incense: Ab illo benedicaris in cuius honore cremaberis - "Mayest thou be blessed by him in whose honour thou shalt be burnt." The churchmen were not amused.

Life as an NHS 'target'

Friday 12 June 2009

'The NHS is increasingly a Third World service for the Third World. It must be reformed' (PA Photos)

If in the past two weeks Charterhouse has seemed a little more hypersensitive than usual, it may be because I have been recovering from an operation for the removal of haemorrhoids.

One's first instinct, of course, on hearing that someone has had this procedure, is to bite one's knuckles and suppress a howl of laughter, or to make one's excuses and leave for a brisk, head-clearing walk on the Pennine Way.

But people can be so kind. A fortnight after I'd been cut open and stitched up by the NHS I managed to hobble along to a party given by Sarah Standing, a former colleague of mine at the Spectator, wife of the great English character actor John Standing, and one of the funniest and most beautiful hostesses in London.

As we queued for the buffet supper, she forgot her other guests - oh, you know: Joan Collins, Sarah Ferguson, Will Young, Geordie Greig (Eton and the Evening Standard), The Catholic Herald's very own Mary Wakefield - and gave me her undivided attention. "Darling Stuart," she said, taking me by the arm. "What a wonderful bonding thing we have - haemorrhoids!"

I can laugh now, but it wasn't funny a few weeks ago. In fact, a few weeks ago I was feeling rather aggrieved. I'd been expecting good things of the NHS, but in the event felt sorely let down.

The London teaching hospital I was sent to is one of those Seventies gulags - a cross between a crematorium and a multi-storey car park - but it was spotlessly clean, and during my pre-op screenings I was seen on time every time, by doctors and nurses who spoke English and were cheerful, courteous, thorough and professional.

The service was magnificent, and made me proud to be English and proud of the NHS, which, however, I have scarcely used for 25 years.

But things soon went wrong. My operation - a day job - was originally set for March, and I duly turned up at the hospital at 7.30 on the appointed morning, only to be told after a wait of perhaps an hour that the op had been cancelled because last-minute cancer cases had to be accommodated. I shrugged - it would have been churlish to complain - and another date was set for May.

This time there was no cancellation, and I was given VIP treatment. A nice Colombian nurse, with pretty good English, asked me what religion I was, if any, and I said Roman Catholic. Did I have any strong belief systems? (Just Catholic...) Did I have any dietary requirement? Did I have issues about being seen by a woman doctor? Many of these questions seemed to me to be aimed less at jobbing RCs (or Anglicans and atheists) than at the more sensitive types of Muslims and Jews.

The anaesthetist turned out to be very agreeable, very jolly. He went through my notes cheerfully, at one point observing, almost casually, that I had Hepatitis C. Hepatitis what? Isn't that rather serious? Why hadn't someone told me that I had Hepatitis C? Fortunately, a little probing in the files revealed that there had been what is known in medical circles as an "unfortunate error".

Somewhere along the line a nurse - perhaps a woman brought up using the Cyrillic alphabet - had seen a note about my having had Hepatitis A - jaundice - and had written it down as Hepatitis C.

Oh, well. At least it was close.

Then they knocked me out, cut me up, and sent me to recovery. Later, I was transferred to one of the day-care wards. Actually, they are called bays, not wards. Mine was E Bay. I shared E Bay with three other geezers - two Indians (one of whom announced proudly that he was from Hounslow) and a loony and boring old Cockney. In the loo there was a discarded hospital gown and a bedside chair.

We were attended by two nurses. One was a nice, overworked Asian woman, with poor English. The other was a big, surly black man. He did not speak. He moved around with what Tom Wolfe calls a "pimp roll". He chewed gum slowly with his mouth slightly open.

The nice Asian nurse kept on saying that "doctors" would visit us, but no one had shown by seven in the evening. There was obviously no question of the consultant coming to see his patients. In the end I spoke on the house phone to a young doctor who was jolly nice but did not seem to be an expert in gastro-intestinal medicine.

I was then given painkillers, antibiotics, a bottle of sickly laxative and some absorbent pads. I was told to see my GP if I had any probs, like sudden, excessive bleeding.

Other than that there was no after-sales service. I was an NHS "target" and I had been "met". I did not know what to expect next. My missus drove me home, as per NHS guidelines.

***

It was not always thus, as readers over 60 - a dying breed - will remember. In the Fifties, before the Second Vatican Council, when Sir Lancelot Spratt did his rounds, and nurses wore uniforms with watches pinned to their ample and reassuring bosoms - in the days, that is, of hierarchy and deference and surnames - the NHS worked well.

But bureaucracy, rising costs, equal opportunities, condoms skills classes, therapeutic abortion, the internal market and health tourism have ruined all that, and what once a public service has now become, in some cases, a public disgrace. The NHS is, increasingly, a Third World service for the Third World. It must be reformed.

The American model favoured by some Tories is obviously not the answer. What would be far more appropriate in England is the French model of universal health care, based on a government-regulated national health insurance system.

Meantime, it is just silly for poor Gordon Brown to prate on about giving power to patients, as he did last week. That's just the sort of modernist nonsense you get from the Tories. Patients don't want power; they want to get better.

Now: do you suppose I can persuade my GP to give me some more sleeping pills? Or will I be told about the dangers of "addiction"? You don't get that sort of tabloid health-page nonsense when you see a doctor privately.

Careless talk costs lives

Friday 5 June 2009

George Tiller's clinic in Wichita, Kansas. 'Babies killed here' is scrawled in chalk on the kerb (AP Photo)

The murder in Wichita on Sunday of the abortionist George Tiller was an accident waiting to happen, and there may be worse to come. Words have consequences. Violent words have violent consequences. And a lot of violent words have been used - not least by me - since Barack Obama won the presidential election last November.

The secular Left blames the mood of anger created by the pro-life Republican Right for the Wichita killing, and even though some of my best friends are pro-life Republicans I think the secular Left has a point, even if it is a small one and even if at the weekend its spokespeople were quivering with righteous indignation and revelling in the certainty that their enemies are life-denying, sexually dysfunctional gun nuts.

In a way we pro-lifers are lucky it was not Obama who took the bullet. Only last week a Pennsylvania newspaper had to apologise for its "oversight" in carrying an ad calling for the assassination of the US President.

The ad read: "May Obama follow in the steps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy!" (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy were of course all assassinated; the poor monkeys in the newspaper's advertising department did not get the reference.)

Whether the advertiser was pro-life as well as anti-Obama we do not know. He may simply believe, as so many seem to, that Obama is a cruel black Marxist intent on enslaving all the white men in America, and raping their wives and daughters, and maybe even outlawing the Rotary Club and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Like the man who gunned down Tiller, however, he may also have strong views about abortion.

Both the advertiser and the gunman must at any rate be people easily swayed by the passionate advocates of truth and justice, and in the past year they will have come across many such advocates - not all of them especially scrupulous - in newspapers and on blogs.

On television they will no doubt have tuned in to Fox News, where they will have seen the sneer-lipped Bill O'Reilly baiting Tiller over the years. In time a mood emerges, a climate is created. Words have consequences...

***

Perhaps the time has come to ratchet down the rhetoric, and to remind ourselves, again, that no matter how good our cause - and it is hard to think of a better cause than life - it cannot be advanced by bad means.

You do not serve the truth with a lie, or with reckless exaggeration and extreme language, or by making your readers and viewers believe that "they" are gunning for you.

For the past month and more the focus of much of the abortion debate - and the occasion of much overwrought rhetoric - has been the University of Notre Dame, where President Obama spoke recently and was given an honorary law degree.

The case against ND is easily made: a Catholic university should not honour a man who is explicitly and avowedly pro-abortion. Nothing more need be said. A lot more was said, however, especially when L'Osservatore Romano seemed to take a rather relaxed approach to what had happened.

There was more to this than talk, of course. Some readers may have seen the YouTube footage of the old priest being arrested on the university campus. In some quarters the arrest was taken as another sign of the fascist American state getting above itself. The priest himself said he was being arrested for trying to stop babies being killed. That is of course what he was trying to do, and what ND did not want him to do, but in truth he was arrested for trespass, and the coppers behaved very well.

This was martyrdom by courtesy of your friendly local police department. What happened was what was intended to happen. But there were cries of shocked protest when Father was cuffed and wrapped up in a canvas bag by a couple of big-bummed police officers and gently carried off to a paddy wagon. The whole performance was ridiculous.

America is not Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, whatever some pro-life zealots may wish us to believe. In any case, isn't it time we kicked Hitler out of our rhetorical toolbag? He never did anyone any good, and he really is now long past his sell-by date. Evil can get along quite nicely without him.

Same with talk of abortion as the new Holocaust. Actually, considered in terms of the numbers, abortion is worse than the Holocaust, but we know that at an emotional level the two cannot really be compared. Most of us have friends who support the abortion laws, believe that a woman has the right to choose, and they are not Nazis. Nor, of course, is Lady Thatcher, who back in the day voted for the David Steel's Abortion Bill. I am not even sure that Sir David himself is a Nazi.

***

The Jews don't like this talk of Holocaust, either, and we don't want any more misunderstandings in that quarter. Not long ago a German bishop had to apologise to the Jewish community for talking about the Holocaust in the same breath as abortion, and Mike Huckabee, the very likeable Republican, got himself into the same sort of trouble for the same reason with the Anti-Defamation League. Besides, talk of Holocaust diverts us from serious discussion, whose purpose ought to be to establish that the foetus is human, and therefore cannot just be discarded like a foot or two of colon. New ultrasound and magnetic resonance techniques are bringing the foetus more and more to life. Science is more powerful than moral rhetoric when it comes to persuading society that abortion is evil.

At the same time, however, the fact remains that we live in a country where millions of children have been destroyed in the womb - and we are paying the bill for it. Ought we not to refuse to pay?

If one refused to pay a portion of tax - openly and on the understanding that one would have to pay the price in terms of jail, fines, whatever - one would concentrate the minds of our elected. It would certainly be more useful - certainly more Christian - than putting a bullet through the head of an abortion doctor or telling your pro-choice friends that they are just a bunch of murdering Nazis scumbags.

This will make you cry

Friday 29 May 2009

St Patrick's Church in Dublin: "We must pray for the victims but me must pray too for the perps"

My first instinct when the report into child abuse in Ireland was published last week was to get the wagons into a circle and to fight off the attacks with sneers and sarcasm. After all, we’d all been beaten when we were young, sometimes fairly brutally, and anyway I always react with a jerk of the knee to the knee-jerk anti-Catholicism in the press. The gunning for Archbishop Vincent Nichols was disgusting… Then I dipped into the report and I felt ashamed of my initial reaction.

It tells a terrible, terrible story, and in part a peculiarly Catholic one. To deny that is to be in denial. The faith, perverted, can turn people into monsters. Life in the industrial schools was sometimes very antithesis of love, and I fear that some of the abuse could only have happened in a Catholic context. Perhaps the problem was Jansenism in a priest-ridden society.

The evidence about the Christian Brothers is especially harrowing.

Here are a couple of extracts:

“We were met by Br ...X... he ruled the roost, he told us about the rules, said if we ran away there was severe punishment, the second time our head would be shaved and the third time we would be sent to [named school]. He then stripped us off, told us to bend over the desk; he hit the desk with a leather strap and said: ‘Say the Our Father’. I could not say it. He hit me across the legs and warned me not to step out of line. He told us to get in the shower, cold water, ‘to scrub away your sins’, with carbolic soap. He then left and came back with clothes, comb ... he hit me with the strap when I had the clothes on because I should be in pyjamas. We went to the dormitory, the boys were asleep, he said, ‘This will always be your bed unless you wet the bed, then you will end up with the smellies with Mr ...Y...’.

“The day I arrived there, I was in the yard and there was all these boys, they all seemed like giants. I remember running up to this man and saying ‘hello Father’ he laid into me, he was a very cruel man, I thought he was a priest, he said ‘don’t call me Father’. He laid me on the ground, he gave me a few terrible clatters and I was terrified from that moment. He was Br ...X... I was terrified of him, oh Lord! [distressed] he was just cruel.”

What the newspapers did not notice was that there was evidence in the report from children who had a positive experience of the schools. Some of that, though, is almost as upsetting as the evidence from the victims. This will make you cry:

“The kindest thing that ever happened to me was a nurse, she was called ... Ms X... we were all around saying the Rosary and she put a sweet in my hand, one sweet. I didn’t want to eat the sweet I wanted to hold on to it, somebody gave me something, somebody was kind. It became a regular thing about once a week, one sweet. I began to look forward to it...”

The Christian Brothers have become a byword for evil. That is grotesquely unfair. Many of the Brothers were good and kind men who taught poor children well. But some of them were bad, and it is no consolation to reflect that they must have been as unhappy as the children they terrorised.

We must pray for the victims, of course, but we must pray too for the perps. Maybe the new Archbishop of Westminster was getting at something like that when he said, very bravely, and to howling protest in the press that it took “courage” for religious and clergy to have to “face the facts from their past, which instinctively and quite naturally they’d rather not look at”.

Of course it required courage.

There is one consolation: child abuse on the scale revealed by the report will never again occur in Catholic institutions in the British Isles.

Meanwhile, the future beckons, and one or two of us are wondering whom to vote for in the Euro elections. Obviously, Labour and the Tories are out of the question; likewise the BNP and UKIP.

The Greens are perhaps tempting – after all, they agree with the Pope (and me) on global warming and the rainforest – but they are associated with that zero-growth wackado Sir Jonathon Porritt, and we can’t be doing with him. Some good people in my neck of the woods are saying good things about Libertas, the pan-European party, but there is something a bit too sceptic about these people for my taste. They seem nice enough, but they say we are living in “an anti-democratic superstate”. If only, I sometimes think. Fact is, however, that we don’t live in such a state, and it is paranoid to suggest that we do.

The only party I like is the Christian Party–Christian Peoples Alliance. It’s an ecumenical outfit, but it is also the closest thing we have here to a Catholic political movement.

These people are pro-life and anti-war, and they want to keep Turkey out of the EU. They press all my buttons. True, they may never win power, but perhaps we are moving towards a time in which small groups can make a difference, and anyway at least a vote for CP-CPA is not a vote for anything that is either criminal or insane.

Did someone at the back mention the Lib Dems? Get out of here! You can’t take seriously a party whose leader chooses to look and talk like the 12-year-old head prefect of a minor prep school.

There was some talk at my kitchen table on Monday about Susan Boyle and Britain’s Got Talent. We agreed that Susan had not done well. She was out of time to begin with, and occasionally flat. She deserved to win, but that’s not saying a great deal, because none of the other acts was worth watching.

It was like a Butlin’s talent show at the end of a poor season. The judges were just as amateur as the performers, and you wondered (just for a moment and in the nicest possible way) whether this was all some sort of scam.

My only prayer is that Susan gets out of it with her faith and dignity intact, and a few million quid.

Time for People Power

Friday 22 May 2009

Corpus Christi in Bavaria: English children should not be deprived of a day off school for the feast

No doubt the new Archbishop of Westminster has other things on his mind this weekend as he opens his presents and works out how to operate the plasma television, but I have just signed a petition calling on him to restore the feasts of the Epiphany, Ascension and Corpus Christi to their proper days.

The petition was got up by my friend Julia Ashenden, daughter of the late Hugh Ross Williamson, historian, novelist, playwright and Catholic apologist. You can find it at www.petition.co.uk/holy_days.

Now the last thing anyone wishes to do is to embarrass the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, but I do think that sometimes a little lay initiative is to be welcomed. We did not ask to be called the People of God, but since that's the name we now go by, let us try wielding People Power.

Already there are signs of that People Power is being wielded, with the encouragement of priests, in the matter of Holy Communion. Increasingly these days people kneel side by side for Communion - and even receive the Host on the tongue! - instead of standing one behind the other and shuffling forward for Communion in the hand.

You can do it if you really want. Another ancient practice that might be restored by People Power is the genuflection in the Creed.

Some weeks ago we were talking about this in the kitchen at home with a chap who'd just been received into the Church.

I said how irritating it was to be instructed to bow at the mention of the Incarnation when we were already, in theory, bowing over our "Mass books". Was bowing somehow more dignified than genuflecting? Was genuflecting demeaning? Was it something that grown-ups did not like to do?

Of course not. In fact, people like to genuflect. It's a mark of Catholicism, like the Sign of the Cross and Friday abstinence. It is tribally important.

In any case the following Sunday my wife suddenly genuflected in the middle of the Creed.

I leaned forward a bit, stiffly. The next week I genuflected but my wife remained upright. The week after that I was at the nine o'clock at the Oratory, so no problemo. Last weekend I was overcome by scruples - should we not obey the rubrics? - and bowed, resentfully.

It is fatuous. By overturning the old "superstitious" Catholicism, we have created a new mumbo-jumbo.

I think it is my intention to genuflect always in future. I have noticed people do it here and there. Maybe it is coming back.

