Beelzebub's Kazoo and other Catholic newspapers

Fr Ray's excellent blog, St Mary Magdalen, has been dealing quite a lot recently with the matter of Fr Clifton's little run-in with Mgr Loftus. He and others have dealt with the matter and, as is my custom, I don't want to rehash what you can read much more profitably elsewhere.

The particular thing that I would like to pick up on is his comment regarding the Catholic newspapers. In the Adur Valley, we don't take the Catholic Times at all. Personally, I have never liked it: when it was re-started, it seems to me that it was intended as a bit of a Trojan Horse. The Universe had, I suspect, been losing readers to the Catholic Herald at the time, and so the publishers decided to revive the Catholic Times as a challenge, to regain the more conservative readers. However, some of the articles I found decidedly fishy, and this was no surprise, given the then editorial board (it's a long time ago now, and I can't remember who they were). It seemed to me that if one were to put 'Follow Peter' on the masthead, one could, and did, put almost anything inside the paper. And of course there were some good names inside, too. But I feared that it would be an exercise in boiling fish; they tell me that (being cold-blooded) fish will not notice if you gently increase the temperature in their aquarium until they are boiled to death. I feared that the conservative readership of the Catholic Times were gently being boiled into Liberalism by means of this particular paper.

The Catholic Herald had a bit of a career, too. I remember Fr James Kenny, my parish priest when I was a boy, banning it from the church newspaper table on account of its left-wing views 'I don't know why I give it house-room', he fulminated one Sunday in a homily. This tendency had begun under the editorship of Michael de la Bédoyère (1934-62), an enthusiast for the Council, for ecumenism and the vernacular liturgy. The liberal progression found its final expression in the time of the enfant-terrible editor Peter Stanford (1986-92). For a while it was christened 'The Lapsed-Catholic Herald'. Peter Stanford resigned after his book Catholics and Sex went too far even for the Bishops' Conference.
But then the paper was taken over by Cristina Odone, who turned it right round. She astutely saw that the main problem of the Universe and its satellites was that the company was owned by the Bishops' Conference (Odone was known by Cardinal Hume as 'The Odd One') and therefore peddled the official liberal line on everything; this, however, was not where people really were. So, lightly dismissing the Universe in my hearing as 'the Catholic News of the World' (or something of the sort), and seeing the independence of the Herald as its principal strength, she aimed her paper at a very different market. And she succeeded very well, because there was nothing else for that constituency just then, except the slightly nutty Christian Order.
But, my goodness, she really got up the noses of the Bishops' Conference! One columnist she had introduced was the inimitable Alice Thomas Ellis whose column was egregiously anti-Newchurch. In 1996 Alice Thomas Ellis penned a piece on the recently-deceased Archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Worlock which caused the bishops finally to revolt. They could do nothing directly, as the Herald was independent, so they threatened that it would be forbidden to sell copies in churches unless Alice were sacked. Poor Alice went, and was soon followed by Cristina, who went to write a book, and then went to the New Statesman. I wish I knew when it was that the Catholic Times restarted, but it must have been during this period, I think; perhaps the Bishops' attempt to capture the conservative end of the market.

 Cristina Odone was succeeded briefly by Debbie Jones (who then went to work for the Bishops' Conference, and now writes letters on animal rights to the papers) and then by the splendid William Oddie, the convert Anglican cleric, who really put a rocket under the paper and sent it into the stratosphere. The Universe still claimed to be the number one read, but it never looked that way to me. If anyone took a paper, they took the Herald. Wiliam Oddie left the paper in 2004 during a strange manoeuvre shrouded in mystery which coincided with Peter Shepherd's purchase of the paper. Luke Coppen has done very well since, steering the paper to its present assured place in the Catholic porch. And since he reads this blog from time to time, perhaps he can correct me if I have gone wrong anywhere.

Where the Herald has recently been particularly acute is the move onto the Web, which Luke Coppen wisely pioneered, seeing that the internet has changed everything. The Universe has its site now, too, labelled TotalCatholic.Com (and that very title tells its own story, doesn't it?). This reflects what Fr Ray has been writing about; the decreasing use of traditional-type newspapers. Like St Mary Magdalen's, the Adur Valley has to dump piles of unsold newspapers every week (though fewer Heralds than the others, since people like it; they found they liked the paper when their parish priest was asked to write an article or two at the time of the Papal elections).

These days, more and more people are reading websites, and the websites are reaching far more people than traditional papers ever could do. This is what has done more to reassert the traditional forms of Catholicism than anything else. While the media were in the hands of the few, the media had to reflect their owners' views. Now anyone can publish anything and have it read, and real opinions of real people can make themselves known. Now, people do not have to physically walk into a Catholic Church to find out about Catholicism; they can do it from their own desk, and this is having its impact.

With its journalistic experience, the Catholic Herald should be able to keep ahead of the competition; but, let's face it, the competition these days is not from The Universe: it is from the Hermenutic of Continuity, or Fr Ray's blog or others.

The media that matter are now in dialogue in a way that they never were in the past, and in this way a consensus is being reached about the future of our faith. And it would seem to be right where Pope Benedict is pushing it.

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Inspired by the same article on Fr Ray's blog, Ttony in The Muniment Room has a hilarious list of hate-words; go along and play.

More Irish Clichés

I've (briefly) been in Ireland again. I managed to take a single picture that has just about as many clichés as one might find in one place.
1) Donkeys
2) Thatched cottages—unfortunately in a lot of shadow on the right
3) Bog
4) Seaweed — Dulse and carigheen are both eaten
5) The quay and boat (for emigration)
6) Galway Bay (though it was mid-morning, not sunset).

It's Ballyvaughan (variously spelled) on the edge of the Burren in County Clare, and the thatched cottages are, alas, for the benefit of tourists rather than the real thing. It's a pretty little town, though.

The road around the Atlantic coast from Ballyvaughan to Lehinch (also variously spelled) is one of my favourite routes of the world. At Black Head I turned the engine off and got out of the car. The day was completely still, barely a ripple on the surface of the Atlantic. An approaching roar was only the sound of the tyres of another car, sounding extraordinarily loud in that silence and then fading into the distance.

I took two photographs which I have inexpertly photoshopped together. That's Black Head on the right, with Galway on the other side on the right (and Galway Bay in between, of course), with Connemara around the middle. Over on the left, you can just make out two of the Aran Islands, Inismor and Iniseer (also variously spelled). In the foreground, you can see the characteristic bare Karst landscape of the Burren, with those strange boulders lying around all over the place; Glacial Weirdnesses or Royal Peculiars, or something. Though the place looks very barren, it isn't at all; between the rocks is very fertile soil where nutritious verdage grows to nourish the animals farmed on the Burren since prehistoric times. Corcomroe Abbey, not far away, was known as St Peter's of the Fertile Rock in consequence.

The road goes on round to some of the most stupendous cliffs in Europe, the Cliffs of Moher. This is not my pic, but one I found on the web—I had to take a cut home as we were going to see my cousin in Limerick. The cliffs are quite breathtaking, especially when the weather is rough. There is a spring in the cliff face, pouring out and down the precipice, and I remember once when the wind was strong off the Atlantic that the blast blew the water high up in the air and back over the cliff onto the land—fabulous!

Modified Rapture

From the beginning I thought the Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda to be a mistake. It would, I thought, provide a chimerical illusion of Anglo-Catholic normality that would hold people in the Church of England, but which would fade away into nothing as the new order increased its grip, ultimately leaving people stranded and starving on the wrong side of the fence. I considered (and still consider) that the Ordinariates are going to be the best place to preserve the historic Anglican patrimony, especially united with Peter in the vision of the Church united willed by our Lord.

