I wholly endorse what he says. Her Majesty, intuitively and skilfully, manages to remain the still centre of the ever-turning Anglican world simply by affirming her faith in Jesus Christ. In her Christmas message last year, quoted by Damian in his post, she stated: “God sent into the world a unique person – neither a philosopher nor a general, important though they are, but a Saviour, with the power to forgive. Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families. It can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided communities. It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God’s love.”

The Queen has met plenty of philosophers and even more generals in her time. With her unique place at the summit of the Establishment, she has had innumerable opportunities to encounter the masters of this world in every walk of life. She knows their place and she knows her own. More than other modern monarchs, I think, she understands the spiritual significance of her coronation oath: a lifelong dedication to her people and her public duties; something to be undertaken with utmost seriousness.

This dedication is deeply admirable. Not for the Queen the possibility of abdication, as in the curious Dutch tradition. As a child of ten she witnessed at first hand the trauma of the Royal Family following her uncle’s dereliction of his duties. Watching her father, unprepared, untrained and unconfident, dutifully take up the burden of kingship as Edward VIII walked away from it, taught her what it means to accept your destiny.

Watching Margaret Thatcher after one of her election victories, the Labour MP Mrs Barbara Castle observed that she had a glow about her: the glow that comes from power. I do not jib at this; by definition, being prime minister is the exercise of power. But it is worth contrasting this with the observation of Cecil Beaton at the Queen’s coronation; that after she had taken the oath and had been anointed with the holy oil, there was an aura, a definite radiance about her. This was nothing to do with vanity, ambition or ego (things that constantly drive politicians); it was the instinctive response to the most solemn moment of a strange and solemn destiny.

When her Majesty said yesterday that she looks to the future with a ‘clear head and warm heart’ I felt that at heart it is her Christian faith that gives her the resilience and the resolve to be able to say this.

Long live the Queen.

Actually, this way of rearing children lasted until after the last War – indeed, until the 60s when everything seemed to change. As a child of the 50s, my parents did not question their right to physically check us if we stepped out of line. My father did it very rarely, mainly because spending his spare time on the golf course was pleasanter than disciplining his noisy, argumentative children. I have one vivid recollection of him putting a younger sister over his knee and spanking her, saying emphatically, “I hate lies.” I doubt if my sister even remembers this incident and I only recall it because it was so rare.

My mother, it must be said, often tended in the impatience of the moment to ‘lay about her’, sometimes with a wooden spoon on the palm of the hand. This was painful and I don’t recommend it; nor would I say, as people sometimes aver, that “it did me no harm”. Smacking a naughty child who is below the age of reason but not above the age of dangerous exploits like running into the road is one thing; deliberately using an implement of chastisement is quite another. I made a conscious decision never to do this with my own children – though I have smacked occasionally.

David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, made the important point (and the headlines) when he remarked recently that working-class parents, who traditionally would have corrected their offspring by physical punishment, feel powerless to discipline them now that smacking has been redefined as physical violence, and outlawed. This came about through Left-wing middle class diktat and it is as patronising and unworkable as you would expect from such a source. Parents hell-bent on abusing their children physically will continue to do so, laws or no laws. How can they be stopped? Other parents, well-meaning and caring, but unconfident and inexperienced, cease to use any discipline at all. Factor in fatherless families and other social problems and you see Lammy’s point: it is all very well legislating from the vantage point of self-confidence, good education and established authority figures – but what of large swathes of the population lacking these features?

My sister-in-law told me that when she and my brother were considering adoption, an officious social worker asked them if they intended to smack a child they might receive. Being honest, she replied that she wouldn’t rule it out completely, but only if it was appropriate to the child and the circumstances etc. This response did not go down at all well.
I have just been reading Great Expectations. Mrs Joe Gargery brings up Pip “by hand” as she often harshly reminds him, meaning frequently knocking him about. Dickens, who loathed all violence to children, gives her a savage come-uppance for her cruelty. Social workers and legislators of the Left-wing consensus need to be reminded that most parents are not like Mrs Joe; they love their children, are occasionally driven to distraction by their behaviour and sometimes administer a smack, just hard enough to stop the miscreant in his tracks. This is not abuse and parents should not be penalised for it.

