Vatican officials have expressed surprise at the Society of St Pius X’s response to the Holy See’s Doctrinal Preamble, reports Andrea Tornielli.

Bishop Raymond Lahey has told a court in Canada that he is “truly sorry” for possessing and importing child pornography.

The Vatican hosted a Latin competition between pupils from Austria and Liechtenstein yesterday.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster urges readers of the Sun newspaper to perform “random acts of kindness” at Christmas.

Donald Snyder reports that a wave of anti-clericalism is sweeping across Poland.

Technology pioneered by NASA is helping to preserve precious manuscripts in the Vatican Library.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty of NPR investigates Newt Gingrich’s conversion to Catholicism.

Dylan Parry wonders if Catholics have the right to deface blasphemous posters.

And eChurch Blog is appalled that the Vatican has failed to claim the pornographic website domain Vatican.xxx.

For instance, in my last post I criticised Cardinal Maradiaga who made comments in a homily at the climate change conference in Durban which could be taken as implying that those who don’t support the IPCC generated global warming cult were supporting something as morally repugnant as apartheid. I opined that he was simply wrong: but one of those supporting me went further than that: “he shows himself to be a Marxist,” he declared, “by promoting the global-warming cultism.” He then asserted that “most ‘cardinals’ made by Wojtyla are degenerate”. Degenerate?

But it’s some of the comments agreeing with my criticisms of Archbishop Nichols over civil unions, this week and also last, that are worrying me at the moment. It seems to me that he is supporting civil unions in a way the Church condemns, and that he ought to be more attentive to maintaining the truth of the Magisterium he is there to teach and defend. And it has seemed to me that as a Catholic bishop, he is too responsive to the notion that at some point in the future the Magisterium itself might selectively change (and so, it sometimes seems he thinks, he might as well do it now).

As one of my correspondents pointed out beneath my last piece, “when interviewed by the BBC, ++Nichols was asked whether the Catholic Church will follow the Anglican Communion in being ‘flexible’ on such questions as women priests, homosexual partnerships etc, his response was ‘Who knows what is down the road?’ What kind of ‘Catholic’ archbishop is he?”

Well, it’s a good question. “The Archbishop would make a good Anglican!” declared another correspondent. Well, would he? I used to be an Anglican: and when I was, I was consistently critical of my bishops, as indeed were most Anglo-Catholics, over a whole range of issues, mostly involving their faithfulness to the basic Christian revelation of the incarnation and Resurrection of Christ, but also including such matters as the “ordination” of women as priests. We made a bit of a nuisance of ourselves, I am glad to say; so much so that when the idea of a collective reception of Anglo-Catholics into the Catholic Church was mooted in the early 90s (to come to fruition only two decades later), it was greeted with horror (and subsequently squashed) by such Catholic bishops as Bishop Crispian Hollis of Portsmouth, who assumed (I suppose noting how papalist we all were) that we would all be just as activist against the English Catholic establishment as we had been against the Anglican one. He was wrong; most of us were desperate to be members of a Church to which we could be loyal; and most of us were content to learn the ropes and leave the business of coping with the English bishops to the Pope, whose job it was, after all.

I remember a fierce argument I had with Peter Hebblethwaite in Oxford on just this subject (I think he had taken Bishop Hollis’s line in the Tablet and had had a go at me personally): what you don’t understand, I said, is that, much as you and I disagree about many things, I can see that we both believe in, and are united within, the same religion. My difficulty with so many Anglicans, I continued, is that I just don’t, at a fundamental level, believe what they believe. I pointed to the annual Sea of Faith conference, with which about 200 Anglican priests were affiliated, which was based on a disbelief in the very existence of God. That, I said, is tolerated by the Anglican bishops in the name of “Anglican comprehensiveness” in a way it could never be tolerated within the Catholic Church. He agreed. And I still think that there is a fundamental difference between an Anglican liberal and a Catholic one. They all read the Tablet; but the Tiber still flows strongly between them.

I really do not believe – I just have an instinct about this – that Archbishop Nichols could ever be an Anglican (though I do now think – as I didn’t when he was at Birmingham – that he has distinct tendencies in a Hebblethwaiteian direction); so it seemed to me, in the interests of fairness, that I had better try to find the original context of that now notorious “who knows what’s down the road”?

