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25 MAY 2013 2.90

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Narnias custodian Why C.S. Lewis
stepson is critical of a new biography
Take the knocks The arts are not
so hard on Catholics, says Mark Lawson
From Russia to Norfolk Robert Walpoles
art collection returns to Houghton Hall
Unlock
the door
Gerald OCollins makes
the case for women deacons
01 Tablet 25 May 13 Cover_Cover 22/05/2013 18:31 Page 1
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25 May 2013
ART OF GETTING AWAY WITH IT
E
vading tax is illegal; avoiding tax is what everybody is
allowed to do in order to minimise the tax they pay.
This is true of individuals as well as corporations,
though in the latter case a great deal of intellectual
creativity has gone into finding ways of reducing tax liabilities.
The result is a labyrinth of interconnected companies under
one owner that can trade with each other across international
boundaries as if they were separate and independent, in order
to keep tax to a minimum. Thus some of the most prosperous
corporations in the global economy make very large profits on
which they pay very little tax. And as a result of their wealth
and the power it brings them, they can frighten off any
government that tries to challenge them.
This is undoubtedly what Pope Francis was referring to
when he told a group of ambassadors last week, including
some from notorious tax havens, that as a result of such
practices a new, invisible and at times virtual tyranny is
established, one which unilaterally and irremediably imposes
its own laws and rules. Public tolerance of this behaviour is
wearing thin, particularly in countries struggling to raise
enough tax to finance public spending in a climate of economic
austerity. What has become clear is that no one country, not
even the United States, can hope to stamp out the blight of
international tax avoidance on its own.
What further complicates the matter is that several countries
Ireland has been singled out particularly have benefited
hugely from the system and may not be keen to kill the geese
that have laid so many golden eggs.
THE TABLET
THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC WEEKLY
Founded in 1840
Googles senior executive in northern Europe, Matt Brittin,
was recently berated by Margaret Hodge MP, chairwoman of
the House of Commons public accounts committee, for trying
to excuse company behaviour that was devious, calculated
and, in my view, unethical. In America, Apples chief executive,
Tim Cook, was called to account by a congressional committee
for the way his company structured its operations so that some
parts of it paid no tax at all.
In each case, the executives purported to be baffled and not
a little indignant they were only doing what the law allowed,
in the interests of their shareholders. In both cases, Irelands
tax regime was a key factor.
What was at stake in all this was well expressed by the BBCs
Robert Peston, who commented that minimising taxes may
be rational for them individually but is bonkers for them
collectively since over time it will erode the very infrastructure
of the global economy which allows them to thrive.
That is both an ethical and a self-interested reason for large
companies to reconsider what they do. But to ensure that the
better ones are not undercut by the worse, some international
coordination will be necessary. This has to ensure that an
international corporation pays its fair share of tax on the actual
profit it makes in each of the countries in which it operates.
That is the message David Cameron says he will take to next
months G8 summit. He must expect to have it pointed out,
however, that through the Cayman, Virgin and Channel Islands
tax havens, not to mention the City of London itself, part of the
remedy lies in Britains own hands.
ESTABLISHMENT UNDERMINED
T
he Church of Englands position as the Church by law
established has been weakened by the progress of the
legislation to permit the marriage of same-sex couples.
Not only is the law on marriage under review, but so
is the nature of the Church-State relationship.
What is surprising is how few in the Conservative Party,
trad itionally the party of throne and altar, seem to be aware of
this. It is as if the nation is taking a significant step towards dis-
establishment in a fit of absent-mindedness. Perhaps not so
absent-minded on the part of the more vociferous secularists,
however, who have been aware all along of the potential for the
gay-marriage issue to further their own agenda. They needed
the Church to do its best to stop the legislation, and fail.
Although the battle is not yet finished, events do appear to be
going their way.
The clergy of the Church of England solemnise about a
quarter of all marriages in England, and so far the law of
marriage they administer has been the law of the land. This is
unlike the case of the Catholic, Jewish or Muslim communities,
who have their own marriage laws, customs and courts where
their own doctrines of marriage take precedence. Thus the law
of the land can say two people are married, but the internal
regulations of each faith community can still maintain that
they are not. They can ignore the civil recognition of gay
marriages if they want to, in a way the Church of England
cannot. At least until the gay-marriage legislation becomes law,
those that the common law of England says are married are
those the Established Church says are married, and vice versa,
with no distinction. In a briefing note to MPs, the Church of
England explained that the assertion that religious marriage
will be unaffected by the proposals was misleading, as at
present there is one single institution and legal definition of
marriage, entered into via a civil or religious ceremony. Talk of
civil and religious marriage is erroneous
Henceforth, if and when gay marriage becomes law, the
Church of England will be like the Catholic, Muslim and most
Jewish communities in having a definition of marriage that
excludes same-sex couples. The Government has drafted legal
protection for the Church of England that in effect bans it from
marrying gay couples. But that will put in place the very
distinction between civil and religious marriage which the
briefing document rejected, the absence of which has until
now been one of the defining characteristics of the Church of
Englands unique status.
So the Church is being forced to move towards becoming a
private self-governing institution with its own internal rules,
alongside other institutions in civil society in other words,
towards disestablishment. Some inside the Church of England
will welcome that as good for the Church. But the larger
question for the rest of society, including other faith communities,
is whether that is good for everyone else. Indeed, some outside
will hail it as a further step towards the exclusion of religion
from the public square, where faith becomes a purely private
matter. That is precisely how the victory for gay marriage has
been greeted in France. At least the French have had a better
idea of what is at stake.
02 Tablet 25 May 13 Leaders_Leaders 22/05/2013 18:27 Page 2
4 Unlock the door Gerald O Collins
A biblical scholar supports calls for the creation of women deacons
and rejects claims that it would lead to female priests
6 Narnias custodian Abigail Frymann
As the stepson of C.S. Lewis prepares for events to mark 50 years
since the writers death, he talks about his unease at a new biography
8 Take the knocks they do the Church good
Mark Lawson
The Tablets theatre critic says Christians should not complain about
how they are portrayed on television
10 Unlikely partnership Liz Dodd
Gay-rights group Stonewall is advising Catholic schools how to stop
homophobic bullying but should the organisation be involved?
25 May 2013
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3
CONTENTS
25 MAY 2013
12 PUZZLES
13 PARISH PRACTICE
14 NOTEBOOK
15 LETTERS
16 THE LIVING SPIRIT
23 THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD
Pope calls for regulation of free market
26 LETTER FROM ROME
27 NEWS FROM BRITAIN AND IRELAND
Public inquiry into abuse urged by safeguarding chief
30 OBITUARY
Gza Vermes
COLUMNS
5 PETER STANFORD
GCSEs are all about jumping through
hoops guided by your teachers
9 CHRISTOPHER HOWSE S
PRESSWATCH
Theres only one long-term alternative to
Heaven, so the more saints the merrier
11 CLIFFORD LONGLEY
David Camerons own party has stopped
caring whether he sinks or swims
BOOKS
17 A. N. WILSON
Perilous Question: the drama of
the Great Reform Bill 1832
Antonia Fraser
JULIA LANGDON
This Boy: a memoir of a childhood
Alan Johnson
LUCY POPESCU
Magda
Meike Ziervogel
ARTS
20 FEATURE
Simon Scott Plummer
Houghton Revisited
CINEMA
Francine Stock
Something in the Air
THEATRE
Mark Lawson
Disgraced
TELEVISION
John Morrish
Dispatches: The Hunt for Britains
Sex Gangs
FEATURES
COVER ILLUSTRATION: NERUUU
03 Tablet 25 May 13 Cont_P3 contents 22/05/2013 18:35 Page 3
GERALD OCOLLINS
Unlock the door
The president of Germanys bishops conference called last
month for the creation of a new specific office for female deacons.
Here, a leading biblical scholar supports the idea and dismisses
objections that it would inevitably lead to women priests
R
eacting to recent proposals in
Germany about a diaconate for
women, the new Bishop of
Regensburg, Rudolf Voderholzer,
has stated on his website that the office of
deacon is inseparably bound to that of priest
and bishop, and therefore to the sacrament
of ordination. He added: The tradition that
only men can be ordained is based on the
Bible (The Tablet, 4 May).
Bishop Voderholzer seems to have over-
looked not only a document co-authored by
his predecessor in Regensburg, Bishop
Gerhard Ludwig Mller (now Archbishop
Mller and prefect of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith), but also an addition
to the canon law of the Western Church made
by Pope Benedict XVI.
As a member of the International
Theological Commission (ITC), Bishop Mller
belonged to a subcommission of seven theo -
logians who produced a 100-page study of the
diaconate, the fruit of five years of research
into the history and theology of the diaconate.
Published in late 2002, Le Diaconat:
Evolution et Perspectives reached two major
conclusions. The first was: The deaconesses
mentioned in the tradition of the Ancient
Church as evidenced by the rite of institution
and the functions they exercised were not
purely and simply equivalent to the deacons.
This implies the recognition of some equiva-
lence, even if it was not purely and simply
a perfect equivalence. The other major con-
clusion was: in the unity of the Sacrament of
Holy Orders, there exists a clear distinction
between the ministries of the bishop and the
priests on the one hand and the diaconal min-
istry on the other. If one stresses the clear
distinction , a door could be opened for ordain-
ing women as deacons.
The distinction was highlighted in an addi-
tion to canon 1009 introduced by Benedict
XVI in October 2009: Those who are con-
stituted in the order of the episcopate or the
presbyterate receive the mission and capacity
to act in the person of Christ the Head,
whereas deacons are empowered to serve the
people of God in the ministries of the liturgy,
the word, and charity. To be sure, another
canon (no. 1024), without going into details,
limits ordination to baptised men. But this
last canon could be changed to allow for
women to be ordained deacons. The distinc-
tion made by Benedict XVI seemed to open
the way for this to happen.
He was, in fact, taking up teaching from
the Second Vatican Council. On the one hand,
the council clarified the unity of the Sacrament
of Orders, a unity found in three different
grades: bishop, priest and deacon. On the
other hand, Vatican II, while recognising the
unity of holy orders, also taught that, unlike
bishops and priests, deacons are ordained
not for priesthood but for service. To support
this distinction between two grades of priestly
participation (bishop and presbyter) and one
grade of service (deacon), the Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church drew on
sources from the Early Church (Lumen
Gentium, 29, fn. 74).
In the Churches of the Christian East, there
was a long tradition of ordaining women dea-
cons, documented by a variety of sources. The
Council of Chalcedon (451) in canon 15
legislated for the ordination of women
deacons. Besides caring for the sick and the
poor, the female deacons assisted in baptising
women. St Olympia (d. 410), a noble
collaborator of St John Chrysostom (d. 407),
featured among the famous women deacons
of Eastern Christianity. Up to the eleventh
century we find popes allowing Western
bishops to ordain women deacons. The office
of women deacons died out in the Middle
Ages, but was revived in the nineteenth
century by Anglicans and Protestants. There
are now women deacons among the Coptic
Orthodox and Greek Orthodox. Is the time
ripe for the Catholic Church to do so?
In an address of 5 October 1957, Pope Pius
XII declared that the time was not ripe for
restoring the permanent diaconate for men
a ministry that existed for centuries before
falling into abeyance. But less than 10 years
later, the bishops at Vatican II believed that
pastoral and missionary needs meant that
the time was ripe, and they voted to re-
establish such a diaconate. One major reason
for doing so was the fact that in various coun-
tries many laymen were already performing
the task of deacons but without being ordained
to that ministry. The council, as the ITC stated
in 2002, wanted to confirm by sacramental
grace those who were already exercising the
diaconal ministry. Ordaining them to the
diaconate would enable them to exercise
their ministry more effectively (5. 1).
This is precisely the situation nowadays
with women entrusted, for example, with the
pastoral care of priestless parishes. Often
called pastoral administrators, these leaders
offer, in place of the celebration of the
Eucharist, a communion service, in which
The case for women in the diaconate
4
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25 May 2013
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Pastoral Centre
PETER STANFORD
GCSEs are all about
jumping through
hoops guided by
your teachers
The GCSE season is upon us and
what a marathon it is proving to be.
My memory, possibly rose-tinted, is
that back when they were called
O levels, we sat in the school hall in
Birkenhead solidly for a week in
June, two papers in the morning and
one in the afternoon. After five days,
we emerged exhausted but
otherwise wonderfully unburdened.
We had never known so much about
so many subjects, but were now free
to forget 90 per cent of it.
Today, the equivalent exams are
spread out over seven agonising
weeks. Most of the papers are short,
and lots of modules have been taken
earlier in the year, so the explanation
for this extraordinary elongation has
nothing to do with having more
material to cram in. It appears to be
yet another peculiar form of torture
in the testing-obsessed regime
imposed on our schools. Writing
fingers remain in shape, but nerves
and emotions are stretched like an
old piece of elastic.
And thats just the pupils. For
parents, there is a seemingly eternal
balance to maintain between
invigilating revision and wanting to
cosset our kids through the ordeal
with hot drinks, encouraging words
and promises to pay for tickets to
summer festivals afterwards. Are you
doing enough revision? Can you
really concentrate with that music
on? Do you want me to look after
your phone so you can focus all your
attention on your books? And the
one that always gets the biggest snort
of derision do you want me to test
you on anything?
But then, out of the blue, that last
offer did finally get taken up just
before the RE paper. My son has
been studying a syllabus with a
particular Catholic bent,
appropriately enough since that is
the ethos of his school. As well as
delving into Marks gospel, there is
also a paper on living out the faith.
So plenty of opportunities to extol the
virtues of Catholic Social Teaching,
which, in my limited experience, has
a particular power to engage
idealistic teenagers with their faith.
Thats not all, though. The syllabus
also touches on some of those
trickier (for teenagers and quite a
few adults too) questions of the
Churchs teaching on sexual morality.
Among the subjects likely to come
up on the paper were sex before
marriage and cohabitation.
In the revision notes, therefore, was
a list of reasons why both were bad
ideas. I tested him on them, and
there was, to be fair, a certain logic
to the argument they encapsulated.
Relationships have to be taken
seriously; this is not a game; people
can get hurt. But at the same time I
couldnt ignore the hollow sound as
I ticked them off. It was the same
hollow sound that would have been
there had we been recounting an
abstract equation in chemistry. This
aide-memoire made relationships
sound like curious, inhuman things.
I debated whether to stay silent, or
pick this most stressful of moments
to have another of those chats that
my mum and dad always avoided. I
opted for a compromise. Is there a
right answer and a wrong answer in
this paper, I wondered aloud?
Again, all credit to the school, the
pupils had been told they could take
whatever line they wanted, on the
proviso that their arguments against
the Churchs line must be equally
coherent. A hard judgement for
them to make, then, and there were
no notes on the counter-arguments.
So my son was set on repeating what
he had been given in class, whether
or not he agreed with it, for the
reason that this, after all, is largely
how revision and examinations
work at GCSE level. It is all about
jumping through hoops guided by
your teachers.
It makes me wonder about the
wisdom of trying to examine RE in
the same way as other subjects,
especially when it comes to questions
of emerging (or, with too many
teenagers, retreating) belief. The
danger is that it feels like a bit of a
charade. And yet, how can we then
argue that our Catholic schools are
genuinely Catholic if we dont insist
that, into the mix which makes up
their daily timetable, the pupils are
obliged to study RE? Perhaps the
answer is for this subject to be
treated as different from all others
no examinations or checklists, and
more open-ended discussion about
where the ideals of the Church meet
the realities of everyday life.
I feel this is the way things are
already going in many Catholic
schools certainly comparedwith my
own experience at a similar age but
once the exam season looms, and
the pressure is on to achieve grade
targets, we risk falling back in RE on
to the old certainties, however much
they fail to capture the imagination
of the next generation of Catholics.
25 May 2013
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5
hymns, prayers, readings from the Scriptures
and a homily precede the distribution of
Communion. They visit the sick and prisoners,
sometimes bury the dead, run religious edu-
cation, preside over parish councils, and in
other ways carry out the ministry of deacons.