But of course no one in their right mind, and certainly no Christian, really believes what the words imply: that there is nothing in your past life and behaviour which you regret or feel remorse about. Socrates said at his trial: “The unexamined life is not worth living”. To examine your life is to find it wanting. I was thinking of this when I read about the hapless Captain Francesco Schettino, skipper of the doomed cruise ship, the Costa Concordia. Having navigated his ship disastrously close to shore, he then allegedly tripped and fell into a lifeboat, leaving many passengers still on board and a few to drown. Now under house arrest I think he will be experiencing many regrets.

In an article in the Sunday Telegraph last week about the Costa Concordia’s captain, Lord Winston explained at length the physiology of panic. But where does panic end and cowardice begin? Cowardly behaviour is morally flawed and having grown up with stories of the Titanic and Captain Edward Smith’s quite proper decision to go down with his ship, I can’t help thinking that citing panic is not good enough; Captain Schettino is not a hero.

Someone else with regrets will be Fr Massimo Donghi. Having told his parishioners in Besana Brianza, northern Italy that he was going on a week’s spiritual retreat, they later discovered that he had been on the cruise ship too, along with his nephew and elderly mother. They all managed to get into lifeboats. But another priest came up trumps: Fr Lorenzo Pasquotti, parish priest of Santi Lorenzo and Mamiliano on the island of Giglio, near where the ship went aground, spent the night dispensing blankets and hot drinks to survivors brought ashore.

To conclude with a mention of a truly great priest: Fr Gregory Winterton of the Birmingham Oratory, who died, aged 89, on January 18. One of my own regrets (not to mention my many past follies) is that I did not know him personally. I only knew him by repute, largely from the stories of him told me by a friend who, having spent some years in prison in his youth, was instructed in the Faith only last year by Fr Winterton. They were memorable occasions. Already very old and frail, the priest always welcomed this former black sheep with open arms, sometimes giving him instruction literally from his sick bed. “You knew you were in the presence of a holy man,” my friend told me; “He seemed to have kept the innocence of a child and he simply radiated love.” My friend wept when he heard of Fr Winterton’s death; “He was like a father to me and I feel I have lost a father.”

May he rest in peace.

According to CFNews, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, has ordered all the priests in his diocese to read out a letter to their congregations this last weekend pointing out that such insurance requires employers’ participation in “evil and grave sin.” He said he would be happy to join the effort to “protest most strongly against a mandate…that requires Catholics in the US to violate their consciences.” He emphasised that “we cannot and will not comply with this unjust decree. Like the martyrs of old, we must be prepared to accept suffering which could include heavy fines and imprisonment. Our American religious liberty is in grave jeopardy.”

Archbishop George Lucas of Omaha has written a similar letter. His diocesan chancellor, Deacon Tim McNeil, explained that the Bishop’s letter “will state how this order negatively impacts the Church in the US. It’s a violation of religious liberty and our First Amendment rights.”

I suspect that Bishop Bruskewitz is right and that penalties will follow. The Bishop is no stranger to strong words and actions. Some years ago he caused a national sensation in America when he issued a formal warning to Catholics in his diocese who belonged to organisations opposed to the Church – e.g. those supporting women priests  – that they were in danger of excommunication. Interviewed on that occasion by Paul Likoudis for The Wanderer, Bishop Bruskewitz stated that bishops “have a duty to maintain unity in the Church. This unity is maintained by full and obedient communion with the head of the college of bishops, the Successor of St Peter, the vicar of Christ on earth, the Holy Father.” Now that is what we want our bishops to state.

Still, there is suffering and suffering, and persecution in the free world is not quite the same as that under violent regimes elsewhere. Our parish priest mentioned on Sunday that not long ago a young priest in Baghdad, only ordained a year, was grabbed by terrorists during Mass, laid on the altar of his church and summarily beheaded – in full view of the congregation which included his elderly mother. This martyrdom by blood has been haunting me since I heard of it.

This means that hundreds of religious colleges, hospitals, school and charities will now be required to provide insurance coverage for their employees for practices they believe to be wrong and which are contrary to their beliefs.

The Obama administration refuses to exempt religious institutions from this mandate, only offering a one-year delay in some cases. It could have allowed the traditional exemption clause – a ‘conscience clause’ – for religious organisations but has refused to do so. Catholic relief services and charities alone employ 70,000 people. If Notre Dame University were to drop its insurance coverage for its 5,229 employees the penalty that the HHS would impose would amount to $10 million a year. As Liaugminas points out, the irony is that Kathleen Sebelius, secretary to the HHS, is a Catholic; so is Joe Biden, the Vice-President.