But now, while I've been away in Ireland again, it seems that perhaps the Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda may, after all, have produced something out of its Canterbury cap. Read Damian Thompson here. Forming another 'unholy alliance' with the Evangelicals, it may have enough votes to block the introduction of women bishops (for now) unless it obtains a 'safe area' wherein it can continue to operate. It has leverage, in other words.

This changes things, and, on the whole, I welcome it. It means that some Anglicans who might have considered the Ordinariates will stay in the Church of England. That is probably a good thing at least in some cases; reluctant converts are not happy converts, and this will make a more united Ordinariate that will not have to deal with quite a lot of problems caused by the presence of people who wouldn't really want to be there at all.

Better a good Anglican than a bad Catholic, in other words.

On the other hand, in the Church of England the process can continue as it has done over the last hundred and more years, and with the Ordinariates established, when people feel ready to cross over the Tiber, it will not be to a very foreign land. If there is friendly territory on either bank, this could be a good thing rather than a bad one.

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Later addition:

I see that the excellent William Oddie doesn't think as I do on this matter, and is in fact highly disapproving of this initiative, regarding it almost as a deliberate insult. He comments

I can only say that I know some of these men of old [behind SWISH] and the ones I do know are about as “Catholic” in any real sense as a clockwork banana.

Well, yes; but would you really want clockwork bananas in the Ordinariates, William? 

Episcopacy, priesthood and marriage

It is quite well known that both Archbishop Hepworth and Bishop John Broadhurst were baptized as Catholics. Indeed, I think that the Archbishop was also ordained a Catholic priest. As some have pointed out (with varying degrees of glee), Anglicanorum Cœtibus specifically excludes those who were baptized Catholics from membership.

Those baptized previously as Catholics outside the Ordinariate are not ordinarily eligible for membership, unless they are members of a family belonging to the Ordinariate.

It seems to be generally felt that this scuppers the right reverend gentlemen's chances: out of the frying pan and into the fire, in fact.

I'm pretty sure that something will be worked out. Ordinariates in the Western Rite exist more or less as parallel dioceses; one does not become a 'member' of it in such a way that one is not a 'member' of another diocese or is not permitted to worship in it. Ordinariate Catholics will simply be entitled to worship in their own churches in their own way, and worship in other churches if they want to, or welcome other Catholics to worship and receive the sacraments (Holy Communion, at any rate) in theirs.

The bishops will simply be rejoining the Church of their baptism, and, no doubt, will habitually worship in the Ordinariate churches, even if theoretically 'belonging' to the wider Latin rite. With respect to the gentlemen, I do not imagine that issues of fathering and needing to baptize their children in an Ordinariate will arise.
They will, presumably, not even need to be 'received'. I expect that there will need to be some sort of official dispensation from the canonical irregularity of their position, they will need to make a (very) good general confession, and their marital situation will need to be regularized. That one will be interesting. Both (I presume) married outside the Catholic Church (Archbishop Hepworth twice, I understand), and therefore their marriages will be regarded as null. Not really a problem; marriages can (and no doubt will) be convalidated.
The next step is interesting. Will Bishop Broadhurst, as a baptized and married Catholic of the Latin Rite be eligible for ordination? It would require a different level of dispensation, I think, if he cannot automatically 'belong' to the Ordinariate, even if it will be his normal place of worship. But it should surely not be above sorting out with a bit of good will. After all, where Rome legislates, Rome can dispense from its own legislation, and surely will in this case.
People have pointed out (sometimes with unholy and uncharitable glee) that Archbishop Hepworth will not even be able to receive Holy Communion as a former priest in an invalid second marriage. I am not sure about that. Certainly, both his marriages will be regarded as invalid, but his second marriage could be convalidated (and probably will be). Former priests have often been dispensed for valid marriage. So much for any prevention of the reception of Communion. The more pertinent question is whether he will be permitted to exercise his priesthood. His courage in leading so many to Catholic Communion would suggest that it would be unjust not to make an exception. But this will have to be balanced against the probable explosion of outrage from those who have left the priesthood to marry and who have felt the cost keenly, having never left the Church's communion to become Anglican or anything else. 'Why may we not also excercise our priesthood', they will say, with justice, 'we, who have borne the heat and burden of the day'.
I don't know how this will work out. Perhaps it has already been decided. But it will be interesting.

//Later comment. Having been away for a couple of days, it strikes me (duh!) that what AC is referring to in the paragraph quoted above is not clergy returning to Catholic unity, but rather existing Catholics who might seek to transfer to an Ordinariate. I apologize for the fact that it took a trip to Ireland to clear my brain cells enough to see this; I claim in mitigation that I was misled by someone else's interpretation.

Welcome home

to Giles Pinnock (of One Timothy 4) and his family, shortly to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church.
I am humbled at the courage and faith of such as they, and am sure that you will all keep them in your prayers and be ready to help with any practical needs that they have over the coming months.
May God bless them and grant them in abundance all the spiritual goods they seek.

You can read Giles' farewell homily to his parish on his blog.

Ushaw and the hermeneutic of continuity

Christopher Lamb, of The Tablet has posted his own reflection on the closure of St Cuthbert's, Ushaw. He thinks that there was an easy and obvious solution to the Ushaw problem: it could easily have become a Catholic college of the University of Durham, and he observes that the University itself was keen that this should have been so.

This would have been an imaginative use of the buildings, and entirely consonant with its own history. For the majority of its past, Ushaw (and Douai before it) was a 'mixed' college, which is to say, clerical and lay students studying together in one building (though then they were boys rather than undergraduates). If the college were not economically viable as a clerical college, why not revert to the former style? Seminarians can easily follow their own life within a larger institution.

Yet again we see an insufficient value being placed on the 'hermeneutic of continuity'. History and tradition have a value in themselves; things that have been treasured by generations are not plastic carrier bags, to be thrown away. Almost always, the replacement is shoddier than what it has replaced (and I write with feeling as the parish priest of a shoddy building which one of my predecessors built to replace a fine one).
It is far too easy to break down what has taken generations to build, and then far too hard to put it back together again.

Having written about it a few posts ago myself, I, too, have been thinking about the closure and wondering again whether they have really chosen the wrong moment for this. Sure, numbers are at an all-time low right now, but even before the Papal Visit, there were signs of an upturn at least down south. And, as I wrote before, there is still the Benedict Bounce to be taken into consideration……

Forward in Faith

You can see on the links to the left, under the St Barnabas blog header (to whom congratulations, if that is the word, for the scoop), that Bishop John Broadhurst has formally announced that he will, in due time, be joining the Ordinariate. You can listen to his talk (the announcement comes very early on) here, on the Forward in Faith website. In this talk, he catalogues with great sorrow, but with very little rancour and occasionally some humour, some of the—let us not muck around—disgraceful treatment meted out to those of the Anglo-Catholic persuasion in recent years, and makes clear that this decision need never have happened had people behaved decently and honourably. He is right.

There are a lot of things that one can say. Of course I am delighted that such a decent man proposes to be my co-religionist. I am sorry, however, that he and others have been driven to it. I would have been sorry at this treatment of him and his colleagues, both in Anglican priests and episcopal orders, even if he and they were joining the Orthodox communion or some other body. I take comfort, however, that he and many others have always seen union with the Holy See as their goal, and that this awful time for them is simply being forced to the action sooner rather than later, as individuals, or a smaller coetus, rather than the corporate reunion for which they worked and prayed. Let them please take comfort from the words of Pope Benedict at Oscott, that this is a profoundly ecumenical act in the long run; instead of seeing it Anglo-Catholicism as a bridgehead on the Anglican side, see it as a bridgehead on the Catholic side. It will do no less good, and probably a great deal more.