Ordaining them to the diaconate would con-
firm by sacramental grace the ministry they
are already exercising and enable them to
exercise it more effectively. Can one block
the ordination of these women to the perman -
ent diaconate by invoking the principle of
unripe time? If the time is ripe for them to
work as deacons, the time is also ripe for them
to be ordained deacons.
Ordination would ratify sacramentally who
these women really are and what they are
doing as permanent official leaders of parishes
that are without a priest. Along with parish
administrators, one should mention women,
both lay and Religious, who already parallel
the work of male deacons by their ministry
as chaplains in hospitals, prisons and schools.
They too should be considered for ordination
to the diaconate. The Second Vatican Council
taught that discrimination in basic personal
rights on the grounds of sex, race, colour, social
conditions, language and religion must be
curbed and eradicated as incompatible with
Gods design (Gaudium et Spes, 29). Are we
witnessing such discrimination on the grounds
of sex between male and female pastoral
administrators in priestless parishes?
O
bviously, some fear that ordaining
women deacons would prove the
thin end of the wedge and would
open the way to women priests, or
at least would encourage hopes about such a
step. Yet, as with appeals to the principle of
the unripe time, fears about the thin end
of the wedge have been used to block appro-
priate changes in the Church and civil society.
Such fears should be taken into account, but
cannot be allowed to decide an issue. In the
case under discussion here, it seems right to
ratify sacramentally what thousands of women
are already doing in practice.
The present ordination rite for deacons
incorporates what we read about Stephen
and six other men in Acts 6: through the
imposition of hands they were called to serve
(diakonein). But this passage does not give
the title or name of diakonos to any of the
Seven. Elsewhere, the New Testament refers
several times to deacons (e.g. Philippians
1:1), but does not provide the names of any
of them. The only person specifically named
in the New Testament as a deacon is a
woman, Phoebe, whom St Paul also calls our
sister (Romans 16:1). Beyond question, the
term diakonos still carried the general sense
of servant. Yet Phoebe clearly exercised a
recognised service in the early Christian com-
munity at Cenchreae. She prefigured what
Vatican II would say about deacons being
ordained not for priesthood but for service.
Gerald OCollins SJ is adjunct professor at
Australian Catholic University. His latest
book is The Second Vatican Council on Other
Religions (Oxford University Press).
ABIGAIL FRYMANN
Narnias custodian
Douglas Gresham has intimate memories of his stepfather, C.S. Lewis, who died 50 years ago.
Theres a host of commemorative events and the writer is to be honoured with a plaque in Poets
Corner, but Gresham is troubled by a new biography of Lewis
W
hen Douglas Gresham, at the
age of eight, first met his future
stepfather, he expected the
great Narnia author to be clad
in silver chainmail and girded with a jewel-
encrusted sword-belt. Instead, he saw a slightly
stooped, round-shouldered, balding man of
55 in baggy flannel trousers and a tweed jacket
worn through at the elbows.
When I met Gresham, now 67, I expected
a marginally updated version of C.S. Lewis
brown or grey corduroy and tweed reminiscent
of the dons bookish dress sense. But I was
greeted by a sprightly, affable character in
knee-length black riding boots, white trousers,
a white polo-necked jumper, four chunky gold
rings on his fingers and, around his neck, a
chain with a two-inch silver cross bearing the
head of a roaring lion.
The lion is Aslan, the messianic figure of
Narnia, he explains, and the cross was made
by his daughter, who is a jeweller. After many
years spent working as a dairy farmer and
broadcaster in Australia, he now lives in Malta.
He is busy at the moment with speaking
engagements and events to mark the fiftieth
anniversary of his stepfathers death in
November. One of these is the reissue of A
Grief Observed, Lewis agonisingly frank
account of his loss following the death of
Greshams mother, Joy Davidman. There is
also the unveiling of a plaque in Poets Corner
in Westminster Abbey and a weekend con-
ference run by Lewis parish church in
Headington Quarry, Oxford.
Yet, at a time when Gresham is involved in
celebrating Lewis life and work, he has
become embroiled in a row concerning a new
biography. Written by the academic Alister
McGrath, it portrays Davidman as a merce-
nary figure who set out to seduce Lewis, a
claim fiercely contested by her son.
Gresham was introduced to Lewis, or Jack
as he was known, by his mother after he had
arrived from the United States with her and
his elder brother David. Davidman had
become friends with Lewis on an earlier visit
to England when she spent several months
in Oxford. She had separated from her alco-
holic husband, author William Gresham, and
had come to Britain on her doctors recom-
mendation. While at Oxford she learned that
her husband had been unfaithful back home.
She went back, collected the boys, and, pen-
niless, arrived in England. Lewis paid for
their rent first in London, then in Oxford.
When the Home Office did not renew her
visitors visa, Lewis entered into a civil mar-
riage with her so that she could stay. She
described the arrangement to a friend as a
pure matter of friendship and expediency.
But soon afterwards she was diagnosed with
cancer and at this point Lewis realised the
strength of his feelings for her. Davidman
lived for another four years the happiest
of her or of Jacks life, says Gresham.
Days before my interview with Gresham,
he addressed 100 or so students, academic
staff and other fans at the C.S. Lewis Society
in Oxford and someone asked him about the
assertion in McGraths book that Davidman
went to England with the stated purpose of
seducing Lewis. Gresham rejected the claim
about Davidmans motivation, although
McGrath cites a 1998 Observer article in which
Gresham himself refers to it.
Gresham believes that McGrath should
have contacted him to check the quotes. When
I ask McGrath about this, he says he did not
see the need to approach Gresham since his
remarks were in the public domain. McGrath
said the view that Davidman came to England
to seduce Lewis was in circulation at least
15 years before he published his biography,
and is echoed in media reports, conversations
she is reported as having with friends, and
concerns expressed among people close to
Lewis. What cannot be easily deduced is the
level of humour or threat in Davidmans com-
ment. Fifteen years ago, The Observer quoted
Gresham as saying, She was not above telling
nosy friends that she was going to England
to seduce C.S. Lewis, he said, but added that
there was nothing reprehensible about a
woman falling in love with an unattached
man and setting out to attract his love to her.
In addition, McGrath concludes that Lewis
earlier relationship with Mrs Moore, the
widowed mother of his friend, probably did
contain a sexual element. Based on his know -
ledge of Lewis, Gresham believes that to be
untrue, and puts McGraths conclusion down
to contempor ary scholars judging behaviour
of the past by the norms of the present.
An account of Davidmans life with Lewis
is loosely told in the 1993 film Shadowlands,
for which Gresham advised director Richard
Attenborough. Lewis lived for another three
years after Davidman died, during which time
the teenaged Gresham experienced the older
mans raw grief close up when he wasnt away
at boarding school. But he relates many of
his memories of that time with a certain polish,
having shared them publicly so often, or breaks
up a serious response with a line at which he
laughs heartily.
Lewis first brought out A Grief Observed
under a pseudonym because of its intensely
personal content but the anonymity back-
fired and Lewis friends tried to console him
by offering him copies of his own book. His
friends would see the book in Blackwells
[bookshop] and say Oh, thatll help Jack,
recalls Gresham with a smile. You wouldnt
believe how many gift copies we received!
The young Gresham, who used to sneak
looks at the manuscript while Lewis was still
working on it, says parts of it still reduce him
to tears today. But he says it contains one mis-
take. Theres a bit where he says that if he
talked about my mother, I reacted as if he had
said something obscene. It wasnt that, it was
(Far left) C.S.
Lewis with the
young Gresham
in Oxford, and
(left) Gresham
today
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6
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25 May 2013
to have their children baptised Catholic,
although he and Merrie are now Evangelicals.
The couple have five children and 11 grand-
children.
On his decision to move to the other side of
the world, he says: I rather wanted to escape
from England and the fact that everybody I
had ever loved had died, one after the other.
In A Grief Observed, Lewis questions
whether God is more like a vet or a vivisec-
tionist working to heal human lives or merely
experiment with them. Gresham explains
what he believes his stepfather went through:
The Devil tries to convince us that what is
being done to us is done not by him but by
God. Jack was being tempted to believe God
had done that to Joy. In the agony he was
being tempted to doubt not the existence of
God but the nature of God. Did Gresham go
through a similar process? Yes, but later on.
I came to the conclusion when Jack died that
whoever was running this world and my life
was doing a lousy job of it everybody kept
dying! He adds: Jack overcame that [temp-
tation] in the end, as did I.
Now Gresham sees it as a moral responsi-
bility to safeguard not so much the estate as
the man himself . So while Lewis works are
still in copyright, which they will be until 70
years after his death, every new adaptation has
to be approved. He hopes to keep going in that
role until the works enter the public domain
in 2033, though by then he will be 87.
A CHURCH
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25 May 2013
|
THE TABLET
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7
embarrassment fear that wed both burst
into tears, which we did sometimes. He adds,
in the same polished tone: It took me 30
years to learn to cry again. He lost his mother,
then his father, then Lewis, in the space of
three years, all while he was in his teens.
In 1962, my father wrote me a farewell letter
and then committed suicide in America. He
had cancer of the throat and the tongue and
he didnt want to go through that or inflict that
process on his new family [that] was the way
he explained it, really to himself I think.
I ask him whether he thought of William
or Jack as more of a father. The one who cud-
dled me and scratched me with his bristly chin
was my dad, my American father. I lost track
of him when I was eight years old, he replies.
The one who nurtured me, taught me, showed
me by example how to live, I suppose brought
me from childhood to manhood, was my step-
father Jack. So you cant really make that
distinction. I know my dad was very heart-
broken to lose my brother and myself.
Within months of Lewis death, Gresham
met Meredith, the niece of a Catholic
landowner, Sir Edward Malet, on whose farm
he worked before starting at agricultural col-
lege. She accepted his proposal of marriage
the third time he asked, and they were married
in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Cathedral
before emigrating to Tasmania. I had to do
Catholic instruction in order to be allowed to
marry Merrie, he said, and kept his promise
Those scripts come across my desk and
sometimes they make the most awful mistakes
quite inadvertently. And I just have to insist
that certain things are done a certain way. He
checks to see that the Christian dimension is
still intact, along with what he calls the
nineteenth-century values that Lewis was
trying to revive honour, personal responsi-
bility, personal commitment, duty, courage.
Projects in the pipeline include film adaptations
of the apologetic Screwtape Letters and another
Narnia chronicle, The Silver Chair. He has also
had requests for an annotated version of
Screwtape, because although it was only pub-
lished in 1942, students are finding the language
and biblical references hard to understand.
Gresham found a measure of peace through
a conversion in 1990 from nominal
Anglicanism to a committed faith in Christ.
Around the same time he began to work for
the C.S. Lewis literary estate, a move he termed
tak[ing] my inherited responsibilities more
seriously. Apart from vetting adaptations of
Lewis varied output, it has also provided him
with no end of speaking engagements, and
one of his sons has begun to take on speaking
at the venues that cant afford him. (He speaks
at the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society for free.)
However, the fact that his mother and
famous stepfather have been immortalised,
not least in Shadowlands, is no consolation.
Id far rather theyd never been heard of and
were still alive with me today.
MARK LAWSON
Catholics assume that the masters of popular culture, from
television writers to West End musical producers, will seize any
opportunity to mock the faith. Not true, says our theatre critic
the Church is being treated with more respect that ever before
E
arlier this year, a television producer
contacted me to ask if I would take
part in a documentary to be pre-
sented by Ann Widdecombe about
the treatment of religion in TV comedy. Her
thesis, I was told, was that television has
become increasingly disrespectful of beliefs
and believers and that it is now more or less
open season on churchgoers.
This surprised me because my own per-
ception as a viewer and reviewer of the
medium over recent decades was that British
broadcasters have become more circumspect
towards clergy and Churches and to worship-
pers in general; and not just in comedy but
also in drama and news.
One way of measuring whether broadcast-
ing attitudes to religion have changed over
the decades is to look at examples of the clergy-
com. In every decade since the 1960s, there
has been at least one major situation comedy
on British television in which the central char-
acter has been a priest. This is a surprising
statistic, which should give pause to anyone
who argues that popular culture is insistently
and increasingly secular.
What is even more striking is the consistency
of tone across the more than 50 years of clergy-
coms. From Derek Nimmos Fr Dominic in
Oh, Father! to Tom Hollanders Adam
Smallbone in Rev., the biggest failing of these
clerics has been that they may be a little silly
and innocuous. Although Father Ted is rela-
tively irreverent in language and the title
characters secret is that he is not particularly
religious the darker areas of church affairs
are never explored. While the viewer may
guess at the nature of the incident that led
to Fr Jack being exiled to Craggy Island, his
offence is never specified, while Fr Ted himself
is an extremely likeable, not very holy, idiot.
The biggest surprise, though, is that, while
instinct might lead us to think that comedy
would be less respectful to priests than 30
years ago, both The Vicar of Dibley and Rev.
are more respectful of their central characters
vocation and beliefs than any of the earlier
series were. It is the central character in the
most recent series of Rev. whose faith is taken
most seriously: Adam prays, non-ironically,
to the God in which he sincerely believes, and
is also politically admirable in his determin -
ation to help the disadvantaged.
Some programmes of the far past were dis-
respectful in a way that would never be
tolerated by broadcasters in todays more sen-
sitive age. A recent BBC2 documentary, Gods
Own Comedian, brought new attention to the
work of Dave Allen (1936-2005), who makes
a fascinating case study for anyone considering
the media representation of Catholicism. It
may seem hard to believe now that, throughout
the 1960s and 1970s on British TV, there was
a peak-time comedian whose weekly subject
matter was Catholicism. Allens target was the
hierarchy, and as he saw it educational
Perhaps Catholics could learn from the
response of Mormons to the mega-hit
musical The Book of Mormon
Catholicism in the arts
8
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25 May 2013
MSc in
Science and
Religion
frst degree in a science or humanities subject.
Postgraduate opportunity
Take the knocks they do
the Church good
25 May 2013
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9
cruelties and political influence of the Church,
rather than belief or believers. And this view
is supported by his weekly use of probably the
most theistic and ecumenical sign-off that any
TV star has had: May your God go with you!
Even so, many Catholics viewed his act as
antagonistic and blasphemous.
Their main objection to a sketch in which
Allen performed a papal striptease was that
it mocked the Pope and failed to respect the
authority of his office. Looking at the scene
now, knowing what we have subsequently
learned about the sexual conduct of some
senior clergy, I wonder if there was also a
darker imputation of effeminacy or even
homosexuality in those high-kicking, clothes-
shedding priests. It is partly for that reason
that if such a sketch were filmed today, it
seems unimaginable to me that the BBC
would screen it: especially as part of a weekly
show in which the comedian drew most of
his material from Catholicism.
As an occasional writer of dramas for radio
and TV, I find that these days there is fre-
quently a hypersensitivity about references
to Christianity, priests or popes that would
not have been the case even five years ago.
Even expressions such as Oh, God! or Jesus
Christ! when used as casual profanities
are now routinely challenged in scripts or
excised from recorded conversations.
Although sensitive Christians are the bene -
ficiaries of this, the victory was won by Islam.
Anglicans, convinced that Muslims were being
given special respect and protection by broad-
casters in both religious and general
programming, complained in blogs, on news-
paper correspondence pages and directly to
executives that a double standard was in oper-
ation in the editorial treatment of Christianity
and of Islam.
For me, the comparison is flawed. Muslims
in Britain are simply more likely to suffer
racial discrimination, social ostracism and
potential violence than Christians. For exam-
ple, even at the height of the Northern Ireland
Troubles, Irish Catholics in Britain were never
routinely assumed to be members of the IRA;
but Muslims commonly suffer ignorant iden-
tification with al-Qaeda. There is, therefore,
a strong case for being especially careful about
depictions and satire of Islam.
I
t is an odd coincidence that one of the
biggest-selling novelists of the moment
and one of the most critically acclaimed
both dramatise aspects of Catholicism.