All this, albeit on a much bigger scale, sounds eerily familiar. Remember the fight the Catholic adoption agencies had in this country against same-sex adoption during Tony Blair’s premiership? The agencies either closed down or, more usually, caved in. So what is now happening in America does not come as a surprise. What is surprising though is the size and variety of the protests against the HHS mandate; it has united liberal and conservative Catholics, people of other faiths and people of no faith at all, as they realise that a fundamental tenet of the American constitution – freedom of conscience in religion – is being deliberately overthrown.

Michael Voris of RealCatholicTV.com offers an interesting commentary on this current battle in the US. He asks what has brought about the collapse of more than two hundred years of a Christian moral consensus and gives five reasons:

Conservative Americans have for decades been more concerned with politics and economics rather than with defending fundamental moral values.

From the 1960s onwards the entertainment media, rather than family, school, parish or church, became the arbiter and shaper of public views and attitudes.

The courts and the legal system have gradually reflected the views of the new liberal and secular electorate.

Conservatives tend to comply with the law rather than rebel against it; they obey rather than protest.

Finally, Voris notes, Christians of all denominations have gradually abandoned traditional moral teaching. Contraception has become completely acceptable in the Protestant churches and in the Catholic Church her wise warning about the separation of sex from procreation has been largely ignored by the Catholic faithful. In America we now see the result; what Christians chose to regard simply and casually as a matter of individual choice is now, in the workplace and in the relationship between employer and employee, being forced on them by law.

All this reminds one of an obvious truth: if we are not permanently vigilant in defence of our fundamental beliefs, they will be swept away from under our feet.

I am sad to see the end of the print edition, as I have a reluctance not shared by the next generation to reading articles online. However, you can’t argue with the economics; an online magazine is much cheaper to produce and Ignatius Press, CWR’s publisher, has been heavily subsidising the magazine for several years.

In an article in the December and final print issue of CWR, Moynihan recalls its birth: “Finally we settled on [the title of] The Catholic World Report, with a slight ambiguity about whether we were focused on ‘the Catholic world’ or on ‘the world as seen by Catholics’. But we knew we wanted the word “Report” emphasised, because we knew we wanted the charism of the publication to be evangelical, a ‘report’, not just hearsay or speculation or chit-chat, but a clear, reliable ‘report’ on what was happening in Rome and around the world – a report that would concern the Catholic Church, but also the entire world the Church is ‘in but not of’.”

In the years that I have been reading it, CWR has fulfilled this purpose admirably. Under Phil Lawler, who took over from Moynihan in 1993, there has been excellent coverage of, for instance, pro-life issues, the sex abuse scandals as they have afflicted the Church in the US, Catholic education and much else. Whatever the problems in the Church, you knew that CWR would provide honest coverage; but you also felt when you had finished a particular edition that, despite these problems, the Church was still full of life and vigour, putting out new shoots and highlighting faithful witnesses to hope and truth.

For instance, in the December 2011 issue, there is a most encouraging article by Edward Pentin about the Dignitatis Humanae Institute. Founded two years ago by a small group of Catholic European parliamentarians and politicians the organisation, as Pentin explains, “aims to be a platform through which Christian politicians can better present coherent, moderate and mainstream responses to the growing opposition to Christian values in public life”. Its declaration of human dignity, drawn up by Catholic European lawmakers, “consists of three main principles: that man is made in the image and likeness of God; that this image and likeness exist in every single human being, without exception, from conception until natural death; and that the most effective means of safeguarding this recognition is through the active participation of the Christian faith in the public square.”

Lord Alton, who has always witnessed admirably to his Christian faith in the public square, believes the institute has a crucial role to play in promoting an understanding of human rights in the light of the natural law. Lord Nicholas Windsor, a convert to the Church in 2001 and a member of the British royal family, about whose committed pro-life views I have blogged before, has been appointed chairman of the new Institute. Rocco Buttiglione, philosophy professor and currently vice-president of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies, is patron.