Interestingly, it occurred in the course of an argument with the fierce BBC journalist Stephen Sackur, most of which shows Archbishop Nichols fighting a valiant defensive action against a very aggressive secularist attack, in defence of the Catholic idea of truth. Here’s part of it:

S. You see you will know as well as I do there are social trend surveys in the United Kingdom and many other western developed nations which suggest that on issues like the view of homosexuality the general population is getting more and more “liberal”.

N. Certainly.

S. And yet you and the Pope are sticking to a deeply traditional, small “conservative” line. Therefore the disconnect between the general population and the Roman Catholic Church appears to be getting wider. Does that not worry you?

N. Well no, what would worry me more frankly is to try and refashion a message simply to suit a time. I think there is if you like a critical distance to be held between how the Church struggles to understand a revealed truth and how a society is moving. If they’re too close there’s no light. If they’re too far apart there’s no light.

S. There’s no Church. If they’re too far apart frankly there’s no Church

N. There might be no Church. That’s true.

S. There’ll be nobody in the pews.

N. That’s true.

S. And let me first just quote [to] you, sorry to interrupt but it is important, the Pope in his letter to Irish Catholics in which he expressed great remorse for what happened in Ireland going back to the child sex abuse scandals. He said and I’m quoting his words now: “Fast-paced social change has occurred often affecting peoples’ traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values.” The Pope himself surely recognises there is a problem here and is the Church not going to have to respond to it?

N. Well let me quote the Pope back to you in 1986, I think it was, as a theologian he said he could foresee the day when the Church in some parts of the world had shrunk so much that it would become a small flock.

S. He used the word “remnant”

N. Yes he probably did. That’s a very biblical expression. So he’s not … afraid of that. He would put fidelity over success so the criteria we’re here for is not success.

S. You say he’s not afraid of becoming “a remnant” he would put orthodoxy, loyalty, purity

N. No, no a search for truth

S. OK so maybe purity of theology before …

N. [interrupting] That is the experience of every Christian. That’s the experience of everybody who loses their security loses their status in a society loses their life in martyrdom. It’s the whole pathway of fidelity to Christ. It’s just the way it is.

That’s the high point, for me, of the archbishop’s argument. The trouble is that he has an impulse towards agreement not only wherever it’s possible, but even sometimes where it shouldn’t be. Having said “It’s just the way it is”, he seems to need to appear reasonable, even to a secularist like Sackur; and my hunch is (I hope this isn’t unfair) that that leads him into danger (it has also, incidentally, led to his refusal to face the facts over the Soho Masses). This need to appear reasonable is the explanation of that now notorious remark about the possibility of the Church changing its views on such issues as women priests and homosexual partnerships. But even after he’s uttered it, you can see him trying to unsay it, and return to his anti-secularising stance. And it has to be said that, overall, most of what I have quoted and will now quote is hardly the kind of argument you can imagine from an Anglican bishop: but here he momentarily stumbles. The trouble is that this is the kind if argument in which if you once lose your footing, you’ve lost everything, even if you recover: it’s a bit like Torville and Dean both coming a cropper on the ice, even if they immediately recover and skate on. This is how the interview continues:

S. The Church of England for example in this country is taking a rather different view. They believe there has to be some flexibility. The church has to be a reflection of society’s values to a certain extent and therefore we see women priests, women vicars, and there’s obviously in some parts of the Anglican Communion, women bishops.

N. Certainly.

S. Some of their vicars are also prepared to sanction gay unions. That church is showing flexibility. Is the Catholic Church not going to have to do the same eventually?

N. I don’t know. Who knows what’s down the road?

S. Well I’m just asking you. You’re rather an important player in the Catholic Church. What do you believe it should be?

N. No no. There’s no doubt in my mind that our first call is to faithfulness and not to success. And if faithfulness involves that kind of shrinking then so be it. But it’s not as if the Church has policies and then focus groups then tries to re-shape so that it captures the mood of the day or the wind and therefore gets momentum behind it. That’s not simply the way the Catholic Church understands itself.