But the responsibility for this pain lies with those who promised much for people of the Catholic persuasion in the Church of England, but took away simply everything.It drives home the fundamental modern division within non-Protestant Christianity between the liberal and the dogmatic wings: liberalism does not mean generosity, but a tyranny of current opinion and fads.

Bishop John; welcome home. And all your brethren, welcome home, too. The fire is lit, the kettle is on, you can now kick off your boots and experience the pilgrim's return home.

Why did I not post this on The Anglo-Catholic? In this case, at this time, it is for others to do so. Domine, non sum dignus.

The Aftermath

The Papal visit has been generally agreed to have been an outstanding success, as I have remarked before. The Holy Father sought to reintroduce Christianity into the public square, to encourage the faithful of these lands, to set a good example of prayerful liturgy and much else.

But let us not delude ourselves that things are all going to be fine from now on. Intelligence Squared, the people who set up the notorious debate when Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens wiped the floor with Anne Widdecombe and some poor African bishop, are staging another debate in which they have persuaded a Downside Benedictine to side with Matthew Paris and Geoffrey Robinson debating whether Christians' sense of opposition is in fact paranoia. Read about it here, on the Catholic Herald website. In other words, it's all beginning again, and we should not be surprised that it would do so.

Now, given that the visit was such a success, surely we should be several weeks into capitalizing on it, and consolidating what has been achieved. In some small ways, this is being done. People are reading and discussing the Holy Father's remarks in parish groups, and benefitting from what has been said, as is only right and proper.

But I haven't noticed any initiatives more widely. A pastoral letter or two have been written, but I was hoping that there might be some bigger operations to keep the faith in the public eye.

I think that part of the problem is the Bishops' Conference. I'm sure that all our bishops are excellent chaps one to one, but they have to wait for another meeting before they can discuss a common approach to things. Then it has to filter through all the various agencies, who have to produce reports, dunk hobnobs, and perform all the other million tasks of a bureaucracy. Then, five years down the line, someone will read a report to someone else, there will be a murmur of agreement around the table, and there may be a document produced, and, maybe, someone will read it.

The trouble is that the committee model is not the one on which Christ built the Church. It is built on communion and discipleship. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but it strikes me that what really works is the sort of thing that Pope John Paul and, more recently, Pope Benedict do, if only, perhaps, because there aren't more Popes with whom they can form a committee. They have to lead, and, by and large, the Church likes to be led. We join in communion with each other to be taught and led by the Holy Father, but also with and by our own bishop. However, if our bishop needs to wait for approval from his colleagues, then we are waiting in vain.

I would like to see our bishops now encouraging and supporting our people
• to get involved in politics, local, national, and European
• to improve the standard of liturgy generally.

These things would mean the making effective of things like Justice and Peace groups. It has irritated me enormously to see the good will and efforts of these people in interfering with wrongs abroad, but refusing to see the wrongs under their noses. At one time, I tried very hard to get J&P to take on the Life issues, as part of their remit. They just would not agree. But to have a group in each diocese who would provide advice to Catholic MPs, local councillors and trades unionists on the real issues that they may be required to legislate upon, to be able to brief them when they are interviewed on local radio or in the newspapers, so that they can have real facts at their fingertips and make their Catholic voice effective; these would be most useful to the Gospel, and would enable us to join that public conversation that the Holy Father mentioned.

The liturgy is going to be a problematic issue, because the resistance will be so strong, not just from many of the liturgical establishment, but also, I suspect, from some of the bishops themselves. The matter will resolve itself in time, simply because things are slowly moving in what I consider the right direction, but it will not be noticed that these things produce better fruits until the lesson of Hyde Park really sinks in. People really are hungry for God, for prayer, for stillness and an encounter with the Divine, and liturgy that seeks simply to entertain simply doesn't spiritually nourish. You can fill a stomach with nothing but chocolate, but that it a way to die of malnutrition, paradoxically with a full belly.

A bishop of my acquaintance spent his first few pastoral letters writing of things that interested him, but without drawing much response from the people. Bit by bit, he began, uncomfortably at first, mentioning God, only to find that suddenly, he was drawing a response. Now he writes of God quite a lot, because it is what people respond to. I wish he would take that lesson more and more to heart. There is a bishop in the far West of the USA who writes letter after letter about the state of the salmon in a certain river in his diocese, and the attached environmental issues, but never mentions God, because he doesn't want to turn people off. Let us please grasp the lesson of the Papal visit, and see that people are in fact hungry for God, and that if we want to feed the starving crowd, there is no better time than right now when for the first time in quite a while, morale is good.

All the other issues, salmon, justice and peace &c will flow naturally and abundantly from a people who are adequately fed with the Word of God made Flesh. Putting the cart before the horse is a waste of time.

The Benedict Bounce and the Tartan

I was pretty sure when I saw First Minister Alex Salmond sporting the Papal Tartan that Cardinal O'Brien had done some canny work (and quite possibly had some shares in Ingles Buchan). I was even surer when I saw him putting a scarf in the tartan around the Papal neck. Now, it seems, the firm has been inundated with orders. Read about it here.

The Closure of St Cuthbert's, Ushaw

How sad to hear that St Cuthbert's is having to close its doors. It has a long and noble history going back to recusant times and the college at Douai in French Flanders which was closed at the French Revolution but found new homes at Ware and Ushaw. The seminarians left Ware in the 70s; now Ushaw is to go, too.
A seminary is a real alma mater to its alumni; as celibate priests we don't have family homes, but a seminary is where we have spent a considerable portion of our lives among the people with whom we still work. To some, perhaps, seminary is a miserable memory, but to many it is something of a foundation, a steady rock on which they have built their lives.
I am living at the seminary at Wonersh at present, (which, I might add, is a much happier community than when I studied here). A final-year student I was talking with last night spoke of the closure of Ushaw with emotion, saying how hard he would take it if Wonersh were to close. There are so many shared memories, as well as growth as a person, and in the spiritual life that take place within the walls, that it is going to be hard to find an adequate substitute elsewhere.
And now there must be the headache of finding a new home for the students. It won't be easy. If they transfer them all together to one other college, there is a real risk of cliquiness, us and them. If they split them up, that in itself would be an additional unkindness.
I dare say they have considered simply decanting into smaller premises and rejected it for one reason or another. Relocating to the very different atmosphere of the south (and two of the three remaining seminaries are in the south, with one in the southern midlands) is not going to be easy, though I'm sure that any college would provide a very warm welcome.
Valladolid would have been a possible choice—it was always a 'northern' seminary in any event—but for the fact that it has recently been converted into a sort of pre-seminary seminary.
I do hope that they will be leasing the buildings at Ushaw and not selling outright. Who knows where we will be in 25 or 50 years? Even this September there might well be a serious upturn in vocations, the hoped-for Benedict Bounce. My year in seminary was the one following the 1982 visit of Pope John Paul, and we were several times larger as the year above us.

Begorra, begob and bedad. A few Irish clichés.

 Ireland is such a photogenic place: I thought I would entertain you with a few Irish cliché shots; sorry about the quality; they were simply taken a few days ago with my iPhone3.

This is Kilmacduagh, on the borders of Counties Galway and Clare. A beautifully preserved monastic ruin with an intact round tower, it is famous for the ministry of St Colmán. Behind, you can see the Burren, an extraordinary area of bare limestone Karst landscape, where arctic and tropical plants grow happily side by side.