Hilary Mantel, a lapsed Catholic, has won
the Man Booker Prize twice and also the
Costa Book Award for Wolf Hall and Bring
Up the Bodies, the two parts so far published
of her trilogy about the aftermath of the
English Reformation. And this month Dan
Brown published Inferno, his fourth book
featuring Robert Langdon, a Harvard aca-
demic who investigates conspiracies in which
the villain is invariably the Vatican. For
Mantel and Brown, the Church is an antag-
onism rather than an inspiration. Their books
are examples of what might be called the
Post-Catholic Novel, in which those with faith
CHRISTOPHER HOWSES
PRESSWATCH
Theres only one
long-term alternative
to Heaven, so the more
saints the merrier
Otranto is a long way past Eboli and
turn left. Stop when you are at the
very bottom of the heel of the boot.
This month, Otranto suddenly
became the town with the most
saints per head 813 for a population
of 5,531. Much as I revere relics, the
sight of whole walls of skulls and
bones in the martyrs chapel at
Otranto Cathedral produces a
slightly vulgar horripilation, of the
kind that Horace Walpole, author of
The Castle of Otranto, would have
envied.
These are, as it were, army-surplus
saints, a job lot acquired in 1480
when the Turks invaded. Despite
having seen a bishop sawn in half,
800 or so able-bodied men, led by a
tailor, refused to embrace Islam and
were beheaded.
On the day he announced his
resignation, Pope Benedict fixed the
date for their canonisation. This,
wrote Lizzy Davies, The Guardians
correspondent in Rome, was an
arguably unwelcome ecclesiastical
move for his successor. Perhaps it
looks like revenge for Regensburg,
that occasion when there was such a
fuss about words that Benedict
quoted from a Byzantine emperor
regarding Islam.
The Guardian noted that Pope
Francis did not mention Islam in his
homily at the canonisation. Let us
ask God to sustain the many
Christians who, today and in many
parts of the world, right now, still
suffer from violence, and to give
them the courage to be devout and
to respond to evil with good, he
said, as if he had just been reading
that well-received book
Christianophobia: a faith under
attack, by Rupert Shortt. For his
own part, The Guardian pointed
out, the Pope had already raised
conservative eyebrows by including
a Muslim woman in a footwashing
ritual on Maundy Thursday.
In any case, the thing that counts
for martyrs is not whodunnit, but
that they were killed in odium fidei,
out of hatred for the faith. One mans
hate is another mans martyrdom. In
2001 Pope John Paul II beatified
233 martyrs from Valencia and in
2007 Benedict XVI beatifed 498
Spanish martyrs. It was not because
they were killed by Marxists or
Anarcho-Syndicalists, but that they
were killed for being Christians.
Does the Church need so many
saints? asked Amol Rajan, in The
Independent. Canonisation, once a
solemn, slow process that could take
decades, now proceeds apace and by
batch. Thats hardly a complaint
about the tailor of Otranto and his
companions, beatified 291 years after
their death and canonised after
another 232 years. But with 10,000
existing saints, wrote Peter Stanford
in The Guardian, surely we already
have our fill. Since there is only one
long-term alternative to Heaven, Id
have thought the more saints the
merrier.
There were, of course, Muslims at
the Queens Coronation, 60 years
ago next month. You can see them in
Arab headdresses in the interesting,
commercially available colour film
of the event. I notice the Daily Mail
is offering a copy in return for
saved-up tokens. But it says: Please
allow 56 working days for delivery.
Thats more than 11 weeks! The
Coronation anniversary will be
history itself by then.
I mention the Coronation because
Cole Moreton wrote a piece for The
Sunday Telegraph saying that the
next one will include a role for
people of other faiths besides
Christianity. Unnamed Church of
England leaders have accepted the
need to be hospitable to other faiths
within any future service, he wrote.
Rather than reading from the
Quran or the Vedas, Moreton
conjectures, people of other faiths
might take part by lighting a
candle, placing a stone or planting a
seed. Placing a stone? Whos being
invited Druids? But perhaps they
have in mind the Stone of Scone, if
the Scots will lend it for the day.
I think Moreton was wrong to call
the monarchs anointing by the
archbishop a sacrament. The 39
Articles are clear: There are two
Sacraments ordained of Christ our
Lord in the Gospel, that is to say,
Baptism, and the Supper of the
Lord. Still, the Coronation does take
place during the celebration of the
Supper of the Lord, or Holy
Communion as it is usually called.
Mail readers, when at last their
DVDs arrive, will notice that the
Queen received the Sacrament, and
the Duke of Edinburgh too. In any
case, will people of other faiths want
to take part? Who will cast the first
stone or plant the first seed?
Christopher Howse is an assistant
editor of The Daily Telegraph. (Continued on page 12.)
LIZ DODD
Unlikely partnership
Should Catholic schools seek help from Stonewall in combating homophobic bullying?
The gay-rights charity says it has been invited into half a dozen, a revelation that has angered
parents who point to the groups hostility to the Churchs campaign against same-sex marriage
L
ast week, a Catholic primary school
in south-west London admitted that
it had invited the gay-rights group
Stonewall to train its staff to deal with
homophobic bullying. Sarah Crouch, the head
teacher of St Marys, Wimbledon, said she
had done so to help the school meet the
requirement of the schools inspectorate,
Ofsted.
The revelation aroused controversy in the
Church and raises questions about Ofsteds
relationship with Stonewall and the pressure
on schools to conform with the inspectorates
guidance on homophobic bullying. There is
also the issue of the alternatives available to
Catholic head teachers who wish to avoid the
training offered by Stonewall.
On the face of it, the gay pressure group is
an unlikely choice to offer training in Catholic
schools. It has twice awarded leading Catholics
its annual Bigot of the Year title and has
been highly critical of the Churchs campaign
against gay marriage. Courage, a lay Catholic
group that ministers to gay people and advises
them to live according to church teaching,
claimed that Stonewalls intervention in
schools could harm children. To do this in
such a profoundly ill-informed way by inviting
in a group such as Stonewall, which seeks to
deliberately and publicly undermine Christs
gift of salvation, is to jeopardise and malign
the long-term spiritual welfare of those for
whom educators have been appointed a duty
of care, the pupils themselves, a spokesman
said.
Since 2012, Ofsted has told inspectors to
investigate whether teachers have been trained
to tackle homophobic bullying. Stonewall is
uniquely placed to advise schools because it
was responsible for training Ofsteds own
inspectors. In March 2010, at inspector
development seminars, Stonewall trained
inspectors to identify homophobia.
In guidance issued to inspectors last month,
Ofsted suggested they identify whether pri-
mary school pupils had ever heard anyone
using gay when describing something;
whether pupils get picked on for not behaving
like a typical girl or boy; and whether chil-
dren had had any lessons about different types
of families. Stonewalls work in primary and
secondary schools involves comparing school
policies with their legal requirements and
in secondary schools arranging for visits
from gay role models, who tell pupils their
personal stories. The Stonewall website lists
participating schools as school champions
and gives the best reason for joining this elite
group as: You will be prepared for your Ofsted
inspections.
Stonewall has reported that homophobic
bullying is a problem in schools throughout
England it said that four-fifths of young
people have reported hearing phrases such
as Youre so gay used frequently as insults
while at school but that the problem was
more pronounced in faith schools. According
to the charity, 75 per cent of young gay people
in faith schools have experienced direct homo-
phobic bullying, compared to 65 per cent
overall.
The Catholic Education Service (CES), the
bishops conference body that advises on edu-
cation policy, opposes bullying of all kinds. A
spokeswoman said: Bullying, including
homophobic bullying, has no place in Catholic
schools and colleges. It is central to the ethos
of Catholic schools and colleges that all pupils
feel included. But the CES also admitted that
it does not offer materials that fulfil Ofsted
requirements. The spokeswoman added that
training was the responsibility of schools and
dioceses, and had to be in keeping with church
teachings.
According to The Daily Telegraph, the deci-
sion to invite Stonewall into St Marys,
Wimbledon, was taken in consultation with
the Archdiocese of Southwark, and only one
school governor opposed it. The text of a letter
reportedly from the Archbishop of Southwark,
Peter Smith, to a critic of the move confirms
this. The letter, reproduced on a Catholic blog
states: The governing body of the school, in
order to fulfil the requirements of Ofsted to
show evidence that staff had been trained in
the area of bullying (including homophobic
bullying), took the decision to ask the
Stonewall education branch to give staff at
the school appropriate training.
It has been impossible to verify Stonewalls
claim to have trained staff at half a dozen
Catholic schools and provided materials at
hundreds more. A trawl of its so-called
school champions list turned up only two
Catholic schools, in addition to St Marys,
Wimbledon. However, the site makes clear
that participating schools can choose not to
be listed, so others may have chosen to remain
anonymous.
The two additional schools listed are both
secondaries in Brentwood Diocese, Essex: St
Marks West Essex Catholic School, in Harlow,
and St Bernards High School, in Westcliff-
on-Sea. A spokesman at St Bernards said the
school had only registered with Stonewall in
order to review its anti-bullying material as
part of a wider consultation to inform school
policy and that this automatically had
qualified it as a school champion. St Marks
did not respond to my enquiry.
Mgr George Stokes, director of education
at Brentwood Diocese and a former teacher
said that schools were responsible for organ-
ising their own training but stressed that he
would, nevertheless, have preferred to have
been told if Stonewall had been giving training
or supplying materials. He questioned the
wisdom of complying with Ofsteds every
requirement with regard to training.
If we started giving training on homo-
phobic bullying then wed end up having to
give training on everything that Ofsted
wanted, he said. Im not unhappy about
teachers receiving the training and using it
as part of the way they deliver but I am con-
cerned that if you start with one group youll
have the world and his wife traipsing through
schools in order to put their point of view
because they feel theyre a minority that needs
respect.
Wes Streeting, head of education at
Stonewall, sends out mixed messages about
Catholic schools with regard to homophobia.
On the one hand, he claimed that reports of
homophobia in faith schools including
Anti-gay bullying in schools
10
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25 May 2013
CLIFFORD LONGLEY
David Camerons
own party has stopped
caring whether he
sinks or swims
A loonie is a one-dollar Canadian
coin, so called because it carries an
image of Gavia pacifica, a duck-like
aquatic bird known as a loon.
According to another definition
recently floated, a loony is also an
elderly, white, middle-class member
of the Conservative Party who is so
disenchanted with the present party
leadership, nay the entire political
establishment, that if it flapped its
wings and flew away, not one quack
would it utter in regret.
The exact identity of the source
who triggered the latest crisis for
Conservatives has been the subject
of much faux-speculation inside the
Westminster political village. Faux
because the media is certain they
know. Several journalists who had
spoken informally to an unnamed
member of the Prime Ministers
inner circle later claimed he referred
to many Tory constituency activists
as mad swivel-eyed loons.
His theory, reportedly, was that
backbench Tory MPs have to act
more right-wing than they feel on
issues like gay marriage or Europe,
because they are under pressure
from the loony activists who, in
turn, sympathise deeply with the
super-loonies, the United Kingdom
Independence Party, to which they
might defect if their MP didnt
dance to their anti-European loony
tune. The problem with the denials
with which the Tories have tried to
smother the story is that the picture
the phrase describes is all too
recognisable. There appear to be
plenty of people around Cameron
who seem to hold ordinary party
members in contempt, and plenty of
ordinary members who feel that
their Conservative principles have
been betrayed. The contempt is
mutual.
In a development of unsurpassed
strangeness, David Cameron has
now felt obliged to write to party
members assuring them of his deep
and lasting friendship and
declaring, I would never have
around me those who sneered or
thought otherwise. That is almost
an admission that the initial story
was not entirely a pack of lies.
As the Tory leadership reads the
crisis, it is about issues support for
gay marriage, tougher rules on
immigration, whether to have a
referendum on Britains EU
membership, indeed whether
Britain should remain a member. So
its response has also been issues-led.
There has been little give on gay
marriage, but immigrants coming to
Britain to sponge off the welfare
state if there are any such persons
are about to find things harder.
The Prime Minister announces that
he is relaxed about proposals for
legislation on an EU referendum,
and several of his Cabinet colleagues
have been publicly polishing their
Eurosceptical credentials. Never
mind the damage to the national
interest: this is designed to shore up
support among the Eurosceptic Tory
faithful. But it is not working.
It presupposes that all the mad
swivel-eyed loons lets call them
MSEL for short really want is a
change of policy, and for the
Government to steer to the right. In
fact the problem with this
Government is one that the MSEL
flock shares with more or less
everyone else, whether pro or anti
gay marriage, pro or anti Europe,
pro or anti welfare payments for
newly arrived Bulgarians. It is
personal. David Cameron and his
friends and colleagues give the
impression of being far above the
rest of the population, superior types
with superior judgement, superior
education, superior everything else
and a lot more money than most.
Thus do their passing policy fads
dreamt up by these allegedly superior
people usually without reference to
expert opinion or research become
translated into official policy; thus
does an aura of arrogant
incompetence surround the
muddles they make thereby. The
country is not being well governed.
The MSELs know this along with
the rest of us, but ministers
themselves either do not know or do
not care. Gay marriage, whether
good or bad, is a classic case. It was
designed to win them friends.
Instead, one way or another, it has
made them a lot more enemies.
One recent poll put its finger on
Mr Camerons fundamental
miscalculation. Instead of the Ukip
protest vote being all about Europe,
it turns out that Ukip voters do not
rate Britains membership of the EU
even as high as third in their order of
priorities. But that suggests a more
profound difficulty. Down to the
grass roots, his own party has fallen
out of love with him. They have
stopped caring whether he sinks or
swims. Writing to them to tell them
he is not sneering at them almost
makes it worse.
25 May 2013
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11
Catholic schools were so pronounced that
they discouraged gay parents from sending
children to such places. There are lots of gay
people who avoid faith schools because its
something theyre worried about, he said. I
hope well get to a point soon where families
can make a decision about where to send their
children purely because of the quality of edu-
cation provided as opposed to fear of
discrimination or persecution.
But Mr Streeting added that Catholic
schools are often, by their very nature, better
at dealing with all aspects of bullying. Often,
the stereotype is that religious people will be
opposed to anti-homophobic bullying agendas
or wont take issues seriously, when in fact
some of the best schools that we work with
are faith schools, he said. The reason they
take this issue seriously is not in spite of reli-
gious teaching, its because of religious
teaching.
In its guidance document on working with
faith schools, Stonewall gives the example of
an anti-bullying policy based on John 15:12
Love one another as I have loved you. The
material suggests that schools policies con-
demn homophobic language, promise to
invoke anti-bullying procedures appropriately
and are proactive in encouraging diversity.
Stonewalls guidance for secondary school
pupils suggests they seek support from the
school chaplain. Catholic teaching on bullying
and harassment generally is that it is some-
thing that the faith doesn t tolerate, Mr
Streeting added. Those faith schools which
have been most successful at tackling homo-
phobic bullying are those that have directly
linked the teachings of their faith to the anti-
bullying agenda.
M
r Streeting explained that
Stonewall tried to tailor the
advice it gave to Catholic schools
to fit their religious ethos, and
that its schools work was separate from its
political agenda. A distinction really does
need to be drawn between the political
lobbying that weve done over the last decade
or more to change the law, and the work we
do in a supportive capacity to engage with
schools on their terms, to help them get the
best outcomes for pupils, he said. Our
relationship with schools isnt [founded on]
trying to compel schools to do certain things,
or tick certain boxes.
The gay-rights pressure groups presence
in Catholic schools has proved controversial,
and while it has helped busy teachers to meet
Ofsted requirements, it has exposed a gap in
the Churchs own provision of support for
Catholic schools. Until that provision is met,
some Catholics have expressed the hope that
this unlikely partnership could be productive.
There is a tendency and an anti-Catholic
bigotry in some gay-friendly organisations to
see the Church as a kind of monolithic,
barricaded fortress, said Joe Stanley, chairman
of the Soho Masses pastoral council, a com-
munity for gay Catholics. So for a church
school to go straight to the people with the
expertise I think is very good at confounding
that sort of prejudice.
12
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25 May 2013
are not the protagonist but the antagonist.
In Wolf Hall (implicitly) and The Da Vinci
Code (explicitly), the Roman faith is a source
of corruption and tyranny; a role the Vatican
also plays in Philip Pullmans popular fiction
trilogy His Dark Materials, where the sin-
ister body threatening the physical and
intellectual liberty of the characters is explic-
itly called the Magisterium.
