Firstly, there is the prior question of women priests. Anglo-Catholics are already members of a Church which ordains these ambiguous beings. Are they priests, or aren’t they? (For the moment, put to one side the question of whether or not anyone in the C of E is a validly ordained priest.) If you believe they’re not, you are already yourself in an ambiguous condition, since you are a member of a Church which has arrogated to itself the power to ordain them, a power which even the Pope (like the Orthodox) denies that he possesses. You are a member, that is to say, of a Church which has already finally divorced itself from any possibility of reunion with the Universal Church of which it has thus far claimed to be a part. So, what kind of a Catholic does that make you? It is a question you must already have asked yourself; and to that problem there is now only one solution: the ordinariate. The existing arrangements for “flying bishops” were a temporary measure, which allowed a constituency of non-jurors to gather itself in preparation for secession: those temporary arrangements are no longer necessary and have now therefore morally lapsed.

But if you accept that women may be priests, that those women already ordained as such by the Church of England are validly ordained (and I actually heard a member of the Catholic group in Synod actually saying on the radio that he did accept them as priests, but that he didn’t want them to become bishops), then what are you on about? If a woman is a priest, then she is eligible to be a bishop. If she’s not, she isn’t. Either way, you are a member of a Church in which there are now hundreds of women priests: and whether you put yourself in a ghetto which doesn’t accept them or not, you are still in full communion with them (and don’t give me that stuff about “impaired communion”: you are in full communion with your own bishops (flying or not), who are themselves in full communion with the male bishops who ordained all these women, so you are in full communion with them: get used to it, or leave.

Expecting special arrangements (the issue which comes before the Synod today) that will allow you to imagine yourself on to some kind of fantasy island untroubled by women bishops as well as women priests is ludicrous. You only have to see the case put to see how ludicrous it is. Here, for instance, is the Rt Rev John Hind, Bishop of Chichester (who has said that women bishops are now inevitable):

Bishop Hind said: “I think the issue facing the Church of England at the moment isn’t whether there will be women bishops or not – which I think everyone accepts is the will of most of the dioceses – the issue is whether the Church of England wants to retain its historic comprehensiveness and generosity and space for dissent.

“Everybody understands that women bishops are coming into the Church of England, the only question is, is there going to be a space in the Church of England for those who, on theological grounds and ecumenical grounds, cannot accept that development.”

This is all very puzzling: for only last year, Bishop Hind was saying that he would join the ordinariate (which he warmly welcomed) if the C of E went ahead with women bishops:

“This is a remarkable new step from the Vatican,” he said [of the ordinariate] . “At long last there are some choices for Catholics in the Church of England. I’d be happy to be reordained into the Catholic Church.”

While the bishop stressed that this would depend on his previous ministry being recognised, he said that the divisions in the Anglican Communion could make it impossible to stay.

“How [he continued] can the Church exist if bishops are not in full communion with each other?” (My emphasis)

The fact is that it can’t: not for you, at any rate, or for anyone else who isn’t prepared fully to accept that Church’s ordained ministry: for, if you don’t accept its ministry, you don’t accept its sacraments. And if you don’t accept its sacraments, you don’t accept the entire foundation on which it has been so shakily constructed.

The fact is that there is now a real alternative: in your own words, bishop, “at long last there are some choices for Catholics in the Church of England”. I now confidently hope that you will make the only real choice left; a good time, perhaps, would be July – for that is when the General Synod will at last vote through the measure enabling women bishops. When that happens, you will know that the die is cast: and it will be time for you finally to come home. What, for you, is most to be feared is that the Synod will today accede to your request for “a space in the Church of England” to be made for people like you: for if it does, you will enter that space, and find yourself in a limbo of futility from which it may become more and more difficult to extricate yourself.

The bitterly cold weather sweeping Britain and the rest of Europe has been linked by scientists with the ice-free seas of the Arctic, where global warming is exerting its greatest influence.

A dramatic loss of sea ice covering the Barents and Kara Seas above northern Russia could explain why a chill Arctic wind has engulfed much of Europe and killed 221 people over the past week…

A growing number of experts believe complex wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above.

The piece mentions the names of one or two of this growing number of experts. I’m glad that at least the piece didn’t say that this was a generally accepted consensus: for, the idea of an incontrovertible scientific consensus behind current ideas of anthropogenic global warming is itself coming under increasingly sceptical scrutiny from another “growing number of experts”, as you will see from a very interesting article which appeared a week or so ago in the Wall Street Journal.

The article is signed by a large number of scientists, whose names I now flourish before you to prove that they exist:

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

The starting point of the article, headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” (subheading, “There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonise’ the world’s economy”) is the resignation from the American Physical Society of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, in a letter which begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.” Dr Giaever had asked simply for the word “incontrovertible” to be removed: the APS refused. He rejoined: “In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”

The fact is, as the WSJ article says (and as I have said in this column before) that large numbers of scientists don’t accept this supposed consensus, and more and more of them are putting their heads above the parapet to say so. The reason is simple: that more and more “incontrovertible” facts are suggesting that the “consensus” has more to do with ideology than science: the most inconvenient truth, perhaps, is the fact that for more than a decade there has been no global warming to speak of, despite the fact that man-made CO2 continues to grow apace. The scientific establishment has no explanation of this, as emerged with wonderful irony in the so-called “Climategate” scandal in 2009, and particularly in an email from a climate scientist called Kevin Trenberth, who wrote baldly (and he thought secretly) that “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

The fact is that the whole anthropogenic warming theory is based not on observation but on computer models: in this case, it seems, computer models in which so-called “feedbacks” involving water vapour and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2. It is, incidentally, interesting that none of the computer models which feed the theory, not one, predicted the present global warming pause: so why, one might ask, should one have any faith at all in their predictive powers about anything else?