Here's a typical Burren hill, technically a 'Karst dome' striated with levels of limestone, looking as if it dropped from the moon. The most famous Burren hill is probably Mullagh Mór, about which there was a huge row a few years ago. The name simply means 'big hill', which is probably a relic of the nineteenth century when, it was said, geographers began to map the area. Somebody from the Ordnance Survey simply pointed to the hill and asked a local 'What's that?' He or she would have shrugged and said 'a big hill, of course', and 'Big Hill', Mullagh Mór, was inscribed on the map for all time.

Ruined monasteries, churches and chapels litter the Irish countryside; if they were not turned into Protestant churches, they would be unroofed, the locals driven to Mass rocks for worship. Now many of the Protestant churches stand without roofs too. Burials inside the walls began very soon; all the former Catholic churches are full of graves. This is the little chapel at Coad (pronounced Cood) a townland (Irish countryside is rigorously divided into townlands) near Corofin (variously spelled). The grave below the East window, according to local lore, belongs to Máira Rúa (Red Mary) O'Brien who lived scandalously in nearby Leamaneh Castle; married three times (reputedly she killed one by pushing him out of a window), including once to a Cromwellian soldier in an attempt to retain the castle after the invasion, it is said that when the devil came for her soul, he stamped his foot on her gravestone, which is why it is broken in three.

I saw this sign on the wall of a petrol station, and was highly amused. Only in Ireland might one assume that anybody would conceivably drink four cups of tea in succession and still be ready for a fifth! I have been told that the Irish drink more tea per head of population than any other nation on earth, and I can quite believe it. I can put away at least two pots every day.

And, finally, you might recognize this house. More commonly known as Craggy Island Parochial House, it is in fact a simply farmhouse just off the Burren, which area was used for filming Fr Ted. The picture of the Karst Dome above is the view from this house. It looks so strange; basically a town house stuck in the middle of a field in the back of beyond (and it is really, really, remote).

Why the Pope will probably not be invited to Ireland, and other conspiracy theories

Shortly after the visit of the Holy Father to the United Kingdom, Martin McGuinness wondered whether there would soon be a similar visit to Ireland. He was (and we were) quickly informed that there were no such plans being made.

Quite.

Perhaps you have read (or seen the TV adaption of) Somerville and Ross’ work The Irish RM. It’s worth a read. It tells the tale of a well-meaning but rather stuffy English Residentiary Magistrate sent over to Ireland to civilize the natives. On their part, the natives are charming scoundrels who run rings around the magistrate like naughty schoolchildren around a benevolent if ineffectual teacher. The book and its accompanying volumes are unquestionably patronizing, but not without genuine affection for Ireland and the Irish.

Different nations, having different temperaments, have taken different approaches to unwanted occupation. Some have co-operated with the occupiers, simply working the system to their own advantage wherever possible. Others have bitterly resisted; still others sung sad songs. The Irish simply practised circumvention, which became something of a national sport, and which I’ll expand on in a minute. The English might make as many laws as they like; the Irish would simply do things their own way. One might readily understand the frustration of a Residentiary Magistrate, but, as Somerville and Ross’ magistrate found, in many, if not most, cases there wasn’t anything to be done about it, but only accept it as a fact of life.

The only real authority that the Irish would recognize, because it was their own, was that of the Church, and its local representative, the Parish Priest, whose word generally was law. He would be listened to with respect, and his law would not be circumvented.

Come Irish independence, the system didn’t really change much. The Church had a huge input into the Dáil Eireann, and the country was poor (thus the continuing emigration) but, on the whole, happy. However, the law continued not to mean much, because, actually, the whole circumvention thing kept going.

It remains possible because of the very conservative nature of Irish society. The land where you belong is the place where you are yourself. ‘Home’ is not the place you currently live, but the place where your ancestors lived and died. Time and again I have been welcomed ‘home’ to places I have never lived, because people know who I am and where I fit into the local structure. I am tied to land where my mother’s ancestors have lived, measurably and identifiably since my distant ancestor Niall O’Cuainn died at the Battle of Clontarf (1014), and in legend and vague memory for centuries before that. A lake bears the family name, and so do three or four villages. That is why it is ‘home’, and though my family on my father’s side lived within the pale and does not have nearly such a long pedigree, it’s held to with equal passion, though there are only two of us left now.

In a land where this is common (though not universal, and indeed decreasingly important), passing rulers have little real importance, and things will continue to be done as they always have been done. Which is to say, when I go 'home', I find that the town has been aggressively covered to its utter and ridiculous limits with restricted parking zones. Even the residents of the terraced streets are now expected to pay 90 cents per hour from 5.15 in the morning until 11.15 at night. This ought to cause outrage, and indeed it does cause indignation in the bars where all the real business is transacted. But it doesn’t really worry anyone that much because, you see, it can be circumvented if this place is your ‘home’. Now, because I ‘belong’, I am shown how to circumvent the parking regulation. This is because a relative of mine knows Peadar, who knows Pádraig, who knows Noel, whose wife, Trisha works on the till in Supervalu next to Maura, whose husband does the ticketing of the illegally parked cars. He has been warned that ‘Pastor in Valle is coming home’, and the Pastor is duly told what to do to avoid a ticket. The Pastor did as he was told, and though other tickets flew around like tickertape on others’ cars, his car was never ticketed. If you ‘belong’, you won’t have a problem. It’s us against them; ‘them’ being the hostile powers that be.

Now just as this sort of behaviour was gall and wormwood to the Irish RM, so it is gall and wormwood to today’s Irish governments, both local and national. Yes, they are Irish, of course, but they have failed to connect with Ireland, though they connect very warmly with Brussels. My relative’s local council are dismissed by her and her cronies as ‘hooks’ (=crooks).  ‘Lazy articles altogether, and they and their whole families have been for the last fifty years or more’, she thunders. And out will come a store of reminiscences to back this up, for every one of these families are known in this society that continues to be so remarkably stable. ‘And’, she concludes devastatingly, ‘you never see them or their children in the chapel’ (=Catholic parish church). This is the surest and most damning bit of evidence that they do not ‘get’ the society of the town. They do not fit, and ultimately they, by their own actions, do not belong, and deserve their by-laws to be circumvented at every step. And the more they make themselves foreign, the less will any of the community participate in the political process, for they know that they will have to surrender something of themselves and their community in order to do so.

Now, you see, I think my relative has put her finger on something. There are serious big interests trying to remake Ireland in a different way—more like the rest of Europe, in fact. But while their authority is still being circumvented, all the authorities can do is to tear their hair and jump up and down like the poor old Residentiary Magistrate. So—and here comes the conspiracy theory— Irish society, in the view of some, has to be broken up and remade. Big new housing estates must be built on the edges of towns. Old communities and bonds must be broken down by allowing streets of old houses to become derelict; a crucial part of this campaign is the imposition of hourly parking charges even for residents of terraced streets (=standard Irish town style) who have no hope of providing off-road parking for their cars. They will have to move. This will have the added advantage of forcing town centre small shops, a system which still survives magnificently in Ireland, to close down in favour of out-of-town supermarkets. As people are forced to move into new areas, old networks will break down and finally the local and national governments will be really in charge.

However, here they have been only partially successful. Great estates have indeed been built at crippling cost, part of the huge bill that the government is now preparing to pass on to the Irish taxpayer (€22,000 per taxpayer apparently), but vast numbers of these new houses are standing empty because people don’t actually want to move into them. For a start, people don’t want to leave their homes and networks, second, if not in their ancestral homes, (or, more importantly, on the ancestral land) Irish people prefer to live in the country with a little bit of land, where possible and anyway, now, they have almost no chance of getting a mortgage to buy one of these new people’s palaces.