Buttiglione was forced to withdraw his nomination as the European Union’s new commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security in 2004 because of his Catholic beliefs on homosexuality and women. He comments: “We must support each other in times of persecution.” As I write this a friend, who edits the online magazine Mercator, which is concerned with similar issues as the new institute, tells me that when he recently printed articles on the nature of marriage the posts he receives showed the enormous gulf between a Christian understanding of personhood and those now challenging it. They said things like, “Good and evil? Get over it”, or “What’s so special about being natural?” or “The purpose of sex isn’t having babies any more. What about IVF?” or “You have your morality and I have mine.”

Such responses indicate the urgent need for Christians in the public sphere to provide convincing and reasonable arguments for their defence of human dignity. The Dignitatis Humanae Institute has been established at a timely moment.

Johnson also had the temerity to strike up conversation with Churchill when he bumped into him after the War, and asked him the secret of his success. The great man immediately replied, “Conservation of energy.” He explained that he never stood up when he could sit down and he never sat down when he could lie down (I must remember that.) Johnson mimicked him perfectly. As a boy he had had a crush on the child actress Shirley Temple and was delighted to meet her years later when she had become the US ambassador to Ghana.

Johnson admitted that he regretted some of the things he had written when he was young, such as his damning verdict on Anthony Eden. The chief influence on him seemed to be his mother, widowed when Johnson was 14 and who lived to 90. On her deathbed Johnson told her she would not spend long in Purgatory. She replied: “But I’ve often criticised the clergy.”

These were her last words. The sudden death of his father, he said, when he was just beginning to get to know him, was the only tragic thing that had happened to him in his life. Asked by Kirsty Young, the interviewer, about his education he told her he had been born a Catholic and sent to Stonyhurst College; he approved of the Jesuit formation he had received there: “They teach you the difference between right and wrong.”

It was an interesting interview and I enjoyed it – apart from one moment. Kirsty Young was probing Johnson slightly (though only in the light format of the programme; it wasn’t a John Humphreys-type interrogation): in his earlier days had he not criticised the sexually permissive society? What did he think of David Cameron’s brand of Conservatism and his support for gay marriage? Was Johnson now a man out of his time?

Johnson’s response was urbane: “Time moves on.” He added, “Cameron is entitled to his views” and “I don’t want to stand in the way of progress”. He had the perfect opportunity here to state the Christian teaching on marriage; instead, although he might not have intended to give this impression, he sounded entirely relativistic. What would his old Jesuit masters at Stonyhurst have made of it?

In his speech last September to the German parliament, the Bundestag, Pope Benedict gave a critique of moral relativism and defended the natural law tradition. He said: “The idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to mention the term.” If only Johnson could have simply said to Kirsty Young: “Whether you are Conservative or Labour, a believer or non-believer, you can’t change the natural law; it doesn’t change with the times.” It would have been an awkward moment and it might have caused him some embarrassment to say it, but it would have been the truth. An opportunity was lost.

It’s not impossible, though sceptics would add that it’s rather unlikely. Why do I mention this item of news? Because of an inspiring article I read recently in the Herald by Lord David Alton of Liverpool, who chairs the British-North Korea All Party Group in Parliament. This was established seven years ago “as a process of constructive, critical engagement” and it resulted in the report “Building Bridges Not Walls.” Lord Alton writes that this positive approach is getting results; he visited the country last October “to participate in North Korea’s first international conference at its first public-private university: the one year-old Pyongyang University of Science and Technology – ‘international’ and ‘private’ in a country that says it doesn’t do international or private.” Perhaps Associated Press’s own initiative was influenced by Alton’s imaginative and hope-filled earlier one?

Christopher Hitchens, who died recently, was definitely not inspired by North Korea. Indeed, he wrote an article for Slate in 2010 entitled “A Nation of Racist Dwarfs” which brilliantly and mercilessly mocked the country. He described it as giving birth to “a sort of new species: starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult.” You can also watch a YouTube clip of Hitchens making the case for North Korea being worse than 1984, where you can hear the audience laughing and clapping at his entertaining performance.