So, People: do not let them scare you into receiving Communion in the hand and do not stand idly by while your children are deprived of a day off school for Corpus Christi. Claim your birthright. The People united can never be divided.

***

In the past couple of months I have spent more time in cyberspace than is perhaps wise, and have come across some rather troubling stuff; funny, too, if you like that kind of thing.

You may remember that a couple of months ago Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver suggested that Right-wing nuts are nastier than Left-wing nuts. "The Left mail I get will use terrible words but be less vitriolic," he said in an interview. "They use the F-word and things like that, call me names like that. But the Right is meaner, but they're not as foul."

Not only meaner, I'd say, but a lot crazier.

Let me introduce you to "Willing Catholic Martyr", an American traditionalist blogger whose interests include Salvation, Fitness and Martial Arts and who has produced a fascinating list of heretics and schismatics to be avoided at all costs.

The list has more than 500 names on it - there are groups and publications there as well as people - and includes all those who attend the New Mass and all members of Opus Dei (OK, that much is obvious), and also the SSPX, the FSSP, the Knights of Columbus, the Legion of Mary, The Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, the Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration Association, Catholic Family News, the Immaculate Heart Messenger Magazine...

Oh, yes, and Cardinal Newman, Marcel Lefebvre, Padre Pio, Mother Teresa, Fr Oswald Baker, Mel Gibson, Michael Davies, Bishop Bernard Fellay, Bishop Richard Williamson (but not on account of his Holocaust denial, I fancy), Mother Angelica (natch), and the "antipopes" Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, JPII and BXVI.

It is perhaps silly to give such unfortunate people as Willing Catholic Martyr publicity, but the paranoid tendency on the Right needs to be acknowledged and confronted, not least by those who call themselves traditionalists. It is perhaps more strident now than it has ever been, and it is not confined to the lunatic fringe.

There is something rather Protestant about all this tough-guy, holier-than-thou religiosity, this tendency to demonise the enemy and thus absolve oneself from the need to be charitable in one's dealings with him (or her).

Could it be that there is an End Times cult emerging in the Church? I have no tangible reason for believing that there is, but I fear there might be.

Of course we have a long way to go before we catch up with the Southern Baptists. In Catersville, Georgia, last week a group of them met to discuss, among other things, the Antichrist. He was not Barack Obama, they insisted, who was seen rather as a valet to the Antichrist.

The true Antichrist will manifest himself in Europe. Ed Hindson, one of the delegates, urged his listeners to do the math: "The political unification of Europe oughta be like a flashing red light to get our attention. All of a sudden the euro is stronger than the dollar... The Antichrist will rise from Europe as Europe revives in the end days."

Think of those words when you cast your vote in a couple of weeks, and reflect too that when people start to speculate about biblical prophesy they are in danger of reaching dangerously wrong conclusions, even if they are Catholics, and sometimes end up ranting about the Whore of Babylon.

A test of pilgrim mettle

Friday 8 May 2009

A volunteer works at the Home for Dying Destitute in Calcutta (CNS photo/Jayanta Shaw, Reuters)

A fortnight ago I met a remarkable American priest, a former tank commander in the US Marine Corps, who invited me to spend two weeks in Calcutta working as a pilgrim with Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity.

Why not? I thought. It sounded romantic, and I had a bit of holiday time coming up. It would make a change from Siena, and there might be piece in it. Plus it would only cost about $300 for food and accommodation.

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst... De dah de dah de dah dah... An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay. OK, wrong country. But you will catch my mood. Certainly, Calcutta would be poor - that much I knew - but colourfully poor, surely, a bit like Naples, but with rather more death and disease on the streets, and with chicken vindaloo instead of pizza margherita.

But O Calcutta. On Sunday night I got several pages of notes for pilgrims from my American friend, and they rather concentrated my mind. This was evidently not a city in which I would find much use for my curling irons. "You cannot imagine how polluted, crowded, and noisy it is in Calcutta," I read. "After you arrive, you will be in shock. It will take you several days to adjust, between the jet lag and the noise and pollution."

The accommodation is fairly primitive, too, with up to eight to a room and no hot water.

"Bring soap, shampoo, two or three rolls of toilet paper, and a towel, as none of these things are provided by [the hostel] and they are hard to come by in India. Bring ear plugs in case your roommates snore or the other noises (dogs barking, fireworks, etc) impede your sleep."

The water is so impure that pilgrims are advised to "keep your mouth closed while showering".

Blimey. It makes the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela sound like a vicarage tea party, even if you walk all the way from Belgium with bunions and a torn cartilage. Could I do it? Did I have the bottle? Or would I, like the rich young man in the Gospel, go away sad?

Unlike the rich young man, I was not being asked to give up everything I had and follow Christ, of course, but I was being asked to do something that did not come at all naturally. It struck me that a fortnight's enhanced interrogation in Baghdad might be more fun.

But this was not about fun. The purpose of the pilgrimage is to get closer to Jesus - and therefore to joy - by sharing your life, very briefly, with the poorest of the poor, to join the Missionaries of Charity in "doing something beautiful for God" (in Malcolm Muggeridge's phrase). Yet I am not sure that I am fit enough for the journey, physically, psychologically or spiritually. We'll see. Perhaps there is a way out. Perhaps I can use a Best Western, with aircon and a breakfast bar, instead of the hostel.

What happened to the rich young man, by the way? We don't know. The passage in St Matthew is followed by the one about it being easier for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Logically, this means that a rich man cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, since a camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle. We are all doomed, therefore. But...

"...when they had heard this, the disciples wondered very much, saying: Who then can be saved?

"And Jesus beholding, said to them: With men this is impossible: but with God all things are possible."

Maybe there is hope for us all. I hope so, because we are all filthy rich now, and will still be even when the recession has finished with us.

And Calcutta will still be filthy poor.

***

Things are not looking too good for Labour right now, but I take little comfort in the prospect of a Tory government - and I speak as a lifelong Tory voter. There is scarcely anything conservative about the David Cameron's Conservative Party. Like Mrs Thatcher's, it is a party mainly for liberals and libertarians, thought it still hopes to keep the support of the hangers and bashers and Little Englanders in the suburbs.

It's getting so bad that young Right-wingers are these days to be heard praising Ayn Rand, the Russian-American atheist capitalist novelist and radical individualist, who believed in "the virtue of selfishness" and that market should be allowed to operate without interference from government... and, wey-ho, look at us now.

In these circumstances it is getting very difficult to place oneself anywhere on the political/ideological spectrum. A good friend of mine in the United States, Chris Check, who writes for the admirably reactionary Chronicles magazine, told me some years ago that when asked whether he is Left or Right, liberal or conservative, he had taken to replying, simply: "I am Catholic."

I am beginning to wonder whether this solution might not also work in a religious context, especially at a time when people are getting very het up about the liturgy. So, to the question: "Are you a traditionalist or a postconciliarist?" the best answer might be: "Neither. I am a Catholic." It is, anyway, important to remember that there were no traditionalists before the Council.

***

It would churlish of me not to congratulate Bob Dylan's achievement this week in becoming the oldest man ever to have a number one album, with Together Through Life.

It's only since becoming an Elderly Person that I have become a fan. One of the most admirable things about Bob Dylan is that he has always been very good at handling the almost insanely pretentious questions he was asked at press conferences. Here he is in the Sixties:

Reporter: "How many people who labour in the same musical vineyard in which you toil - how many are protest singers? That is, people who use their music, and use the songs to protest the, uh, social state in which we live today: the matter of war, the matter of crime, or whatever it might be."

Bob Dylan: "Um... how many?"

Reporter: "Yes. Are there many?"

Bob Dylan: "Uh, I think there's about, uh... 136."

Reporter: "You say about 136, or do you mean exactly 136?"

Bob Dylan: "Uh, it's either 136 or 142."

Thank you, Darling

Friday 1 May 2009

The Chancellor Alistair Darling leaves 11 Downing Street with his red Budget box last Wednesday (PA)

Swine fever could not have come at a better time for Gordon Brown. Now at last the newspapers have turned their attention from the horrors of the recession and sleaze - aggravated most recently by the Budget - to the rather more straightforward horrors of a flu pandemic that, we are told, could kill 120 million people worldwide.

You know where you are with mass graves, and pretty soon no doubt there will be someone to blame. It couldn't be better. All the same I am still focusing on the economy.

Last week, for the first time in my life, I listened to the Budget as it was being delivered, though I cannot pretend that I took it all in. It was a nice day and I was sitting in the garden sunning myself like an old lizard - or a teenage girl - and some of the ledger-clerk stuff was a bit above me. What on earth is an "accelerated capital project"? What, come that, is a "top-up trade credit insurance scheme"?

Most years I rely on those Budget-at-a-glance boxes in the tabloids to find out what it means to me. It usually means absolutely nothing. Mostly it's a penny here, a penny there. Only billionaires care about such sums, because a billion times a penny adds up to the price of a lunch for two at Le Gavroche followed by a modest weekend at the tables in Monaco.

But let's not be snobs. Billionaires are people too, and right now they are hurting. Not only will they soon have to pay more tax, but in the past year, as we read last weekend in the Sunday Times, the recession has wiped £155 billion from fortunes of Britain's richest 1,000 people: Lakshmi Mittal is down to his last £10.8 billion and Roman Abramovich to his last £7 billion.

Our newspapers - some of which are owned by billionaires - gave the Budget stinking reviews, but I rather liked it, or at least was greatly impressed by Alistair Darling's performance.

He did not have a very upbeat tale to tell, and he chose exactly the right language for the job. He was a model of calm, Somme-like stoicism as he delivered the bad news about, for example, the hundreds of billions of pounds we must borrow to see ourselves through until pay day. The figures were so ridiculously large, however - and the recovery forecasts so wildly optimistic - that it was hard to take them seriously. Still, you never know...

We are living in an Alice-in-Wonderland world, and the only sensible thing for the sceptic to do at the moment is to be sceptical about the experts' scepticism. All we know for sure is that we know nothing about how all this will pan out.

***

The recession is a great opportunity for the Church to get its message across. God willing, the Pope's forthcoming social encyclical - due, apparently, on the feast of SS Peter and Paul (June 29) - will sock it to the neo-liberals (aka neocons) who take it upon themselves to speak for the Church in matters of economics, and try to persuade us that Benedict XVI is sold on the Anglo-American economic order.

He isn't. The Pope is a Catholic, and therefore subscribes to Catholic social teaching, which is as hostile to liberal capitalism as it is to socialism, and especially to the sort of deregulated numbers rackets that the Mammon-worshippers of London and New York have been running.

In his days as a cardinal the Pope spoke out against the "tragic legacy" and "cruelty" of liberal capitalism. In Brazil in May 2007, addressing the Latin American and Caribbean bishops, he drew parallels between Marxism and capitalism: "Both capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves; they declared that not only would they have no need of any prior individual morality, but that they would promote a communal morality. And this ideological promise has been proved false. The facts have clearly demonst- rated it.

"The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful oppression of souls. And we can also see the same thing happening in the West, where the distance between rich and poor is growing constantly, and giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness."

***

Everyone needs a secular hero or two, and one of mine is Rian Malan. In the Sunday Times at the weekend he had a very nice diary, in which he said that he liked Jacob Zuma, because the president-elect of South Africa had "old-fashioned views on stuff like law and order".

Malan also said that it was a good time to be a Boer: "...as South Africa staggers towards its destiny, it's white Left-liberals who are wailing about our government's shortcomings. The Boers never expected any better, so we are generally immune to the gloom."

The diary made my heart go out, once again, to the Boers. They are brave, honest, hard-working, courteous, old-fashioned and often God-fearing, with a weakness for the bottle. Plus they were on the right side in the Boer War and their women - sometimes their men too - are beautiful.

Malan was born in Johannesburg, in what was then the Transvaal, and was a teenage rebel against apartheid. He is probably best known for My Traitor's Heart, a gripping, and grippingly honest, book about race and violence in the Republic.

I first met him fairly late on the night of the 1997 election, at a party given by the Daily Telegraph. I listened to him talk for about a quarter of an hour, but without understanding a word he said.

He'd had a few drinks, and there was a lot of noise in the room, and he speaks quietly. I just nodded and laughed every now and then, in case he'd make a joke.

The Sunday Telegraph's Jenny McCartney later told me that at five in the morning of the same day she'd had a similar experience at Tory party headquarters. By that time Rian was well relaxed, and Jenny said that in a conversation lasting perhaps half an hour she'd recognised only one word: corduroy.

It would be fascinating to know what he'd been getting at. Tony Blair evokes flannel rather than corduroy, but no doubt Rian had some insight.

Don't be mean to Mel

Friday 24 April 2009

Mel Gibson: 'It is possible for people who are not even Christian to get into the Kingdom of Heaven' (PA)

The similarities between me and Mel Gibson may not at first sight be obvious. For one thing I am taller than he is by perhaps three inches, or was before I began to shrink, and have therefore never felt the need to wear heels. For another I have never been voted the "sexiest man alive", or even the second sexiest. For yet another I have not, yet, appeared in leathers with Tina Turner on the cover of Cosmo Man.

But there are similarities. Mel and I both lived in Sydney in the Sixties, we are both "traditionalist" Catholics, we are both alcoholics, and we have both made a mess of our marriages. Mel is about to get divorced, and I was divorced 25 years ago.

The traditionalists who leapt noisily to Mel's defence over The Passion of The Christ (which A N Wilson once described as "that rather sweet film") have been largely silent since Robyn Gibson served divorce papers on her husband last week.

Even when Mel was done for drink driving in 2006, he got a fair amount of support, but then getting wrecked and slagging off the Jews is one thing; divorce quite another, especially if you are a traditionalist.

Those of us who make a point of defending the Church's rather strict teaching on sexual morality - and who at the same time get all bossy-boots about the liturgy - really ought to avoid things like divorce and chatting up girls in bars, or whatever it was that Mel had been doing when he was stopped in Malibu by deputy sherriff James Mee for driving at 87 mph in a 45 mph zone.

***

All the same, Mel deserves our sympathy. As an alcoholic - and a Tridentine alcoholic at that - he is not absolutely right in the head. I do not know whether he is drinking at the moment, but if he was anything like me in his cups - tearful, abusive, self-pitying - then I am surprised Robyn took so long to change the locks. Even if Mel wasn't like me, though, his wife had plenty to contend with, not least what once appeared to be Mel's literalist interpretation of extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

In September 2003 the star of What Women Want told the New Yorker: "My wife is a saint. She's a much better person than I am. Honestly. She's, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it's not fair if she doesn't make it, she's better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it."

That quote is lovingly cut and pasted every time liberal journalists want to take Mel down. Yet he recanted that exclusivist position in a television interview with Diane Sawyer only five months later.

Asked by Ms Sawyer whether in his traditionalist view heaven's doors were shut to Jews, Protestants and Muslims, he answered: "That's not the case at all. Absolutely not! It is possible for people who are not even Christian to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. It's just easier for - and I have to say this because it's what I believe..."

"You have a non-stop ticket?" suggested Ms Sawyer.

"Well, yeah, I'm saying it's an easier ride. I have to believe that."

Ms Sawyer noted that Mel's father, Hutton, a real headbanger if ever there was one, had questioned the extent of the Holocaust, and she asked Mel whether he had any sympathy with his father's views.

He said he did not, but refused to condemn his father: "Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father and it's not going to happen. I love him. He's my father."

Sawyer: "And you will not speak publicly about him beyond that."

Gibson: "I am tight with him. He's my father. Got to leave it alone, Diane. Got to leave it alone."

Good on yer, Gibbo! Mind you, Mel was being interviewed as part of a publicity drive for The Passion, and his agent would probably have advised him against Holocaust denial in that context. I am persuaded, however, that Mel is not a denier, even if he has had "issues" and even if Hutton's heretical (or schismatic) traditionalism has obviously had a profound influence on him. Maybe Mel's literalism was a symptom not just of his father's influence but of his alcoholism, or maybe his alcoholism was a product of the mind games he has forced himself to play. Who knows? It does not matter now, though. What matters now is that he may get properly sober, properly Catholic; the break-up of his marriage may be his rock bottom.

***

In AA we talk of sharing our "experience, strength and hope". I therefore share this: that my marriage ended in February 1982 after 16 years, some of them pretty blurred. That was my rock bottom. I have not had a drink since. Three years later, however, having divorced my wife, I got married again, this time in a civil ceremony. For many years I did what the Church suggests in cases such as mine: I went to Mass on Sundays and holy days, but did not go to Communion. I was an observant Catholic, but not a practising one.

Last January, as I recorded here a year ago, I spent a few days at Ampleforth, and told my story to a monk I had known some 50 years earlier. After lunch one day he tapped me on the sleeve and said: "I think it's time you went to Confession." So I made my first Confession for 26 years.

It would be unfair to the people I love and whose lives I share or have shared to go into more detail. I mention these things now because I have a tendency to lay down the law and readers have a right to know that I have "form".