A crucial step in the remaking of the country is that the Church must be brought to heel, and, if possible, discredited.

Here, the Irish media are firmly behind the new order. Irish reporting of the Papal Visit to the UK was accompanied, for instance, with incessant reminders of the abuse crisis; far more strongly than in England. Abuse was the only important theme of the visit, according to the overwhelming majority of the media. The only possible motivation for this, I suggest, is to discredit the Church in the eyes of the people. They know, of course, that if you sling mud long enough, some of it will stick. And if there happens to be truth in some of the mud, so much the better. They are helped, I think, by the fact that nobody really wants to go back to the time when the Parish Priest ruled a town like an oriental despot. That truly is best left in the past, I and most people think.

In this climate, the very last thing the Irish government wants is to risk a Benedict Bounce in Ireland. They know very well that the welcome Pope Benedict would receive in Ireland would make the UK visit look positively lukewarm. In their eyes, that would undo decades of their work. Back in 1979, when Pope John Paul visited Ireland, State and Church were still at least co-operating (I think that contraception was still illegal, even). That isn’t the case now; the government would dearly like to make abortion available in Ireland as in the rest of Europe, but they know what they are up against. It is still one issue that will bring out the voters. I listened to a very ordinary chat programme on one of the Irish radio stations the other day; it was clearly another attempt to promote a liberalization in these matters. But the case came up of a 14 year-old ‘forced’ to go to England to get her ‘human rights’ to an abortion because contraception, according to her parents, was not freely available. Clearly we were all intended to be horrified at this hard case. But even the young (male) host was deeply shocked at an abortion being practiced on a 14 year old, and could not hide (despite apparent efforts) his horror at the parents’ attitude. In the end, he put on a record and changed the subject.

I have often been tempted to despair about Ireland, from what I read in the media. But then I go home (yes, home), and I realize that the real Ireland is still very much alive. It is used to being governed by other powers, and is still finding its own way of dealing with them. But I guess it can’t hold out for ever.

Long live circumvention, satyagraha, whatever you want to call it.

While the cat's away……

…Our young people from the Adur Valley have been to St Cecilia's Abbey on the Isle of Wight (a relatively easy journey from Shoreham by train) where they had Mass (thank you, Fr Glaysher) and had a great talk from Sisters Clare and David, which our young people enjoyed. The group is the first shout of the Confirmation course, and present were some of last year's confirmati, some of this year's confirmandi and a couple of catechists. I miss you people!

Photos: Miles Leeson

Safeguarding note: Parental permission to post these pictures is presumed. If any parents of these young people object, I will, of course, blur out the face of their children.

Wimmin and the Church

The estimable and patrimonial Fr Hunwicke has just posted a perceptive commentary on the forthcoming Society of Sts Wilfrid and Hilda (SWILH); he iterates all my own reservations about this society more eloquently and knowledgeably than I could do.

One comment struck me; he observes that more than half the priests in the CofE will shortly be women. Well, as a Catholic, it isn't really any of my business to tell the CofE what to do, but the sheer fact is interesting.

As in schooling, it seems that diocesan structures now favour the female of the species over the male.

A friend who is a (male) priest in the CofE tells me that nearly all (if not actually all) Diocesan Directors of Training (DDT) Ordinands are women. In addition there are posts for Diocesan Support for Women's Ministry, but no equivalent for men.

Furthermore, we both opined, the large number of half-time posts now offered in the Anglican dioceses will suit women very well indeed. Husband can work full time, wife can, as a part-time priest, get a much larger home than they would perhaps otherwise be able to afford, free, (thus saving mortgage payments or else collecting rents from the family home), and have lots of flexible time to spend with family as she needs it. Quite ideal, in fact, and though this would naturally be an option for men, too, the fact is that it would probably appeal far more to women.

Yup, I think that we will be seeing a lot more lady clergy in the future.

The Clarion Call

This morning, Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster has written a pastoral letter to his diocese. Quite rightly, he recognized in the Papal visit a clarion call to action. If the visit was nothing more than an uplifting occasion, then it will be an opportunity wasted.

Here is the whole text.

The first observation His Grace makes is liturgical. We should strive to achieve the 'beauty of holiness', he writes, and he means in the liturgy; perhaps he might have expressed it as the holiness of beauty. Anyway, he quite rightly praises the reverence of the papal liturgies (gosh, what a contrast to 1982!) and the profound use of silence, especially at the Vigil in Hyde Park, and suggests that our own liturgies try to reflect this.

The Archbishop goes on to admire the Holy Father's gentleness and courtesy when speaking the truth, and suggests that we should do the same. Can't quarrel with that!

We must, too, 'witness to the joy and freedom born of a living faith in Christ' by prayer and generous service.

We should be 'more confident in our faith, and more ready to speak about it and let it be seen each day'. He suggests that we do this by to tell others that we will pray for them (be careful if you're a nurse, he might have said!) and be prepared to say 'God bless you' to people, and make the sign of the cross more often.

Now, it is with this last paragraph that I take issue. Of course, what His Grace writes is quite correct; it just doesn't go far enough. We have become so accustomed in the Catholic Church to living in the shadows that it has become second nature. Back in Shoreham, due to some building works, we had to celebrate Mass in the local ancient Anglican Church, who were the very soul of courtesy and welcome. But some members of the Anglican congregation were amazed (and one or two aghast) at how many of us there were. 'I had no idea!' was said several times to me. All these practising Christians in Shoreham that nobody knew about!

There are very good reasons for this, of course. We have had centuries of persecution, and, as recent months have shown, anti-Catholicism is very far from dead. We have learnt to keep our heads down. In addition, I think, the last forty years have seen so much of the Church's energies going inwards one way or another—various liturgical ministries, sacramental instruction that used to be done in schools, groups, committees, &c &c &c, that the outward dimension has suffered.

In the 1950s, Catholics had begun to get involved in the world outside through Catholic Action (getting involved in the Unions &c) and the Young Christian Workers, but this seems to have run into the sand, perhaps because of all this internal focus.

In Westminster Hall and elsewhere, we have heard the Holy Father appeal to the state to let religion once more enter the public conversation and, what is more, we have seen with our own incredulous eyes him listened to with the profoundest respect by those from whom we least expected respect.

The possibility has been made now; the state may well now be prepared to engage with us, but we, too must be prepared in our turn to engage with the state, or it will all have been a waste of time and energy.

Now if at no other time, before the Holy Father's visit is forgotten or brushed under the carpet, is the moment for us to be prepared to enter into that public conversation, and this is not something that should be left to the Bishops' Conference, for it is the proper vocation of the laity.

Now is the time for Catholics to join political parties and become active in them. To join unions, to stand for election on local councils, to engage in the public conversation. In no other way is the climate (in any sense) going to be changed.

While he was with us, the Holy Father did not talk about abortion, euthanasia and other crucial issues. He knew he would not be listened to, that far more important ground work needed to be done first. The same must be true for us, I think. We should not hold aloof from political parties because many of the members hold (or indeed the party officially holds) rebarbative views on things we hold dear…… we should be prepared to dilute with our presence the strength of these positions and perhaps go about changing hearts and minds. Standing on the sidelines and shouting 'boo' will achieve very little but only entrench the opposition. The Holy Father has demonstrated with the most courageous voice just how our position might be heard if we are prepared to engage gently and courteously, yet firmly with others. And we cannot do that unless we, too, are prepared to join the conversation.