Why, on a Catholic website, bother about this at all? Well, because we have been here before. Attacks on the Church over the Galileo affair have been going on for centuries, especially from the scientific community. Now, however, it is the scientific community which is recoiling from free scientific inquiry in the name of a supposedly “incontrovertible” belief based not on observation but on something else, which some have even called a “substitute religion”. And truly, for many, an environmentalism which warns of a man-made doom approaching us all has indeed begun to take on distinctly quasi-religious overtones: and certainly, an environmentalism of this kind is not going to allow its basic assumptions to be challenged. Man needs religion: and if he won’t have a true religion, he will tend willy-nilly to adopt a false one. As Cardinal Pell puts it “some of the more hysterical and extreme claims about global warming appear symptomatic of a pagan emptiness, of a Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature… Perhaps they’re looking for a cause that is almost a substitute for religion… In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.”

The effects of these “extreme claims about global warming” have had a direct effect on our national life even to the extent of threatening our economy. Coincidentally, this could in fact be a moment when the government might do something about that. On Saturday, Chris Huhne, Energy and Climate Change Secretary, had to resign from the government. I can’t, I have to say, see exactly why what he is charged with is such a heinous crime that it may well put an end to his political career, but I’m bound to say that I hope either that it has, or at least that he never gets anywhere near “climate change” policy ever again.

He has already, for instance, spent hundreds of millions on disfiguring the landscape with wind turbines, of which there are currently 3,000 onshore and several hundred offshore. They produce just one to two per cent of the nation’s power. But there’s potentially a lot more where they came from. In December, Huhne announced that in 20 years’ time there were going to be altogether nearly another 30,000 of these useless things (which most of the time produce nothing at all), at a cost of heaven knows how many billions. Overall, he has steered the Government into making overall “climate change” commitments we almost certainly cannot afford. We may all, for other reasons, be returning to sanity: so now is the perfect time for the Government quietly to reverse all that.

JAIPUR: Richard Dawkins – scientist, bestselling author and the world’s foremost atheist – comes across as mild-mannered and genial but doesn’t believe in pulling his punches. He certainly didn’t on Monday at the Jaipur Lit Fest as he blasted the “lamentable disgrace” of Salman Rushdie’s enforced absence. He also launched a broadside against the “virus of faith”, and said he looked forward to the “complete death of organised religion” in his lifetime.

Dawkins singled out various irrational beliefs, including “Santa Claus, baby Jesus and Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer” and then homed in on the Catholic Church:

Dawkins pointed out that in the 16th century, some Catholics in England had written to a senior figure in the Vatican asking if it was acceptable to murder Elizabeth I. The answer was that since the Queen had led millions away from Catholicism, her murder would be a commendable act. Dawkins didn’t spell it out, but two points were clear- he wasn’t targeting a faith but all of them, and nothing much has changed in almost 500 years. “Religion is deadly because it makes people willing to die and kill for it without a shred of evidence to back up their beliefs,” he said.

Well, that needn’t detain us for very long. We all know that Pius V’s bull, Regnans in Excelsis (1570), which declared Elizabeth I a heretic and released her subjects from their allegiance to her, was a massive political blunder, since Elizabeth, who had thus far tolerated Catholic worship in private, now started actively persecuting Catholics, a persecution whose effects lasted for over 400 years and are with us still (Dawkins himself is in a sense riding on the back of it, as we saw in his campaign against the Pope’s visit to England). Dawkins claims to rule his life by the light of reason: but to say that Pius V’s disastrous blunder disproves his religion is entirely irrational. Regnans in Excelsis isn’t in any sense a religious or spiritual document: it’s power politics from beginning to end. As for religion being deadly “because it makes people willing to die and kill for it without a shred of evidence to back up their beliefs”, how about the willingness of the atheists Stalin and Mao massively to kill for it in the name of their own supposedly scientific but equally unproved anti-religious beliefs?

But this is the kind of thing we are used to from Dawkins. What attracts attention here is that prediction: that there will be the “complete death of organised religion” in his lifetime. Well now. He’s almost certainly wrong, and I wouldn’t bother to dignify his polemical sally with any argument against it, if it didn’t seem on the face of it to be not entirely dissimilar to a recent predictive speculation of the Holy Father’s, uttered three days later at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s recent plenary session. “We are facing,” the Pope said, “a deep crisis of faith, a loss of religious sense which poses the greatest challenge for the Church today”: he went on to warn that “In vast areas of the world faith risks going out like a flame that no longer has anything to burn on.”

It’s happened before, of course, this selective death of faith where once it flourished: where is St Augustine’s Hippo now? In North Africa, once a centre of the Catholic faith, that’s where. But to realise that the survival of the faith in any particular place or area of the globe is never secure is quite different from doubting the dominical promise that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”. Whatever may be happening in Europe and North America, worldwide the faith is still advancing, not retreating.

And of course, that’s what the Pope is really saying: it’s the renewal of faith that he’s after, especially in areas of the world where it seems threatened. Fr Z’s translation of the relevant passage (which I didn’t find complete and in English anywhere else) is useful here:

As we know, in vast areas of the world the Faith is in danger of being snuffed out like a flame that no longer has any sustenance. We are at a profound crisis of faith, at a loss of a religious sense that constitutes the greatest challenge for the Church of today. The renewal of the faith must therefore be the priority in the undertaking of the whole Church in our times. I hope that the Year of Faith can contribute, with the cordial collaboration of all the members of the People of God, to bring God back anew to this world and to open to men an access to the faith, to a reliance on the God who loved us to the end (cf John 13,1), in Christ Jesus, crucified and risen.