The Church does not offer divorced and remarried Catholics a way out - the teaching on marriage is unambiguous - but she does offer us the love and courage necessary to find a way back. Nothing is impossible.

Blair's Attitude problem

Friday 17 April 2009

Tony Blair smiles at Bush after receiving a Presidential Medal of Freedom
at the White House (PA Photos)

In London next week a group of Jews and Christians will meet to discuss the problems encountered by men and women who want to overcome their homosexual inclinations and try to lead chaste and celibate lives.

I do not know where the conference, Sex and the City, is to be held. As of Tuesday the organisers had not announced the venue because they did not want to give their enemies time to plan disruptive action.

Isn't that a bit paranoid? Apparently not. I am told that a similar conference two years ago was disrupted by militant gays. You can rather see why. To believe, as these Jews and Christians do, that homosexuality is a disordered condition - and, worse, that it can be "cured" - is to challenge everything modern society holds sacred. In fact, it is a form of secular blasphemy, the socio-sexual equivalent of Holocaust denial.

The liberal consensus - gushingly endorsed by Tony Blair last week - is that homosexuals should be glad to be gay, or at the very least never troubled by their sexual tastes, and that the Pope should get back in his cage and let the poor blighters get on with their lives.

This is not a subject I much care to talk about. I have no right to criticise others for their promiscuous views and conduct and I truly do not wish to hurt the feelings of gay friends. I dislike the gay lifestyle, but I do not dislike gay people. On the contrary.

There is anyway nastiness on both sides of this debate. If the gay lobby is shrill, so is the anti-gay lobby, and ugly too. Consider, for example, those angry, overweight evangelicals who waddle about America holding up placards proclaiming: "God hates fags."

In the meantime the approach advocated by the delegates to next week's conference, with its emphasis on chastity, mercy, love, courage, is either ignored or ridiculed. Militant homosexuals do not want chastity and militant homophobes do not want love.

***

What does Tony Blair want? What does he believe? Should we laugh or should we cry? When he was received into the Church, many of us gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed that, in the privacy of the confessional, he must have acknowledged his errors in such matters as abortion, contraception, embryonic research, gay sex and (maybe as a bonus) pre-emptive war.

It was not our business, after all, to pry into the man's heart, to judge him, and so we tried not to.

Now, however, Tony's heart is there for all to see, beating like Jim Carrey's in The Mask. His interview with the gay magazine Attitude last week leaves us in no doubt that, at the very least, he rejects in its entirety the teaching of the Church on homosexuality; and it is a moral certainty that he remains liberal on most other matters of life and human sexuality.

The former prime minister told the magazine that Benedict XVI ought to abandon his "entrenched" views on gay sex and get with the programme.

"Look," Blair said, "there are many good and great things the Catholic Church does, and there are many fantastic things this Pope stands for..."

"...good ... great ... fantastic..." The banality is worthy of Austin Powers. All that was missing was "cool and groovy".

It is not, mind, that Blair is a bad Catholic - we are all bad Catholics - but that he is not a Catholic at all. Some may think that he should be denied Holy Communion, but that is something for the experts to decide, and it would be irresponsible and uncharitable for me to take that thought any further.

All the same, I sometimes wonder why he goes to Holy Communion at all, since by his own choice he is not in communion with the Church. Maybe he thinks it is something nice to do on Sunday morning with Cherie and the kids.

***

The only time I met Tony Blair - over lunch at the Sunday Telegraph before he became PM - I liked him, and was especially keen on his openness to Europe. No doubt in consequence I have never been able to rid myself entirely of the feeling that deep down he is really rather nice.

On the surface, though, he is really rather nasty. For all his principled and moist-eyed enthusiasm for minority rights - minority rights supported by the majority of his wealthy and privileged peers, be it noted - Blair has consistently promoted the culture of death, at home and abroad.

In 2003, ignoring the warnings of John Paul II (and Cardinal Ratzinger), he took this country to war with Iraq. The war resulted in the death of scores of thousands of civilians, the persecution of Iraqi Christians, the rise of Iran, the spread of terrorism, and the creation of more than three million refugees.

Blair stood shoulder to shoulder with George W Bush, got a standing ovation from a joint session of Congress, posed grim-visaged for photographers at Camp David with his hands in the pockets of his cheesy black jeans - and in the fullness of time 179 British servicemen died.

Death, death, death. Now Blair says he thinks every day about the aftermath of the Iraq war, but he still seems to think the war was morally justified.

***

Soon, perhaps, Blair will be the first president of Europe. What a team he and President Obama would make as the twin emperors of the secular West. It does not bear thinking about.

Even if Blair fails in his bid for the top job in Europe, he will continue to spread his grinning errors through his Faith Foundation, about which he was preaching on Radio 4 on Tuesday night.

According to reliable reports, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor will join the foundation's advisory council when he leaves Westminster next month. Say it ain't so, Your Eminence.

This is surely no job for a Prince of the Church. Far from joining this preposterous undertaking, Cardinal Cormac should be leading a rosary crusade for the conversion of Tony Blair.

With God all things are possible. St Thomas More, pray for Tony and Cherie and the kids, that they and we may all meet merrily in heaven.

How to fall off the wagon

Friday 10 April 2009

If you gave up alcohol for Lent, it's best to ease yourself gently back into the habit (PA Photos)

Lent ends for me at midday on Saturday. One of the really fun things about being a traditionalist, even a semi-detached one like me, is that you not only get to eat Dover sole at Wilton's on Fridays and use a cat-o-seven scourge made by cloistered nuns, but, by observing the old customs, you can end your Lenten fast early.

I remember a Holy Saturday some years ago when the late Desmond Albrow and I - Desmond edited this newspaper from 1966 to 1967 - got up from our desks at the Sunday Telegraph at 11:55 and made our stately, innocent, purified, insufferably sober way next door to the Kings and Keys and ordered ourselves some alcoholic refreshment. Oh, I don't know: large whiskeys, I suppose, with pint chasers.

Actually, it is a mistake to overdo these things. Not only is it wrong in itself but - as I know only too well - it can make you feel poorly. You need to come off the wagon gently, starting with nothing more challenging than half a pint of very cold Niersteiner after Mass on Sunday, especially if you go to an early Mass, and to end your fast step by step, one doughnut at a time. In some cases medical supervision may be required.

For me, though, the most difficult Lenten duty is almsgiving. By the beginning of this week I had done little more than shove a few quid in the poor box. This was not so much because I am reluctant to give - though when I consider my own indifference and meanness over the years I am filled with horror - as because it can be difficult at times to decide whom to give to.

In some cases the decision is a no-brainer. I won't give to Comic Relief, for example, the luvvy charity founded by Richard Curtis, whose "life-affirming" approach to life and to rock and roll - now showing in a cinema near you - is enough to fill one with suicidal despair, or would be if such a thing were not gravely sinful.

Red Nose Day is about as much fun as an attack of diarrhoea at Butlins. On one awful occasion, if memory serves, Stephen Fry simulated gay sex, satirically, on the charity's television comedy spectacular. Happily, he kept his kit on, so it was not anatomically disgusting, but it was all so forced, so unfunny, so juvenile, so ... in denial.

People these days do not have the courage or the honesty to do what is wrong. If they are luvvies at any rate, they have to persuade themselves that everything they do is not only blameless but virtuous. I'm OK, you're OK, we're OK.

But that's what you expect from a TV sniggerthon. What about a Catholic charity? In headline terms charity means Africa and Africa means Aids and Aids means condoms. This may present problems. Few of us are moral theologians, praise the Lord, but the bottom line, surely, is that Catholics cannot support agencies that either promote condoms or make common cause with those who do.

But let's emphasise the positive. Aid to the Church in Need is a fine charity. So, of course, are the pro-life agencies, and I am pleased to see that the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) publishes a Charities Bulletin on its website - a sort of givers' guide.

I like the sound of the Little Way Association, which helps the missionaries. In 2007 it collected £4.9 million and distributed £4.6 million. Donors may insist that everything they give goes to the mission or cause they name and none is spent on administration, though if too many did that, of course, the Little Way would cease to exist. The number is 020 7622 0466.

Another fine outfit, I gather, is the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (SCIAF), the international development charity of the Catholic Church in Scotland, which works on behalf of the poor and oppressed in more than 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and at the same time promotes Fairtrade, carbon reduction, and organic farming. Politically incorrect bores may scoff at that, but I won't. Give peas a chance.

So maybe it is not so difficult to give after all. Maybe I'll get my Lenten almsgiving done before Easter Day. Don't bet on it, though.

***

At least now the heated speculation will stop. We have a new Archbishop of Westminster and we wish him well. Forward into the future, as Boris Johnson says. The secular press has decided that the Most Rev Vincent Nichols is a traditionalist. Traditionalist Catholics are less sure. Let's hope, however, that he promotes the old rite of Mass - and is both thorough and compassionate when the new new Mass is introduced.

In the meantime let's give thanks to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. He had his faults, and made some bad decisions, but I liked (and like) him. He is an agreeable and kind man.

Some said he was a sworn enemy of tradition. That was not my impression. When two years ago I interviewed him for the Spectator I quoted the then Cardinal Ratzinger's observation in 2000 that in getting rid of the old rite "we are despising and proscribing the Church's whole past". Was there not some truth in those words? I asked.

"Well, there must be," the Cardinal said. "I think some of the things that people rightly lament over the loss of the Tridentine Rite are the sense of mystery, the silence, and a number of other things that I think Pope Benedict, and indeed I, regret."

Nor was he a patsy for his friend Tony Blair. In fact, the Cardinal was the only major public figure in Britain who regularly rebuked Blair for his unChristian policies.

No Tory grandee did anything like that, but then the Tory party is scarcely more Christian than New Labour.

Pax tecum, your Eminence. Enjoy the golf.

***

It is a good thing we no longer pray on Good Friday for the conversion of the "perfidious Jews". It is a bad thing, however, that we no longer pray explicitly for their conversion. Now more than ever we should pray for it. We should pray also for the conversion of the Muslims.

The Church would be immeasurably strengthened - and peace would descend on the Middle East - if Jews and Muslims were to bring their huge spiritual and moral strengths to Rome.

The gentle art of killing

Friday 3 April 2009

The State of Alabama's lethal injection chamber at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore (PA Photos)

We had one of our cats put to sleep the other day - or "killed", as well-bred people would say. My wife gave her a condemned kitty-cat's last meal: Sainsbury's tuna steak mixed with Hellman's mayonnaise (or perhaps I am making the Hellman's bit up).

I had never liked the cat, but I felt guilty about having her put down, and so did my wife. Perhaps we felt guilty because the cat had not been seriously ill or in any pain. It's just that she was very old, very incontinent and angry all the time.

The end came when I took the Daily Mail to my wife one morning and she discovered that the sports pages were smeared in cat poo. The odd thing is that I'd been reading the paper downstairs and hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary.

A few days after the vets had done Flossie in they sent us a nice card with a picture of a cat on the front and the words "Deepest Sympathy". Inside was the following handwritten message: "Dear Mr and Mrs Reid, Sorry for the loss of Flossy. Our thoughts are with you at this sad time..."

I could mock, I suppose, but why should I? These were nice people trying to keep their customers happy.

The way the vets dispatched Flossie - it took 30 seconds, tops - made me wonder, and not for the first time, why the Americans can't kill people more humanely.

Lethal injection is now widely used in the United States as the kinder, gentler alternative to the electric chair and hanging, but it can take three quarters of an hour to kill a chap with drugs, and that does not sound very humane to me.

To be fair, some say that the method is painless, but Albert Pierrepoint, one of our most gifted hangmen, said he considered it "sadistic".

One of the problems is that doctors do not generally take part in these executions, because, you know, whoever heard of a doctor killing people?

That means that the administration of the drugs is left to amateurs. On a couple of occasions the condemned man, no doubt worrying a bit about what the future holds, has had to help the guards find a vein.

Why not give the people you want to cull a big injection of morphine, and then finish them off when they are happily asleep, perhaps with another dose of morphine? An ex-junkie friend tells me that there is an expression used by addicts that gets to the heart of this approach - "one to feel it, one to seal it".

I shared these morbid thoughts with my youngest boy. He said he'd rather be hanged than given a lethal injection, but he thought that a bullet in the back of the head was probably the best bet. His mother said that the bullet would be far too messy.

So we sat around the kitchen table and talked about the guillotine. That seemed quite humane, but there was the spooky possibility that the victim remains conscious for a moment or two while his head bounces around the cobblestones and sees things from the perspective of a football. His mother said she'd heard it was a few minutes.

"Know what?" said the boy. "We'll never know."

I hope he's right.

Thank God, at any rate, that the Church has turned its back on the barbarism of capital punishment. There is nothing de fide here, so of course some Catholics continue to support the "ultimate deterrent".

But not the parents of poor Jimmy Mizen, RIP. In an age of anger and blame, they are an example they are to us all.

***

On Sunday I went to Naphill Common in Buckinghamshire with Harry Mount and Mrs Reid to pick up some holy relics. I am not talking here about tongues or toenails or blackened index fingers - body parts have never really worked for me - but of typewriters once belonging to the late Michael Wharton, who, as Peter Simple of the Daily Telegraph, was one of the great satirists of the 20th century.

Harry needs no introduction. He is an occasional contributor to these pages, as well as to the pages of the Daily Mail, and a distinguished author, most recently of A Lust for Window Sills (about architecture, by the way). He is one of a group of young people who, to my great delight, revere Michael Wharton. Another is Mary Wakefield, deputy editor of the Spectator, who has also contributed to these pages and on whose behalf we picked up an Adler built like a tank Such is Harry's charm that Sue Wharton, Michael's widow, produced another relic after feeding us a splendid lunch - one of Michael's working notebooks from 1998. It was very small, about the size of a mobile telephone, and contained ideas for his column, all set out in meticulous hand. There were lots of names there (the Pope and Lady Warnock among them) and of course phrases, too ("Are we insects?", "Racists are people who fear change", "pernicious nonsense").

Michael remains an example to the many people who call themselves conservatives, but are often nothing more than libertarians.

He thought that Clement Attlee was one of the great English Prime Ministers of the last century (he had little time for Churchill), and he supported almost anyone who resisted change - thus, in the Eighties, the Fleet Street printers and the coalminers, and especially his fellow Yorkshireman Arthur Scargill.

The economic and military humiliation of Anglo-America would not have surprised Michael. He detested international capitalism and the war on terror, believing that both were inspired by what he might have called "pernicious nonsense". As he used to say: "Things are never as they seem."

***

On Friday I dropped into Oratory House and, waiting in the hall while a friend of mine left a Mass stipend in the office, I noticed a huge and elaborately carved chest of drawers, on the top of which were what looked like dead crows or maybe fedoras left by visiting members of the Camorra, but which on closer inspection turned out to be birettas. What a thrilling sight. But even more thrilling was the fact that among the birettas were three pith helmets.

The Chattering Church

Friday 27 March 2009

The Second Vatican Council in session: In 1975 a Herald correspondent suggested it was inspired by the Devil

One of the many things I look back on with some regret is the three months I spent editing this newspaper in 1975. It was not a happy time. I sided with Archbishop Lefebvre in a way that, as I can now see, was neither prudent nor gentlemanly. The archbishop deserved a hearing, of course, and had a case, but it was not for a Catholic newspaper to elevate him above the Pope, as I fear I may have done.

My memories of the time are hazy, but one thing I do remember is that the letters we received on the liturgy and the Second Vatican Council were vicious.

On one occasion, pressed for time, I ran a letter from a traditionalist without reading it to the end. When the paper came out, Otto Herschan, then the managing director, called me into his office and in the kindest possible way suggested that we might vet our letters a little more carefully in future.

He pointed his pipe at the last paragraph of the letter I had hurriedly chosen, and I saw immediately what he meant. The offending words went something like this: "We know who inspired the First Vatican Council - the Holy Ghost. Who inspired the Second? The Devil?"

The old problems, the old enmities, seem to be with us again. The Church - the Chattering Church at any rate - is hissing with anger, and the loudest hisses, it seems to me, are coming from the traditionalists.

I do not know whether this is the view of Fr Ignatius Harrison, Provost of the Brompton Oratory, but last week, on the Third Sunday of Lent, he preached a sobering and (to me) rather shaming sermon during the 9am old rite Mass.

His text, from that day's Gospel, was that a "kingdom divided against itself shall be brought to desolation". Gently, almost tentatively, and taking care not to absolve priests from blame, he said that all the recent finger-pointing and name-calling had given grave scandal and risked setting back the cause of Catholicism in this country, including a wider use of the traditional form of Mass.

He asked how could we possibly hope to bring about the much-needed conversion of England if we spent so much time arguing among ourselves, and he implored us to think before we opened our mouths, and to pray before we thought - or picked up a pen or switched on our computers. What Fr Harrison was talking about might perhaps be described as the tabloidisation of the Church. The Pope touched on it in his recent apology over the mishandling of the SSPX case. "At times," said the Holy Father, "one gets the impression that our society needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be shown; which one can easily attack and hate."