I fear that when it comes to responding to an invitation to confront a known enemy, there are only two possible alternatives. Either (and I suspect that this is the wise course) the encounter should be avoided entirely: if they’re out to get you, they’ll probably succeed – it’s what they’re good at. But if you do get involved in such a conversation, don’t try to come over as reasonable, it’s not what they’re interested in. Just state the Catholic view clearly and stick to it. Make no concessions. Keep a straight bat: and don’t be tempted to try to hit the ball to the boundary unless you’re sure that it’s a really weak one. These people bowl fast and tricky. Your job isn’t to score a century: it’s to defend your wicket and avoid being bowled out. That’s the most you can hope for against an aggressive enemy: you’re not going to convince him, get used to that. Your short-term priority is survival. “It’s just the way it is.”

An article in the Lancet medical journal has called for nuns to take the Pill in order to reduce their risk of cancer (full text).

Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has said that human dignity is “a primary doctrine” of the Church.

Carey Gillam of Reuters investigates the child pornography case that has shaken the Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols tells BBC Radio 2′s Chris Evans that there is no shortage of generosity in Britain despite the economic downturn (audio from 2:48.00).

Fr Raymond de Souza praises the “real hero” behind the new English translation of the Mass.

And Desmond Samith urges Catholics not to get too absorbed in venerating saints’ relics.

The next Morning Catholic must-reads will be on Monday, December 12

My initial hope that we would now get a straight answer to a straight question was of course dashed: what we actually got was a kind of sideways slither, in which he said that the bishops actually simply accepted the existence of civil unions. But what he had said before was that they were valuable: “We would want to emphasise that civil partnerships actually provide a structure in which people of the same sex who want a lifelong relationship [and] a lifelong partnership can find their place and protection and legal provision… The Church holds great store by the value of commitment in relationships and undertakings that people give…” If that isn’t actual approval, I would like to know what is. Here’s the relevant part of the CNA article:

Catholic commentator William Oddie wrote in the Nov 30 edition of the Catholic Herald that “Archbishop Nichols says he is in favor of gay civil unions: but that legally includes the right to adopt. So why did we lose our adoption agencies?”

“Now we are told, by the chairman of the bishops’ conference, [Archbishop Nichols] that the English Church supports civil unions between homosexual persons, unions which have been given the legal right to adopt children,” Oddie continued.

When Archbishop Nichols was asked by CNA if the bishops of England were contradicting the Vatican’s guidelines, he said that the bishops have tried “to recognize the reality of the legal provision in our country of an agreement, a partnership, with many of the same legal safeguards as in marriage.” He further explained that while the bishops recognise the existence of civil partnerships, they also “believe that that is sufficient”, and that they should not be placed on par with marriage…

“Clearly, respect must be shown to those who in the situation in England use a civil partnership to bring stability to a relationship,” the archbishop said, qualifying that while “equality is very important and there should be no unjust discrimination,” that “commitment plus equality do not equal marriage”.

Archbishop Nichols said the key distinction between civil partnerships and marriage is that the former does not “in law contain a required element of sexual relationships”.

“Same-sex partnerships are not marriage because they have no root in a sexual relationship, which marriage does,” he explained. “And that’s the distinction that I think it’s important for us to understand, that marriage is built on the sexual partnership between a man and a woman which is open to children to their nurture and education.”

So while the bishops of England and Wales “respect the existence of same-sex partnerships in law,” he said, “the point we are at now is to say that they are not the same as marriage.”

There’s one new element in that answer: the preposterous argument that “Same-sex partnerships are not marriage because they have no root in a sexual relationship, which marriage does.” In other words, they’re not like marriage at all. But of course they’re like marriage in one very important respect: that they have as a fundamental defining element that those in such unions have the legal right to adopt children. This isn’t the first time Archbishop Nichols has said he accepts and supports these unions, and has attempted to father his views on the bishops’ conference: in the immediate aftermath of the Pope’s visit, in September of 2010, he claimed that the bishops weren’t against them:

ROME, September 24, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com)– A day after the departure of Pope Benedict XVI from Britain, his senior archbishop, the unofficial head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, told a BBC interviewer that the English bishops had purposely refused to oppose (my emphasis) legalizing homosexual civil partnerships. (Download the audio here.)

Attempting to defend the Catholic hierarchy from accusations of being opposed to the homosexualist political agenda around the world, Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster hastened to assure the BBC’s Huw Edwards, “That’s not true.”