Fr Z’s own contribution to that process is to say that “nothing of which His Holiness spoke is going to be accomplished without a renewal of our liturgical worship”; and I’m quite certain that he’s right. That’s where it has to begin: at the altar. I’m less sure than he is that this can be accomplished principally by homing in on Summorum Pontificum, though I absolutely agree that it remains “one of the most important acts of his pontificate”. This is what Fr Z would like to see:

We need more and more and more opportunities for people to experience the older, traditional form of the Roman Rite in our Latin Church parishes.

Younger priests: learn the older form. This is your Rite! Know your Rite! If you are a Latin Church priest, who are you if you don’t know your Rite? Just do it!

Lay people: band together and start requesting celebrations of Holy Mass also in the Extraordinary Form. Get organized. Form a schola and start singing chant so you will be ready when the time comes. Offer to take care of all the material details. Offer to provide vestments, books, money so the priest can go get training. Start thinking about forming a group of servers, perhaps even father and son teams.

I agree with all of that, and on Sundays I not infrequently hear Mass in the Extraordinary Form. But I still find myself more often attending High Mass in Latin according to the Novus Ordo. I am, I admit, exceptionally fortunate in my parish church, the Oxford Oratory, where I can experience every week what the Church’s liturgy could be everywhere. There’s no question for us of “the Faith [being] in danger of being snuffed out like a flame that no longer has any sustenance”. Fr Z concludes by saying that “Many benefits will flow from a side by side experience of both forms of Holy Mass of the Latin Church”, and I’m certain he’s right: I’m quite sure, for instance, that my clergy’s celebration of the Novus Ordo is deeply enriched by the fact that they all regularly celebrate the Old Mass too.

But I am also only too aware that when I am away from home Sundays can be very different, and that though the Mass is always irreducibly the Mass, the way it is celebrated can send a real chill to the heart. For every priest, everywhere, seriously to address this problem has to be seen as a first priority. Do the bishops understand how important this is? I wonder.

It’s a simple but invariable formula. Guests are invited to imagine themselves cast away on a desert island, and to choose eight pieces of music to take with them; discussion of their choices permits a review of their life. At the end of the programme they choose the one piece they would save if all the rest were swept away by the sea.; they are automatically given the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the Bible: they are then asked which other book they would take with them. They also choose a luxury of some sort.

Would you appear on the programme if asked? Of course you would: so would I, just as I would accept if I were offered them both a knighthood and membership of the Order of Merit (than which an appearance on Desert Island Discs is scarcely less prestigious). The fact that I won’t be asked to appear on the programme has never been a disincentive to my thinking up, repeatedly over the years, what my eight desert island discs would be. You’re not asked on, of course, for your musical taste, but for your distinction and achievements. But a surprising number of people think it’s all about the music. I think it was Sue Lawley (the last regular presenter before the present incumbent –the best – the admirable Kirsty Young) who said that people were always coming up to her with their own list of eight choices, under the impression that if she thought they were a really interesting selection she might ask them on to the programme.

The point is that what you choose is supposed to elicit some anecdote or other explanation of why you chose them (apart from any possible musical merits) which will be revealing about the sort of person you are. This was charmingly epitomised by the selection of the great cook, Nigel Slater, who chose some excellent music, but when it came to the record he would save before all the others chose “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” because he always found it so comforting at times of anxiety.

Well, as I say, I’m not going to be asked on to the programme, not now, not ever. But I’ve been refining my personal Desert Island Discs for many years now and the anniversary provides me with my last big chance, one which will never come again: this is my big opportunity to tell the world what I would choose if I were asked. So, here goes (log off now if you’re not interested):

1. Louis Armstrong Hot Five (1928), “West End Blues”
2. Elgar, Violin Concerto (played by Jascha Heifetz)
3. Duke Ellington (1940), “A portrait of Bert Williams”
4. Beethoven, Cello Sonata no 3 in A major (played by Jacqueline Dupré)
5. Jelly Roll Morton, “Doctor Jazz”
6. Schumann, Piano Quintet
7. Mozart, Final sestet of Le Nozze di Figaro
8. JS Bach, B minor Mass: Sanctus (Karajan and the Berlin Philarmonic

But what does that tell you about me? And why on earth should you be interested? Well, what it may indicate – which might be of interest to someone else, and not just to myself – is how very revealing the Desert Island Discs basic formula really is. That choice of eight pieces is never just about the music, since musical taste is always, at least in part, about who you are, sometimes even about how you came to be who you are. I thought I was just choosing some of the pieces which over my lifetime have meant the most to me on purely musical grounds. The fact is, though, that when I look at them from an autobiographical perspective, how much they explain about my own attitudes over the years becomes blindingly obvious to me. That Louis Armstrong piece, for instance, certainly explains not only why I have always detested racial prejudice against black people: not because it made me an anti-racist, but because when it comes to the music I really loved at that time (I was 16, I think, when I discovered the early Louis Armstrong) I was actually distinctly racially prejudiced, but in favour of black people. White jazz musicians like Bix Beiderbecke were all very well. There was nothing actually against them; I travelled down on the train (still pulled by a vast steam engine) from Yorkshire (in 1957, for heaven’s sake) to see the very white Humphrey Lyttelton, one of my great heroes, in his famous club at 100 Oxford Street.

But it wasn’t just that black people were better jazz musicians: it was that only they reached the level of actual musical genius. That recording of “West End Blues” wasn’t just great jazz: it was music which operated at a level which can only be described as sublime. I still think so more than half a century later. Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton underlined my sense of black people’s musical superiority, which came to be balanced, but never entirely expunged, by my slightly later (though overlapping) discovery of dead whites like Elgar, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.