Another sidelight

I learnt yesterday, from someone who was there, that when the Holy Father visited the Birmingham Oratory last week to view Newman's room, he was introduced not only to the community (or such of it as is there, to save you pointing this out in the comments box) but to the Oratory cat too. And as a gift, he was given a rosary that had belonged to Blessed John Henry Newman. With this he was genuinely touched and delighted, and said that it was quite the best gift of the visit. On departure, he carefully checked that Mgr Georg had not left it behind.

Thanks to Br Richard for the info about the pictures

That photo again

A friend has pointed out to me what the two are wearing: Rowan Williams is wearing the ring that Pope Paul VI gave to Archbishop Michael Ramsay, which he likes to produce on those papal occasion. Pope Benedict, on the other hand, is wearing a stole that belonged to Pope Leo XIII. That, too, cannot be an accident.

Leo, was, of course, the pope of Apostolicæ Curæ, but I don't really see the Holy Father being that tactless. And yet what other explanation might there be?

On another topic, I was very pleased to notice that the altar is no longer (or at least was not on this occasion) piled high with the abbey plate: on certain state occasions it used to look like a victorian sideboard, with dishes, jugs, and probably a box or two of Namaqua wine and a bowl of fruit. I also noticed that at the very beginning, the choir sang a very peculiar responsory with lots of yelping noises instead of music. The Holy Father was quite clearly trying not to giggle.

Father Philip Smith

Today has been a very special day; Philip Smith, a young man who had been an altar server in the parish where I was in charge for the first time, Sutton Park, near Guildford, Surrey, and whom I prepared for Confirmation, was ordained to the Sacred Priesthood in Southwark Cathedral.

It was quite a splendid affair: there were two archbishops, an abbot, a member of parliament, and lots of priests. Fr Philip has been appointed as assistant priest in St Thomas' Canterbury.

Please do say a prayer for him today.

It is one of the real joys of priesthood to see people develop from childhood into adults and still be strong in the faith that one has tried to impart; still more wonderful when they desire to share that same priesthood.

Ad multos annos, Fr Philip!

That's him on the right (in the unlikely event that you needed to be told), in the very smart Gammarelli cassock.

Our Charter for our Lifetimes

It is not usually my practice simply to replicate something I have seen on another's blog: the Catholic blogosphere is something of a hortus conclusus, and if you are like me, you, the reader, go around a simple circle of blogs on a regular basis and often get the same story several times. I am going to break my own rule today and include something that Fr Zuhlsdorf drew my attention to, because it is one of the most perceptive and articulate things I have read in some time. Which is to say that I also find it inspiring.

I have wondered where the Church was going in Europe: surely there must be more to life than fighting to preserve the Church's liturgy, important though that is?

Pope John Paul, having achieved the greater part of his life's work in contributing to the reuniting of Europe had begun to turn his attention to the saving of its soul; he fought hard to have Christianity acknowledged as one of the foundational elements of Europe, but failed. He had no time to try again, for his illness and then death intervened.

Pope Benedict, in his own very different way, has taken up the fight. He argues and appeals, bringing to bear all that formidable intelligence and sweetness of personality.

I had heard it predicted that the visit to Great Britain would be his 'Poland' moment, and I think that it has happened just as foretold. Now, we see his agenda clearly, and it is something we can get ourselves behind.

And it is simply to be the leaven in the lump: oh, I know it is obvious, but in his own person he has shown how it can be done. In Westminster Hall, he spoke, and the world fell silent to listen. Was that not astounding?

The question is whether we will have men of sufficient holiness, faith and eloquence to take up the task. One name springs to mind, and it is Charles Chaput, the Archbishop of Denver; he gets it.

Anyway, what about the piece that inspired all this: well, here it is; it's by Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute.

Benedict's Creative Minority.

by Samuel Gregg

In the wake of Benedict XVI’s recent trip to Britain, we have witnessed—yet again—most journalists’ inability to read this pontificate accurately. Whether it was Queen Elizabeth’s gracious welcoming address, Prime Minister David Cameron’s sensible reflections, or the tens of thousands of happy faces of all ages and colors who came to see Benedict in Scotland and England (utterly dwarfing the rather strange collection of angry Kafkaesque protestors), all these facts quickly disproved the usual suspects’ predictions of low-turnouts and massive anti-pope demonstrations.

Indeed, off-stage voices from Britain’s increasingly not-so-cultured elites—such as the celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins and others whom the English historian Michael Burleigh recently described as “sundry chasers of limelight” and products of a “self-satisfied provincialism”—were relegated to the sidelines. As David Cameron said, Benedict “challenged the whole country to sit up and think.”

Of course the success of Benedict’s visit doesn’t mean Britain is about to return to its Christian roots. In fact, it’s tempting to say present-day Britain represents one possible—and rather depressing—European future.

In an article welcoming Benedict’s visit to Britain, the UK’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs observed, “Whether or not you accept the phrase ‘broken society,’ not all is well in contemporary Britain.” The facts cited by Sach were sobering. In 2008, 45 percent of British children were born outside marriage; 3.9 million children are living in poverty; 20 percent of deaths among young people aged from 15 to 24 are suicides; in 2009, 29.4 million antidepressants were dispensed, up 334 percent from 1985.

Such is the fruit of a deeply-secularized, über-utilitarian culture that tolerates Christians until they start questioning the coherence of societies which can’t speak of truth and error, good and evil, save in the feeble jargon of whatever passes for political correctness at a given moment.

But what few commentators have grasped is that Benedict has long foreseen that, for at least another generation, this may well be the reality confronting those European Catholics and other Christians who won’t bend the knee to political correctness or militant secularism. Accordingly, he’s preparing Catholicism for its future in Europe as what Benedict calls a “creative minority.”

The phrase, which Benedict has used for several years, comes from another English historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975). Toynbee’s thesis was that civilizations primarily collapsed because of internal decline rather than external assault. “Civilizations,” Toynbee wrote, “die from suicide, not by murder.”

The “creative minorities,” Toynbee held, are those who proactively respond to a civilizational crisis, and whose response allows that civilization to grow. One example was the Catholic Church’s reaction to the Roman Empire’s collapse in the West in the 5th century A.D. The Church responded by preserving the wisdom and law of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, while integrating the invading German tribes into a universal religious community. Western civilization was thus saved and enriched.

This is Benedict’s vision of the Catholic Church’s role in contemporary Europe. In fact, it’s probably the only viable strategy. One alternative would be for the Church to ghettoize itself. But while the monastic life has always been a vocation for some Christians, retreat from the world has never been most Christians’ calling, not least because they are called to live in and evangelize the world.

Yet another option, of course, is “liberal Catholicism.” The problem is that liberal Catholicism (which is theologically indistinguishable from liberal Protestantism) has more-or-less collapsed (like liberal Protestantism) throughout the world. For proof, just visit the Netherlands, Belgium, or any of those increasingly-rare Catholic dioceses whose bishop regards the 1960s and 1970s as the highpoint of Western civilization.

Even the Economist (which strangely veers between perceptive insight and embarrassing ignorance when it comes to religious commentary) recently observed that “liberal Catholics” are disappearing. Long ago, the now-beatified John Henry Newman underscored liberal Christianity’s essential incoherence. Liberal Catholicism’s future is that of all forms of liberal Christianity: remorseless decline, an inability to replicate themselves, and their gradual reduction to being cuddly ancillaries of fashionable lefty causes or passive deliverers of state-funded welfare programs.