Of course North Korea is an easy target for the likes of Hitchens. Doubtless what he described is true; I have read other journalists stating the same thing though not so wittily or cleverly. Hitchens believed that “peace and disarmament negotiations with [North Korea] are a waste of time”. After all, the country had zero redeeming features, didn’t it? Perhaps if you are an atheist as Hitchens was, you are more likely to despair of the place and to pick up on the more hellish aspects of its society. Perhaps it takes a Christian vision like Lord Alton’s to want to build bridges with these fellow human beings from a far country rather than a wall of eloquent yet excoriating words.

Should the film have been made while Lady Thatcher is still alive but incapable of protesting about it? That is a good question. I tend to agree with the Herald film critic, Quentin Falk, who thinks that if a film can be made about the Queen, with Helen Mirren brilliantly suggesting the odd, different world, quite apart from the rest of us, that the Queen inhabits, then Margaret Thatcher cannot be off-limits.

It all depends on the treatment. Here the depiction of dementia was sympathetic rather than cruel, probably accurate in its portrayal of the former prime minister’s confusion and memory loss, alongside moments of insight and understanding, and superbly acted by Meryl Streep. Of course there were inaccuracies; films can never capture the subtle currents of a life in the way a biography does and Thatcher is particularly easy to caricature. For instance, I don’t think it provided a balanced picture of Thatcher’s marriage to her husband. It suggests she walked over him for the sake of her personal ambition. Yet Denis Thatcher is on record as stating that when he met her he was smitten by her beauty, her brains – and the power of her political convictions. He determined to help her achieve her ambitions and supported her all the way.

Max Pemberton’s article focuses on the dementia, a disease which he describes as “cruel and tragic” and the film as dramatising “deeply tragic aspects of someone’s life”. Again, I disagree with this. Tragedy occurs when someone’s life is cut short too early or in their prime, when they have not fulfilled their potential. Margaret Thatcher fulfilled her extraordinary potential in spades. When dementia develops in old age – as will happen to many of us – it is hardly tragic, though it is certainly sad. None of us views the waning of our vital powers with equanimity, but that is the nature of life.

If you are a Christian who looks forward to the “life of the world to come”, then the depredations of old age such as the onset of dementia or physical disability can be accepted and borne with patience by others. I rather think the reason Pemberton finds the thought of dementia so appalling is because he lacks faith in life after death. It is only a short step from this attitude to that of another Baroness, Warnock, who thinks very elderly people should have easy access to euthanasia and shuffle off the stage of life altogether.

I also challenge Pemberton’s view that the film treats Thatcher as if she had already died. It doesn’t. What it does is to treat her in a mythic way as if she were already part of history – which she is. Whatever people think of her politics – and again I would query Pemberton’s contention that an “insidious selfishness… crept into the collective consciousness under her premiership” – she is the only prime minister of the 20th century who is spoken of in the same breath as Churchill.

Jean Vanier, like the Holy Father, is now in his mid-eighties and his friends have finally got him to move to a little house next to the chapel in the L’Arche community at Trosly, in France. It means that he will not have to walk far to be in the company of Christ in the tabernacle. Yet leaving his familiar surroundings where he has spent the last 36 years is a wrench, Vanier writes: “We do not know what new birth will bring. Little ones are in the womb of their mother for nine months. ..For the little ones, it is also a time of mourning because they have had nine months of a protected life (in my case, 36 years). So it is for me, living a time of surprise and mourning. Pray that I will welcome everything with joy.”

He speaks movingly of living in a hermitage “where I can live the last years of my life on the path of weakening that leads to the final and first encounter face to face and heart to heart with God.” And answering the question, what makes an old person’s life still worthwhile? He responds, “I can do small acts of tenderness and love to reveal to the different ‘others’ {those with learning disabilities] their beauty. At L’Arche we are not militants for a cause, but rather witnesses of hope.” Looking at the wider society with all its problems, Vanier finds the answer in “creating communities of welcome where people can grow, develop, find confidence in themselves and discover the deep meaning of their lives.”

For Jean Vanier and for Pope Benedict, as for all Christians, it is their faith that gives both present and ultimate purpose to life. And it is the same faith that finds life valuable and precious even in old age. This will be the battle-ground of the future, as our society increasingly ages: between those whose religious faith teaches them that life is still valuable when it is no longer useful and those whose pragmatic, utilitarian outlook will increasingly urge the opposite. Lord Falconer and his ilk haven’t gone away; they are waiting in the wings for a more propitious moment. We need strong prophetic voices like Jean Vanier’s to challenge them.