The pro-Reformation and anti-Catholic
narratives of Mantel, Brown and Pullman are
perhaps the most compelling evidence for
those who argue that there is a cultural plot
against the Church. My personal theory,
though, is that the popularity of the Vatican
as a baddie in popular culture is a price that
Catholicism is playing for the scandals over
sexual abuse. As the scale and nature of the
depravities have become apparent, and in
many cases, serious failures also in the inves-
tigation of complaints, Rome has come to
represent, for some non-Catholics or
secularists, what the Soviet empire meant to
Westerners during the Cold War. This may
be unfair, but these books and films are a
comparatively oblique and coded version of
the denigration that the Church could have
suffered, and my view is that Catholics should
take it quietly and humbly.
Perhaps Catholics could learn from the
response of Mormons to the current Broadway
and West End mega-hit musical The Book of
Mormon, which savagely satirises both their
Church and their holy books. Mormons did
not picket the theatre or seek a legal injunc-
tion. Instead, they placed advertising in the
shows programme and, perhaps unexpectedly,
recruitment to Mormonism has reportedly
experienced an increase.
T
he claim of some members of some
faiths to have special protection from
depiction, journalism and satire is
extremely dubious. Religions make
huge, challenging and often supernatural
claims about life, death and the afterlife. They
must expect to be challenged on them and to
be willing to defend them. Religion is an argu-
ment for a certain way of life, and any
argument will feature conflicting voices.
Any religious faith that is significantly
wounded by a play, a novel, an article, a sit-
com or a joke is probably not worth having in
the first place. Any beliefs benefit from being
tested regularly: both internally and externally.
Graham Greene, the high priest of the doctrine
that doubt is as central to Catholicism as faith,
referred in his novels to the doubting voice
inside the believer to which, notably, even
Mother Theresa of Calcutta admitted but
doubters, questioners and jokers from outside
must also be accepted and faced.
Mark Lawson is The Tablets theatre critic
and presents BBC Radio 4s Front Row.
This article is taken from the Digby Stuart
Annual Lecture, From Brideshead Revisited
to Benedict Resigned Catholicism in
Popular Culture, delivered on 16 May at the
University of Roehampton. To read the full
lecture, visit www.thetablet.co.uk/texts
PUZZLES
Across
7 De ------: author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (6)
8 Provincial governor in the Achaemenian Empire (6)
10 ------- Platema: desolate Andean tableland in Argentina and
Chile (7)
11 Eponymous heroine of works by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,
who wrote under a pen name (5)
12 Surname of founder of the Irish Christian Brothers (4)
13 Youll never have a ----- world till you knock the patriotism
out of the human race. (OFlaherty V.C., Shaw, 1919) (5)
17 Caissa is muse and patron goddess of this, according to a
poem by Sir William Jones in 1763 (5)
18 These mammals belong to the family Cervidae (4)
22 Metrical feet, each consisting of an unstressed syllable
followed by a stressed one (5)
23 Any architectural or artistic decoration behind an altar
adjacent to a wall (7)
24 ------ 31 won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival in
1969 (6)
25 Jean-Philippe ------ (1683-1764): French composer of
harpsichord music and operas (6)
Down
1 Mother Virginie ------- (1882-1969): Grey nun of Montreal (7)
2 ------- knives are used in an artistic technique known as
scraperboard. (7)
3 In the ----- nebula, according to one hypothesis, the Sun and
planets formed (5)
4 Substance obtained by boiling sugar to beyond
115 degrees C (7)
5 James ----- (1795-1860): British surgeon and pioneer in
hypnosis (5)
6 Canaanite Royal city near the present-day Israeli city of Petah
Tiqwa (5)
9 The intellectual process of applying moral principles to
particular cases (9)
14 British city which the Romans named Deva or Castra Devana (7)
15 Down among the ---- ---, poem by John Dyer (c. 1700) (4,3)
16 Desiderius ------- (c. 1467-c. 1536) from Rotterdam: friend of
Thomas More, lectured in Greek at Cambridge (7)
19 A cleric who substitutes for another in the exercise of an
ecclesiastical office (5)
20 ----- Bar Sheshna: rabbi who was first to write a synagogal
liturgy for the year (5)
21 In the Temple of Jerusalem, ----- of the presence
symbolised the fact that God is the resource for Israels life (5)
Solution to the 4 May crossword No. 358:
Across: 7 Clicks; 8 Acuity; 10 Othello; 11 Okapi; 12 Draw; 13 Asset;
17 Bacon; 18 Lots; 22 Rinse; 23 Caramba; 24 Presto; 25 Apache.
Down: 1 Accords; 2 Rich man; 3 Skill; 4 Scooter; 5 Midas; 6 Cynic;
9 Hopscotch; 14 Patents; 15 Dormice; 16 Ashamed; 19 Props;
20 Andes; 21 Tripe.
Winner: John R. McKay, of Helensburgh, Scotland.
Please send your answers to: Crossword Competition
25 May, The Tablet, 1 King Street Cloisters, Clifton Walk,
London W6 0GY. Please include your full name, telephone
number and email address, and a mailing address.
A copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Saints, fifth edition revised, by
David Farmer, will go to the sender of the first correct entry
drawn at random on Friday 7 June.
The answers to this weeks puzzles and the crossword
winners name will appear in the 15 June issue.
Dictionary
of Saints
For further information
visit www.oup.com
The worlds largest
University Press
Crossword No. 361 | Enigma
Sudoku | Hard
Each 3 x 3 box, each
row and each column
must contain all
the numbers 1 to 9.
1
7
10
12
14
19
22
24
2
6
2
20
1
17
3
14
2
13
16
4
9
23
3
8
13
25
4
11
21
4
18
5
15
7 6
16
(Continued from page 9.)
liturgical life of a parish. For example, when
the altar occupies the vertical axis, these two
dimensions are conflated into one, thereby
diminishing ritual possibilities. But when
the vertical axis stands free, as at St Peters
Basilica, it naturally becomes a place also
in a parish of ritual activity such as receiving
Communion, anointings or the exchange of
marriage vows, religious professions and
ordinations, and a place of rest for the
deceased during a funeral liturgy.
When these two axes are more fully devel-
oped, the baldachin or ciborium over the
altar expresses the gift of the Spirit upon the
bread and wine placed on the altar, just as
the dome expresses the gift of the Spirit
descending upon the body of Christ, the
Church, often gathered under an image of
Christ the Lord of All located
at the centre of the domes
ceiling. Sadly, this symbolic
meaning of the dome is dis-
placed from the body of Christ,
the Church, to the altar when
centred below without its own
proper baldachin or ciborium.
When the altar is in the cen-
tre of a circle, the processional
character of the liturgy is
diminished because all move-
ment is in relation to this one
point. A procession can move
in and out or around the circle,
but the central focus does not allow for
different places to process to and from. A
central altar produces a more static liturgy.
When the altar occupies the only focus of a
building, the Liturgy of the Word does not
have its own natural architectural space and
is thereby diminished even though the devel-
opment of the Liturgy of the Word, along
with the cycle of Scripture readings, is one of
the hallmarks of the liturgical reform following
the council.
The rich ministerial character of the liturgy
is diminished when areas of liturgical activity
are not well developed other than the altar
which focuses on the ministry of the ordained.
The centrality of the altar in the liturgical
life of a parish and the more immediate par-
ticipation it engenders need not be lost if the
altar is moved away from the central focus
so that a fuller arrangement may be developed
M
any recently built or renovated
churches have an altar in the
geographic centre of the
crossing, directly under the
dome or in the centre of the people; but for
all its benefits, this position flattens the
celebration of liturgy and stands in contrast
to the examples of early churches.
The altar at St Peters Basilica in Rome is
set slightly behind centre so that an imaginary
vertical line extending from the centre of the
dome passes just in front of the baldachin
and altar and down into the lower level
where the tomb of the Apostle is visible.
Many people presume that this altar is
centred under the dome; but setting it back
allows the vertical axis to develop a focus on
the apostolic tomb in this mortuary basilica.
In contrast, since the Second
Vatican Council many altars
have been relocated from the
far end of a long hall to a geo-
graphic centre of the building
so that people may gather
around it. One motive for this
was found in the text of the
early Roman eucharistic prayer,
now number 1: Memento
omnium circumstantium,
meaning exactly, Be mindful
... of all [people] standing
around as in, standing in a
circle. This has been rendered
in the new translation without reference to
standing (stantium) nor to around (circum)
in the still accurate expression, Remember
all gathered here.
This phrase of the prayer was often promoted
at the time of Vatican II by those who wanted
the faithful to stand around a central altar so
that they would be able to participate better
in the liturgy by seeing the actions at the altar
and hearing the prayers. Such arrangements
provide immediate rapport with the altar
and thus enhance the participation of people
in the liturgy. People who are drawn into a
more immediate contact with one another
standing around a central altar may be
prompted to assume greater responsibility for
the practice of their faith in regard to their
neighbour and their liturgical participation.
But such a central arrangement comes at
the cost of diminishing other aspects of the
PARISH PRACTICE
Gather them in
DANIEL McCARTHY
The altar has a particular place in liturgical life, which need not be lost if it is moved
from the central focus of the church. Different arrangements can provide the gathered
people with ample space to participate in a range of ritual practices
that provides several different focuses for
different liturgical ministries.
The altar can reclaim its position as the
goal of a processional way without locating
it at the extreme end of a long hall. Recent
excavation has revealed a worthy example in
one of the first central plan churches built in
Rome, St Stephen in the Round. Presently,
the altar stands on a raised platform in the
centre point of the whole structure. But, in
the original arrangement, the altar stood at
the edge of the central area at the end of a
processional way. Thus, the processional way
was combined with the intimacy and partici -
pation of a central plan that left the vertical
axis free for other ritual activity and an
ample space and focus for the celebration of
the Liturgy of the Word.
A different solution was developed at Romes
cathedral, the Lateran, and at St Pauls Outside
the Walls. The floor plan of each basilica is a
variant on the shape of a cross, but the altar
is not located at the centre of the crossing,
nor is it set back into the apse. Rather, these
altars, establishing subsequent Roman practice,
are situated so far forward towards the front
door that they stand at the head of the nave,
just beyond the triumphal arch into the
transept. Thus, the centre of the crossing is
open and the transept is available for seating
all the way around the altar when needed.
Members of a parish building or renovation
committee may find inspiration in these
several arrangements that preserve the strong
sense of communion among the people gath-
ered around a central altar and of participation
in the liturgy celebrated together, while main-
taining the procession along an axis to and
from the altar. These examples also inspire
more fully developed architectural arrange-
ments for the celebration of the Liturgy of
the Word and the rites that naturally occur at
the vertical axis when intentionally left empty
and so available for people.
A parish need not renovate its church,
however, to consider how it already uses the
space available and how it might develop
these places for a fuller celebration of all the
rituals of a parish community.
Daniel McCarthy OSB is a monk of St
Benedicts Abbey, Kansas, who writes on
and teaches liturgy.
TO DO
Invite people into more
immediate contact with one
another around the altar
Develop places for a fuller
celebration of all the rituals of
your parish community
Encourage people to
practise greater participation
in liturgy and charity towards
their neighbour
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13 Tablet 25 May 13 PP_P27 parish practice 22/05/2013 14:48 Page 14
NOTEBOOK
Lost gems
THE BACK garden of a hotel is not the first
place you would expect to find the remains
of an impressive piece of late-Victorian
Catholic patrimony. But that is where salvagers
recovered a weathered carved stone altar
including a carved relief depicting St Augustine
blessing King Ethelbert of Kent, who in the
sixth century was the first Anglo-Saxon king
to convert to Christianity.
The altar, which was made around 1890,
is thought to have been bought by the
unnamed hotel in Dartmouth, Devon, in a
sale of items from the nearby former St
Augustines Priory in Abbotskerswell which
closed in 1983 following the departure of the
last members of a community of Augustinian
nuns. The convent building has since been
redeveloped into apartments for the elderly.
The recovered sections of the altar, which
had to be taken apart due to its poor condition,
are now on sale on an antiques-dealers
website, alongside paintings, icons and dec-
orations from other former churches and
chapels.
The carved stone altarpiece from the priory
is on sale for 995 while an ornate wooden
statue of St Augustine, which was also part
of the altar and needed extensive restoration
after it was found to be rotting is available
for 850. For more information visit
www.churchantiques.com
Night shift
MAX WEBER would have been proud of
his work ethic. Alongside his job as head
teacher of a Catholic secondary school, and
being father to his seven children, Dr Paul
Doherty is about to celebrate the publication
of his one-hundredth book. A historical
novel, The Last of Days, about the end of
Henry VIIIs reign, goes on sale on 6 June.
Dr Dohertys books have been translated
into 21 languages and sold in places as varied
as China, Argentina and Mexico. One of his
works, The Secret Life of Elizabeth I (2006),
was made into a television documentary for
Channel 5.
Dr Doherty, now 66, became head teacher
of Trinity Catholic High School in Woodford
Green, Essex, at the age of just 34. Last year,
he was appointed OBE for services to educa-
tion. So how does he find time to write?
Mostly after the day job, he told us. I am
one of those people who does not need much
sleep, he said, adding that he needs only a
few hours a night. The trick is to keep doing
a little bit at a time. His first book, The
Death of a King, was published in 1985.
Rome to Wimbledon
IT IS ONE of the best-attended Catholic
churches in England and Wales with around
2,000 attending Mass every Sunday. Last
November, after almost 130 years, the Society
of Jesus decided to withdraw from running
the Sacred Heart Parish, Wimbledon, south-
west London, in order to free Jesuits to
work in other parts of the province. The
parish is in the process of being handed
over to the Archdiocese of Southwark.
Now it is understood that Southwark has
decided who should be the new parish priest.
It is believed that Mgr Nicholas Hudson,
the rector of the Venerable English College,
Rome, has been selected for the role.
Mgr Hudson has been rector of the
Venerabile since February 2004 and is a
Southwark priest. He clearly has a fondness
for the parish as he celebrated the silver
jubilee of his priesthood at the Sacred Heart
in 2011.
His move to Wimbledon means a new
rector of the English College will need to be
found and it is understood that the process
is now under way.
German approval
TWO THINGS were unusual about
Chancellor Angela Merkels private audience
with Pope Francis on Pentecost Saturday,
18 May. First, it isnt customary for heads of
government to be given a private audience
only months before a general election;
Germany goes to the polls on 22 September
this year. Secondly, such audiences normally
last just 20 minutes, but this one was
unusually long a full 50 minutes.
An obviously moved Angela Merkel told
the press afterwards how delighted she had
been to be granted a private audience so
soon after meeting the Pope at his
inauguration and that this was an honour
for Germany.
To mark her gratitude, Merkel took the
Pope a 1905 edition of the collected works of
the German poet Friedrich Hlderlin (1770-
1843) in leather with gold edging, and a
collection of the recorded performances of
the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwngler
(1886-1954) in 107 CDs.
Hlderlin is among Pope Francis favourite
poets. At one of his first audiences he quoted
from one of Hlderlins poems; and he is
known to appreciate Furtwnglers interpre-
tations of Beethoven and Wagner.
The Pope has first-hand experience of
Germany: he spent several months studying
in Frankfurt.
Taste of victory
WHILE BRENTFORD FC were unsuccessful
in the final of the Football League One play-
offs last Sunday, a Catholic school representing
the team managed to win at Wembley.
Corpus Christi Catholic Primary School,
from New Malden, Surrey, beat Chetwynd
Junior School, from Nuneaton, Warwickshire,
who represented Coventry City, 2-0 on penal-
ties following a 1-1 draw. They became the
winners of the League One Kids Cup and
climbed the stairs to the royal box, where
they were presented with a trophy and
medals.
Corpus Christis road to Wembley began
back in September 2012 when each football
league club held a local competition to find
the best under-11 school team to represent
them. They then played in regional finals.
Their victory is particularly impressive given
that the tournament comprised 1,784 schools
and almost 15,000 pupils.
Meanwhile, Brentford lost 2-1 to Yeovil.
Poignant commemoration
IT WAS A school cricket match that ended
in tragedy.
On 15 May 1943, a Hawker Hurricane
aeroplane crashed into Downside Schools
cricket fields while a game was being played.