Actually, as the Pope will know, one group is never enough. Society has instable appetites, and it is always feeding time at the zoo. Journalists and politicians never tire of creating hate figures, people to blame, because public outrage sells newspapers and wins votes.

If it's not dodgy Lefebvrists we are invited to hate, it's paedophiles, and if it's not paedophiles, it's bankers, or social workers, or immigrants, or the "politically correct", or neocons, or single mums, or Brussels bureaucrats, or, until the tabloids were overcome by guilt, Jade Goody (RIP).

My wife says she is suffering from "outrage fatigue". Perhaps she has spent too much time listening to my howlings. But I do hope that I/we can listen to the Pope - and to Fr Harrison. There is much to be said for thinking before you open your mouth, and praying before you think, and for leaving moral grandstanding to the tabloids.

***

A lot of people have been saying in the wake of the Pope's so-called condoms "gaffe" last week that what the Church needs above all else is a media-savvy Vatican. Oh, really? Many of us would believe that PR should be left where it belongs, with the Father of Lies.

What Benedict said about condoms was regarded by most respectable people - by one's friends and neighbours, by workmates and drinking companions, perhaps even by people one has exchanged the sign of peace with at Mass - as being almost criminally insane.

No amount of smart PR could have changed that. You cannot get a good press if you are faithful to Catholic teaching on human sexuality. The one thing that everyone agrees on is that sex is just good clean fun. Last week, however, the Pope reminded the world that, so far as the Church is concerned, sex is not just good clean fun (even if it is fun); that it has a God-ordained, life- and love-affirming purpose; that artificial means of contraception frustrate this purpose, and are objectively wrong; and that condoms will not anyway overcome the scourge of Aids and may even help spread it.

The last bit ought to be easy to grasp, since no sane person believes that there is, or ever was, such a thing as safe sex, but the rest of the teaching is not only hard but challenges the most deeply held beliefs of secular man. That's why the Pope was universally denounced, and why Spain - Spain - immediately announced that it was sending a million condoms to Africa.

To much of the world the Pope is Papa Nazi; to liberal Catholics he is a dangerous obscurantist; to the fiercer traditionalists he is a borderline modernist. To the rest of us, though, he is a shepherd, the most intellectually distinguished Pope of modern times, a nuanced absolutist who makes the Faith both attractive and doable. He is the man.

***

Good list of 100 top films last week, but I think there were four important omissions: Scrooge (Alister Sim at his finest), The Sweet Smell of Success (Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster and New York in grimy black and white and at the top of their games), Apocalypse Now ("Charlie don't surf" is a cliché, but none the worse for that), and Citizen Kane (just because film buffs like it does not mean it's all bad).

Obama's ideological fix

Friday 13 March 2009

President Obama is applauded after signing the executive order on stem cells on Monday (PA Photos)

“Barack's name ain't Jesus. Barack ain't gonna improve your child's reading score. There are things we've got to do on our own." Thus the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor, speaking last week in Selma, Alabama.

The Rev. is right. Barack's name is indeed not Jesus, and some of us occasionally go so far as to wonder quite how "committed" a Christian the new President is. In fact, whenever I see him described as a "committed Christian", I am reminded that tabloid reporters like to use of the term "devout Catholic" to describe any Catholic who is not a publicly declared Satanist or Germaine Greer.

Wright, the rather droll black power preacher best known for his "God damn America" sermon, was not only right about Obama, but spoke like a Christian gentleman (whether or not he is one) in showing both an independence of spirit and a contempt for liberal individualism. The Black American Nation has to help itself...

Barack, of course, is not part of that nation. Along with Michelle and the kids, he is a naturalised citizen of Ivy League America.

He is a preppie president, the representative of rich, white secular liberals, including just about every airhead in Hollywood; and on Monday he gave these people the fix he'd promised them last year: wider use of human embryos in medical research.

In lifting George W Bush's restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research on Monday, Obama declared that scientific policy decisions would in future be "based on facts, not ideology". Oh, really? Just try getting work on a government-funded stem-cell project in the United States if you are a pro-life Christian with 16 children and 48 grandchildren and a tendency to talk about the Fatherhood of God.

Embryo experimentation is an ideological matter through and through. It is part of the utilitarian, God-denying worldview - described in another context by Pius XI as "Satanic optimism" - that drives not only the United States but Great Britain (and the rules here are far more permissive than those in America).

Respectable people everywhere are thrilled. The headline on the Guardian's leading article on Tuesday was: "Welcome back to the 21st century". The Guardian is in many ways an admirable newspaper, and I believe what it says about these things. On Tuesday it said that "the rejection of his predecessors religious conservative approach to the stem-cell issue was total".

So there you have it. In some ways the rejection of conservative religion seems almost as important as any possible cures, of which so far there is no sight. Everywhere there is a mood of elation bordering on hysteria. "It is a relief to know that we can now collaborate openly and freely with other scientists in our own university and elsewhere, without restrictions on what equipment, data, or ideas can be shared," said Doug Melton, Harvard's stem-cell institute co-director.

It's as though Doug wishes us to believe that under the Bush terror scientists had been too cowed to talk to one another. But American scientists were able to do pretty well what they wanted in the Bush years. Their freedom was not restricted. The only restriction was on government funding, and now that restriction has more or less gone.

All this is going to be good for business. As soon as the news emerged on Friday that Obama was going to lift the restrictions, Wall Street jumped for joy and shares in biotech companies shot up.

As John Cornwell pointed out in the New Statesman in January, there is big money to be made in embryonic stem-cell research because you may be able to patent embryonic stem cells, but you can't patent adult stem cells.

Professor Geoffrey Raisman, of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, told Cornwell: "Adult stem cells are much more promising therapeutically; they're already in use for such things as skin grafting, but they attract less funding and much less interest because they can't be patented."

Anthony Ozimic, political secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), thinks that it is rather more complicated - and sinister - than that. He believes that research on embryos is pursued as an end in itself and will probably never result in treatments.

"The scientists conducting human embryo research are attracted by what they wrongly believe is a new frontier, and the chance to be revolutionary in turn attracts funds," he says. "What's more, Robert Winston has said openly that he is playing God and that's what embryo researchers should be doing. Hubris is overtaking science."

Meanwhile, said Ozimic, adult stem cells have delivered benefits to patients in the case of more than 80 different medical conditions.

Still, we should guard against party political finger-pointing. Perhaps Obama is just a more honest liberal than his opponents. Many Republicans, after all, support funding for embryonic stem-cell research. Nancy Reagan is one.

Just before last year's presidential election, John McCain turned against federal funding, having only a year earlier been in favour of it. Maybe he was converted. Maybe not. You don't always know quite where you are with the war hero, or for that matter with people who call themselves conservatives.

***

Yoko Ono said last week that Liverpool Cathedral's plan to play "Imagine" on its bells had brought her to the edge of tears. She's not the only one. I almost wept too, though mainly with laughter.

As Richard Littlejohn says (in his inimitable way), you couldn't make it up - except that you could.

Just before Christmas I wrote an item about the horrors of the corporate carol service and having to listen to "a ruffed and cassocked choir singing 'Imagine'..." In a moment of scruple, I almost pulled that gag, on the grounds that it was too wildly improbably to be funny and was, therefore, nothing more than a gratuitous sneer.

I am grateful to the far-sighted editor for telling me not to yield to my scruple.

Who's guilty now?

Friday 6 March 2009

Bishop Richard Williamson, centre, walks toward the boarding area at Buenos Aires airport (Photo: CNS)

Richard Williamson hit the headlines again last week when he flew into Heathrow from Buenos Aires. In the melée he apparently did not notice the former Australian beauty queen (now anti-Zionist kook) who had turned up in case he needed legal advice, but he was no doubt pleased to be attended by armed policemen in flak jackets.

For a man of 68 (69 this Sunday) he looked remarkably chipper after the long flight, and there was something appealing, to me at least, about the rather self-deprecating smile he gave as the policemen guided him to his car. Is it time, then, to cut the bishop a little slack? No, his carefully worded non-apology does not incline one to soften one's heart.

On Monday I had lunch with my old friend and former colleague Mira Bar-Hillel of the Evening Standard, who is not only Jewish but was born in Israel.

Some years ago, as I reminded her, she had defined anti-Semitism for me as "disliking Jews more than is absolutely necessary".

The reason I reminded her of this was that I had been trying to talk honestly about Bishop Williamson and anti-Semitism, and it helps to be able to laugh when you are addressing these far from amusing subjects.

It is easier to laugh than to be honest, however.

I told her that I was a bit fed up with the attacks on Bishop Williamson because I suspected that some of those Catholics now booing the man and howling "anti-Semite" were themselves no strangers to anti-Semitism, or at the very least had a bit of a "thing" about Jews.

But it is my own humbug and hypocrisy that should concern me, not the humbug and hypocrisy of others. What I meant to say to Mira, but did not, was that many years ago I had confessed to "harbouring anti-Semitic sentiments".

I am not sure at this distance in time what the circumstances were, but the priest seized on that particular sin and gave me a decade of the rosary as penance. I think I felt a little aggrieved.

On Monday, though, I felt too guilty and embarrassed to mention my confession, and instead said lamely: "There is a lot of anti-Semitism about. We are all guilty..."

"Of course, we are all guilty," said Mira impatiently. "Everybody is anti-Semitic. We are all racists in our hearts..." "But," she said, "there is a huge gulf, an unbridgeable gulf, between Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism."

Mira knows what she is talking about. Her family is Polish, and she lost many relatives in the Holocaust. Her uncle was saved by Oscar Schindler, but her aunt and her aunt's three children and her maternal grandparents perished.

In spite of the suffering of her own family, Mira has been in trouble in Israel, and with Jewish friends here, for accusing the Israeli authorities of exploiting the Holocaust for geopolitical ends while at the same time neglecting Holocaust survivors who are living on the breadline.

But exploitation is one thing, denial quite another, and of course Mira is right about the special horror of Holocaust denial. Whatever their intentions, those in denial endorse Hitler's view that the Jews are part of worldwide conspiracy of deceit. In doing so the deniers can be said to be accessories after the fact.

I do not suggest for a moment that Bishop Williamson is any such thing, or that he is a cruel man, and of course he would argue that he does not deny the Holocaust so much as minimise it. All the same I am sure he has given comfort to unbalanced people, and he has certainly harmed tradition and the Church, and perhaps even the Mass that gave joy to my youth.

But you know what? I am tired of the Williamson circus, and hope not to return to the subject.

Thanks for the fish and chips, Mira. Not sure about that beer batter. Next time it's my shout.

***

The late Michael Wharton, Peter Simple of the Daily Telegraph, was no stranger to traditionalist loonies.

Perhaps it is tiresome to drag "Pete" (as a PR man who rang the Telegraph once referred to him) into the column again - he was here only five weeks ago - but the story I want to tell has some bearing on the present hysteria. In The Dubious Codicil, the second volume of his autobiography, Michael described being taken to lunch by a charming and civilised man who had telephoned him out of the blue.

They met in an expensive but unfashionable restaurant, where, without embarrassment or hesitation, the man, an RC if ever there was one, shared his thoughts, and the more outrageous they were to generally accepted opinion the more quietly certain he seemed to be of their unarguable truth.

Eventually, the man asked Michael what he thought of John Paul II. From the book:

"I said, as most people would have said, that I thought him a remarkable man who promised to have great influence for good and might even reverse the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church. He laughed, though without patronage or unkindness:

" 'My dear fellow... how can you be so easily deceived? We live in a world in which everything is turned upside down. What is generally thought to be good is bound to be evil, however cleverly disguised. No, the mere fact that the Pope is universally praised proves that he is an agent of the Devil.' "

Was this man himself and agent of the Devil? Perhaps not, since he urged Michael to enter the Church without delay. Michael, however, felt unable to do that, and some weeks later received a letter from his strange host. It ended:

"I fear you are determined to fry in hell ever more. Yours, with very best wishes..."

***

Here is a nice Lenten thought (though it would make nice thinking at any time of the year): somewhere in her diaries Dorothy Day mentions a rather crazy helper at one of the Catholic Worker houses who had become a Catholic after seeing someone make the Sign of the Cross.

What a beautiful and potent sign it is. If I had any right to pronounce on these matters, I'd say that we should never underestimate the power of externals.

The hounds of heaven

Friday 27 February 2009

Mickey Rourke takes his beloved dog, Loki, for a walk at the Venice Film Festival last September (PA Photos)

Poor Mickey Rourke. His failure to win an Oscar on Sunday came only days after he had lost his beloved chihuahua, Loki, aged 17, to the grim reaper. By any reckoning that's a double whammy in the life of a Hollywood hellraiser.

Mickey and the chihuahua seem to have been inseparable. "Loki is the love of my life," he said when he took her with him to the Venice Film Festival last September.

He also loved Loki's father, Beau Jack. In 2002, when Beau Jack collapsed, Mickey gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for 45 minutes, and then took his corpse to a nearby church to be blessed.

But I am in no position to sneer. It is true that I'd never give a dog mouth-to-mouth resuscitation - in fact, I am not sure that I'd do it for anyone other than a close relative, and possibly not even then - but I am inordinately fond of dogs, and am capable of getting soppy about them.

I do not own a dog myself, alas, but that may be why I am soppy about them. The last one I had broke into the outside loo while I was at work and helped herself to the slug pellets. Poor Sam. She almost died. Eventually, I realised she was more than I could handle and, heavy with remorse, I took her to Battersea Dogs Home. I hope she found a good owner.

As I have discovered again recently, Battersea Dogs [and Cats] Home is one of south London's great institutions, and, the English being what they are, it is probably cleaner and better appointed than your average Kensington old people's home. Classical music is piped into the kennels to keep the dogs calm, and there is a cafe, though I wouldn't recommend it to the fastidious.

Unlike Mickey Rourke, I am not churchy about dogs, but I do regard them as good, God-fearing creatures. Their sense of guilt alone attests to that.

My late parents' late dog, Blue, a wall-eyed, merle-marked border collie, was guilt on stilts. One Christmas he ate a plate of turkey, and when confronted with his crime - when the evidence (the empty plate) was thrust in front of him and we said: "Blue, how could you?" - he averted his eyes and sank into the floor, deeper and deeper, until it seemed he might disappear altogether. Then, when he was forgiven - as he was almost immediately because we could not endure his pain - his eyes lit up and his tail started to thump, and he made a good act of contrition, very possibly by running around in circles and barking.

He was a lovely, loyal and clever dog and would die for the Queen on command: roll over on his back and hold his paws limply in front of him, with his tongue lolling out and his eyes eager for approval. Once a friend of ours persuaded him to die for Karl Marx, but Blue was not stupid and I think he was just playing along with the joke. Like many dogs, he had a keen sense of the absurd.

But now I go too far. This sort of sentimentality is regarded as offensive in some quarters. Who was it who said that the more people love animals, the less they are inclined to love God? G K Chesterton? Certainly Chesterton had misgivings about people who doted on animals. "Wherever there is animal worship there is human sacrifice," he wrote. Dogs are not Disney creatures. They can be unpredictable and savage, as this week's funeral of the baby boy killed by dogs in Wales reminds us.

But while excessive love of dogs - animal worship - is dangerous, indifference to dogs is not a sign of virtue, and cruelty to dogs, or to any other animal, even grey squirrels, is certainly wicked.

There is, of course, a spiritual dimension - over and above Blue's displays of guilt. The patron saint of dogs (and by the way of people with knee problems) is St Roch, who was born in Montpellier in 1293 and, according to the legend, gave all he owned to the poor and devoted himself to the care of plague victims.

Eventually, he succumbed to the plague himself and retreated to the forest to die. There, however, he was befriended by a dog, who brought him food and licked his wounds. He recovered, but was later thrown into prison, along with his dog, and after five years died there.

The most famous animal-friendly saint is Francis of Assisi. There is a fabulous painting by Sassetta of Francis shaking hands with a wolf in Gubbio. The painting is in the National Gallery, and you can see the dismembered body of one of the wolf's victims in the background. The painting must be very popular with a certain sort of child. I love it.

***

Good grief. Is that the time? Can it be Shrove Tuesday already? "Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return."

One has to strike the right balance during Lent, but that can be a tricky business. I once heard a priest say that anyone who observed Lent properly would, at the end of it, say: "Thank God that's over." So the suffering must be real.

But must we make ourselves miserable? Some people think not.

My very good friend the lay prison chaplain and former chairman of the LMS was once invited to lunch in a restaurant by a priest who was for a while prominent in the traditionalist movement. My friend suggested that a little fish might be in order, given that it was a Friday in Lent, but the priest would have none of it.

"Have a steak, my dear boy!" he said. "I dispense you, I dispense you!" The priest also dispensed himself, and ordered large slabs of beef for them both.

***

Wasn't the final of University Challenge a triumph for all that is wholesome in English life? Three cheers for the pink and flustered Gail Trimble, and another three for the pink and unflustered Jeremy Paxman.