It was the great classics which, I suppose typically enough, came with age to move centre stage in my musical tastes. And here, too, it wasn’t just the discovery of the music which was life-changing. I was still a Protestant atheist when I had to depart early from a rehearsal of the Bach B minor Mass to be performed a few weeks later by the Dublin University Choral Society. The choir was singing Bach’s majestic Sanctus. I noticed a Catholic priest, just inside the double doors which formed the main entrance to the hall: he was in tears. My companion, a theological student at this still very Protestant institution, explained: the priest, he told me, said the words the choir was now singing every day at the altar; they were at the very centre of his life: he had never heard them like that before.

I thought about that scene many times over the years, every time I listened to the B minor Mass in fact. Little by little, it was the Sanctus I found myself waiting for when I put on my increasingly worn (and now replaced) CD. What part did that day, long ago, play in my conversion 30 years later? God knows, not I. But this story does exemplify one thing: music that really matters to us is never just music, it always puts down roots to intellectual and emotional levels well below anything we fully understand. I could write about all my eight choices at equal length: but in the immortal words of Mr Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, I have “delighted [you] for long enough”. Time to sign off. Cue: “By A Sleepy Lagoon”…

Well, if ever there was any doubt about whether or not I was right, it has now been removed – that is for Catholics who understand, unlike the late Cardinal Bernardin, with his “seamless garment” theology (according to which abortion, say, was just one of a whole raft of other issues like war and peace, opposition to the death penalty, welfare reform and civil liberties), that actually “life issues” are not like others, negotiable or – like the morality of war, for instance – subject to context and circumstance: who understand, in other words, that abortion and euthanasia are always and under all circumstances, just wrong.

Obama’s health secretary has now issued a ruling: that under his administration’s Health Care Act not only must any provider of health care be prepared to supply artificial contraception (including drugs which, though labelled contraceptive, are in fact abortifacient) but that that definitely includes Catholics (for the CNS story, see here):

(CNSNews.com) – Cardinal Donald Wuerl, head of the Catholic archdiocese of Washington, DC, issued a warning last week against the implementation of an Obamacare regulation that would place many Catholic employers in an “untenable position” by requiring all health care plans to cover sterilization and abortion-inducing contraceptives, in violation of religious liberty and particularly Catholic moral teaching.

His warning coincided with a full-page ad by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which said the regulation, set to start on Aug. 1, 2012, could “severely curtail” Catholic health care providers.

Catholic institutions account for 12.7 percent of the nation’s hospitals, according to the 2009 American Hospital Association Annual Survey, with more than 5.6 million patients admitted to Catholic hospitals in a one-year period. An additional 1,400 long-term care and other Catholic health facilities are present in all 50 states, according to the Catholic Health Association of the United States. Also, there are about 70 million Catholics in the United States.

So, American Catholics, you now know, if you didn’t know before: you cannot, if you are a faithful Catholic, vote for this man. He is an enemy of your Church and everything it stands for. But that prompts the question: how come so many Catholics voted for him last time? How come, while we are about it, that one of the first things that happened in his presidency was the conferring on him of an honorary degree by Notre Dame, that renowned “Catholic” University?

This is a long and murky story. It involves telling (which I don’t have time for here) all about the links between Notre Dame and certain clergy from the Archdiocese of Chicago (prop. the above-mentioned Cardinal Bernardin) and their connections with a legendary political radical, a Marxist atheist called Saul Alinsky, who despite his many attacks on the Church received vast funding from something called the Catholic Fund for Human Development (CHD), an agency of the USCCB which over the years has raised hundreds of millions from second collections taken up after Sunday Mass. The following are examples of some of the grants made by the CHD:

• 1985: $40,000 for Chicago’s Developing Communities Project, led by then lead organiser, Barack Obama
• 1986: $33,000 for Obama’s Developing Communities Project, which Obama continued to lead
• 1992: ACORN funding (see below) for Project Vote, a Chicago programme which Obama also led
• 1995: Cardinal Bernardin helped commit $116,000 from the national CHD fund to Chicago Metropolitan Sponsors, an Alinsky Industrial Areas Foundation organisation
• 2000 – 2008: $7m went to ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), an Alinsky-influenced, leftist network under criminal investigation in several states. ACORN supports radical, ‘in your face’ local and national causes as well as abortion. CHD funding stopped only in November 2008, well after every other American wondered when the bishops would halt the allocation of $1m to the group.
• Ongoing: $20,000 to $30,000 per community group across the country under the guise of ‘community organisation’
• Also ongoing: 4% to 5% of total CHD funds to the Gamaliel Foundation, a Marxist socio-political network of Alinsky-inspired organisations
• Still ongoing: Alinsky’s own Industrial Areas Foundation, which receives 16% of CHD funds annually!

No wonder that when Obama received his degree at Notre Dame, he spoke so warmly about Cardinal Bernardin: he was addressing an institution that had been deeply impregnated with the CHD mentality and with Cardinal Bernardin’s seamless garment theology. No wonder that when he later spoke to a small group of Catholic journalists, he more or less told them that Cardinal Bernardin had given him his (very Left-wing) start in politics:

“The president said he had fond memories of Cardinal Bernardin and that when he started his neighborhood projects, they were funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development,” he said. “After the first question, from the National Catholic Reporter‘s Joe Feuerherd, the president jokingly asked, ‘Was there really [a controversy at Notre Dame]?’
“The president spoke about how during Cardinal Bernardin’s time the US bishops spoke about the nuclear freeze, the sanctuary movement, immigration, and the poor, but that later a decided change took place,” added Fr Kearns. “He said that the responses to his administration mirror the tensions in the Church overall, but that Cardinal Bernardin was pro-life and never hesitated to make his views known, but he had a consistent ‘seamless garment’ approach that emphasized the other issues as well. The president said that that part of the Catholic tradition continues to inspire him. Those issues, he said, seemed to have gotten buried by the abortion debate.”