The accident occurred when a trainee pilot
from New Zealand, following his instructor
in buzzing the area at low level, crashed his
plane among about 150 boys from Downside
and Worth School who were watching the
match around the playing fields in Stratton-
on-the-Fosse, Somerset. Nine boys from the
Benedictine schools were killed eight from
Downside and one from Worth.
Last Wednesday, on the seventieth anniver-
sary of the tragedy, Mass was celebrated by
the Abbot of Downside, Dom Aidan Bellenger,
in the Abbey Church in the presence of some
15 old boys who were present at the time of
the disaster.
People then paid their respects at the
memorial plaque in the cloister. Afterwards
many made visits to the site of the crash; to
the cricket pavilion where they exchanged
eyewitness accounts of the event; and to the
graves, including that of the pilot, in the
monastic cemetery.
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No mere listening exercise
While your leader (Abuse inquiry urgently
needed, 18 May) calling for a royal commis-
sion in relation to abuse and safeguarding
echoed previous calls by others, it was inter-
esting to see you recognise that such a
commission should include other institutions
alongside the main Churches. That is right
and just. I would unreservedly welcome
such a commission.
Although the Catholic Church in this
country has made progress in ensuring that
national procedures are in place to protect
children, young people and vulnerable adults,
there is much yet to be done to convince vic-
tims and survivors that there is an openness
to authentic healing and reconciliation. Yes,
our bishops have to take due notice of their
trustees and insurance agencies, but the
heart of the Gospel must direct all we do in
relation to those who have been so seriously
damaged and personally devastated by those
abusing their power and position within the
Church. Any failure truly to listen and seek
forgiveness reinforces the damage done.
A royal commission could open up the
possibility of all those victims of abuse by
any individual in any institution being heard
and a genuine calling to account of those
responsible to enable genuine healing to
take place. The principles of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in South Africa
would be a good starting point.
Our bishops conference and the executive
of the Conference of Religious publicly sup-
porting the proposal of a royal commission
in the UK would send a very significant
message to victims and survivors about a
genuine new beginning.
Danny Sullivan
Chairman, National Catholic Safeguarding
Commission for England and Wales
Power dressing
In your leader (Thinking the unthinkable,
4 May) you recall Pope Francis words in
Buenos Aires against clergy who strut about
declaring, Im the boss, and you hope his
words might influence the way the Church
functions elsewhere.
Bishops could lead by example if they
realised that the mitre proclaims symbolically,
and therefore more powerfully than words
do, precisely that: Im the boss. Thats what
it meant in the imperial court of Byzantium
from where we got it. And that is what it
continues to mean, notwithstanding other
pious explanations. Ive heard laypeople say
it reminds them of their place. Others more
gamely say it just looks silly.
The issue is not authority, but whether
dress that symbolised authority in the court
of Byzantium is appropriate as a symbol of
the authority Jesus gave his Apostles. Similar
questions could be asked about titles that
do wonders for ecumenism and the Roman
Communion if we could get rid of the notion
that the essentials of the faith are held in a
portmanteau into which the Magisterium is
entitled periodically to drop additional items
without notice or consultation.
Patrick Bryan
Wolverhampton, West Midlands
Misleading equivalence
Church leaders are seeking to secure an opt-
out clause for registrars and other public
officials from conducting same-sex marriages
in the legislation currently before Parliament.
In doing so, some seem to have adopted a
demand that such an opt-out be elevated to
the status of conscientious objection. This
is an ill-advised tactic which in the long run
will further damage the moral authority and
credibility of the Church in defending the
sanctity of human life. Conscientious objec-
tion is accepted in very narrow circumstances,
generally involving acts affecting human
life (shooting foreign soldiers as a part of
military service, abortion, work on embryos,
euthanasia if it were ever permitted in the
UK). Registering a couples relationship bears
no resemblance to such an act.
For the Church to suggest a moral equiva -
lence between conducting a same-sex
marriage ceremony and carrying out an
abortion would be a strategic mistake. It
would cheapen the right to life. And it might
well put at risk the established conscientious
objection safeguards for medical and nursing
personnel. Same-sex marriage is not a pro-
life issue; to claim that it is undermines the
genuine pro-life cause.
Julian Filochowski
London
Case for academic boycott
It is Clifford Longley (18 May) who is wrong
about the academic boycott of Israel, not
Professor Hawking. A number of Israeli aca-
demic institutions are actively involved in
Israels illegal settlement activity in the West
Bank and East Jerusalem; one has even
opened a branch in one of the settlements.
The specific event which Professor
Hawking is boycotting is being held in
honour of President Peres who as head of
state presides over Israeli policies including
settlement activity in the West Bank and
East Jerusalem. Previously, as a minister,
sometimes as Prime Minister, in successive
Israeli Governments he shared direct respon-
sibility for these policies.
Clearly, not all Israeli academics support
Israeli policies and some, indeed, have played
an honourable role in opposing them. Such
people deserve sympathy and support for
their courage.
Edward Kelly
St Helens, Merseyside
belonged to an era when bishops were still
thought of as courtiers and princes.
You also referred to the opportunities
that define this new Franciscan era. It is
indeed a time of historic opportunity. Perhaps
it is also a time for bare heads?
Peter Cullinane
Emeritus Bishop of the Diocese of Palmerston
North, New Zealand
Sentiment for another time
Conor Gearty (Imagining a Catholic future,
11 May) suggests that Catholics who see civil
society as having taken a series of wrong
turnings have secretly signed up to Pius IXs
Syllabus of Errors. In particular, he sees
the syllabus as offering an explanation for
the Pope Emeritus clear wish not to reconcile
himself, and come to terms with progress,
liberalism and modern civilisation (Error
80). This should come as no surprise. Benedict
XVI could hardly have given a clearer signal
on where he stood regarding the author of
the syllabus when, at his inaugural Mass,
from the vast array of chalices at his disposal,
he appeared to choose, presumably in
preference to any others, the diamond-
studded chalice that had belonged to Pius.
It was good to see that at Pope Francis
inaugural Mass this piece of vulgar opulence
did not make a reappearance.
John A. Sibbald
Edinburgh
Your leader An unconvincing show of unity
(11 May) questions where to draw the bounds
of theological diversity so as to bind the
Roman Communion together. The answer
to the problem was published recently in
your Letter from Rome. The context was a
meeting to agree a document for a dissident
priest to sign to prove his orthodoxy. A
lawyer, presumably a layman, suggested the
Nicene Creed. That man deserves a bishopric.
It would not please some of those men-
tioned in Conor Geartys article, but it would
LETTERS
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Fax 020 8748 1550 Email thetablet@thetablet.co.uk
All correspondence, including email, must give a full postal address and contact telephone number. The Editor reserves the right to shorten letters.
A mitre
proclaims
symbolically
Im the
boss: a
monk kisses
the feet of St
Cuthbert,
vested as a
bishop.
British
Library
25 May 2013
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Realism about Cardinal OBrien
Fr John Michael Hanveys description of
Cardinal Keith OBriens inappropriate behav-
iour as his very human failings in his private
life (Letters, 18 May) cannot be allowed to
pass. If the cardinal had behaved inappro-
priately with men he met at his golf club or
pub you could let the description stand and
hope wed all be suitably forgiving. Heaven
knows, were all in need of Gods mercy.
But these were (attempted) relationships
with men under his jurisdiction. In other
walks of life he could be disbarred from his
profession and the complainants could (in
my country at least) sue for damages on
account of sexual harassment. If we accept
this as merely human failings in Cardinal
OBriens private life, what hope is there for
the much-needed reform in church govern -
ance that is needed at every level, not only in
Rome?
Margaret Callinan
Balwyn, Victoria, Australia
Shakespeares Catholic instincts
Maybe we have all gone astray in neglecting
Shakespeare as a Christian dramatist, opines
Alexander Lucie-Smith (Books, 11 May) in
his review of Michael Alexanders book,
Reading Shakespeare. And perhaps this is a
new seam to be worked, he conjectures.
What? Is he so ignorant of the latest devel-
opments in Shakespeare studies as to call
the possibility of his being a Christian, and a
Catholic Christian at that, a new seam, to
be qualified by such hesitant words as maybe
and perhaps? What? Doesnt he know that
these developments have been going on for
the past 15 years, ever since we moved into
the twenty-first century? And doesnt he
realise that King Lear, of all Shakespeares
plays, so far from having been inspired by
the theatre of cruelty and the theatre of the
absurd or from having inspired such a
theatre in postmodern times can only be
understood in the light of its deep Christian
meaning, with reference to the Old Testament
book of Job, the New Testament Parable of
the Prodigal Son, and above all the Gospel of
the Passion, yes, and the Resurrection?
Maybe in little England these changes in
the understanding of Shakespeare have been
bypassed by the Shakespeare establishment
in Stratford, but in the wider field of American
studies, which admit of more variety than is
tolerated in England, they have long been
regarded as a hot topic. Nor is this just a
May your peace Lord Christ go with me,
Wherever you may send me.
Guide me through the wilderness,
protect me through the storm,
and bring me home rejoicing
at the wonders you have shown me.
May you bring me home rejoicing
once again into these doors.
Celtic Prayers from Northumbria
in Prayers of Great Traditions, edited
by Christopher Voke (Bloomsbury, 2013)
Paradoxically, it is in contemplation that
we become more in touch with our
authentic selves and thereby better able
to relate to others. As the author of the
Cloud of Unknowing says, contemplation
gives discernment, when he needs it, to
read peoples characters It gives him
the knack of being at home with everyone
he talks to, habitual sinner or not, without
sinning himself to the astonishment of
the onlooker, and with a magnetic effect
on others, drawing them by grace to the
same spiritual work that he practises.
Contemplation, community and min-
istry are intertwined. The fruits of
contemplation are to be found in the way
we relate to others, to those in community
and to those for whom we minister.
Paul Graham OSA
Making Room for Others: Augustine
and the contemporary world
(St Pauls, 2013)
Complete freedom from fear is one of
those things we owe wholly to Our Lord.
To be afraid is to do him a double injury.
First, it is to forget him, to forget that he
is with us, that he loves us and is himself
almighty, and second it is to fail to bend
to his will. If we shape our will to his, as
everything that happens is either willed
or allowed by him, we shall find joy in
whatever happens, and shall never be
disturbed or afraid. So then we should
have faith that banishes all fear. Beside
us, face to face with us, within us, we
have Our Lord Jesus, our God whose
love for us is infinite, who is himself
almighty, who has told us to seek the
Kingdom of God and that everything
else will be given us.
Charles de Foucauld
in A Maryknoll Book of Inspiration,
edited by Michael Leach and Doris
Goodnough (Orbis Books, 2010)
The living Spirit
16
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THE TABLET
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25 May 2013
For more of your correspondence,
go to the Letters Extra section on
www.thetablet.co.uk
In Kristina Coopers article, Feel the
Spirit (18 May), a leader of Jesus
Youth was mistakenly referred to as
Archbishop Emeritus Thomas. In fact
his name is Abhy Thomas. We
apologise for the error, which occurred
during the editing process.
matter of biography or confessional allegiance,
in a hesitant answers to the questions, Was
Shakespeare a Catholic? What is basic is
the very different question, How does his
Catholic faith enter into and transform his
plays? Also in answering this question one
has to take into account something the
reviewer failed to do the religious back-
ground of the plays, involving the persecution
of anyone who dissented from the policy
and the religion of what we call the party
line.
Peter Milward SJ
Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan
Each in his own language
Let me add and then subtract from Joseph
OHanlons article about Pentecost (Parish
Practice, 11 May). The addition first. We
have done this at the principal liturgy: before
the reading from Acts, a dozen or more per-
sons come forward in the midst of the
assembly. Each of these members of the
parish has a different first language. From
the lectern, a reader begins in English:
When the day of Pentecost had come up to
began to speak in other languages as the
Spirit gave them ability.
Then immediately one of the others repeats
this loudly in, say, Slovak. Then another,
perhaps in Arabic, then another in Spanish,
another in Korean, another in Polish.
Sometimes a Native American language.
When all have read one by one through
those four verses of Acts 2, all together
loudly read, each in their own language, to
the beginning of verse 11. Here is marvellous
cacophony! Then together, in English: In
our own languages we hear them speaking
about Gods deeds of power. The Word of
the Lord!
And the subtraction. I would quarrel with
OHanlons suggestion that national flags be
used to show the diversity of the community.
Then what do we baptised mean: There is
no longer Greek or Jew? Are flags of nations
the best way to show the wonderful diversity
in our assembly? As a Catholic and a US
citizen, I consider it offensive to see the US
flag, or any other flag, on display in the sanc-
tuary. Bring musical instruments from various
cultures, wear traditional clothes, sing folk
songs. But put the flags away.
Gabe Huck
New York City, New York, USA
Tutti frutti
Rose Prince (The Ethical Kitchen, 4 May),
mentions a proposal by Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to lower
from 60 per cent to 50 per cent the sugar
content of fruit preserves which can be clas-
sified as jam. Further on she states: Increase
the fruit content by 10 per cent per pot and
profitability is going to be a problem. Actually,
if the fruit to sugar ratio were changed from
40:60 to 50:50, the fruit content would
increase by 25 per cent. In every 10 ounces
of jam, the fruit content would be increased by
one ounce (i.e. by 25 per cent of four ounces).
Damian Bell
Gateshead, Tyne and Wear
25 May 2013
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17
BOOKS
t is shocking, at the end of this
book, to realise how little the Great
Reform Act of 1832 actually
changed. Rutland, with a popula-
tion of 800, entirely dominated by two large
aristocratic families, sent two members to
Westminster. Westminster itself, with a pop-
ulation of 50,000 was represented by just
two MPs also. The electorate was increased
from 3.2 per cent of the population to 4.7 per
cent. The great proportion of the House of
Commons was still full of the aristocratic
or at least the landed classes. The unprop-
ertied classes had no vote. There was still no
secret ballot. And it would not be until well
into the twentieth century that women were
enfranchised.
But 1832 was nevertheless a turning point
in history. No doubt about that. Parliament
claimed to represent the people of Britain.
Before the bill, the electoral system, which
had obtained for most of the eighteenth cen-
tury, was creakingly unrepresentative. It took
no account of the new industrial cities, and
the expanded population. The very phrase
the People was suggestive of the Mob. The
simple Parliamentary catch-phrase No tax-
ation without representation, which had
started the American Revolution, came
nowhere near to fulfilment in the Mother
Country until after 1832.
I
As this completely admirable book shows,
once the matter had been aired in Parliament,
the people of Britain made it clear that they
would simply not stand for the bill to be
rejected. To that extent, the bill was the child
of public opinion, of the yearning, felt by so
many in the British Isles, for a truly repre-
sentative system of government, and
eventually for a parliamentary democracy.
But though the voice of the people was heard
in 1832, the reform itself was the responsibility
of a small number of Whiggish aristocrats
who had come to power after the accession
of William IV in 1830. The Whigs had been
out of power for 70 years, and regained power
only as the result of a foolishly reactionary
speech by the Prime Minister, the Duke of
Wellington, in the House of Lords.
Antonia Fraser has shaped her book as a
simple narrative, from the moment when
Wellington made his crass speech, to the elec-
tion of Lord Grey as Prime Minister, the
proposal of Reform in the Commons, and its
rejection in the Lords, provoking riots in the
country at large and outrage in the Commons.
She has been painstakingly thorough in her
research, both among secondary and primary
sources. In the Royal Archives she has read
Queen Adelaides diaries and reveals that
that nice woman, I am sorry to say, became an
enemy to Reform. And she has been to the
Public Record Office to read the scribbled draft,
with many crossings-out, of the Reform Bill,
written (for discretions sake) by Lord Greys
clever daughter Georgiana, and mulled over
at Panshanger, the country seat of Earl Cowper,
whose wife was Palmerstons mistress.
This book, so limpid in its prose, so enthu-
siastic for the Good Cause it describes, could
be read by any student as the clearest possible
narrative of what happened between 1831
and 1832 to make these liberal proposals law;
and it would also explain to such a student
why the reforms mattered. But the book is
much more than a schoolroom narrative. It
glows with life, because Antonia Fraser has
such a natural feeling of empathy with these
prodigious Whig aristocrats. The eccentric
painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who
immortalised the Guildhall banquet celebrat-
ing the passing of the bill, remarked there
was nothing like em when they add intelli-
gence to breeding.