It was the greatest display of sporting skill I have seen since Ian Botham took on the Aussies all those years ago.

Walk on the Wilders side

Friday 20 February 2009

Provocative politician Geert Wilders is pictured in his office in The Hague, Netherlands (PA Photos)

It is hard not to feel conflicted about Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who was denied entry to Britain last week. He is a furiously anti-Islamic, pro-Israeli Eurosceptic who is supported here by the National Secular Society and the Pink Triangle, on the one hand, and, on the other, by the United Kingdom Independence Party and every dingbat on the pro-war Anglo-American right.

He comes with the usual hard-right/libertarian baggage: he wants to slash taxes drastically, introduce mandatory life sentences for violent criminals on their third conviction and limit public television to a single channel, no doubt to propitiate the god of Choice. Sometimes there seems to be something a bit spiteful about him, at any rate if we are to believe what we read on Wikipedia. For example, he'd like Dutch law to be changed so that as many as five prisoners may be accommodated in one cell (hanging's too good for them). Mr Wilders is clearly not a big fan of Catholic social teaching.

Still, that's no reason to ban him. Why should he not have shown his anti-Islamic film Fitna to his pals in the House of Lords? The dangers of riot, pillage and rape seem to me to have been pretty remote.

All the same, I am not greatly moved by the howling about Freedom of Speech. Is there not some humbug here? The whole purpose of Geert Wilders's life and work, and maybe also his hair-do, seems to be to deny Freedom of Speech (and religion) to Muslims - by, for example, banning the Koran.

And yet... which among us is not a humbug, and, more to the point, which among us does not sympathise with some of what Mr Wilders says?

The leader of the Party for Freedom has denounced the presence in the Netherlands not just of the Koran but of burkas, headscarves, the ritual slaughter of animals, so-called honour revenge, blaring minarets, female circumcision, abuse of homosexuals, halal meat at grocery shops and Sharia mortgages.

Amen to much of that, for it applies here too. Wicked and disgusting practices such as female genital mutilation are against the law, and must be robustly prosecuted. The same is true, it goes without saying, of "honour killings", or, to use the proper term, premeditated murder.

For the rest, however, there is little that can be done, or should be done. The presence of huge and sometimes threatening mosques in our cities is a consequence of the very Freedom of Speech that is solemnly invoked by Mr Wilders's and his supporters.

Muslims are free not only to practise their religion but to preach it. The 7/7 bombers were corrupted by the false prophets of a creed that had been permitted to take root here as a result of the Enlightenment principles of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. As moral relativists, we do not believe that there is such thing as a true religion, and most of us don't give a damn about any religion. Why are we here? Who cares when you can buy a bottle of vodka at the supermarket for £7 and surf internet porn free in a municipal library.

It's because we don't believe in anything except human rights - even if we deny those rights to the foetus - that we have created a rights-based multicultural nation, in which alien religions are allowed to compete in the marketplace.

No wonder Muslims regard us with contempt.

There is nothing that can be done about multiculturalism now, however. You can no more dismantle a multicultural state than you can a multiracial one. To deny rights that have been granted would be unjust and would, furthermore, result in even more civil disorder than we experience now. We have no choice but to love one another.

***

And maybe we can learn from the Muslims. Mr Wilders is troubled by Sharia mortgages. But consider: if we'd had Sharia mortgages rather than sub-prime mortgages we'd probably not be in the economic mess we are in now.

Not everything about Islamic jurisprudence is bad, it seems. Maybe, as Peregrine Worsthorne has suggested, our inner cities could do with the smack of Sharia law. Maybe the much-traduced Dr Rowan Williams had a point last year when he said that adopting certain parts of Sharia law might help maintain social cohesion...

Mr Wilders also dislikes headscarves, no doubt because he thinks they are demeaning, but are they? I have met thoroughly modern and liberated Muslim women who like to wear the hijab, perhaps to outrage sensitive souls like Mr Wilders.

Who anyway is not charmed by the modesty, good manners and cheerfulness of so many Muslim women? These are clearly good people, who have said Yes to life and No to decadence.

English girls who have converted to Islam or married Muslim men can give the same impression, or so I gather from a friend of ours who came to lunch on Monday. She is an Australian-Polish-Jewish woman who works with the homeless and was once a stand-up comedian, and she is obviously no shill for Islam.

In her part of the East End, however, she has noticed that for some English girls marrying a Muslim and converting - becoming part of a patriarchal and apparently misogynist society - is a form of liberation. These girls leave behind the drugs and booze and serial pregnancies of the sink estates and are given a sense of dignity and worth that their own families could not have given them.

But let's not carried away. Our friend also said that when she went to see her local GP she felt depressed by all the women in burkas, only their eyes showing. They seemed alien, unfriendly, judgmental. You cannot relate to a pair of expressionless eyes, to creatures, as she put it, "bandaged like a pulsating sore".

It rather makes one glad to live in Balham, where on a visit to your GP you will seldom encounter anything more troubling than OAPs and pregnant teenage mums - and the occasional Sloane.

Don't try to convert me

Friday 13 February 2009

You don't have to be happy-clappy to care (PA Photos)

There is something rather enchanting about Caroline Petrie, the West Country supply nurse who was suspended in December for offering to pray for an elderly patient. She represents everything that is good about the NHS, which is more than can be said for the NHS itself.

She has now been reinstated, but she should never have been disciplined in the first place. My sympathies are with those who see what has happened as political correctness gone mad and yet another sign that we live in an irredeemably secular society.

All the same, I am pretty sure this is not the end of the world. My good friend Mary Kenny got it about right last week when she advocated a policy of Christian resignation in the face of these creepy provocations.

But our moral guardians wanted a fight, and by the end of last week ordinary punters might have been forgiven for thinking that the sole purpose of the NHS was to wipe out what remains of Christianity in this country.

Last Friday the main headline on the front page of a popular mid-market broadsheet proclaimed: "NHS staff face sack if they discuss religion."

That sounded pretty serious. The sack for discussing religion? Wow! Is that what we have come to?

Well, no. According to new NHS guidelines cited by the newspaper: "Members of some religions... are expected to preach and to try to convert other people. In a workplace environment this can cause many problems, as non-religious people and those from other religions or beliefs could feel harassed and intimidated by this behaviour.

"To avoid misunderstandings and complaints on this issue... such behaviour, notwithstanding religious beliefs, could be construed as harassment under the disciplinary and grievance procedures."

Cut through the verbiage and you will see that NHS staff do not face the sack if they discuss religion. The new guidelines say that they face the sack - or at any rate a disciplinary hearing - only if they proselytise. What's so bad about that?

The last thing I want when I go into hospital next month for a minor, though rather humiliating, "procedure" is to find myself in the care of a happy-clappy nurse who wants to convert me.

All I want is a good anaesthetist, a cup of tea and some strong painkillers. I should also like to be addressed by my surname rather than by my Christian name, but... dream on, Stuart.

If things go wrong, meanwhile, I'd like a nurse to call a priest to give me the last rites, and then to call my family, so that they can all kneel around my bed sobbing and rending their garments.

***

Popular newspapers never let up on the moral outrage, but when they talk of Christianity they tend to confuse it with clean, honest, sensible, decent family values - ie, values associated with two kids, a Spaniel, a vasectomy and an MFI kitchen extension.

What the newspapers seem to have overlooked on this occasion is that religion in multicultural Britain is a two-way street, not to say a six-lane highway. Many Muslims are employed by the NHS, and Rastas too, I imagine, and maybe cargo-cultists; and the new guidelines apply to them all.

In other words, a Muslim nurse who tried to convert you would face the sack, as would a Rasta. Nobody wishes these people ill, of course, but many of us will feel grateful to the NHS for trying to save us from unwelcome spiritual attention.

Besides, imagine the howling in some quarters if these guidelines were not in place and it was discovered that an immigrant nurse had tried to convert a nice old English woman to the religion of Allah.

"I was frightened and humiliated," the woman would be quoted as saying. "I have nothing against immigrants as such, but this was nothing less than a slap in the face to everything I have lived by."

There is enough wrong with the NHS without exaggerating its sins. For one thing it provides abortion on an huge scale; for another it hands out condoms and contraceptive pills to just about any teenager clever enough to locate a health centre.

But we don't hear much about these things. It is far easier - far more profitable - to bash the politically correct Left-wing multiculturalists of the NHS. It's a bit like bashing the social services or poor Amy Winehouse. Easy pickings.

***

All this talk of prayer and sickness will remind some readers that it is 200 years this year since Tom Paine died in New York. He was 72, and the story of his death rather concentrates the mind.

Paine was, of course, a dangerous radical - author of the Rights of Man and The Age of Reason - and hostile to much the Catholic Church holds and believes. He was also, however, a brave, principled and honest man, and a quite extraordinarily good writer.

A fortnight before Paine died, two Presbyterian ministers, the Reverends Cunningham and Milledollar, pushed their way past his housekeeper into the room where he lay. As John Keane tells it in his biography, Cunningham said: "Mr Paine, we visit you as friends and neighbours: you have now a full view of death, you cannot live long, and whoever does not believe in Jesus Christ will assuredly be damned."

Paine was not moved. "Propped up in his bed by cushions," writes Keane, "he leaned forward slightly, glanced toward the door, and said, 'Let me have none of your popish stuff. Get away with you, good morning, good morning.' "

At the very end, his physician, Dr James Manley, said to him: "Mr Paine, you have not answered my questions - will you answer them? Allow me to ask again, Do you believe, or let me qualify the question, Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?"

Paine replied: "I have no wish to believe on that subject." Then he died.

No doubt Paine would have liked it if the new NHS guidelines had been in place in New York in June, 1809, but I have to say that if I'd been attending him I might have behaved much as James Manley did.

Poor Tom Paine. May he rest in peace.

Warming to the wild cats

Friday 6 February 2009

Workers demonstrate outside the Lindsey oil plant at Killingholme in North Lincolnshire (PA Photos)

Poor Gordon Brown. Sometimes you just want to hug him. Even at the best of times, it's no joke being a dour Presbyterian, but these days it must be grim beyond measure, like Motherwell on a rainy Sunday in 1929. How does the Prime Minister get out of bed in the morning?

Every day must start the same way for him: with industrial-strength muesli followed by the newspapers. And every day the story is the same: Government incompetence and chicanery, 500,000 more jobs to go at Port Talbot, house prices at levels not seen since 1911, the pound worth two cents Confederate, food riots in Knightsbridge.

On and on it goes. The newspapers are having a grand old time talking down the economy, and the finger of blame is pointed relentlessly at the Prime Minister. It is obviously unfair, but that's what the "narrative" demands.

All the same, one's sympathy for the man is not boundless, especially at a time of widespread civil unrest.

A journalist friend in Washington rang me on Monday and said he thought the wildcat strikes looked pretty bad. "It's an insurrection," I suggested. "Like 1848?" he said. "Should I get over there?"

I said my hunch was that it would peter out.

The Prime Minister has not helped matters, however, by sternly warning the strikers not to abandon globalisation. What a bossy-boots. No wonder most of us warm to the wild cats. Brown may not be directly responsible for the present economic mess, but runaway globalisation certainly is.

Without globalisation - without the export of jobs and debt and trash culture - the world would not find itself on the brink of bankruptcy and moral collapse.

***

Phillip Blond, theologian, political philosopher and occasional contributor to The Catholic Herald, is no friend of globalisation. He has just written a remarkable piece in Prospect in which he outlines a "red Tory" agenda that is socially conservative and sceptical about neoliberal economics.

Blond, now with the think-tank Demos, is an admirer of Benedict XVI and a believer in localism, or what the Pope would call subsidiarity. He rejects all the pieties of the neoliberals and therefore just about everything Westminster policymakers accept as revealed truth.

He acknowledges, for example, that we live a "broken society", but says that we are not going to fix it with beefed-up free-market superglue. "British conservatism," he writes, "must not ... repeat the American error of preaching 'morals plus the market' while ignoring the fact that economic liberalism has often been the cover for monopoly capitalism and is therefore just as socially damaging as Left-wing statism."

But here's the best, the most outrageous bit: Blond rejects the doctrine that social mobility and meritocracy are desirable, and scorns what he calls the "statist and neo-liberal language of opportunity, education and choice".

Why? "Because this language says that unless you are in the golden circle of the top 10 to 15 per cent of top-rate taxpayers you are essentially insecure, unsuccessful and without merit or value." In place of that, he argues, we need "an organic communitarianism that graces every level of society with merit, security, wealth and worth".

David Cameron seems to have been listening. In Davos at the weekend the Leader of the Opposition spoke of "global corporate juggernauts".

"This is what too many people see when they look at capitalism today," he said. "Markets without morality, globalisation without competition, and wealth without fairness. It all adds up to capitalism without a conscience and we've got to put it right."

Neither Blond nor Cameron has yet gone as far as Eamon de Valera, however. When asked in 1927 by the Manchester Guardian whether he understood that a self-sufficient Ireland would mean a lower standard of living, the great Irish patriot replied: "You say 'lower' when you ought to say a less costly standard of living. I think it quite possible that a less costly standard of living is desirable and that it would prove, in fact, to be a higher standard of living. I am not satisfied that the standard of living and the mode of living in western Europe is a right or proper one. The industrialised countries have got themselves into a rut and Ireland is asked to hurry along after them."

Well, Ireland caught up, God help her. It's a good thing Dev did not live to see it.

***

O ye ice and snow, bless the Lord. It has probably gone by now, or turned to slush, but on Monday morning when I went out to buy the newspapers (ie, the Daily Mail and the Guardian), the snow was deep and crisp and even.

In the still, muffled streets, grown people were exchanging shy smiles. There were occasional grunts of wry amusement, too, as when, near the Balham Health Centre, I lost my footing for a moment and almost broke my hip in three places.

It reminded me of the way things were in the happy days when George VI was on the throne and sweets were rationed.

Some things were different, though. My wife went for walk and when she returned told me that there were lots of nice snowmen on Tooting Common plus a surprise display - huge, carefully modelled male genitalia.

"It was probably done by young people," she said, as she busied herself in the kitchen making tea and setting out the hot cross buns. "You are probably right, dear," I wheezed.

On the other hand - let's not be ageist - there is no reason why it should not have been done by a couple of bored OAPs after too much lunchtime sherry.

At any rate, I went down to the Common to have a look for myself, since it is my job to keep track of social changes, but by the time I got there the display had been knocked down.

Even in its ruined state, however, it was obvious to me that effort, thought and concentration had gone into building it. Perhaps it is time to bring back sweet rationing - and the branding iron.

Just Williamson

Friday 30 January 2009

The Bee Gees are not Bishop Richard Williamson's cup of tea

My very good friend the lay prison chaplain and former chairman of the Latin Mass Society once took Fr Richard Williamson (as His Lordship then was) for a drink in Victoria Street, London.

It was in the Seventies, about as horrible a decade as there has been since the reign of Elizabeth I, and Fr Williamson did not warm to the pub. In fact, he said he made his excuses and left - in protest at the "Satanic" music coming over the speaker system. My friend says he thinks it was the Bee Gees.

Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive. I met Fr Williamson myself at about that same time, when he said his first Mass in England, at the Great Western Hotel, Paddington.

What a night that was. My friend John Wetherell (author of Lex Orandi Lex Credendi) was there, and so was the late Michael Wharton (Peter Simple of the Daily Telegraph), and maybe also a delegation from TFP (for Tradition, Family and Property, known in some quarters as Torture, Fascism and Popery).

Before we all sloped off to the boozer, I put it to Fr Williamson, who seemed a pretty agreeable and clubbable fellow, that Rome might not approve of all this traditionalist malarkey, and he said cheerfully that he didn't care what those Freemasons in Rome thought. He may also have suggested that there were other undesirables in Rome, but it's a long time ago, and obviously I do not want to put words into the bishop's mouth. He is quite capable of putting them there himself, along with his foot.

You all know the story by now: a few months ago Bishop Williamson gave a television interview in which the he said that no Jews had died in Nazi gas chambers, and the interview was released last week shortly before the Pope lifted the excommunication on the four SSPX bishops, among them, of course, the same Richard Williamson. The timing was unfortunate. I am reminded of the Bob Newhart sketch about the captain of a nuclear submarine who, having called the crew together at the end of a mission to review the ups and downs of the previous six months, recalls one incident that earned them some bad publicity:

"The machine-gunning of Miami Beach can best be described as inopportune. It happened on what the news guys calls a slow news day." The interview with Bishop Williamson did not hit YouTube on a slow news day - on the contrary, it was Day Two of Year One of Barack Obama - but it still attracted a lot of ink and certainly put a damper on what was, or should have been, a joyful occasion.

Decent people were quite understandably outraged by Bishop Williamson's perverse reading of history, and there were some who felt that the lifting of the excommunications indicated that the Pope and the Church were soft on Holocaust deniers. Dr Ed Kessler, of the Centre for the Study of Jewish Christian Relations at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, cannot have been one of them, but he did feel compelled to describe His Holiness as "a German-bred Pope".