Well, Mr President, you’re wrong: there has indeed been something, perhaps not yet enough, of a “decided change” (though what about the CHD? I’d like to know, if anyone can tell me): but American Catholics still take issues to do with social justice seriously, of course they do. Notre Dame, however, is now very clearly seen as being an institution which is Catholic in name only. And that is a very definite advance: at least American Catholics know where they are. It might be fitting, indeed, to end with the letter Archbishop Nienstedt of Saint Paul and Minneapolis wrote to the President of Notre Dame about his now notorious invitation to Obama, a letter which spelled out the parting of the ways very clearly:

Dear Father Jenkins:

I have just learned that you, as President of the University of Notre Dame, have invited President Barack Obama to be the graduation commencement speaker at the University’s exercises on May 17, 2009. I was also informed that you will confer on the president an honorary doctor of laws degree, one of the highest honors bestowed by your institution.

I write to protest this egregious decision on your part. President Obama has been a pro-abortion legislator. He has indicated, especially since he took office, his deliberate disregard of the unborn by lifting the ban on embryonic stem cell research, by promoting the FOCA [Freedom of Choice Act] agenda and by his open support for gay rights throughout this country.

It is a travesty that the University of Notre Dame, considered by many to be a Catholic University, should give its public support to such an anti-Catholic politician.

I hope that you are able to reconsider this decision. If not, please do not expect me to support your University in the future.

Sincerely yours,

The Most Reverend John C. Nienstedt Archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis

That about says it all; and now Obama’s abortionist Health Care Act has put the matter beyond doubt. The question now is this: how will that 54 per cent of American Catholics (and that’s a lot of votes) who helped put him into the presidency, vote this time? And why is it that I have a sinking feeling about the answer to that question?

Mary Kenny commented in the Telegraph that “Our Irish parents and grandparents would find astonishing the acidly anti-clerical views expressed in the Republic of Ireland today. The land that once called itself a foremost Catholic nation and most loyal ally of the Holy Father is awash with sentiments that seem to veer between Ulster Paisleyism and the Spanish republicanism of the 1930s”.

The Irish foreign minister a few months later announced that the Government had decided to close the Irish embassy to the Holy See, saying that it cost too much and that given Ireland’s current financial situation, with great regret, and bla de bla de bla. Whatever the excuse, the closure was pretty clearly part of a continuing anti-Vatican (and anti-Catholic) campaign by the Irish government.

But how far was all that part of a real and fundamental rejection by the Irish people of the Catholic religion itself? George Weigel, from across the Atlantic, pronounced confidently that “Ireland has now become the epicentre of European anti-Catholicism”. But this was always a ludicrous conclusion to reach. Of course, there had been a huge disenchantment with the Irish bishops, and widespread calls for radical reform in the way the Irish Church was actually run. But to suggest that the Irish had lost their faith, that there had been a massive cultural shift leading to the kind of secularisation that we have seen on this side of the Irish sea, even to the birth of an anti-Catholicism on the scale suggested by George Weigel, was always utterly absurd.

As I wrote at the time,

The real point about the Irish people is that they have not become disenchanted with the Catholic religion at all; it’s precisely by the moral standards of the Catholic religion that they are now judging all too many bishops and some, a small minority but still far too many, clergy. The child abuse scandals themselves have brought no decline in Mass attendance. On the contrary, far from being the “epicentre” of European anti-Catholicism, the practice of the Catholic religion is one of the highest in Europe.

As Michael Kelly pointed out in the Irish Catholic in April: “Decline in Church attendance in Ireland happened long before revelations about abuse and the subsequent cover-up. Polls show that in 1981 a staggering 88 per cent of Irish people attended Mass at least once a month, with 82 per cent attending weekly. By 2006 that figure had slipped to just 48 per cent for weekly Mass attendance while that figure climbs to 67 per cent when those who attend at least once a month are factored in.

Subsequent polls have been fairly consistent, putting weekly Mass attendance somewhere between 45 per cent and 48 per cent. These are remarkably high figures by western European standards (the latest figures for Italy are 22 per cent and approximately 10 per cent for France). The fact is that the rebellion of the chattering and political classes against the power of the bishops (in itself not necessarily a bad thing) was never remotely a rejection by a largely Catholic people of their faith. And that, it seems, is now being borne out by recent events. According to a piece in the Catholic World Report,

the Irish Government is now coming under increased grassroots pressure to reverse its always controversial decision to close the country’s Embassy to the Holy See:

Dozens of parliamentarians – including many from the Fine Gael and Labour coalition parties – attended a meeting in Dublin January 18 called to highlight opposition to the closure and some 96,000 postcards have been sent to Prime Minister Enda Kenny by members of several different lay initiatives and individual Catholics protesting the move.

‘Ireland Stand Up’ is campaigning for the closure of the embassy to be reversed and for the Government to issue an invitation for Pope Benedict XVI to visit the country.

Note the name of that movement: “Ireland stand up”: this is a movement of the people against politicians who have now gone just too far (incidentally, almost a third of TDs (Irish MPs) – backbenchers, with their regular contact with their constituencies, are often better informed than ministers about grassroots opinion – attended that meeting calling for the Irish embassy to the Vatican to be reopened). The CWR reports that the energy around the campaign to restore the embassy to the Holy See has surprised many. “Ordinary Catholics seem to have found a voice around this issue,” they quote David Quinn of the think tank the Iona Institute as saying.