By contrast, Benedict’s creative minority strategy recognizes, first, that to be an active Catholic in Europe is now, as Cardinal André Vingt-Trois of Paris writes in his Une mission de liberté (2010), a choice rather than a matter of social conformity. This means practicing European Catholics in the future will be active believers because they have chosen and want to live the Church’s teaching. Such people aren’t likely to back off when it comes to debating controversial public questions.

Second, the creative minority approach isn’t just for Catholics. It attracts non-Catholics equally convinced Europe has modern problems that, as Rabbi Sachs comments, “cannot be solved by government spending.”

A prominent example is Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Chairman of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow’s Department for External Church Relations. A deeply cultured man, who’s completely un-intimidated by either liberal Christians or militant secularists, Hilarion has conspicuously cultivated the Catholic Church in Europe because he believes that, especially under Benedict, it is committed to “defending the traditional values of Christianity,” restoring “a Christian soul to Europe,” and is “engaged in common defence of Christian values against secularism and relativism.” Likewise, prominent European non-believers such as the philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Marcello Pera have affirmed Europe’s essentially Christian pedigree and publically agreed with Benedict that abandoning these roots is Europe’s path to cultural suicide.

Lastly, creative minorities have the power to resonate across time. It’s no coincidence that during his English journey Benedict delivered a major address in Westminster Hall, the site of Sir Thomas More’s show-trial in 1535.

When Thomas More stood almost alone against Henry VIII’s brutal demolition of the Church’s liberty in England, many dismissed his resistance as a forlorn gesture. More, however, turned out to be a one-man creative minority. Five hundred years later, More is regarded by many Catholics and non-Catholics alike as a model for politicians. By contrast, no-one remembers those English bishops who, with the heroic exception of Bishop John Fisher, bowed down before the tyrant-king.

And perhaps that’s the ultimate significance of Benedict’s creative minority. Unlike Western Europe’s self-absorbed chattering classes, Benedict doesn’t think in terms of 24-hour news-cycles. He couldn’t care less about self-publicity or headlines. His creative minority option is about the long-view.

The long-view always wins. That’s something celebrities will never understand.

21 today

21 years ago today, the then Bishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor ordained me a priest in the church of St Anne, Banstead. How the time flies! And yet the priest who baptized me in the same church nearly half a century ago, Fr Brendan Burke, is still fit and in active ministry.

The Pope in the Press

Looking around the religious press, it is interesting to see the coverage of the Papal visit. Naturally, the Catholic Press are very cock-a-hoop about the whole thing; even The Tablet seems to have developed an enthusiasm for Pope Benedict which I have discerned growing for some time now.

The Methodist Recorder (here's their rather home-made website) is rather chilly, recording on its front page

Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Britain has been hailed a "success" by the Methodist Church in Britain.

Every positive word about the visit is put in inverted commas, as if to suggest that the writer thinks otherwise, though he does note that the General Secretary of the Methodist Conference seemed to have enjoyed herself. There is a sad comment from someone that Methodism itself could not now manage to raise the profile of Christianity in Britain, and that it was a good thing that at least someone managed to pull it off.

The Church Times (aka Jezebel's Trumpet) is quite surprisingly (and refreshingly) positive. Last week it had been quite sniffy (to my eyes) about the whole thing, even running a poll among Anglicans as to whether the Catholic Church should continue to maintain a celibate clergy. As if it's any of th………… but I forbear. This week, several pages are devoted to the visit and in a very positive way, which is very nice to see; the front page features the Holy Father and the Archbishop of C striding down a path (presumably in Lambeth Palace), the ABC gesticulating oddly. It's a nice pic, but not as nice as the one of the two of them embracing, which the Holy Father spoilt by clutching his service menu. I've seen it several times in print, but can't find a copy on line to post here. (Now at the top of the page: thanks to Fr William & KMcN).

I haven't seen a paper copy of the Jewish Chronicle, but the online edition (closed now for Succot) doesn't seem very interested in the visit (and why should it be?). There is another of those nice pictures, though, of the Holy Father with the fascinating Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a man who seems constitutionally incapable of saying anything dull. O si sic omnes!

Compensation

The French Revolution nationalized and sold French Church property—this is commonly known. But it did the same to English property in France, most notably the various emigré institutions that had been founded on the continent to serve the English Catholics who could not live religious life at home because of the penal laws. All the properties in Douai, for instance, were confiscated, and though the Benedictines returned for a while, the seminary did not, but established itself in England, eventually at Ushaw and Old Hall Green, near Ware.

After the Battle of Waterloo and the Treaty of Vienna, the new restored Bourbon French government paid handsome compensation to Britain for the properties which were not restored.

And here comes the greatest scandal. The British government refused to pass on the money to the Catholic Church, giving as the excuse that to do so would be to further superstition! It was only an unexpected legacy that enabled the London District to build adequate accommodation at Ware for the seminarians to live alongside the schoolboys. In other words, the government profited substantially from the French Revolution at the expense, not of the revolutionaries, but of the Church.

Maybe unease about this theft accounts for the readiness of the government later on to build the great seminary at Maynooth at the public charge, 'Rome on the rates' as it was dubbed.

And, as another footnote, in 1863 the domestic plate of the college at Douai was uncovered from the place it had been hidden from the revolutionaries—forks, spoons, cruets, that sort of thing—and divided between Ware and Ushaw.

Happiness in the Church of Rome

Now that the incense and euphoria of our Holy Father's visit are beginning to dissipate, our minds inevitably turn to the next thing on the agenda which is, I think, the prospect of the establishment of Anglican-Patrimonial bodies in communion with the Holy See as proposed in the Holy Father's letter Anglicanorum Cœtibus.

When, many years ago, I was an undergraduate, a friend (Anglican) then told me with great authority of Blessed John Henry Newman's misery once in the Catholic Church. He told me with great pathos of the aged Newman leaning over the gate at Littlemore and weeping for what had once been. 'People become Romans', said my friend, 'but they all come back'.

Some do, in fact, return to the Church of England, having failed to find what they sought in Catholic communion; I have indeed known some, including one who (to the surprise of all who knew him) went on to receive not just a mitre but also a wife.

After 1992, practices differed in different dioceses as to the various hoops that clergy being received into full communion were required to jump through. At the time, Cardinal Hume's arrangements in Westminster were considered particularly generous: clergy continued to wear their collars, and would attend what were facetiously variously called 'Confirmation classes' or 'Irish dancing classes'. Ordination would speedily follow. Some dioceses refused to make any concessions to convert clergy whatever and were consequently avoided. Others took a middle path. In the diocese of Arundel and Brighton, then headed by the man who was to become Hume's successor, Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, clergy were required to sit in the pew for a minimum of two years, usually being associated with a particular parish and pursuing some studies in the seminary where I am sitting right now, with the view of topping up whatever had lacked to their studies for Anglican priesthood. This was perceived as being somewhat hard (indeed, I thought so at the time), but yet we must acknowledge that several of those whom Basil Hume ordained returned to the Church of England (with all the consequent scandal), and none of those (as far as I am aware) that Cormac Murphy-O'Connor ordained have done so. In the end, the tougher path was the better.

The reason, no doubt, is that greater knowledge of the church which one is joining is valuable, and in some cases essential, to make a good assessment of just what one is doing. Men building towers, and kings going to war, that sort of thing.

Potential Ordinariates, of course, are an unknown quantity. Life may be similar enough to what has been left behind to obviate any sense of profound loss or disorientation in an unfamiliar setting that unsettled those who waded over the Tiber in 1992. But there will be differences and (at least in this country) there will be need for some education in matters like canon law and moral theology. Perhaps this can satisfactorily be arranged within the Ordinariate itself. But it must not be assumed that a cleric, his feet still wet with Tiber mud, can easily settle into the new situation, 'because it is just the same, really, only with the Pope added'.