“In this country, we were very nuanced. We did not oppose gay civil partnerships. We recognized that in English law there might be a case for those. What we persistently said is that these are not the same as marriage.”

But that simply wasn’t, and isn’t, the case. Archbishop Nichols, in a tight corner, and faced by several aggressively secularist interlocutors, was winging it. That fact is that “we” (ie the bishops) never said that “there might be a case for those”. What the bishops actually said in 2003, as I pointed out in my article last week, was that “the government’s proposals to create civil partnerships for same-sex couples would not promote the common good”, because these proposals would in the long term undermine marriage and the family, and that they were “not needed to defend fundamental human rights or remedy significant injustices for same-sex couples, as these have either already been substantially addressed or can largely be addressed by the couple entering into contractual arrangements privately.”

And now we are being told, preposterously, that gay civil unions aren’t based on a sexual relationship, so Catholics don’t have to be opposed to them. If that’s the case, one has to ask, why can’t siblings living together be given the same legal framework of protection? And I repeat, why do partners in a civil union have the right to adopt – (making these unions virtually indistinguishable in law from civil marriage) – a right which the Church everywhere else in the world including here has consistently opposed?

That claim that civil unions aren’t based on sexual relations taking place has a familiar ring to it, however: it is highly reminiscent of the persistent claim by this same Archbishop Nichols that we cannot know that those gay people who communicate at the Soho Masses are sexually active. He also says that those who aver (with very good reason, including the open and repeated avowals of those concerned) that at the Soho Masses those involved in active homosexual relationships do receive Holy Communion, in defiance of the laws of the Church, should “learn to hold their tongue”. And if you doubt that he said that, here he is on YouTube, actually saying it.

To return to civil unions, the fact is that when the bishops said in 2003 that they “would in the long term undermine marriage and the family”, they have very evidently already been proved right. It’s all very well for the archbishop to say that he supports marriage: why then does he also support the gay civil unions which by having virtually all the rights of marriage have undoubtedly weakened the distinctiveness of true marriage and will certainly weaken it further?

I hope that CNA follow up on this story. They are read in Rome; and that’s where this matter should now be taken up.

Popular Christian Christmas traditions “create islands for the soul” amid consumerism, Pope Benedict said before a screening arranged by Bavarian Television on Friday (video).

Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo of Kinshasa has urged the electoral authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo not to attempt to manipulate the results of last week’s general election.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster has clarified his position on civil partnerships after critics suggested he was at odds with the Vatican.

The supreme court in Spain has ruled that Opus Dei must delete the personal details of an ex-member from its records as she asked them to do when she left.

Fr Joseph Komonchak disputes the SSPX “mantra” that the Second Vatican Council was pastoral not doctrinal.

John Allen reflects on a “new symbol” of false abuse allegations against priests.

Fr Federico Lombardi says that 20,000 of the Church’s 125,000 health institutions and charities are dedicated to serving children.

And Ella Ide identifies the world’s best tweeting cardinals.

It is the closest a Catholic bishop in England and Wales has come to criticising the Coalition’s austerity measures.

In his speech the archbishop urged the Government to listen to people on the “front line” of the social security, health and criminal justice systems.

Speaking at the Houses of Parliament, he painted a grim picture of the state of Britain.

He said: “None of us can be in any doubt about the severity of the challenges facing us in the coming months and years.

“The increase in youth unemployment, the pressure on housing provision and support, and the impact of personal debt are bringing hardship and distress to those least able to sustain them. At the same time some aspects of the distribution of wealth cause scandal and dismay.

“The summer’s disturbances in some parts of the country demonstrated a callous disregard for the common good of our communities, increasing the burden for those whose homes and businesses were affected.

“And, ever present throughout these developments, are enormous pressures on families and particularly on our young people, most of whom struggle hard to maintain their dignity and self-respect. They need our support.”

Archbishop Nichols was speaking at a parliamentary reception organised by Caritas Social Action Network, an agency of the bishops’ conference.

He urged peers and MPs to “utilise the wealth of knowledge and creativity available in this room”.

He said: “It is only by strengthening relationships between those organisations which work across the social action spectrum, and those parliamentarians who are shaping the legislative response to society’s challenges, that we can together achieve a better future.”

The reception is the first organised by Caritas and comes after the bishops’ conference announced earlier this year that it wanted to give the agency a stronger national voice and more powers to co-ordinate Catholic social action.