It’s one thing for Irish politicians to get out from under the historically excessive political power of the bishops: that can never now be re-established, and probably a good thing, too. But the political attacks on the Vatican itself were a big mistake. When you have lost faith in your bishops, it’s the Pope you look to. “Ireland Stand Up” wants the Pope to celebrate Mass at the closing ceremonies of the 50th International Eucharistic Congress next June in Croke Park, Dublin. I have a feeling that that will happen. Pope Benedict will come and celebrate Mass before a vast congregation: and he will once more, by the great power of his visible holiness and humility, weave his magic. Just as his visit here led to many salutary changes in the English Church, so the regeneration of the Irish Church, and the beginning of the restoration of its morale, will be set in motion then.

A gay senior clergyman who claims he was blocked from becoming a bishop has threatened to take the Church of England to court.

Church sources say the Very Rev Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans, believes he could sue officials under the Equality Act 2010, which bans discrimination on the grounds of sexuality.

He has instructed a leading employment lawyer after being rejected for the role of Bishop of Southwark in 2010.

One of the first Catholic Herald blogs I wrote in 2010 was about Dr John, who is certainly homosexual but is also (so he very clearly declares, and there is no reason to doubt him) a celibate Anglican priest, who has for years been at the centre of controversy over homosexuality in the Church of England. He had just failed to be appointed Bishop of Southwark, having apparently been told that he was going to be appointed (incidentally, I know perfectly well what the Catholic Church teaches about Anglican orders and I of course accept and believe it: but I’m not going to write about Anglican prelates as being – in quotes – “bishops”, or Anglican priests as, by implication, “priests” – it’s just offensive).

I wrote at the time that this was yet another example of a consistent (and I suspect ineradicable) Anglican incapacity to think theologically:

The point about Dr John is that he is “celibate”: and by that he means that he and his long-term partner are chaste, that they abstain from any kind of sexual act. In other words, his behaviour is entirely consistent with article 2359 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which teaches that “Homosexual persons are called to chastity” and that “By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom… they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”

In other words, his behaviour is an example of chastity for other homosexuals to follow, not an encouragement to clerical promiscuity.

But this kind of thing lies way outside the normal intellectual processes of the average Anglican, who either thinks that active homosexuality just doesn’t matter, nothing to do with him, or alternatively thinks (especially if he is your average Anglican evangelical) that if you have homosexual inclinations, whatever you actually do you are steeped in sin and will infect others if you are allowed anywhere near them.

This wasn’t the first time Dr John had been at the centre of controversy over the appointment of known homosexual clergy to senior posts in the Church of England: he was, indeed, the first example of it. In 2003 he was appointed Bishop of Reading. There was opposition to this appointment from a minority of bishops and he was persuaded to withdraw by the then newly enthroned archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. Other bishops, however, thought the archbishop was wrong, supported Dr John, and he was subsequently installed as Dean of St Albans (ie, as adminstrator of St Albans Abbey, the cathedral church of that diocese). That then led to controversy in the diocese, and some evangelical churches in the Diocese of St Albans decided that they would withhold their statutory financial contributions to the diocese until further notice in protest. So, one way or another, Jeffrey John has had a pretty rough time of it.

As it happens, I used to know him quite well: we were both trained together for the Anglican priesthood at the Anglo-Catholic seminary, St Stephen’s House, Oxford, which in those days was still one of the centres of the Anglican internal Counter-Reformation, since defunct. He is, I am quite sure, a man of considerable ability and integrity.

And, so far, he appears to me to have been a man of unbending theological principle. Now, however, he has for the first time made a major error precisely where he has thus far been so surefooted; he has fallen into the morass of secularism which in the end is inseparable from the Anglican mind: he has, in other words become – or so it seems – the kind of Anglican he would once have recoiled from with horror. He has decided to invoke an entirely secular conception of human rights against what still claims to be part of the one, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Presumably he still believes that it is, since unlike many of us who left it and became Catholics on precisely the ground that we no longer believed that it was, he is still a member of it. So against what still he believes to be a divine entity, he now, it seems, proposes to deploy the Equality Act 2010. It is a very sad falling away, and I am sorry to see it.

Let me direct your attention to a couple of websites, which seen together provide food for thought. The first is the website of the new US ordinariate, the Ordinariate of the Chair of Peter, a name which splendidly makes very clear a basic characteristic of most Anglican converts these days: their loyalty to the Magisterium (undoubtedly one reason for the open hostility of most of our hierarchy to the idea of an independent Anglican Catholic jurisdiction 20 years ago). The newly announced US ordinary (who has been a friend of mine for 30 years; I first knew him in Oxford when he was doing his DPhil) is Fr Jeffrey Steenson, a distinguished Patristics scholar and the former Anglican bishop of the Rio Grande. From his website, I perceive that he is getting very full support from the American hierarchy in more than just fine words: he already, for instance, has a “principal church”, in other words, a sort of cathedral, which was immediately designated as such on the erection of the US ordinariate, by the Cardinal Archbishop of Houston, Texas, where he will be based.

The second website is the Ordinariate Portal, which reports on our own English ordinariate, that of Our Lady of Walsingham. In October, this reproduced without comment the following from an article which appeared on Damian Thompson’s feisty Telegraph website:

I was disappointed to miss Cardinal Levada’s visit to London for a fundraising event for the ordinariate sponsored by the Catholic Herald …. It would have been good to hear the Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith remind us that the ordinariate is the Pope’s own project and an “important new structure for the Church”.