Wasn't that a bit out of order? The Pope's German birth - or "breeding" - has nothing to do with this disciplinary matter. It is absolutely clear, furthermore, that Benedict XVI does not endorse Bishop Williamson's views. Nor does the SSPX. The Church of Rome is a friend of the Jewish people; Jesus was a Jew; anti-Semitism is a sin, a matter for Confession.

But what can you do? Bishop Williamson has long been a problem. Anyone who is familiar with the darker recesses of the traditionalist mind - as I am, because I have been there - can only react by meditating on the mysterious workings of paranoia, and then by laughing.

***

Paranoia is the default setting of some traditionalists, partly because people really have been against them these past 30 years and more. My impression is that you will find more conspiracy theorists at an Old Mass in London than you will at a happy-clappy New Mass on the blameless coast of Essex.

Mind you, it would be silly to suppose that people do not conspire. Many years ago, before he went to work for the military-industrial complex, Christopher Hitchens responded to someone who accused him of believing in conspiracy theories by saying: "What do you believe in, then? The coincidence theory of history?" How we miss Christopher Hitchens.

All the same, great care is needed. My youngest son, Robert, has a workmate who believes that the world is ruled by lizards. Robert does not himself believe that the world is ruled by lizards - rats more like, he says - but he has shown me a YouTube clip of a television reporter starting to turn into a lizard in front of our very eyes: you can see the scales forming on his head - unless that's just electrical interference as a result of a bad hook-up.

Then, suddenly, the camera moves away from him; he goes out of shot. The fact that we don't see him finally turn into a lizard just goes to show what clever blighters these lizards are, what a cunning conspiracy this is. Nod, nod, wink, wink, say no more.

Even I have entertained the occasional conspiracy theory. I carry a dollar bill around in my wallet (as perhaps Bishop Williamson does in his) and from time to time take it out and show it to some unwary friend or acquaintance. I point to the depiction of pyramid with the all-seeing eye at its apex and to the inscription "Novus Ordo Seclorum", and say: "What's that all about?" No one knows the answer, but everyone accepts that it is the right question.

***

What now? I haven't the foggiest. Maybe a bit of kindness and courtesy would help. There sometimes seems to be a lot of hatred in the Church, and it is wearying, whether it is aimed at traditionalists or at progressives.

Moral indignation and raucous laughter are all very well - I don't know how I'd manage without them - but there is no harm in moderation and prayer. Sorry to be pious, but Bishop Richard Williamson is perhaps not as terrible as some think, or as funny. In the end he is a saddo. Let's hope he gets over whatever it is that is troubling him.

The Darwin jamboree

Friday 23 January 2009

Natural selection doesn't explain how Ringo Starr became a rock legend

As even my cats know by now, it will be 200 years next month since Charles Darwin was born, and 150 years in November since the publication of his On the Origin of Species.

Laissez les bon temps rouler, as they say in New Orleans. No one wants to miss these anniversaries. Even the Vatican is joining in the celebrations by hosting a conference on Darwin in March.

Alas, I have not yet had time to read Origin myself, but John Paul II said in 1996 that evolution was more than a hypothesis, and that's good enough for me. Mind you, at the Great Western Hotel, Paddington, about 30 years ago, I heard much the same point made rather more robustly by a young Lefebvrist priest.

"Anyone who believes that Genesis is factually correct has no interest in truth," he said. I seem to remember one or two disapproving intakes of breath, a reproachful sucking on teeth.

But no matter how daft Creationism is, the fact remains that evolution is not rocket science, either. Look around you on the Tube. Does survival of the fittest seem a plausible explanation of what you see? Clearly not.

Nor does natural selection - or even random mutation - make it any easier to understand how Ringo Starr became a rock legend.
It's easy to laugh, of course. Most of us are not clever enough to understand the science, so we mock. I dare say also that in the privacy of our cramped, fearful, oxygen-starved brains, some of us permit ourselves to think that the Intelligent Designers - men like the liturgically delinquent Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna - may be on to something.

Whether the Cardinal is, technically, an Intelligent Designer I am not sure, but his ID-friendly article in the New York Times in July 2005 caused quite a bit of controversy. Not in my home, though. I especially liked this:

"Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science."

Funnily enough, David Attenborough and the other popularisers have sometimes given the impression that they see some planning in evolution. The way they tell it, you at any rate can be forgiven for thinking that that billions of years ago a couple of amoebas in the themed pond at Tooting Common thought it would be, like, cool to evolve into William Shakespeare. Such anthropomorphism almost makes you want to launch an advertising campaign with the slogan: "EVOLUTION PROBABLY ISN'T TRUE."

***

My friend James Le Fanu, the Telegraph's medical writer, is very good on all this. He has just written a book called Why Us?, in which he outlines the achievements and discoveries of modern science and at the same time points to the flaws in scientific materialism.

In the introduction he writes: "Scientists do not 'do' wonder. Rather, for the past 150 years they have interpreted the world through the prism of supposing there is nothing in principle that cannot be accounted for, where the unknown is merely waiting-to-be-known."

Yet there is clearly much that cannot be accounted for, and, says James, recent discoveries in genetics and neuroscience show one thing above all others: that it is simply not possible to "get from" the genetic instructions strung out along the Double Helix to the near infinite diversity of form and attributes of the living world, or to "translate" the monotonous electrical activity of the brain into the rich subjective experience of the human mind. When it comes to the mechanics of evolution, moreover, James is a Doubter, though he is very far from being a Creationist or even an Intelligent Designer. If our famous ancestor, Lucy, had had to evolve along the statutory lines of natural selection and random mutation, says James, she would have been run down and eaten by predators long before she had developed thigh bones strong enough to allow her to run away and invent the bow and arrow and the elephant trap.

I have not read the book, which is to be published next month, but according to early reports it is superb. In the February issue of Reader's Digest, out next week, A N Wilson says it is quite wonderfully refreshing and "guaranteed to cause a tremendous hullabaloo". "It will be fun," he writes, "seeing how the fanatical atheists try to answer all this." I can't wait.

***

On my way to Mass on Sunday I stopped at a newsagent to buy a newspaper. I was carrying only twenties and needed change for the collection. I put the Sunday Telegraph on the counter and alongside it my gloves and my St Andrew's Daily Missal.
The man behind the counter - a Pakistani almost certainly - pointed to my missal and said: "Bible?" "No," I said. "Missal - for Mass." He grinned shyly and said: "God bless you." I said: "God bless you, too."

He gave me the change and pointed to the Missal again and again grinned, and said: "God bless..." and there followed a name, or names, that I could not make out. To begin with I thought that my friend was calling down God's blessings on Mohamed and others, and I wondered whether it would be morally licit, out of courtesy, to endorse his prayer.

What would my friend Fr Julian Large at the Oratory do? I asked myself. Well, no I didn't, actually. I said: "Sorry, but I do not know those names." So he repeated himself, and this time I caught what he was saying: "God bless Tony Blair. He is good Catholic, eh?"

Call me a big girl's blouse, if you like, but I could not bring myself to nod in agreement. "He is a bit of a war-maker," I said with an ingratiating smile. "God bless you."

I find is easier to forgive George W Bush than I do Tony Blair. Bush is a tragic figure, deserted by his former friends and enablers. In his last interviews you sensed he was chastened, even sorry, and aware of his own foolishness. Blair seems unchanged. Still, God bless Tony Blair. (And God bless George Bush.)

Go on, wear the top hat

Friday 16 January 2009

JFK and Eisenhower leave the White House for Kennedy's swearing-in ceremony in 1961

No doubt you are all geared up for the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States of America on Tuesday. You will have your flags at the ready by now and your party hats and your pepper sprays - you never know what might jump out of the television - and your Hostess Cup Cakes and your popcorn and your phrase book.

This is going to be the greatest show on earth, as you'd expect from a spend of $40 million. The numbers speak volumes. Two million people will be in the centre of Washington on the Big Day and they will be accommodated by 5,000 porta-potties; there will be 8,000 local policemen on duty, backed up by 10,000 National Guardsmen; pub opening time has been extended to 4 am and the Willard InterContinental Hotel has ordered in 12,000 eggs, one ton each of chocolate and cheese and 800 lbs of bison.

Looks like they are going to need those porta-potties.

But at the weekend I was still puzzling over a question put to me just before Christmas by the distinguished author and journalist Ferdinand Mount: Will Barack Obama wear a top hat?

The last president to wear a topper at his inauguration was John F Kennedy in 1961. Most people would probably agree that the presidents who succeeded him would not have looked convincing in formal headgear (and not everybody is sure that Kennedy did: see picture). Bill Clinton? Richard Nixon? It doesn't do to think about these things.

But Obama is a different kettle of fish. Obviously, he would look just swell in a topper. Like Fred Astaire, whom he closely resembles, he was born to wear not only a top hat but a white tie and tails, too.

Did someone just suggest a stovepipe hat and a frock coat? Good idea. There is a danger, of course, that such an outfit might make the president look like a runaway slave at a revivalist tent meeting in Ohio in 1859, but it would also make an important point by reminding the people that Barack Obama is the New Abraham Lincoln.

Not only is the first black president going to use the Lincoln Bible for the swearing-in ceremony - for the first time since Abraham Lincoln himself used it in 1861 - but he will welcome visitors from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when he arrives in Washington by train on Sunday. It sounds a bit like one of those mass audiences in St Peter's Square.

Not everybody in the United States, as it happens, worships Lincoln. Here and there - in my address book, for example - you will find apostates, mostly unreconstructed Confederates, who regard him as a bloody tyrant.

Even well-wishers have their reservations. In her immensely readable and sympathetic (and short) study of that president, the historian Jan Morris identifies Honest Abe as one of the founding fathers of American imperialism. Thanks in part to Lincoln, she writes, America was by the end of the 20th century "perhaps the most innately imperialist" nation on earth. Furthermore: "The modern American sense of privilege, so irritating to foreigners today, and the belief that the USA has the right - the duty indeed - to intervene in the affairs of other cultures, had its origins in Lincoln's victory." That's the American way, and it will be the way of Obama no less than it was of George W Bush, a man who began his presidency, remember, as a well-meaning liberal, or at any rate as a "compassionate conservative".

***

A likeable and clever young chap said to me last week that he thought it was really, really boring the way people were sneering at Obama even before he'd taken office. It was all so predictable, he said, so obvious, so easy; and I had to agree.

Like my friend, I hope that Obama will turn his back on unilateralism, protect the environment and introduce universal health care. Yet what are his chances of realising the dreams of my young friend? Pretty slim, I'd say. It seems to me that change Obama speaks of will mean more of the same - more abortion (perhaps a lot more abortion), more war, more soundbites.

The best take I've seen on the likely course of the presidency is a cartoon in the latest Private Eye. Obama is standing before a flag of Israel and looking intelligent, statesmanlike and compassionate. Someone says: "Can America stand by and do nothing?" And Obama answers: "Yes, we can." In other words, it will be business as usual in the United States - and in foreign lands too. At home right now the business of America is bailing out big business - to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars. Abroad, it is looking after the empire.

There is much work to be done. The Iraq war is more or less over, for the Americans at least, but there is still Afghanistan, where as many as 30,000 more US troops are to be deployed. There may be dialogue with Iran, and Guantanamo will close, though no one is quite sure yet what to do with the "enemy combatants".

My feeling is that most people in Britain - and on the Continent too - are rooting for Obama, and that includes the good folks at the Right-leaning Spectator. In much the same way so-called conservatives in the United States are getting quite sweet on the young president. In the New York Times the other day Bill Kristol, son of the "father of neoconservatism", Irving Kristol, and one of the most dedicated Bush-boosters of the past eight years, wrote: "I...have to admit that I look forward to Obama's inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer."

We are all in the mood for love, it seems, but - to be predictable and boring - I rather fear it will end in tears.

I hope, really hope, that I am wrong.

Degrees of disproportion

Friday 9 January 2009

Protesters march towards the US Embassy in London in a demonstration against Israeli military action in Gaza

As I watched the anti-Israel demonstrators in Whitehall on Saturday I felt a sudden surge of xenophobia. For a moment I really did fear the angry young Islamists screaming slogans and waving their fists. For a moment it struck me that they were quite capable of unleashing a massacre in central London, and right now.

Perhaps I was being fanciful, however, or racist. These threatening and alien people were not, after all, foreigners. In law, they were Englishmen, most of them, just like the 7/7 Tube bombers.

It was mind-numbingly cold, anyway, and the vibes were rattling my teeth. Earlier I had been greeted in Trafalgar Square by an Osama bin Laden look-alike, in keffiyeh, three-quarter-length shorts and trainers, who, seeing my alarm, grinned and said: "You good?" That sort of thing can do your head in.

But what's the use of fretting? We live in a multicultural country, whether we like it or not, and have to get on together. That's not to say that we should be soft on militant Islam, or abandon attempts to convert Muslims. On the contrary, we must pray for them, teach and instruct them, bear witness. Many would make exemplary Catholics.

In Trafalgar Square on Saturday, however, the only people praying were the Quakers, who in their admirable way were holding a peace vigil.

Elsewhere the brutish Left was out in force, looking as though it had emerged, already booted and bewhiskered, from some hideous Petri dish of grievance. There were nice Lefties there, too, of course, among them the veteran socialist Tony Benn and the Catholic traditionalist Bianca Jagger, and rather sweet young people collecting for medical supplies for Gaza, as well as "Jews Against the War".

But there were plenty there too who want to destroy Israel, or rebuild the entire Middle East on Marxist lines, thus destroying both Israel and Palestine. With enemies like these, Israel ought to find it easier to find friends. But even Israel's well-wishers find it hard to deny that there is what the BBC calls a "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza, caused in part by the blockade, and that Israel's military response to Hamas has been disproportionate.

The 6,000 rockets fired on Israel by Hamas in the past seven years - in a campaign of low-rent terror that Binyamin Netanyahu likens to the Blitz - have killed 20 people. By Tuesday of this week the Israeli action in Gaza had killed more than 600 Palestinians, according to Palestinian estimates, perhaps a quarter of them civilians. The Israeli death toll was five.

While Israel has both the right and the duty to defend herself from attack, she is so well armed and Hamas so poorly armed that any military action she takes will seem excessive, even bullying. But what can you do, ask the Israelis, when Hamas uses the barbaric expedient of hiding its ordnance among civilians? The answer is that you can use the civilised expedient of refusing to bomb even legitimate targets in densely populated areas.

No doubt I'd be less fastidious about this matter if I lived where those Hamas rockets are landing, no doubt I'd want to flatten Gaza. But that kind of thinking plays into the hands of Hamas. Every dead Palestinian baby held up for the cameras of the western press is another propaganda victory for the terrorists.

The war on terror fuels terrorism, which is why jaw-jaw remains better than war-war. That's more or less what Joseph Ratzinger has been saying for the past six years. He has even suggested that modern weapons make it impossible to think in terms of a "just war".

***

But it is unlikely that the Daily Mail journalist and international commentator Melanie Phillips is going to be persuaded by the Holy Father. Ms Phillips, whom I know slightly, is a good and honest woman, and awesomely clever. She is a social conservative and a force for good. When it comes to the Middle East, however, she is a no-holds-barred wackado, an absolutist who regards much of the western media as ignorant and/or malicious in its coverage of Israel. Like many other extremist defenders of Israel, she throws around the charge of anti-Semitism. On the day after Israeli ground troops went into Gaza she declared:

"The moral dividing line in this battle is very clear. Those who stand with Israel are on the side of morality, justice and civilisation. Those in the media and public life who denounce Israel for having the temerity to defend its people are the fellow-travellers of barbarism. Having done so much to embolden and strengthen Hamas and Iran, who are playing them for suckers, they are continuing to stoke the fires of irrational hatred and genocidal hysteria."

There is no middle way here, no room for nuance or ambiguity: you are either with Israel or you are against her. Even those who, like the Pope, are neutral, and have called on both sides to lay down their arms, can be seen on this reading to be enemies of civilisation and promoters of genocidal hysteria.

Ms Phillips is guilty of disproportionate rhetoric.

***

On a related matter, the American monthly magazine Commentary is offering subscribers a free "World Terrorism Wall Map". Commentary is in many respects an excellent magazine, but it is perhaps a bit paranoid. Here is its pitch: "Our full-colour 39" x 26" World Terrorism wall map includes detailed inset maps highlighting countries battling narco-, Maoist, and Islamist terrorism, icons depicting aspects of world terrorism, political and topographical detail as well as definitions and facts, terrorist organisation summaries, and sources and websites recommended for further research. The World Terrorism Wall Map is an essential resource for anyone who wants to learn more about the global scope of the terrorist menace."

No home is complete without one.

Resolutions I won't keep

Friday 2 January 2009

New Year's resolution: To attend the extraordinary form of the Mass more regularly

Do Catholics make New Year's resolutions? I suppose so, but it seems rather pagan. A Catholic does not wait for the New Year; a Catholic makes resolutions every day: that at any rate is what contrition implies. "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner" (to borrow from the Orthodox).