There has been no better evocation of the
Whig character than this book since David
Cecil wrote the opening chapters of his life of
Melbourne. Grey, who was the same age as the
King (mid to late sixties), while the heroic cam-
paign was pressed forward, comes over as a
figure of steadfastness, courage and charm:
well-dressed, handsome and an unusual
quality in a Whig aristocrat a good husband
and father. The Holland House set was
enlivened by the wit of Sydney Smith, who
likened Wellington to Mrs Partington, trying
to keep the Atlantic Ocean at bay with her
mop. (The joke was a gift to the cartoonists.)
Smith suggested that London apothecaries
should dispense special medicine for those
with a phobia of the formidable Lady Holland.
This book conveys how close-knit the Whig
circle was many of the Greys, Russells, Cokes
and Lambtons being cousins. There is an espe-
cially vivid moment when Radical Jack
Lambton (Lord Durham) was overcome by a
horrible fit of rage at a Cabinet dinner and
began insulting Grey, his father-in-law who
had only just lost his son. Much of the Reform
Bill business in the House of Lords was con-
ducted while Grey was bitterly bereaved.
The proponents of the bill emerge as stu-
pendous and largely admirable characters;
the opponents, especially the bishops, seem
awful. Even the great Wellington in this con-
text cannot be admired. This is one of Antonia
Frasers very best books, well up to the stan-
dard of her admirable life of Cromwell and
her gut-wrenchingly brilliant life of Marie
Antoinette. When you have read it, you will
not only have grasped all the twists and turns
of one of the great parliamentary adventures
of history, you will also feel as if you have
spent the most entertaining week at a Whig
house-party.
A.N. WILSON
ARISTOCRACY
WHO SERVED
DEMOCRACY
Perilous Question: the drama of the
Great Reform Bill 1832
Antonia Fraser
WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON, 318PP, 20
Tablet bookshop price 18 Tel 01420 592974
Once the matter had been
aired in Parliament, the
people of Britain made it
clear that they would not
stand for it to be rejected
OUR REVIEWERS
A.N. Wilsonis a writer and journalist.
John Cottingham is Professorial Research
Fellow at Heythrop College, University of
London, and an Honorary Fellow of St Johns
College, Oxford. His books include The Spiritual
Dimension and Why Believe?
Julia Langdonis a political journalist.
Lucy Popescuis the author of The Good
Tourist, a guide for ethical travellers.
18
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25 May 2013
Universal acid
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools
for Thinking
Daniel C. Dennett
ALLEN LANE, 460PP, 20
Tablet bookshop price 18 Tel 01420 592974
I
t is a basic principle of logic that one
truth cannot contradict another: if two
statements are both genuine truths, they
must be compatible. So religious believers,
in affirming the truths of their faith, need
have nothing to fear from the truths
disclosed by modern science. And indeed,
so far from being anti-science, all the
religious believers I know both admire and
wholeheartedly support the scientific
enterprise. What they and many others are
rightly wary of is not science, but
scientism the stunningly misguided but
surprisingly widespread view that all truth
must be explicable via the language of
science. Scientism is a kind of intellectual
imperialism an insistence on forcing all
truths into a scientific mould.
In his latest book (a retrospective
round-up of some of his ideas) the
American philosopher Daniel Dennett, in
his understandable enthusiasm for science
in general and Darwinian science in
particular, comes perilously close to
scientism. He tells us of the fantasy he used
to amuse himself with as a schoolboy, of a
universal acid a liquid so corrosive it will
eat through anything. Little did I realise,
he explains, that in a few years I would
encounter an idea Darwins idea bearing
an unmistakeable likeness to universal
acid. Darwinism, Dennett tells us, will eat
through just about every traditional topic
ethics, art, culture, religion, humour, and
yes, even consciousness
Its a curiously aggressive image. But
Dennett disclaims any destructive intent:
Darwins idea does not destroy what we
value in all these things; it puts them on
better foundations, because it finds a
proper anchoring for them in the physical
world. But theres the rub. What is left
uncorroded by Dennetts Darwinian acid
will only be what can be ultimately
explained in terms of natural science.
Anyone who jibs at this is accused of trying
to hide behind a veil of mystery. Science,
for Dennett, offers the only real
explanations solid workmanlike cranes
that perform the laborious task of
explanatory lifting. Anything else is a
skyhook a futile attempt to short-circuit
all the hard work of empirical scientific
research by invoking some imaginary and
miraculous solution from on high.
The way Dennett draws the battle-lines
has been persuasive to many people. The
cranes of modern science have been so
successful, and we all owe so much to them
so what are we doing still clinging on to
the spooky pseudo-explanations of
religion? But there is a crucial ambiguity in
Dennetts call for everything to be
anchored in the physical world described
by science. Lets forget the problematic case
of religion for a moment, and consider
some of the other items on Dennetts list,
such as ethics, art and culture items that
are an uncontroversially precious part of
our human experience. The complex
human activities involved here require
complex sensibilities which no doubt in
turn depend on cognitive capacities and
biological structures we evolved from our
ancestors over millions of years. But to say
that the capacities for these activities are
physically anchored does not imply
anything about their content.
If we ask what the products of culture are
about, then the answer is clear enough.
Ethics is about the wrongness of cruelty and
the goodness of compassion. Mathematics
is about truths like two is the cube root of
eight or the angle in a Euclidian
semi-circle is a right angle. Logic is about
the norms of consistency and coherence
that necessarily govern all thinking. Art is
about the creation and appreciation of
beauty. So in virtue of having evolved as a
special sort of animal, with remarkable
cognitive capacities and sensibilities, we
humans have managed to gain access to a
whole realm of truth and meaning and
value ethical, mathematical, logical,
aesthetic that defies complete explanation
in physicalist terms.
Dennett is, reasonably enough, fascinated
by the properties of the brain and nervous
system that enable us to handle
information, have beliefs, and experience
the world. And he wants to underline that
all these processes depend at the micro level
on the biological robots we call brain cells.
Even here in the brain, he sees the
Darwinian acid at work: the neurons in the
brain are in a life-or-death struggle
where the victories go to the cells that can
network more effectively. Well, he may
possibly be right about all that the
question is one for science to settle. But the
question of how exactly our brains work
doesnt settle the question of what kind of
reality we gain access to when we use our
brains and think about the world. And the
reality accessed when we think ethically,
mathematically, logically, artistically, is a
non-physical reality replete with meaning
and value.
Of course this could all be an illusion, a
kind of vapid effluent given off by the brain
as a by-product of the serious business of
struggling for survival. But remember that
science itself is one of the products of
human thinking: scientific understanding,
no less than ethical and mathematical and
logical and aesthetic understanding, is one
of our precious and characteristic human
activities. And its objective value, its beauty,
and its truth, is something Dennett
implicitly affirms on every page of his book.
However we got here, and however our
bodies and brains work, we humans clearly
have the power, when we use our faculties
aright, to discern an objective reality,
independent of us, in which we recognise
truth and beauty and goodness. For
religious believers, all this speaks to us of
the transcendent and the eternal. But
however it is interpreted, the mere
existence of objective truth, and our power
to discern it, shows that there is something
beyond the reach of Dennetts universal
acid.
John Cottingham
Redemptorist Publications will endeavour to sell you the book at the price
advertised. However, occasionally on publication the published price is
altered,in which case we will notify you prior to debiting your card.
THE TABLET BOOKSHOP
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Daniel C. Dennett: science, for him,
offers the only real explanations solid,
workmanlike cranes that perform the
laborious task of explanatory lifting
Sunday 26 May 2013
Mass Times:
Vigil: Saturday 6pm
Sunday: 8am, 9.30am (Family Mass),
11am (sung Latin),
Mozart, Palestrina, Philips, Bach
12.30pm, 4.15pm, 6.15pm
www.farmstreet.org.uk
JESUIT CHURCH
FARM STREET, MAYFAIR
25 May 2013
|
THE TABLET
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19
Notting Hill, but not
as we know it
This Boy: a memoir of a childhood
Alan Johnson
BANTAM PRESS, 297PP, 16.99
Tablet bookshop price 15.30 Tel 01420 592974
A
lan Johnsons mother, Lily, used to
smoke Weights cigarettes which she
bought in packs of five and cut in half with
an old razor blade to make them go further.
But that was only until smart modern
brands like Kensitas and Guards began to
offer coupons, something that was
irresistible to someone as hard up as Lily.
If you got through enough fags to trigger
emphysema you could acquire a bedside
lamp with the coupons, writes Johnson
with the laconic irony which makes this
book such a delight.
This Boy is, truly, remarkable. It is the
autobiography of a politicians harrowing
childhood, written in a style which is
neither self-justifying nor self-pitying, and
which, even more surprisingly, is not about
politics. That in itself is extraordinary
enough. There has been a vogue, perhaps
heralded by the controversial publication of
Richard Crossmans Diaries, for every
former Cabinet Minister to believe that the
world is waiting to hear his or her view of
the politics of the period. There is no point
in This Boy where Johnson pauses to draw
the readers attention to the circumstances
that took him into the Labour Cabinet and
which, we have learned from recent
interviews, might even have made him
Prime Minister of a Labour/Liberal
Democrat Government if events had
developed otherwise in 2010. There is no
balloon-shaped bubble containing the
words Authors Message! bouncing
around the script.
Instead, Johnson paints a brilliant
portrait of what it was like growing up poor
in London in the 1950s. It is a book of social
history, of minute details closely observed,
evoking life in Notting Hill when he was a
boy and of the two strong women in his
childhood Lily, and his sister, Linda. As
such, of course, every word is redolent of
the politics of the period. The poverty was
absolute. To describe it as Dickensian
would be to somehow romanticise it. There
was no money. Alans father, Steve, had
done a runner. The housing conditions he
left behind are unimaginable today: no
electricity, no running water inside, no
heating in winter, a shared outside lavatory
three floors down, and a weekly bath shared
by the family because they couldnt afford to
boil the copper (when they got one) more
than once a week. And bread and dripping.
Or Oxo with a stale crust (kindly given by
one of the ladies for whom Lily cleaned)
floating unappetisingly on the greasy surface.
But there is an upside. There is the route
out of all this for Alan through the 1944
Education Act. There are free school meals
and milk and orange juice. There is the
National Health Service, which nursed Lily
for years before her tragic premature death
at 42, leaving the two children to fare for
themselves. There is the heroic Linda who
fought for Lily and her brother against
everything that fate could throw at them,
and won. There is the aspiration of the
human spirit, exemplified by Lily seeing
both her children pass the 11-plus and going
on to grammar school.
And here I have to declare an interest. I
lived in Notting Hill from the late 1960s. I
moved in round the corner from the
Johnsons, just as Alan moved out. It wasnt
desirable even then. I lived in Ruston
Mews. It had recently been renamed, as
had Ruston Place. Do you know, I
excitedly told my less than enthusiastic
parents, this used to be called Rillington
Place! I know the streets of Johnsons
story. I know the pubs and the shops and
the launderettes and I saw the drunks
fighting outside the KPH (the Kensington
Park Hotel) and I watched people like Lily
at the jumble stalls in the Portobello. I was
elected as a Labour councillor to
Kensington and Chelsea Council for the
area and represented people like the
Johnsons in the early 1970s. I was also a
governor of Isaac Newton School, the
secondary modern to which Johnson would
have been condemned if he had failed the
11+, and I was angry then at the poverty of
the educational choice that school offered
and our inability to do anything about it.
While I was reading This Boy I was at a
dinner at which the Education Secretary
Michael Gove was the guest speaker. My
ears pricked up when I overheard him say,
in passing conversation: just round the
corner from where Alan Johnson lived,
actually. I realised he was talking about the
location of his own family home. If he was
claiming some sort of vicarious political
authenticity by the accident of geography,
but without any reference to how Notting
Hill has changed since the Johnsons lived
there, I knew he couldnt possibly have read
the book. Julia Langdon
NOVEL OF THE WEEK
Delusions of destiny
Magda
Meike Ziervogel
SALT, 128PP, 9.99
Tablet bookshop price 9 Tel 01420 592974
T
he debut novel of the founder of
Peirene Press, Meike Ziervogel, carries
many of the hallmarks of her publishing
ethos. Its short, beautifully packaged by
Salt Publishing, and the themes are
hard-hitting and distinctly European.
Joseph and Magda Goebbels arrive in
Hitlers bunker with their children aware
that the end of war is nigh. We already
know their fates: Hitlers propaganda
minister and his wife committed suicide
after killing their six children. Ziervogel
suggests Magda murdered the children
alone and focuses on what leads her to this
final brutal act.
Combining fact and fiction and knitting
together the perspectives of Magdas
embittered mother and her eldest daughter,
Helga, Ziervogel creates a multi-layered
portrait. Magdas mother, a former
maidservant, reveals how her estranged
husband insisted that his daughter receive a
convent education. Its harsh environment
hardens Magda from a tender age. She is
rescued by her mothers second husband, a
kindly Jewish shopkeeper, who brings up
Magda like his own and encourages her to
pursue an education rather than follow her
mother into domestic service.
After meeting Goebbels, Magda realises
that her destiny is to serve the Party and she
dedicates herself to Hitler as though He was
God, confiding in him her fears and desires.
Rather than presenting Magda as a
monster, Ziervogel gives her a human face.
She comes to represent all the ordinary
German women who were swept up by
Hitlers abominable vision, refusing to
recognise its horrors and absolving
themselves with state propaganda. Helgas
diary entries suggest that her mother is
already distancing herself from her
children, perhaps preparing herself for the
inevitable. Ziervogel dedicates one chapter
to Magdas vision of what might happen
should she and her children live under
enemy occupation. Helga would have to
prostitute herself while Magda would have
to watch helplessly, terminally afflicted by
her migraines. It is too hard for Magda to
contemplate this possibility and so she
chooses the only alternative left open to her.
Even in that, she is deluded: seeing her act
of prolicide as heroic rather than
cold-blooded murder. Lucy Popescu
Alan
Johnsons
mother, Lily
(standing),
with Linda
and Alan
(seated)
20
|
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25 May 2013
ARTS
SIMON SCOTT PLUMMER
oughton Hall in north Norfolk is
among the most splendid of
country houses. But for over 230
years it has been stripped of the
paintings collected by its creator, Sir Robert
Walpole, Britains first de facto Prime Minister.
In 1779, to pay off debts, they were sold by
his grandson to Catherine the Great for more
than 40,000. She hung them in the
Hermitage, the picture gallery of the Winter
Palace in St Petersburg, where most of them
have since remained.
Now, in a wonderful twist of fortune, 57 of
them are back in their former home for the
summer. Houghton Revisited offers a unique
chance to see a great Palladian mansion
restored to its former glory through the return
of a collection considered so important in
Walpoles day that the English radical John
Wilkes advocated its purchase by public funds
to form the basis of a new National Gallery.
It has taken three years to mount the pres-
ent exhibition. Close association with the State
Hermitage Museum enabled the French art
historian Thierry Morel to persuade it to send
42 paintings to Houghton, the first time it
has lent to a private house. For the duration
of the exhibition, the house has assumed the
status of an official museum under supervision
of the British Government, which has indem-
nified the loans against loss and damage.
Houghtons owner, the Seventh Marquess
of Cholmondeley, a direct descendant of
Walpole, has taken down the permanent col-
lection to make way for the originals. The
walls of one room have been relined in dark
green velvet, the better to show off paintings
by the Baroque Roman artist Carlo Maratta.
In another, Poussins Holy Family with Sts
Elizabeth and John the Baptist is displayed
in the frame made for it by William Kent,
having been removed from the one in which
it normally hangs in the Hermitage.
There have been some disappointments. A
Rubens portrait of his second wife, Helena
Fourment, was too fragile to travel from the
Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, and
it proved impossible to get Marattas Acis and
Galatea from Khabarovsk. Both are among
Walpole paintings no longer part of the
Hermitage collection. Some have moved else-
where in Russia, others to museums and
private collections in America and other parts
of Europe. Fifteen of them have returned from
these various destinations to Houghton.