But, talking of important structures, could I just ask: where is the London church that will serve as the ordinariate’s headquarters? The question was already a pressing one when I raised it back in January. The failure to address the matter is so morale-sapping that I really can’t blame those Anglicans who are hesitating to take the plunge. This isn’t the fault of the ordinary or Cardinal Levada; as usual, the blame lies with the slow-acting Bishops of the Benzodiazepine Rite based in Eccleston Square. If they don’t find a church soon, there won’t be a second wave of Ordinariate converts. And you have to ask: do they really want one?

It’s a very good question, which I am now in my slow-moving way beginning to ask myself. Damian Thompson was asking it from the outset. He repeated the question yet again last month: this time, the Ordinariate Portal reproduced his article in full, under the headline “Damian Thompson: The English bishops are trying to smother the ordinariate. How long will Rome tolerate this situation?” It’s a headline which doesn’t surprise one much when one reads it on Mr Thompson’s blog; it’s his style, and he has been from the beginning the principal scourge of the English hierarchy in general and of Archbishop Nichols in particular. But it’s one thing to see a headline like that in the Telegraph: entirely another to see it in the Ordinariate Portal. Have a look at it: it’s very striking, as is the article which follows.

It prompts the question: what is the policy of those running the Ordinariate Portal; is it just to reproduce everything that appears online about the ordinariate? I doubt that, because there’s lots of such material that isn’t reproduced in it. Or, do they repeat material sympathetic to them, material, furthermore, with which they to some extent agree? In this particular case, it prompts the question: does the leadership of the ordinariate agree that the English bishops are trying to smother it? It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if they were: it’s what they did 20 years ago after all, and they haven’t changed that much; many of the same bishops, indeed, are still there. Does the leopard change its spots? Last time, they killed the idea of people crossing the Tiber in parish groups, but put in place fast-track provisions for the recycling of convert Anglican clergy: they got quite a lot of high-quality priests that way without having to bother with their laity: this mitigated the effects of the shortage of indigenous vocations no end. Are they up to the same tricks again? This time, just let the whole thing fall flat, then absorb the ordinariate clergy into the local diocese, and their laity into the local parishes?

Let me make it clear: I have deliberately, in the course of writing this article, not asked, even off the record, any of the ordinariate monsignori if they agree with what I might call the “Thompson scenario”. I say this in order to protect them from the accusation that I am knowingly reflecting their views. But if this analysis is correct, if the bishops do have some such strategy, and if the ordinariate’s leaders do think so, then it really is time for Rome to intervene. I hope that Archbishop Mennini is keeping a close eye on all this, and that he is still Rome’s man and hasn’t, like so many of his predecessors, gone native, seduced by the “creamy English charm” (Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead) of whoever is the current incumbent of Archbishop’s House, Westminster. Damian Thompson claims that “The Vatican is well aware that the English bishops are trying to smother this initiative”. If so, as he comments, “much depends on the Pope’s state of health… The enemies of the ordinariate are counting on this pontificate coming to an end before the structures of the English ordinariate are set in stone.” Well, I suspect (certainly, I pray) that the Pope has plenty of life left in him yet: it isn’t time for him to go, he has too many things to complete. And this increasingly looks like one of them.

And how typical of the Catholics he leads are the views of Cardinal O’Brien, who in an interview in this newspaper in October 2006, conducted by Professor John Haldane, declared that he would be “happy” if the Scots voted for independence, and predicted that independence is coming “before too long”. He drew parallels with the independence of the Catholic Church in Scotland: “It is difficult to argue that ecclesiastical independence is acceptable but political independence is not.” I have to say that Cardinal O’Brien’s views sound logical to me. Certainly, I would vote for Scottish independence in the forthcoming referendum if I were a Scot. What irritates me is that the Scots will get a referendum next year, but I won’t. The question the Scots will answer will be whether they should be independent of the English. The question I would like to answer is whether the English should be allowed independence from the Scots.

We need to ask the question: why is it that support for Scottish independence is so much higher in England than it is in Scotland? The polls are unanimous and their results are very striking; they are, indeed, staggering. The ICM survey for the Sunday Telegraph, published yesterday, shows that there is a narrow majority, 43 per cent, of Scots against independence, compared with 40 per cent in favour. Far fewer English, however are opposed. Forty-three per cent are in favour: but only 32 per cent are against. Why is that?

There are in fact very good reasons for it. I hope that my Scottish friends will be patient if I am frank. What the English are really shown to be in favour of in that ICM survey is not so much Scottish independence as their own liberation from the increasingly irksome burden of the relationship between England and Scotland. Do not mistake me. I (we) admire the Scots and Scottish culture. But frankly, on this side of the border we are getting seriously fed up with post-Braveheart Scots chippiness for one thing, and with the results, for another, of the coming home to roost, within our now seriously mutilated constitution, of the so-called West Lothian question – thus named by the late Enoch Powell, as a somewhat ironic dig at the former member for West Lothian, Tam Dalyell, who was constantly raising it in debates on Scottish devolution in the Westminster Parliament. The West Lothian question, for those who don’t know, was not so much a question as a prediction, of a dire problem that would arise (and did) for the post-devolution governance of England: that though no Westminster MP, including Scots MPs, has any right to vote on questions within the purview of the Scottish assembly, Scottish MPs can and do vote on questions to do uniquely with England. This is more than irritating: it is just wrong. With Scottish independence, these frankly underemployed Scots Westminster politicians would simply disappear, to the regret, I suspect, of very few.