As to happiness, and the Blessed JHN, I am engaged, at the moment, in writing a book in which the late Francis Cardinal Bourne of Westminster (d.1935) features largely. I came across a letter written by Newman to Bourne's father, who had been received into the Church a few months before the Beatus. Bourne senior had been distressed to hear the rumours that Newman was profoundly unhappy in the Catholic Church, and the rumours were sufficiently strong to inspire Bourne to write to Newman and ask if they were true. Newman replied:

Dear Sir,

I return an immediate, though necessarily hasty, answer to your inquiry, which made me more than smile.

It is wonderful that people can satisfy themselves with rumours which the slightest examination, or even attention, would disprove; but I have had experience of it long before I was a Catholic. At present the very persons, who saw through and reprobated the Evangelical misrepresentations concerning me, when I was in the Church of England, believe of me things quite as extravagant and as unfounded. their experience of past years has taught them nothing.

I can only say, if it is necessary to say it, that from the moment I became a Catholic, I never have had, through God's grace, a single doubt or misgiving on my mind that I did wrong in becoming one. I have not had any feeling whatever but one of joy and gratitude that God called me out of an insecure state into one which is sure and safe, out of the war of tongues into a realm of peace and assurance. I shrink to contemplate the guilt I should have incurred, and the account which at the last day would have laid against me, had I not become a Catholic, and it grieves me to the heart to think that so many excellent persons should still be kept in bondage in the Church of England, and should, among the many good points they have, want the great grace of faith, to trust God and follow his leadings.

This is my state of mind, and I would it could be brought home to all and every one, who, in default of real arguments for remaining Anglicans, amuse themselves with dreams and fancies.

I am, Dear Sir,

Truly Yours,

John H. Newman Maryvale, Perry Bar, June 13, 1848.

As for the person who told me of Newman's unhappiness in the Catholic Church, well, he is a Catholic priest now, too.

Perspective

During these recent days, I've taken to trawling around the newspapers on line to read about the reactions to the Papal Visit. Almost universally, they began tough, and then gently melted under the charming influence of Pope Benedict. Naturally, here and there one will read something disagreeable, but it feels very different being a Catholic in Great Britain today than it did last week.

One newspaper I had avoided reading was The Independent, which, others had warned me, was the most strident in its anti-catholic tone. Today I took courage and was very glad I did so. I was very deeply touched by this article by Joanna Moorhead which pays the warmest tribute to the Catholic Church.

Read it here. You won't agree with everything, but it is moving nonetheless.

Thank you, Ms Moorhead.

And how does Richard Dawkins look now?

His site is remarkably silent, as is Stephen Fry's.

Not surprising, on the whole, given reaction elsewhere:

The New York Daily News says how the critics 'really made fools of themselves'.

Richard Ingrams of The Independent thinks that Atheism really needs to replace Dr Dawkins with a new leader that isn't Stephen Fry, either.

The Telegraph was, I suppose, the most likely to turn out to be our friend; there, Jenny McCartney suggests that Dawkins is turning into the new Ian Paisley.

Andrew Brown in the Guardian (a paper which is rarely on our side) has a very good piece about not distorting what the Pope actually had to say, and in particular not twisting his words into a suggestion that atheists are all potential nazis (one scare story that ran a few days ago).

And yet, if you look at the comments on many of these posts, you will see yet again the vile, shrill and hysterical nastiness that has cowed so many of us in recent months. Given the opinion polls taken shortly before the visit, combined with the actual experience of these last few days, I think that we may conclude that these comments are made by a very few sad, mad or (even, but let us hope not) bad individuals who post under several different names and spend a long time hunting out articles favourable to Catholicism just to unleash their venom.

Now, I think, they just look ridiculous, and I shall do my best to ignore them. And pray for them.

From someone who was there……

I gather that at Twickenham on Friday there were two groups of protestors ; the ultra-gay lobby and the ultra-Protestants. The police were out in force to keep them from really spoiling the occasion and managed to herd them together into one corner where they could keep an eye on them.

What they didn't reckon on was that the two groups spied each other and realized that here was an enemy even more hateful than the Pope; so they then set about having a regular ding-dong at each other and quite missed what they had come to spoil.

As dying and yet we live

I have just participated in the Holy Father's Mass in Bellahouston Park (via television in my case) and find myself deeply moved. I remember the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1982 and the celebrations then, and I was struck with how very much I preferred this occasion. This time there was none of that rather hysterical atmosphere that prevailed on the former visit, but now there was a great air of recollection and prayer, something that I would have thought nigh impossible among a crowd of some seventy five thousand people.

Yes, it seems that perhaps we have learnt some lessons from the last forty years, and there really is a new spirit abroad.

Perhaps this is partly because in the wake of all the recent opposition to our faith we have a greater sense of who we are and what is important to us. How forcibly those words of St Paul struck me today:

As servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities,5beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; 6by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love; 7by truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; 8through honour and dishonour, through slander and praise. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; 9as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed;10as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything. (2Cor 6)

The Holy Father's homily, too, was both moving and inspiring, and will irritate many a secularist, no doubt.

The evangelization of culture is all the more important in our times, when a “dictatorship of relativism” threatens to obscure the unchanging truth about man’s nature, his destiny and his ultimate good. There are some who now seek to exclude religious belief from public discourse, to privatize it or even to paint it as a threat to equality and liberty. Yet religion is in fact a guarantee of authentic liberty and respect, leading us to look upon every person as a brother or sister.

Let nobody now doubt that the Catholic Church on this island is still alive and can be given a very much better prognosis than I might have given it a few years ago.

And now, I must offer heartfelt congratulations to Cardinal O'Brien and the Scottish hierarchy for an impeccably organized day. I can only pray that the English and Welsh hierarchy will prove to have done as well.

And, incidentally, does His Eminence have shares in a certain tartan weaving firm, by any chance?

Away

Again, I'm sorry for the slow posting, but there is a nice reason. My bishop has kindly agreed to me having a year's sabbatical break from the parish in order to write (well, finish, really) the history of St John's Seminary, Wonersh. I started work on it some ten or more years ago, but with all the work in the Valle Adurni, it still stands in the same place. So, as of yesterday, having worked very hard to prepare the parish for my absence, I've moved into the Seminary for a few months and am working now at a very different pace. Bliss!

And maybe my posting might get back up to speed.

Baptistery

I've just been to a Baptist service; it was very long and there was an awful lot of talking. But it's funny what preconceptions one has about real Protestants (such as the Baptists); quite a number were demolished this afternoon. I should say straight away that there was a lot that was good: there was a real atmosphere of keenness, and nobody could doubt that their faith was genuine and deep.

Surprise 1: The scriptures played almost no part in the service. There were two very brief (and very familiar) quotations from Hebrews, but these were simply there to act as the springboard for the preacher (who read the passages himself in the context of his sermon).

Surprise 2: I thought that Protestants believed in irresistible grace and despised 'works-righteousness'. But a hymn (sorry, worship song) that constantly repeated 'I choose to follow you' (or something like that) sounded almost Pelagian.

Surprise 3: There was quite a lot of prayer, of the extempore making-up-prayers type that I am no good at. But the Lord's own prayer was clearly found to be deficient, because it didn't feature at all.

I'm not criticizing, merely recording my own surprise. Perhaps there are perfectly good explanations for all this.