There are many individual delights in this
exhibition, but the chief pleasure is to see the
acquisitions of one of Britains greatest col-
lectors back in the rooms designed for them,
and, thanks to papers discovered by Lord
Cholmondeley, often in the exact spots in
which they originally hung. It is a miraculous
recreation of the interior of a magnificent
Whig house in which, as Dr Morel, the curator,
puts it, the pictures come to life in the sur-
roundings created for them.
Pride of place in the Common Parlour, used
by Walpole as the family dining room, goes
to a Kneller portrait of Grinling Gibbons, sur-
rounded by a pearwood garland attributed to
the famous woodcarver. Among its compan-
ions are Velzquezs famous portrait of Pope
Innocent X, perhaps a sketch for the fuller
version in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome;
portraits by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck
and Hals; and a kitchen scene by David Teniers.
In the Marble Parlour, the formal dining
room, two full-length portraits by Van Dyck
of English aristocrats face each other across
the length of the room. In the White Drawing
Room, renamed after Carlo Maratta for the
exhibition, a superb portrait by the artist of
Pope Clement IX hangs above the fireplace.
Also there are Marattas huge Judgement of
Paris, which had to be removed with the help
of scaffolding from the ceiling of the imperial
staircase in the palace of Tsarskoye Selo out-
side St Petersburg, and Murillos Flight into
Egypt and Crucifixion.
Next door to the White Drawing Room,
the Saloon has Giordanos Sleeping Bacchus,
a painting so large that, defying normal pro-
cedure, it had to be removed from its crate
outside the house in order to get it inside.
Other masterpieces in the same room include
Salvator Rosas Prodigal Son, Murillos The
Immaculate Conceptionand Paris Bordones
sensual Venus, Flora, Mars and Cupid.
Pleasure in the return of these treasures to
Houghton is enhanced by knowledge of their
political history. Despite lengthy and lucrative
terms in office, Walpole left debts of around
40,000 when he died in 1745. His grandson,
George, spectacularly profligate and occasion-
ally insane, was forced to stave off bankruptcy
by putting over 200 works, about half his
grandfathers total collection, up for sale. This
infuriated his uncle, Horace, the famous man
of letters, who had played an important role
in acquiring these treasures. In his opinion,
the mad master was selling out to an empress
whom Horace variously described as the
Crocodile and The Great Turk at St
Petersburg. He saw the sale as an ominous
illustration of Russias imperial pretensions.
The paintings were transported in the
frigate Natalia, which suffered a minor ship-
wreck off the coast of Holland. Its cargo,
eagerly awaited by Catherine, was transferred
to another vessel. The Russian art historian
Vladimir Loewinson-Lessing has described
its arrival in St Petersburg as one of the great-
est events in the life of the Hermitage.
Sales from the collection were made under
Nicholas I and Stalin and other paintings dis-
appeared during the German occupation of
former imperial palaces. In 2003, some of
the works were displayed in Somerset House
in London.Houghton Revisited is both more
ambitious and more fitting than that exhibi-
tion. After the death of George in 1791,
Horaces chosen heir, later to become the first
Marquess of Cholmondeley, bought all the
furniture for 10,000. Lengthy restoration
of the house by Sybil, wife of the fifth
Marquess, and by the present Lord
Cholmondeley has created the perfect
ambience for the return of the pictures.
Houghton this summer should not be missed.
The exhibition runs until 29 September.
For tickets, telephone 01603 598640.
www.houghtonrevisited.com
RETURN JOURNEY
One of Britains former great collections, once proposed as a
basis of a National Gallery, has been reassembled in its original
home, on loan from St Petersburgs Hermitage Museum
H
Detail of Carlo Marattas portrait of Pope
Clement IX, on show at Houghton Hall
RADIO
Asterisks here
Four Thought
BBC RADIO 4
L
istening to the science writer Emma Byrne
begin her defence of swearing in front
of a live audience at Somerset House (15 May)
I thought of my late grandmother and a
story celebrated in our family history. This
was the moment when my father, in the early
stages of his courtship of my mother, arrived
at the family house and remarked, when the
door was opened to him, that it was damned
cold, Mrs Spalding he was instantly
informed that we didnt want language like
that, young man. This seemed to demonstrate
Byrnes essential point that swearing involves
taboo and that as taboos change, so does
language.
Swearing, Byrne declared, had a bad name,
but it was more important than we thought.
Research carried out among chimpanzees
had demonstrated that it was a valuable proxy
for physical violence. Indeed, an exceptionally
clever specimen called Lucy, who had been
taught sign language and was aware that the
symbol for excrement was dirty, could some-
times be persuaded merely to signal rather
than fling the stuff about. Lucy and her coevals,
like their human equivalents, knew that swear-
ing was a way of expressing anger and that it
involved breaking a rule by which their society
chose to abide.
By this point you were wanting Byrne to
define her terms. Given that the swear words
25 May 2013
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21
We guess that Ayad Akhtars careful
gathering of complex ethnicities in one room
will finish in punches at least, PAGE 22
Something in the Air: an
authentic evocation of 1970s
France, without the clichs
CINEMA
End of the rainbow
Something in the Air
DIRECTOR: OLIVIER ASSAYAS
F
or any group that follows where the rad-
icals have gone before, the path is not
simple. They can attempt to exceed or con-
tradict or settle for simple imitation. French
director Olivier Assayas tender evocation of
the trials and discoveries of a group coming
of age in 1971 the younger sisters and
brothers of the 68 students demonstrates
that for follow-on revolutionaries, love and
good intentions may not be all you need. The
French title is Aprs Mai, a reference to the
evnments: for anglophone audiences, it
becomes Something in the Air, recalling the
melancholy Thunderclap Newman song,
which even at its initial release in 1969 seemed
to lament the revolution it announced.
At the centre of the film is schoolboy Gilles
(Clment Mtayer), the son of a celebrated
screenwriter Assayas own father adapted
the Maigret stories for television. Gilles is a
young bourgeois with the floppy hair and
sophisticated political vocabulary of his class.
He and his schoolmates yearn to smash the
system as their older siblings battled to do.
Conscious that the promised revolution has
not arrived but that political action is clearly
possible, they begin their own programme of
protest, with graffiti and banners. Soon they
are more organised and ambitious, with
greater and more hazardous challenges to
authority. Yet, even as they become university
students, their fervour sets into factionalism.
The struggle for social reform becomes bogged
down in turbulence and squabbling. Within
the red at the Lefts end of the rainbow, there
are a thousand different shades.
All this could be comical or maudlin. What
makes Something in the Air worth pursuit is
the respect (without pomposity) that Assayas
accords his own generation. He avoids the
usual clichs to make each of the young pro-
tagonists believable without romanticising
the period. There are few of the lazy cinematic
signifiers of the early 1970s. Although I am
a few years younger still than these characters,
I spent time in France in the mid-1970s, I
went to parties that were not dissimilar and
I have never seen a better representation
on-screen of what it felt like. Equally, that
precise terminology of the Left was still the
charged vocabulary of students when I went
to university.
The youngsters portrayed here are rejecting
the entire system of their parents in order to
create something more equal and authentic.
When they eventually fail, for fail they must,
it is because they are distracted by love or cre-
ativity, the conventional goals for screen
protagonists. As they progress into their early
twenties, these young people are pulled by
individual yearnings for happiness or fulfil-
ment. Artistic endeavour is dismissed by the
genuine revolutionaries as solip-
sistic, a conflict that over the years
has clearly troubled Assayas.
His cast is a group of mostly
unknown youngsters. Who
knows what, from the age of
iPhones, flashmobs and online
global petitions, they make of the
clunky old student presses and
leafleting, the demonstrations and the in-
fighting? Yet the film inevitably stirs up
thoughts of mass movements such as Occupy
even as it gives us the background for Europe
today. And for all that, it is a curiously light
experience, far from a lecture, with the haunt-
ing quality of that 1969 song. Francine Stock
people get het up about change over time
see my grandmother, above this was difficult
to do. On the other hand, she seemed reluctant
to distinguish between swearing and the sim-
ple causing of offence. Watching the film Mrs
Henderson Presents, about the nude tableaux
of the mid-twentieth-century Windmill
Theatre, she confessed to finding the subject
matter quaint, only to draw in her breath
sharply when Dame Judi Dench, faithful to
the spirit of the times, dropped an anti-Semitic
remark.
This, you felt, was rather confusing. Surely
a twenty-first-century racist who uses the n-
word is working in rather different territory
from a football supporter who calls the referee
a ****? Elsewhere, Byrnes defence of bad lan-
guage dwelt not merely on the advantages of
freedom of expression, but on swearings ability
to help people withstand stress, relieve their
feelings and conquer pain. Research students
encouraged to plunge their hands in buckets
of iced water and then, as it were, let off steam,
were thought to feel less discomfort than those
who preserved a stiff upper lip.
It wasnt that everybody ought to swear
more, merely that we ought to take the phe-
nomenon more seriously. Swearing, Byrne
concluded, was often a cry for help,
particularly among stroke patients. People
who swore were trying to tell you something
very important.
All this reminded me of a story in Anthony
Burgess memoirs, in which an army colleague,
bent over a defective motorbike, uses the f-
word to fulfil five functions in a six-word
stretch (F***! The f ***ing f ***ers f ***ing
f ***ed!) Never mind about taboos. What
about swearings increasingly common role
as the substitute for vocabulary? D.J. Taylor
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Telford police prepare to make an arrest:
The Hunt for Britains Sex Gangs
TELEVISION
Breaking the case
Dispatches: The Hunt for Britains
Sex Gangs
CHANNEL 4
T
his weeks Dispatches was highly topical.
The Hunt for Britains Sex Gangs
(23 May) looked into the organised rape and
trafficking of young girls. It did not, however,
deal with the recent Oxford case, but looked
closely at an earlier investigation.
Coverage of the Oxford horrors has led to
fingers being pointed at the police for their
tardiness in investigating and prosecuting
these crimes. This film director Anna Halls
third on the subject detailed an earlier sex
ring in Telford, and explained the difficulties
faced by officers in dealing with crimes involv-
ing large numbers of perpetrators as many
as 200, in this case when only a small num-
ber of terrified victims are willing to come
forward. Reporter Tazeen Ahmad made the
most of the exceptional access granted by the
police, joining them in their operations room
and on raids.
These were horrendous crimes. Girls as
young as 11 were picked up, given drink and
drugs and raped. Then they might be offered
to the perpetrators cousin, or his brother, or
his uncle, and then to any number of other
men, often several at once. Then the trafficking
began. One policewoman explained the modus
operandi of one suspect: He would rape them
all first, to test the waters, to see who was good,
and then take the best ones to Birmingham.
One girl was raped repeatedly for up to 13
hours. All were under the age of consent.
From the start, two Pakistani men were in
the frame: Ahdel Ali, known as Eddie, and his
brother Mubarek Ali, known as Max. The offi-
cer in charge, DCI Alan Edwards, knew when
to tread carefully. The difficulty is, how do
you deal with that without being accused of
being racist in some way? He did not, he said,
care what background they came from. I dont
know anything else about them, other than
that they are gang-raping young girls. And I
am going to arrest them. Three cheers for that.
And that was rather the films approach.
There are questions to be asked about the cul-
tural attitudes behind these crimes, but they
werent raised here. We learned nothing at all
about the suspects; the film stuck to the crim-
inal investigation. As such, it was an exemplary
piece of work, but in covering the who,
what, when and where, it omitted the
why.
It is perhaps not surprising, given
the close working relationship
between film-makers and police, that
the programme rather saw things
from the officers point of view. One
parent claimed he had reported his
daughters absence from home 60 or
70 times, and that it took the police
18 months to act. The police said only
that the victims did not complain.
The films criticisms were reserved
for the legal process. In the cases that resulted
from this investigation, five victims were cross-
examined for hours at a time by seven different
barristers, one after the other. There is an
analogy with the kind of rough treatment
they had already suffered.
The girls had to testify because the forensic
evidence wasnt there. Not because there wasnt
any DNA, but because it was hopelessly con-
fused: too many men were involved. In the
end, the case was broken not by science but
by a clever legal manoeuvre. When the men
faced rape charges, their barristers could argue
that the girls consented, despite their age. But
when the case became about trafficking, the
European Convention on the crime makes
that irrelevant: it is not possible to consent to
being trafficked. Ahdel Ali and Mubarek Ali
went down for 18 and 14 years respectively,
and six more were also jailed. Five girls were
there to see it, but about 100 more were preyed
on by this gang, and Telford police are still
making arrests. Good.
John Morrish
THEATRE
Too much symmetry
Disgraced
BUSH THEATRE, LONDON
O
ne of the tasks of modern drama is to
reflect developments and tensions in
society and the lists of recent winners of the
Pulitzer Prize for theatre-writing suggest that
American playwrights are fulfilling this obli-
gation during an Obama presidency that,
after seeming to resolve historical racial
divides, has also exposed new ones. Two years
after the Pulitzer went to Bruce Norris
Clybourne Park, in which a rhetorical civil
war breaks out between black and white
residents in a Chicago suburb, the honour
has been given to Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar,
a troubling tragi-comedy about racial identity
and assimilation.
Akhtars five characters have backgrounds
carefully contrived to make them serve as
chess pieces on the board of black and white
interaction. Amir (Hari Dhillon) is a New
York corporate lawyer, headed for a partner-
ship at a swanky Manhattan firm. Muslim by
birth but secular and atheistic by thought,
Amir lives in wealthy splendour on the Upper
East Side with his white wife, Emily (Kirsty
Bushell), an upcoming artist who employs
traditional Islamic iconography in her work.
During four short scenes, taking place over
nine months between 2011 and 2012, their
apartment is visited on various social errands
by Isaac (Nigel Whitmey), a Jewish-American
art curator, who is considering Emilys work
for a future show and happens although we
are aware that the dramatist has made it
happen to be married to Jory (Sara Powell),
who works with Amir and also happens to be
an African-American. We also twice meet
Amirs nephew Abe (Danny Ashok), who
seems to be an all-American boy and therefore
leaves the playgoer beady about whether he
will remain so throughout.
When an Irishman, a Scotsman and
Welshman walk into a bar, it always ends with
a punchline and we guess that Akhtars careful
gathering of these complex ethnicities in one
room will finish in punches at least. In expos-
ing liberal social manners as masks, Disgraced
overlaps not only with Clybourne Park but
also with Yazmina Rezas The God of Carnage.
Ahktar strikes some tremendous and
unsettling blows. Amir, who is dismissive of
Islam both religiously and artistically, finds
himself accused by his white wife of racism:
a curious phenomenon that several non-white
writers and comedians have suffered in the
liberal press. However, Isaac frets over whether
Emilys art might not be culturally offensive
in appropriating the icons of a civilisation to
which she does not belong. And, all the time,
Palestine and 9/11 lie between Amir and Isaac
like improvised explosive devices on a road,
waiting for them to tread too heavily.
Pacily played at 90 minutes with no interval
in Nadia Falls production, Disgraced is excit-
ing, tense and provocative. Its weakness is its
neatness, confirming that one of the oddities
of theatrical history is that well-made plays
those social comedies of contrived motiva-
tion and coincidence, which dominated British
drama in the middle of the last century have
unexpectedly been resurrected by twenty-
first-century American dramatists.
Carefully constructed to speak to Akhtars
motion (This play maintains that assimilation
often merely disguises difference) from dif-
ferent angles, the characters possess secrets
timed to explode in the final scene. Aware of
how convenient the situation is isnt it lucky
that Amir has a colleague married to someone
big in the art world? the writer introduces
back stories to make the connections seem
more natural but these merely draw attention
to the plays almost geometric collection of
racially representative Americans.
Mark Lawson
THE CHURCH IN THE
WORLD
Pope calls for regulation of free market
Robert Mickens
andMichael Sean Winters
POPE FRANCIS has fiercely criticised the
cult of money and the tyranny of unbridled
capitalism in what aides described as his first
major address on the global financial and eco-
nomic crisis. The worship of the golden calf
of old has found a new and heartless image
in the cult of money and the dictatorship of
an economy that is faceless and lacking any
true human goal, the Pope said on 16 May
in a speech to welcome four new ambassadors
to the Holy See from Kyrgyzstan, Antigua
and Barbuda, Luxembourg and Botswana.