The question remains. Why shouldn’t I have a referendum asking whether I as an Englishman would be in favour of independence from Scotland? BBC Radio 4’s Question Time last Saturday, broadcast from Edinburgh, was particularly irritating. The panel, all Scots, were asked whether they felt British (answer, no: they all felt Scottish). Nobody ever asks the English if they feel British. Many Englishmen feel English a long time before they “feel” British: but they’re not allowed to. They go to Sainsbury’s and are told that they can buy British strawberries (from Herefordshire) or British lamb from Dorset. But if it’s Welsh lamb, it’s called Welsh, and if it’s Scottish beef it’s called Scottish.

Why is that? Not being allowed to describe things, and ourselves, as English is a nuisance we have to put up with because of the Scots. I once wrote an article for the Sunday Times during the editorship of the very Scottish Andrew Neil, in which I referred to “English culture”. It was changed by a sub-editor to “British culture”, which wasn’t at all what I had meant (there’s no such thing as “British culture”, any more than there’s any such thing as a “British accent”). When I asked why, I was told “sorry, under the current editor that’s the house style”. Infuriating.

These are not the only sources of the current English groundswell of opinion in favour of the Scots taking themselves off: but they will do to start with. None of this, of course, is to say that the Scots have no reason for their own irritations and resentments against us (and please, don’t anyone point this out indignantly as though I hadn’t accepted it myself). There is no question that we currently feel very badly about each other, and that the relationship between our two nations is currently in a very bad state. We English now have a much better and warmer relationship with the Irish Republic than with the Scots, despite the fact that historically the Irish suffered infinitely greater injustices at our hands – and for much longer – than the Scots ever did. I look forward to Scottish independence because, paradoxically, I think that English-Scottish relations would then be much closer, even warmer. There will be a hard-fought settlement. But once that has been achieved and accepted on both sides, our relationship could then be freed at last from its current state of mutual resentment. I think that needs to happen: and the sooner the better.

The sensitivity of the Turks at the time the ITV programme was first broadcast (three years ago, when they kicked up a huge fuss) clearly had to do with their ambition to enter the EU. They even accused the Duchess herself of trying singlehandedly to scupper this ambition. As the Mirror recalls,

Nimet Cubukcu, Turkey’s minister of family affairs, said after the film aired: “It is obvious Sarah Ferguson is ill-intentioned and is trying to launch a smearing campaign against Turkey by opposing Turkey’s EU membership.”

An ITV spokesman said of the broadcast: “This is a valid area of public interest at a time when the UK government is endorsing the accession of Turkey into the EU, a process which is conditional in part on Turkey improving its human rights record with children.”

Chris Rogers, the presenter and reporter who travelled with the Duchess for the undercover trip said: “Sarah and I witnessed children dressed in rags at Turkey’s Saray Institution, which had 700 unwanted, disabled youngsters shut up within its walls.

“There was a terrible stench of urine, sweat and vomit. We saw children tied to benches like dogs, women with their arms pinned behind their back and covered in faeces.”

One thing is clear enough: that if Turkey were now a member of the EU, the Duchess of York would already have been arrested on a European arrest warrant, and would probably already be languishing in a Turkish jail awaiting trial. So far, the worst case involving these appallingly unjust warrants (against which there is no appeal in an English court) led to a year in a stinking Greek jail for an innocent man. That case could one day be horrendously overshadowed by new injustices, beginning with the most sensational of all: for if ever Turkey does join the EU, the Duchess of York will undoubtedly, soon after the country’s accession, be in handcuffs on a plane to Ankara, there to await trial and a probable jail sentence of up to 22 years, for doing something which in any other EU country would have been perfectly legal. She has, in fact, become a one-person extra argument (there are already so many) against allowing the Turks in to the EU.

If Turkey really does still want to join the EU, this attempted prosecution is, in fact, a huge own goal. The Independent, I see, ended its report on this affair with the laconic observation that “Calls to the Turkish embassy in London went unanswered yesterday”. I don’t blame them: what could they possibly say? Turkish diplomats in London are presumably well aware of the implications of this case for Turkey’s relations with Europe. I don’t say “with the rest of Europe”, you will note, since this whole grotesque affair demonstrates nothing more starkly than that these people are just not Europeans. They don’t think like Europeans, their culture, their traditions and their politics are utterly alien to the European mind-set. This is not a European country, and in the very nature of human cultures never could be.

Its continuing treatment of its own Christian minority, about which I have written here before now, is one major sign of this. You could argue, of course, that modern secularism is just as anti-Christian. But this is on a scale and of a kind which operates in an entirely different dimension. And it is getting worse: as I indicated in the headline of a previous blog post: “Despite the EU’s demands on human rights, Turkey’s persecution of Christians is escalating.” And it is important to understand that this is not simply Turkish government policy. It is deeply embedded in Turkish tradition and mores. As I wrote in that article (about 6 months ago)

There is little doubt that the Turkish government’s anti-Christian policies have a good deal of popular support: this is, quite simply, an anti-Christian culture (and therefore incompatible, I would argue, with the European culture it claims to want to be part of). … a survey [has shown] that more than half of the population of Turkey opposes members of other religions being allowed to hold meetings or to publish materials explaining their faith. The survey also found that almost 40 per cent of the population of Turkey said they had “very negative” or “negative” views of Christians.

Christ Rogers, the reporter accompanying Sarah Ferguson in her brave exposure of that disgusting Turkish children’s “home”, was yesterday “unavailable for comment”. However, as the Independent quotes him writing in 2010: “For Turkey to try to prosecute us rather than admit its failings in caring for some of its most vulnerable children is shameful. The message has been clear: if you want to expose our human rights’ abuses, there is a price to pay.”

This whole affair reveals a frame of mind so utterly and immutably alien to everything we believe in that it really is now time for European governments to declare clearly what surely they already know: that Turkish membership of the EU is simply not a possibility. Not now, not ever.