Their resolution followed on from a promise in November last year to try to deepen the Church’s social engagement in the wake of the papal visit.

The reception’s timing coincides with the progress of the Welfare Reform Bill in the House of Lords. Caritas has worked with Baroness Hollins in her tabling of an amendment to protect benefit claimants from being penalised as a result of administration errors.

Kevin Flanagan, director of the St Anthony’s Centre for Church and Industry, said: “If the present [Welfare Reform Bill] proposals go through, I am gravely concerned that a number of people who are receiving benefits could, through no fault of their own, be placed in debt and face other far reaching consequences for matters which are beyond their control.”

Caritas Social Action Network is an umbrella organisation for domestic Catholic charities. It is separate from Caritas Internationalis, a global confederation of Catholic relief agencies.

He was assisted by Bishop Alan Hopes and Mgr Keith Newton, Ordinary of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, and 15 other concelebrants, many of them former beneficiaries of the society.

The SBS was set up in 1896 by Cardinal Vaughan as the Converts’ Aid Society at the request of Pope Leo XIII to support convert clerics who were received into the Catholic Church.

In his homily, Archbishop Nichols spoke of Blessed John Henry Newman and his three conversions: first as a teenager, to a personal faith in God and to Evangelical Christianity, secondly, to the Church as the vehicle of saving truths and finally to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church and union with the See of Peter.

At a reception at Archbishop’s House, in the presence of some 80 invited guests, Archbishop Nichols thanked the SBS for its work and its support of those in need, as did Mgr Newton, who reminded those present that the only true motive for coming into the Catholic Church was to seek full communion with the See of Peter and not a reaction to anything which might occur in the Church of England.

He predicted that the ordinariate would swell in numbers in future years but thought that the number of clergy coming into full communion in the traditional way, by seeking to join dioceses, was also likely to increase.

In thanking the two speakers SBS chairman Gerald Soane reminded guests that due to the increasing calls on its benevolence the SBS greatly needed additional sources of income. He especially asked guests to pray for the society.

For more information visit Stbarnabassociety.org.uk or call 01865 513377.

On September 6 he met Fr Anthony Chantry, the general superior of the Mill Hill Missionaries, Fr Bernard Phelan MHM, the regional superior of the Mill Hill Missionaries, Canon James Cronin, the new Missio national director and Mgr John Dale, the outgoing Missio national director.

Archbishop Nichols said on behalf of the bishops’ conference: “All the bishops of England and Wales recall with pride the decision made by our predecessors 75 years ago to unite the parish-based activities of the APF and Mill Hill Missionaries.

“The bishops warmly endorse the contribution made to the life of the local Church by these two societies through their constant and forthright proclamation of Christ’s universal mission to teach the Good News to all peoples and to serve the poor. This steady and diligent work on the part of APF and Mill Hill enables Catholics to live out their own missionary vocation and to take an active part in the universal mission of the Church.”

Canon Cronin said: “In St John’s Gospel some Greeks came to St Philip with a simple request: ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’ There are many across the world who still say: ‘We wish to see Jesus.’ I have recently had the opportunity of visiting places where the Church is very young and still growing, where Red Box help is vital in building the visible and tangible presence of the Church. It has been a great joy to see that in those places the faith is strong and Church members such lively witnesses.”

Today the Red Box, unique to England and Wales, is present in more than 200,000 homes. Thanks to the generosity of so many people in 2010 the Catholics of England and Wales contributed more than £3m to 39 dioceses in countries such as Pakistan, South Africa and Zimbabwe and to Mill Hill’s work with the poor in 27 countries.

In order to mark the 75th anniversary of missionary cooperation, Masses of Thanksgiving are being celebrated in each diocese in England and Wales during 2011.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster has sent a video message to schools in his diocese reflecting on last month’s riots (video).

The Catholic bishops of Scotland have promised to fight attempts to legalise gay marriage in the country.

The Catholic Church in Kazakhstan has stayed proceedings against a new law regulating religious groups in the Central Asian country.

The US Diocese of Crookston has agreed to pay $750,000 (£470,000, €530,000) to settle a lawsuit with a woman who said she was molested by a priest from India.

And Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino of Havana has said that the Church in Cuba is experiencing a “springtime of faith”.