All the same, it does one no harm to have a game plan for the coming year. Mine - and I'll no doubt regret writing this, since it will be a source of Guilt and Remorse - is to attend the old rite of Mass with greater regularity. For reasons of harmony and prudence (and convenience) I now go to the New Rite more often than the old.

But to relax now that the struggle seems to have been won risks reversals. One has to watch and keep guard.

As it happens, I do not think there's a danger of our ever returning to those really embarrassing (not to say offensive) People's Masses of the Seventies, but we - at any rate I - surely ought to do more to support the dignity and decency, the truth and beauty, of the Mass that inspired Beethoven, Bach and Palestrina. (Fastidious moderns like to make the point, at this juncture, that Bach was a Lutheran, but that makes absolutely no difference to the argument.)

I am sure I will disappoint myself. I lack discipline. I am not even sure that I can stick to my resolution never again to watch or listen to old hit songs on YouTube while writing this column, and especially not when I am in the middle of an angry denunciation of Decadence.

But try to understand: when you no longer drink or smoke, and when you have qualified for your travel pass (complete with an "expiry date"), when humiliation and disappointment face you at every turn, "Boney Maronie" by Ritchie Valens (who with Buddy Holly and the Big Boppa died in a plane crash 50 years ago next month, RIP) can be a great comfort.

"I got a gal named Bony Moronie. / She's as skinny as a stick of macaroni."

The Sanctus from the Grande Messe des Morts by Berlioz is pretty comforting too, but sometimes you just want to weep over your lost and misspent youth. I have quoted Theodore Dalrymple on this vice before, but he deserves another outing: "Is there a man so lacking in pity that he cannot feel sorry for himself?"

***

Since the economy is still in the news - or was when this issue went to press just before Christmas (it may since have been replaced by bubonic plague or nuclear war in the Middle East) - I hope I will be forgiven if I write about money, again.

When our builder took up the floor in the kitchen not long ago he found two coins: a 1948 George VI half-crown and a George III ha'penny. Both are objects of joy, but especially the ha'penny, which was legal tender during the Napoleonic Wars and when the future Curé d'Ars was in hiding from the military police.

The stash set me thinking. Not all Eurosceptics are stupid, or even Protestant - on the contrary - but in their talk of "saving the pound" all show themselves to be sentimental and superstitious. The pound was lost when Britain went decimal. Before that we had real money. Since then we have had playdough.

The old currency was not only beautiful in its own right but, with its farthings and florins and guineas, was also good for the brain and therefore for the soul. Fifty years ago people were rather more nimble than they are today; certainly I was.

In 1953 any reasonably well-fed 10-year-old knew how to subtract a penny three-farthings from two shillings and sixpence, and still have change for a packet of cigarettes, a fish dinner, a trip to the cinema, three pints of Mackeson's Stout and a tram ride home - oh, and a ha'penny for the collection at the seven o'clock Mass next morning (for which, such was the medieval cruelty of the times, he would have had to fast from midnight if he wanted to receive Communion).

And now? Absolutely nobody can do the math, and we watch helplessly as our currency is debased and debauched. Bring on the euro - but it is probably too late for that. Tony the Evangelist put America ahead of Europe and we have been paying the price ever since.

***

If you try hard enough, you can turn any problem into a moral problem. When is it sinful not to stand up for a woman on the Tube? Probably never when you are as old as I am; and probably never whatever age you are.

Even so, I am assailed by both guilt and righteous fury on the way to work these days, since for the first time in years I have to travel before 10 am, and often find myself sitting when women are standing.

If they are young (up to 40, say) I do not scruple too much. If they are over that age, I get agitated and sometimes (not often enough) stand. And yet I am perhaps less concerned about the poor women who are standing than by the young men who sit with their iPods and their lewd newspapers, legs aggressively apart, and do not stir themselves until they have reached their stops.

One morning recently, perhaps partly to shame men young enough to be my grandchildren, I made to stand for a woman of perhaps 45. As I tried to get up, however, the pocket of my sleeve got stuck in the arm rest of my seat and I had to bend over to loosen it.

That was more difficult than I had expected, and as I struggled my glasses dropped from the bridge of my nose to the carriage floor. After I had retrieved them, I rose sweating and flustered and offered the woman my seat.

"No, thank you," she said, looking embarrassed.

"Oh please do take it," said I.

"No, really. Thank you."

"Oh, but I insist."

"No, really. I am getting out at the next stop."

Serves me right for being so pompous and ingratiating and - in targeting the young men - passive aggressive.

Boris's tidings of joy

Friday 19 December 2008

Boris Johnson has delivered a sterling Christmas message to readers of The Catholic Herald

Southwark Cathedral was in festive and caring mood for the Mayor of London's Christmas carol service last week. There was a large but tastefully decorated Christmas tree in the sanctuary and signers were on hand to accompany the carols and readings.

Those in the congregation who were deaf, and were unable to follow the order of service because they had left their reading glasses at home, at least had the consolation of knowing that they were not excluded. The rest of us, meanwhile, enjoyed a most extraordinary show, as the signers made baby-rocking gestures, or suggested flights of angels by waving their hands like Hawaiian dancers.

We sat with an English Hindu couple from Kent. The man had Krishna markings on the bridge of his nose, and engaged my wife in small talk about "paradigms" ("whatever they are," as my wife said later).

But do not run away with the idea that this was just another gig for London's vibrant, multifaith (and hearing-impaired) community. It was nothing of the sort. This was a traditional Christmas.

The Greater London Authority apparatchiks had wanted there to be absolutely no mention of Christmas, but the Mayor put his foot down. It was to be a Christmas carol service.

And so a carol service it was, and with a bonus: Boris broke ranks with the cathedral authorities by reading the opening of St John's Gospel from the King James Bible rather than from the New Revised Standard Version Bible as printed.

That's not to say that the New Revised etc is all bad, but the King James is better, not least for being close to the Douay (which predates the King James by three years - 1609 vs 1611).

I much prefer the cadences of the older versions, and the blue-blazered Daily Mail reader in me noted with satisfaction that the King James version (like the Douay) gives us "the life was the light of men" rather than the Revised Standard's "the life was the light of all people". Come on, people: women are men too.

After the service we struggled through the photographers and fans to congratulate Boris on his brave defence of tradition. "If a Conservative Mayor of London can't pull that sort of thing," he said, "what's the point of being Mayor?"

Quite so. But did the Mayor of London perhaps have a message for the readers of The Catholic Herald? He had, as it turned out, and it was a message of comfort and joy.

"I cannot remember a Christmas when there has been such foreboding about the state of the economy," he said in a message delivered later by a faithful retainer, "and so I want to remind any anxious readers of the words of Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now: 'Some day this war's gonna end.' Some day this recession is going to end, and in the meantime we need to help the poorest and neediest of London to get through it."

Then Good King Wenceslas yielded to City Hall:
"That's why we are freezing our share of the council tax, giving older people the right to travel free for 24 hours a day, and maintaining cut-price travel for those on income support."

Then the Good King returned:
"But I hope it is not naïve to imagine that the downturn will also promote a sense of duty to our neighbours. And so I want to conclude by reminding all Catholic Herald readers who happen to feel guilty about their huge bonuses that they can readily palliate their guilt by donating them to the Mayor's Fund for London, a new charity dedicated to disadvantaged young people in the capital city.

"Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."

***

At the party that followed the service, as the congregation scoffed mince pies and glugged mulled wine, Stanley Johnson, Boris's father, asked me if I had ever found out whether Boris was baptised a Catholic.

It was what my youngest son would call a "surreal" moment. I said that my inquiries had satisfied me that he had indeed been baptised a Catholic - when I'd asked Stanley about it in the summer, he said he couldn't remember - and furthermore that I had written as much in The Catholic Herald.

Oh, said Stanley cheerfully. "But I think he was confirmed an Anglican at Eton." Too late, mate. Boris is one of us. But he is not a bigot; he is not one of those embarrassingly shrill and narrow-minded Catholic apologists who carry all their worldly possessions about with them in a plastic shopping bag. Old Boris sees the other fellow's point of view. Witness his recent, rollicking After Rome series on BBC Television, about the clash between Church and Mosque.

But did he give the Muslims too easy a ride? Call me paranoid and prejudiced if you like, but it seemed to me that Boris depicted the RCs at the time of the Crusades as a bunch of hypocritical barbarians whose only purpose was to kill, rape and pillage, while the Muslims came across as more or less blameless coves who sat around all day doing algebra, reading Aristotle, eating dates, reading to one another from Candide, and performing miracles with ceramics.

Personally, I think it was more complicated than that.

***

What a terrible year it's been, and the worst is yet to come. Where has all the money gone? Nowhere. There never was any money. It was all imaginary.

It is beginning to look as though we have nothing to lose now by becoming Christians and, like Dorothy Day, setting our faces against the both so-called free market and the secular state.

Dear Dorothy. I read her extraordinary diaries earlier this year, and dip into them from time to time before I turn off the light. I should like to leave you with this sweet Christmas story about a poor alcoholic priest, from an entry for December 28 1953, the Feast of the Holy Innocents: "Fr Elias showed up quite the worse for wear after a wet Christmas in town ... During the newspaper strike last month [he] came in before breakfast announcing that Churchill was dead - a way to distract our attention from his condition."

What resignation, what acceptance, what an eye for the absurd, what tolerance, what kindness - and all without a hint of sentimentality. Fr Elias RIP.

I sense that I'll inflict more Day on you next year. In the meantime, though, Happy Christmas and Prosperous New Year to all readers of The Catholic Herald.

How to create a monster

Friday 12 December 2008

'Who do this copper think he is?': Det Supt Andy Brennan described Karen Matthews as 'pure evil'

One should always keep one's shirt on, I know, but I confess that I did experience a spasm or two of irritation last week when Detective Superintendent Andy Brennan, of the West Yorkshire Police, described Karen Matthews as "pure evil". Who does this copper think he is? The editor of the Sun?

Elsewhere in the past week Karen - mother of the kidnapped Shannon - has been described as "scummy mummy", a "monster", a "sub-human". What with Shannon and Baby P, the guardians of our morality in the red tops have been having a high old time of it lately.

Let's be clear: the crimes we are talking about here are unimaginably wicked, and popular outrage is an appropriate response. So, however, if you'll forgive the piety, is prayer.

But you don't get a free rosary with every copy of the News of the World, and perhaps one should not get too agitated when red tops do what comes naturally to them: whip up anger and resentment. After all, the posh papers aren't always that much better.

Still, there is something especially revolting about the new blame culture: it is not enough these days that the culprits are vilified and banged up. Others must be held accountable, and, if possible, punished.

The collateral hate figures right now are social workers, those rather creepy, often politically correct men and women who have to deal with the intellectual and moral consequences of drugs, porn television, and a welfare dependency that they themselves (with the help of successive governments) have perhaps helped to foster.

Sharon Shoesmith, who was director of children's services at Haringey when Baby P died in the borough, may plausibly claim to be Britain's most detested public official. By all accounts, she is an arrogant and abrasive woman, and no doubt deserved to be sacked.

But the mob always wants more. Last week we learnt that Ms Shoesmith had received death threats to one of her daughters, and hate mail suggesting that she should kill herself. Hanging, as they say, is too good for her.

According to the popular account, it is not just that she was negligent in the case of Baby P; no, she was somehow responsible for his death and, even worse, she was being paid £100,000 a year by Haringey. As the Sun put it before she was sacked: "This brazen, box-ticking bureaucrat has already drawn £150,000 in blood money from the public purse since she let poor Baby P die."

***

The case against social workers right now is that they are reluctant to intervene. Once, however, they were widely attacked for the opposite vice: intervening too readily. Twenty years ago ritual satanic abuse was the rage, and social workers all over Britain were busy separating satanists from their children.

It was spooky. In 1990, for example, 21 children were taken from their parents in a dawn raid by social workers and police officers in Rochdale. There was no ritual satanic abuse, of course, and charges against the parents were dropped, but two of the children were separated from their parents for six years. (To its great credit, the Mail on Sunday exposed this scandal.)

The Government's guidelines are that where possible children should remain with their families. In most cases - though not of course in the case of Baby P or Shannon Matthews - that is sound guidance: bad parents are usually better than no parents.

Even so, more than 35,000 children were taken into care in Britain last year. Since all such cases are dealt with in secret, we cannot know for sure whether the social services are behaving sensibly. But according to Alasdair Palmer, writing in this week's Sunday Telegraph: "While no one knows how many children are wrongly taken from their parents, we do know that the consequences of being taken into care are almost universally dire. The vast majority of children emerge without any formal educational qualifications. Many end up homeless, as drug addicts, criminals or prostitutes."

Ready, in other words, to neglect and abuse their own illegitimate children.

Who knows what to do about any of this, about the Shannons and the Karens and the Baby Ps? David Cameron pulls a long face and asks questions in the House; the Government tries to show it means business by announcing another inquiry. Life goes on. We eat, drink and make merry - credit crunch permitting - and when things go wrong, when accidents happens, when terrible crimes are committed, we wonder what the world is coming to, and thank God that at least we are not to blame.

***

A couple of weeks ago at Mass my wife picked up one of those Christmas posters for the front window. "What's that all about?" I asked her on the way home. "I know what you mean," she said. "It goes against my nature. So I think I'd better put it in the window."

She didn't put it up immediately. That Sunday we were having some old friends to lunch. They are lovely, intelligent people, borderline atheists, with whom we share a love of Italy and the occasional Italian holiday, and we felt it would be inappropriate - both aggressive and twee - to place it in the window for their benefit.

The poster finally went up last Friday. I was a bit shocked when I arrived home that evening and saw it there in the window. It says "Celebrate... The Birth of Christ!" and it looks a bit Protestant, which is perhaps not surprising since it is part of a local ecumenical initiative.

Would St John of the Cross have one in his window? Would the Duke of Norfolk? Maybe I am a snob, but I am not comfortable with what the poster says about my modest suburban semi: it says that here live decent, church-going blighters, honest, respectable, reliable, who read the Daily Telegraph, listen to Barry Manilow, and belong to the Rotary club. Surely (I tell myself) there must be some Catholic printer in London who would be prepared to produce a poster with a rather most robustly orthodox message - "SUBMIT!", perhaps.

Still, the poster will remain in the front window until the Epiphany. It goes against my nature too, but my nature is fallen, and I should perhaps try to love my neighbours. Bah humbug to bah humbug!

Dying for a bargain

Friday 5 December 2008

An American man catches up on sleep after waiting in line from midnight at Wal-Mart last Friday (AP Photo)

'That dangerous time of the year is upon us," writes Liz Hoggard in the Evening Standard. You can say that again, Liz, but how so?

"In the run-up to Christmas, perfectly sensible women throw off all decorum and start experimenting with décolletage."

Oh, yeah, that. But if low necklines were all we had to worry about at this time of the year, we'd be laughing (while at the same time of course maintaining custody of the eyes).

The run-up to Christmas is rather more dangerous - and scandalous - than Liz Hoggard allows.

In Valley Stream, Long Island, it began with a vengeance at 5am last Friday when apparently crazed bargain-hunters trampled a Wal-Mart worker to death at the start of the Christmas sale. The dead man was Jdimytai Damour, 34, whose family is from Haiti.

Jdimytai's father said: "Life is better than a bargain, I believe so. A bargain is $40, $50, $100. A human being, forget it... He was 34 years. So far he wasn't married yet. He didn't have any kids. You know, he was a good boy."

Mind you, this sort of thing could happen at any time of the year, and anywhere, and is perhaps what you might expect when people have been whipped into frenzies of fear by a constant stream of news about what may be nothing more than an economic downturn but may equally turn out to be the end of the world.

So far, though, the violence in Britain has been cultural rather than physical. The weekend newspapers marked the beginning of Advent in the time-honoured way: with pages of "gift ideas" in which you sometimes thought you detected the hand of marketing men. The Observer offered wrapping paper designed by Kylie Minogue. The Sunday Times's Style magazine had a saucy cover flagging a feature on party frocks.

For some weeks now the bleak midwinter lights - Hindu, Muslim, and "Christian" - have been twinkling on rain-slicked suburban high streets, and Santas beam from the windows of Pakistani newsagents.

But why carp when immigrants cash in on Christmas? After all, the modern Christmas has nothing to do with the Incarnation. At best, it is a festival of sentimentality, handed down to us by Walt Disney, Irving Berlin, and Bernard Matthews; at worst, it is a time to fleece both the rich and the poor. Christmas is an equal opportunities confidence trick.

***

Which is worse: the corporate carol service or the office Christmas party? The corporate carol service by far. There is nothing more grisly than having to listen to the head of human resources, lipstick slightly smudged, reading from St Luke or Khalil Gibran, unless it is listening to a ruffed and cassocked choir singing "Imagine" and "Silent Night". At least office parties can make you laugh.

Michael Heath caught it perfectly some years ago in one of his Great Bores cartoons in Private Eye. Sad geezer is talking to a young woman amid balloons and general mayhem: "... I don't like office parties myself I hate Christmas but it does give people an opportunity to talk to people like yourself who you don't manage to get to know in an office situation my name's Donald I'm in buying my wife and I don't get on I don't know why I'm telling you this ... I feel like I've known you all my life my name's Donald I've noticed you in the canteen you sit with that middle-aged woman ... I hate Christmas no I'm perfectly alright I love you no don't go away I'll get you another drink I'm sorry I've made a complete fool of myself forget everything I've said only there's something about you that's different I think I'm going to be sick..."

It's not for us to hate Christmas, of course, or even the people who have hijacked it. But even if we love our enemies, as we must, it does not follow that we should turn the other cheek.

Christianity is a subversive religion, after all, a religion for sceptics and those who reject the consensus, and a good case can surely be made for taking up the sword of radical tradition by refusing to play the game. If you are over 18 at any rate, you might like to consider approaching Advent in a mood of aggressive, party-pooping self-denial.

"Do have a mince pie... Old family recipe. My mother made them shortly before she died last night."

"I am afraid I have given up mince pies for Advent, along with meat, bread and potatoes. Sorry about your mother. I hope she was in a state of grace."

"Let me give you a glass of champagne."

"I am afraid I have given up alcohol for Advent, and quite frankly I am surprised you haven't."

"I say, have you heard the one about the mendicant friar who walks into a pub with a crocodile and says to the barman, 'Do you serve Masons?', and the barman says..."

"Sorry, let me stop you there. I have given up jokes for Advent, and in any case I am beginning to sense that this one may be coarse."

If you kept that sort of thing up, you could lose about three stone by Christmas, and most of your friends (but what are friends for?). And yet... Perhaps moderation is more sensible, and more Christian, than in-yer-face asceticism. On earth peace to men of good will, and so on. But that's not to say that one should not always try to subvert the unChristian order.

By the way, in case you were wondering about the Mason joke... The mendicant friar with the crocodile says to the barman: "Do you serve Masons?", and the barman says: "Yes." The friar says: "OK, then. A pint for me and a Mason for the crocodile."

Tell it to someone at a Christmas party, but only if you are sure that he is not a Freemason. You wouldn't want to give offence.

God bless you, Auntie

Friday 28 November 2008

Would commentator Charles Moore wow the judges of Strictly Come Dancing? (Photo: PA)

The case for the BBC (in roughly chronological order): Children's Hour, Dick Barton, Muffin the Mule, Journey into Space, the long-range shipping forecast, Two-Way Family Favourites, Received Pronunciation, Edward Norman's Reith Lectures, the Today programme, the World Service, Fawlty Towers, Newsnight, Test Match Special, Gardener's Question Time, Have I got News for You, Start the Week, Spooks, and (to name names) David Dimbleby, John Humphrys, Jeremy Paxman, Robert Robinson, Harry Enfield, Robert Peston, the late Charles Wheeler, the late Alistair Cooke, the late Gilbert Harding, and, yes, Melanie Phillips, whose stern performances on The Moral Maze leave me howling in anger, if the subject is the Middle East, or swooning in admiration, if the subject is the moral state of the nation.

The case against: Life on Earth, Monty Python, Dr Who, Little Britain, unfamiliar regional accents, pious secularism, and, now more than ever, Jonathan Ross.

In my necessarily narrow world, and viewed from the perspective of great age, the "fors" have it. I love the BBC. It is the greatest broadcasting organisation in the world, and represents everything that is admirable and wholesome in British life, like the monarchy and the Brigade of Guards.

Unfortunately, it also represents much that is base, and last month showed how low it could sink when it broadcast the lewd, sniggering and bullying telephone call made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to Andrew Sachs.

Something must be done, but what? In the Daily Telegraph last Saturday Charles Moore repeated his undertaking not to renew his television licence, having earlier declared that he would only pay up if Ross were to be sacked. Here is a key paragraph in his Saturday article:

"Is there any other walk of taxpayer-funded life in which a man who rings up a 78-year-old Jewish refugee from Hitler to tell him that someone has just '----ed his grand-daughter' can keep his job? What teacher, social worker, soldier, policeman, doctor, civil servant, what cabinet minister so mighty, what council lavatory-cleaner so obscure, could manage that?"

There is no answer to that, and the more frivolous among us can only hang our heads in shame. All the same, I have misgivings about Charles's protest. This not because I think Ross should keep his job; he should not, and should never have been employed in the first place. Nor is it because I think it is always morally wrong to break the law. Honourable men faced with what they regard as an evil or unjust law may feel obliged publicly to disobey it, though the law in this case seems arbitrary rather than unjust, and it is certainly not evil.

What really troubles me about Charles's act of civil disobedience, however, is that it seems unlikely to improve standards in public life but may contribute to the destruction of the BBC, with dire consequences for broadcasting. I am sure Charles cannot wish that. The news service supplied by Auntie is second to none, and, though the corporation's output is often bad, biased and downright disgusting, whatever replaced it would be worse.

That seems to be of no concern, however, to some of Charles's more excitable allies, who see the Jonathan Ross spat as a splendid opportunity to undermine the corporation. "They will never admit it," wrote Bruce Anderson in the Sunday Telegraph earlier this month, "but quite a few Tories are grateful to Jonathan Ross. They believe that, as a result of his edginess, the BBC is now on the edge: more vulnerable than ever before. They are determined that it should not be allowed to recover."

And then what? Who knows? It's enough that the BBC is mortally wounded. Mainstream Tories, meanwhile, are not unhappy about lewd television, and indeed are keen to have it pimp for them. One of the counts against Jonathan Ross is that he once asked David Cameron whether he had ever masturbated while looking at a photograph of Margaret Thatcher. That was a disgusting and embarrassingly unfunny question. What was even more disgusting and embarrassing, however, was that Cameron agreed to appear on the show. Presumably he did so because his minders decided it might help him with the youth vote. Charles has every right to talk about public decency, but many of his friends in the Tory party do not.

Still, the "refuseniks" have focused attention on a national disgrace, and it is now up to the BBC to put its house in order, again, perhaps by abandoning its obsessions with ratings and youth - far from rejecting market values, by the way, the BBC has in recent years clasped them to its bosom, along with the vipers Ross and Brand - and concentrate instead on what it is supposed to do: inform, educate and provide civilised entertainment.

Failing a counter-reformation at the BBC, the pure of heart will be left with no other option but to throw out their televisions. I am not sure that I am yet ready for the nuclear option, but I recall that when the late Michael Wharton (Peter Simple) used to say that television was evil, and never more evil than when it was "good", I would feel distinctly uneasy.

***

But let's hope this all ends happily, that Charles Moore, former editor of the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph, does not go to jail, and that Ross is allowed to find his true metier, perhaps as a bingo caller in Billericay. Wouldn't it be nice, anyway, if this time next year, as a sign of reconciliation, Charles were to compete in Strictly Come Dancing?

I can see it now. After a particularly eye-watering jive with Lilia Kopylova, a sequined Charles, slightly flushed and sweating decoratively, would face his judges. The most giddily rapturous would be Arlene Phillips - "I want Moore! Gimme Moore!" - but Bruno Tonioli would be well excited too: "Charles! You are an animal! You shoulda be in a cage!" Anyone would think that I watched television.

Why we still remember

Thursday 13 November 2008

Three of the last surviving veterans of the First World War are pictured at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day

On the way to Mass on Sunday morning I passed a couple making their way arm-in-arm to Balham Underground station. They were in late middle age. The man wore a navy blue overcoat and had a row of medals on his chest. His wife, an Asian woman, was in a dark coat and her head was covered in a hijab. They were going to the Remembrance Day parade in Whitehall.

It is 90 years since the killing stopped on the Western Front, and England has changed a lot since then. Demographically and culturally we are a different people. But at least we still mourn our war dead, and marvel at their heroism, especially of the poor young men who died - 20,000 of them on the opening day of the Somme alone - in the First World War.

Open Siegfried Sassoon anywhere and your heart will be pierced. Consider the "simple soldier boy", who "grinned at life in empty joy"; then:

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

After Mass I went to Whitehall myself. I hadn't seen so many people there since the big anti-war demo of February 2003. There was little chance of getting close to the Cenotaph, so I made do with a position on the corner of Great Scotland Yard and Whitehall, where I watched the show on a big television screen.

It was essentially a repeat, except for the sudden appearance in giant close-up of a grim-visaged Boris Johnson, tie fastened and scarcely a hair out of place. I gave an involuntary laugh. Others laughed too. Good old Bozza.

The Queen, of course, comported herself perfectly, under David Dimbleby's watchful and benign eye, and, to my surprise, Gordon Brown appeared dignified, even dashing. David Cameron rather let the side down, alas. His first mistake was to look tanned and fit; his second was to pull a long face and chew his lip, as though fighting back tears.

It's hard for the viewers at home not to cry, of course. Most years, I sit in the front parlour and watch the parade on the BBC. Elgar's Nimrod theme usually does the trick: the feel-good tears start to roll. I luxuriate in the pleasure of pity.

It is really rather disgusting, like getting drunk on cider. What about the people for whom tears are not a source of pleasure but of pain, the product of unendurable heartache?

What of Maureen Feely? In the little cemetery at Wetheral, in Cumbria, on Sunday Mrs Feely remembered her only daughter, Corporal Sarah Bryant, killed in action in Helmand province last summer when the vehicle in which she was travelling on a secret mission to meet an Afghan contact was blown up by an enemy mine. Corporal Bryant was in the Intelligence Corps.

Last week Mrs Feely told the Cumberland News: "I miss her. I miss telling her things, receiving her letters, hearing her news, laughing with her. She would have been home by now. Had things gone differently, I would have seen her, spent time with her. I miss her physical presence. That's the hardest thing now...

"There are good days and bad days. But nothing can stop me missing her. I'm sure the families and friends of all servicemen and women lost to war will feel the same way. We can't expect our loss to grow easier with the passing of time. We don't expect it."

Mrs Freely is a good, brave, patriotic woman. She believes that her daughter died for freedom. I grieve with her, and I admire her daughter, who was a good and brave soldier and did her duty. Lest we forget...

And yet, and yet. There are many who will say that Sarah Bryant should never have been placed in harm's way, indeed should never have been allowed to risk her life as a soldier.

We seem to be abandoning all notions of honour and chivalry. The Army is not yet an equal-opportunities employer, but may be moving in that direction. Under present rules, women may not serve in either the infantry or the Royal Armoured Corps, but may do frontline duty - and risk their lives - as pilots, medics, dog-handlers and so on.

Before long, however, the Army may be required to allow women to serve in the thick of it. According to a recent report, the Army Board fears that if doesn't permit women to serve in the infantry it could face legal challenges under human rights legislation. The board has conceded quite enough already and should not yield another inch. The law is an ass. This business has nothing do with human rights. A woman does not have the right to bear arms. Her first right is the right to life; her second right is the right to bear children; her third right is the right to be obeyed in the home.

When he was still a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger told Peter Seewald in God and the World: "... it still horrifies me when people want women to be soldiers just like men, when they, who have always been keepers of peace and in whom we have always seen a counter-impulse working against the male impulse to stand up and fight, now likewise run around with submachine guns, showing that they can be just as warlike as the men".

When young people hear this sort of reactionary talk, they grow impatient and ask: "Why is it wrong in logic and justice for women to fight in the front line?"

The answer to that is simple and easy to remember: "It is wrong because it is wrong."

***

I hope you have saved all those Barack Obama souvenir editions to pass on to your grandchildren. The tone of religious hysteria was perhaps caught best by the Mirror, which last Thursday had a one-word headline on its front page: BELIEVE.

Can you believe it? Well, yes, of course you can. When people stop believing in God, as G K Chesterton noted, they believe not in nothing but in anything. We are surely the most biddable and gullible people who ever lived.

Farewell to the Poles

Friday 7 November 2008

Migrant workers look for jobs in Hammersmith, an area of west London with a strong Polish presence

Will the misery never end? On top of everything else the credit-crunched middle classes now discover that they may have to get through the Greater Depression without the help of cheap and cheerful Polish nannies and plumbers. Recent estimates suggest that in the coming year as many as 400,000 Poles will flee the recession in Britain and Ireland and return home.

All that could change by the end of the week, of course, but for the time being we should perhaps look on the bright side. Notting Hill's loss will surely be Poland's gain. A nation needs its people, as many Poles long settled in England would be the first to agree Here is another thing, though: we know that Polish popes are magnificent and Polish Chopins too, but are Polish workers really as good as they are cracked up to be?

The magnificent A N Wilson, a man whose spleen is usually in the right place, thinks they are, and furthermore that our own workers are pretty hopeless. In his new book, Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II, he writes: "Certainly, the arrival of the Poles, especially in London, with their eager, intelligent faces, their willingness to work 50-hour weeks mending the lavatories and building the kitchens of the British middle classes, made the indigenous poor seem all the more pathetic."

That's not quite been my experience. I have seen Polish faces in south London that were a good deal less than eager and intelligent, most of them belonging to the young men you find sitting at the back entrance to supermarkets drinking Special Brew, listening to their iPods and smoking roll-ups.

Mind you, and to be fair, one of the problems here is that "Poles" are not always Poles. Sometimes they are Latvians or Ukrainians, or even, and I mean no disrespect to anyone, Russians. We Brits find it hard to distinguish between one group of Slavs and another, and we have a poor ear for language.

Not long ago we had some Polish builders in to fix the back of the house, and they were hard-working and honest and agreeable, but were otherwise pretty useless. They managed to put in a casement window so that the top flap opened sideways rather than up and down. They offered to correct the mistake, but we thought it would be more trouble than it was worth.

We all got on well, I think, though there was a certain amount of mutual incomprehension. One day I asked the boss what part of Poland he was from. He said: "Not Poland. Slovakia."

"Oh," I said. "I'm sorry."

"Is OK. Is same thing," he said.

You sometimes wonder what the Second World War was all about.

In the meantime, though, I am well served by local craftsmen, who are intelligent, work hard and charge reasonable rates. At the moment I have a London-Irish plumber putting in a new kitchen, with the help of his mate and his brother (a carpenter).

The plumber, as I have mentioned here before, doubles as a robustly orthodox moral theologian, and his mate has pretty strong views too. On Tuesday morning I found myself in the middle of a four-sided debate about life, the environment, and our old friend just war theory. It was fairly heated stuff. The plumber's mate said that Sarah Palin was a friend of the environment. Whoa! You should have heard my wife! It got even worse when he said that he would like to cull all the baby seals in England because they were wiping out cod stocks.

The work is going well, and I am happy to be backing Britain, hiring Londoners, and good Catholic Londoners at that. But you have to draw the line somewhere, right? You can't allow love of country to rule your head as well as your heart. My dentist is a German.

John Paul II RIP.

***

Joshua Heller's elegant and thoughtful review of Hunger in The Catholic Herald last week was the tipping point, and on Sunday I took myself off to the Ritzy in Brixton to see it. I agree with Joshua that it is a powerful film, but I do not think it is a good one.

Hunger does not glamourise terrorism, that's for sure, but Bobby Sands is presented sympathetically, and with a touch of soft focus. There are a couple of moments when all that is missing is "Danny Boy" on the soundtrack.

The worldly Republican priest, Fr Moran, whose debate with Sands forms the centerpiece of the film, is not convincing, and his purpose in the film is to strengthen the case for Sands as martyr. To Fr Moran, it seems, suicide is nothing more than bad politics and a tragic and vainglorious waste.

Let's be clear: the Republicans had a case and a cause, but the IRA did not. It was Irish only in the sense that the Mafia is Italian, it did not represent the Republic, and it was not an army. Did Bobby Sands commit suicide? I think so. He certainly killed himself.

Bobby Sands RIP.

***

You win some, you lose some. On Monday I put £100 on John McCain to win at 13-2. But by that time my bookmakers, Paddy Power, were already paying out on Barack Obama.

Ah well. At least I was covered, having bet a friend £100 in May that Barack Obama would win.

Some will think that this is no occasion for frivolity, but my purpose is not entirely frivolous. What I did I did in part in memory of my late mother-in-law, who died long before I met her daughter.

Her name was Mary and she brought up four children - two boys and two girls - on her own, having been widowed when the children were little. She got by with the help of a small inheritance and her income as a librarian. She was a good Catholic: she drank rum, smoked Pall Mall, said a weekly novena, took her children to Mass every Sunday and most days during Lent.

In 1960, when priests everywhere were urging their parishioners to vote for John F Kennedy, my mother-in-law voted for Richard M Nixon, perhaps the only Catholic in her parish to do so.

I think she was right. Remember that Kennedy, whom I adored at the time, told the voters that he would not allow his Catholicism to interfere with his decisions as president, thus placing Caesar above God.

Mary Louise Bruton RIP. Yes, and John F Kennedy too.

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