He said the lack of market regulations had
widened the gap between a minority of the
worlds people who continue to grow wealthier
and a majority becoming ever poorer. This
imbalance results from ideologies that uphold
the absolute autonomy of markets and finan-
cial speculation, and thus deny the right of
control to states, which are themselves charged
with providing for the common good, he said.
A new, invisible and at times virtual
tyranny is established, one which unilaterally
and irremediably imposes its own laws and
rules. Pointedly, given that three of the ambas-
sadors represented acknowledged tax havens,
he continued: Added to this is widespread
corruption and selfish fiscal evasion which
have taken on worldwide dimensions.
The head of Europes most powerful econ-
omy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel,
appeared to back the Popes broad analysis.
Crises have blown up because the rules of
the social market have not been observed,
she told reporters on Saturday after a 50-
minute meeting with Pope Francis at the
Vatican. Pope Francis made it clear that we
need a strong, fair Europe and I found the
message very encouraging. The Chancellor
said the group of 20 economic powers would
seek to tighten financial market regulations
when it meets next September.
Earlier in his meeting with the ambassadors,
the Pope had affirmed that the ultimate ori-
gin of the global financial crisis was the lack
of person-centred ethics in the world of
finance and economics and the denial of
the primacy of human beings. He under-
scored that more colloquially on Saturday
evening in St Peters Square in off-the-cuff
remarks to members of ecclesial movements.
If investments in the banks fall a bit, [its a]
tragedy how can this happen? But if people
die of hunger, if they dont have enough to
eat or arent well, it doesnt matter! he said.
Eric LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee
USA, a Catholic group that focuses on debt
relief and poverty in the developing world,
said: Pope Francis comments are truly
remarkable, not just his words, but his speci-
ficity. Mr LeCompte noted that tax havens
are a principal form of systemic injustice.
For every $10 [6] the US Government
sends in aid to the developing world, $15 [9]
leaves that world in untaxed profits, he said.
Pope Francis renewed his criticism of the
liberal economic model again on Tuesday
while visiting a soup kitchen and shelter on
Vatican property run by the Missionaries of
Charity. Unbridled capitalism has taught us
the logic of profit at all costs of exploitation
without regard to persons, he said.
(For the full address to diplomats, visit
www.thetablet.co.uk)
Protests go on as gay marriage is legalised
25 May 2013
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23
OPPONENTS OF gay marriage in France
vowed to keep up their protests after President
Franois Hollande signed the reform into law
one day after the Constitutional Court declared
it valid, writes Tom Heneghan.
Another large march is planned for Paris
tomorrow and the turnout there could deter-
mine how the protest movement continues.
The Constitutional Court on 17 May rejected
a legal challenge to the reform by the oppo-
sition UMP party, saying it did not violate
any laws or infringe basic rights or liberties
or national sovereignty. It clarified that the
law did not establish a right to a child for
couples hoping to adopt or produce one
through medical means. The interests of a
child must take precedence in cases of adop-
tion, it added.
Opposition leader Jean-Franois Cop said
he would rewrite the law if his UMP party
won the 2017 elections, but other opposition
leaders said such a major reform could not
be reversed after a few years.
The anti-gay-marriage movement might
become a political force in next years munici -
pal elections in France if Sundays protest
succeeds in attracting large crowds. Small
groups of activists have been holding silent
protest vigils around the country and jeering
leading supporters of the reform in the
Government. Some activists have discussed
presenting candidates to challenge pro-reform
politicians at the polls next year.
Lyons Cardinal Philippe Barbarin called
the new law a great violence done to the whole
nation by changing the meaning of words.
On Tuesday a man committed suicide
beside the main altar of Notre Dame Cathedral
in Paris, in an apparent protest against gay
marriage. Dominique Venner, 78, an award-
winning far-right historian, pulled out a
shotgun and shot himself through the mouth.
Police have not disclosed the contents of a
note found next to his body but in a blog entry
on Tuesday morning Venner criticised the
Governments legalisation of gay marriage.
Special prayer for
tornado victims
AFTER HEARING about the death toll from
the tornado that struck near Oklahoma City
on Monday, Pope Francis offered a special
prayer for the victims during his early
morning Mass on Tuesday, writes Michael
Sean Winters. Let us pray for the victims
and the missing, especially the children,
struck by the violent tornado that hit
Oklahoma City yesterday. Hear us, O Lord,
the Pope said during the prayers of the
faithful at his morning Mass in the chapel of
the Domus Sanctae Marthae where he lives.
The tornado left a 20-mile path of death and
destruction. Two primary schools were
struck by the tornado. Twenty-four people
were reported dead as of Wednesday,
including nine children.
Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma
City said the members of his archdiocese
were appreciative of the vast outpouring of
prayers and support.
ROME: Pope Francis has
encouraged members of the
new ecclesial movements to
allow the Holy Spirit to push
them outside the confnes of
their own particular groups and
become an integral part of the
mainstream Church and its
mission under the guidance of
the bishops.
Let us ask ourselves: am I open
to the harmony of the Holy
Spirit, overcoming every form of
exclusivity?the Pope asked
members of some 150
movements that gathered on
Sunday for a huge Pentecost
Mass in St Peters Square. A
record crowd of at least 200,000
people stretched out of the
piazza and down the Via della
Conciliazione towards the Tiber
River. About the same number
showed up on Saturday for a
prayer vigil at which Pope
Francis spent about 40 minutes
ofering impromptu responses
to questions. A Church closed in
on itself is a sick Church,he
declared at the Saturday vigil.
24
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EUROPE
EU needs
spiritual
foundations
Christa Pongratz-Lippitt
AS THE EU struggles with the economic
crisis and escalating levels of unemployment,
senior cardinals and the German Chancellor
have emphasised the importance of spiritual
as well as economic solutions. Europe needs
a spiritual key currency besides the euro,
the president of the Pontifical Council for
Christian Unity, Cardinal Kurt Koch, proposed
in his address at the Pentecost dialogue on
The Vision of a United States of Europe at
Seggau Monastery in Styria, Austria.
The secular state needed the Churches and
religious communities to protect fundamental
values, Cardinal Koch said. Should Europe,
faced with the present economic crisis, con-
tinue to see itself solely, or at least
predominantly, as an economic union, that
could be ruinous for European identity?
Cardinal Koch asked. He added that he would
SPAIN
Religious education
a mainstream
subject again
SPAINS BISHOPS have succeeded in boosting
the importance of religion in the school
curriculum through education reforms
approved by the Government, writes
Isabel de Bertodano.
The reforms make it obligatory to study
either religious education (RE) or an
alternative on cultural and social ethics in
secondary school. In future, RE will be a
mainstream subject, equivalent in weight to all
other academic subjects, with RE students
gaining credits that can be used towards their
fnal average and for grant applications.
The reforms, approved on 17 May, also put
an end to citizenship classes and lessons on
values, which Cardinal Antonio Rouco had
denounced as an invasion of religious
freedom and the rights of parents to demand a
moral education for their children.
Ever since a 1990 education bill diminished
the weight of RE in schools, Spanish bishops
have insisted that it should be equal to other
subjects which would encourage more
students to take it.
THE French-based Community of St John,
which has about 540 religious brothers and
sisters around the world, has admitted that
its late founder, Dominican Fr Marie-
Dominique Philippe, had been guilty of
making unchaste gestures to women he was
counselling spiritually. He did not have sex
with the women, the community said, writes
Tom Heneghan.
The community, which began in 1975 and
was popular in the 1980s among some trad -
itionalists, has been accused of being a sect
that proselytised specifically among young
people and pressured new members to cut
off all ties to their families. Pope Benedict
XVI praised Fr Philippe when he died in 2006
but later removed the communitys prioress
general and put a bishop in charge of its divi-
sion for contemplative nuns.
Br Thomas Joachim, who was elected prior
general in 2010, wrote in a letter to the com-
munity after its recent general chapter that
Fr Philippe had been idolised during his life-
time but a search of the groups records had
brought his transgressions to light.
like to recall the wise words of the unforget-
table Cardinal Franz Knig who had said,
Europe can only survive if it is aware of its
spiritual roots. A Europe without a spiritual
order will become a pawn in the power game.
Religion was indispensable for solidarity,
Cardinal Koch said. When a society shows
God the door, there is an acute danger it will
ride roughshod over human beings dignity.
The financial crisis and its effects were the
main subject of discussion at Mrs Merkels
50-minute private audience with Pope Francis
on 19 May. It was a great joy for her and an
honour for Germany to encounter Pope
Francis again so soon after his inaugur ation,
Mrs Merkel told the press after the audience.
No politics could lay the foundations of a
society, she underlined, and added: We live
on prerequisites that do not lie in our hands,
implying that certain values were unchanging.
The Catholic Church played a central role
in fostering societal foundations, she said.
Pope Francis had made it quite clear at the
audience that Europe is needed and that we
need a strong Europe.
Meanwhile Cardinal Christoph Schnborn
of Vienna has warned that the financial crisis
in Europe is leading to an alarming resurfacing
of nationalism. At a discussion with leading
bankers and politicians in Vienna, Cardinal
Schnborn recalled that nationalism
Europes original sin had led to two world
wars. Instead of seeing permanent economic
growth as unshakeable, Cardinal Schnborn
said, Europeans would do better to admit
their vulnerability and practise solidarity.
(See Notebook, page 14.)
FRANCE
Community founders
sexual lapses admitted
25 May 2013
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25
POLAND
Jonathan Luxmoore
POLANDS NEWESTarchbishop has appealed
for greater social sensitivity to inequality and
exclusion in his country.
I regret that Catholic Social Teaching has
been so much ignored here in recent years,
after providing such inspiration at the start
of Polands [post Cold War] transformation,
said Archbishop Jozef Kupny of Wroclaw.
We urgently need to reshape the sensitivity
of Christians to social issues. This should be
a great area of church mission today, especially
for laypeople and in a time of crisis.
In an interview with KAI, the Polish
Churchs information agency, the 57-year-old
archbishop said interest in Catholic social
teaching had very much declined in Poland,
when it should be integral to church doctrine.
He added that he had been struck by the new
Popes sensitivity towards the needy.
Mgr Kupny heads the Polish Churchs social
affairs commission and was named last week-
end to head the western Polish archdiocese.
Polands gross domestic product has risen
sharply over the 25 years since Communist
rule endeed, making it the EUs sixth-largest
economy and the only one maintaining
growth during the recession. However, in a
recent report, a church commission con-
demned government failure to tackle child
poverty rates, which are the EUs highest, as
well as the lack of support for family life.
Fourteen Muslim clerics from across the
globe were due to visit Poland this week as
part of a Holocaust awareness and anti-
genocide programme, writes Josef Pazderka.
Imams from Bosnia, Indonesia, Morocco,
Nigeria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and
the United States among other countries were
to visit the former Nazi German death camp
at Auschwitz and the new Museum of the
History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Some Muslim leaders still use the infor-
mation about the Holocaust from highly
anti-Semitic sources and texts, Marshall J.
Berger, one of the Muslim visit coordinators,
told the Polish media.
New archbishop demands
revival of social teaching
Church restitution opponents in papal plea
OPPONENTS OF the newly approved church
restitution law in the Czech Republic have
sent a letter to Pope Francis asking him to
prevent the return of state-owned property
to the countrys Catholic Church, writes
Josef Pazderka.
The authors some of whom are well-
known Czech writers and film-makers
highlight the Popes own beliefs that the
Church should serve the poor. They say the
return of church property has split Czech soci-
ety and intensified the despair of the countrys
poorest. Under the restitution, 16 Czech
Churches (with the Catholic Church being by
far the biggest recipient) are to be given back
real estate worth 75 billion Czech crowns
(2.4bn) plus 59bn Czech crowns (1.9bn)
in financial compensation over 30 years.
The groundbreaking agreement was
reached after 20 years of difficult negotiations.
Although the decision was approved by the
Lower House of the Czech Parliament and
signed into law by the Czech president last
year, opinion polls have shown a majority of
Czechs are against the church-restitution bill.
The opposition Social Democrats and
Communists say it gives Churches more prop-
erty than was confiscated by the Czechoslovak
Communist regime after 1948. The objectors
also filed an official complaint to the Czech
Constitutional Court, which will hold the first
public hearing on the matter on 29 May.
CROATIA: Croatias Catholic
Church has rejected allegations
by the Serbian Orthodox
patriarch that its leader, Cardinal
Josip Bozanic, supports the
violation of elementary human
rightsamong the Catholic
countrys Orthodox minority,
writes Jonathan Luxmoore.
The church statement was
issued in response to Patriarch
Irinejs attack on a homily by
Cardinal Bozanic given last
month during a clergy
pilgrimage to the eastern city of
Vukovar, which was largely
destroyed by Serb paramilitaries
during the 1990-92 Balkan War.
The patriarch said Mgr
Bozanic had used the homily to
endorse outrageous demands
for a ban on Cyrillic signs in
Vukovar, while also claiming a
monopoly on sufering and the
sacrosanct status of victim. He
added that some religious
leaders in Croatia, which
becomes the EUs twenty-
eighth member state on 1 July,
had encouraged the violation of
Orthodox Serb rights to
employment equality, restitution
of property and the use of Serb
names, language and alphabet.
The Zagreb Archdiocese said
Patriarch Irinejs very strong
wordswould create confusion,
as Cardinal Bozanic had merely
been concerned to recall
Vukovars wartime fate, and
stress the need for coexistence
and reconciliation.
BRAZIL
Gay marriage
effectively legalised
by justice council
BRAZILS National Council of Justice (NCJ) the
body that governs the countrys legal system
has ruled there is no reason for same-sex
couples not to be issued with marriage
licences, writes Jon Stibbs.
The decision on 14 May by the NCJ, which is
led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, is
the equivalent of authorising same-sex
marriage in Brazil, said Raquel Pereira de
Castro Araujo, head of the human-rights
committee of the Brazilian bar association.
Some marriage licensing ofces already
allow the liberalisation, while others had been
waiting for Congress to make a fnal
interpretation of a 2011 Supreme Court ruling
about equality. The Church has campaigned
against any constitutional change to the
defnition of marriage, and faith groups in
Congress, such as the Social Christian Party,
have vowed to appeal against the NCJ ruling.
RUSSIA: Russias Orthodox patriarch has
warned that his Church will always insist on
the depravity of same-sex marriages, writes
Jonathan Luxmoore. If people choose such a
lifestyle, this is their right but the Churchs
responsibility is to say this is a sin in the face of
God, Patriarch Kirill said in talks on Tuesday
with Thorbjorn Jagland, secretary general of
the Council of Europe. We are concerned that,
for the frst time in the entire history of
mankind, this sin is being justifed by law.
CARDINAL Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New
York, gave the graduation speech at the
University of Notre Dame this year, writes
Michael Sean Winters. Notre Dame was
embroiled in controversy four years ago when
President Barack Obama gave the graduation
speech at the fagship Catholic university.
Cardinal Dolan spoke about meeting an
observant Jewish man on a train who had
attended the university. He turned out to be a
fanatical, in-your-face, obnoxious Notre Dame
alumnus, Dolan joked. Notre Dame is known
for its highly devoted alumni. He said the man
told him to discover the secret of Notre Dame
by visiting the Grotto of Lourdes on campus.
Last night, I snuck down to the grotto to
discover the secret, Dolan said. He recalled
seeing graduates and their friends and family
members, and hundreds of votive candles. The
man on the train was right, he said. At this
grotto, theres a touch of the transcendent.
(For the full text of Cardinal Dolans address,
visit www.thetablet.co.uk)
CZECH REPUBLIC
UNITED STATES
Dolan finds secret
of Notre Dame
26
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25 May 2013
I
ts Pentecost in St Peters Square. There
are a record 200,000 people, more than
half of them members of church
movements. You are a gift and richness in
the Church! Pope Francis tells them. But he
says they need to be open to Gods surprises
and accept the newness of the Spirit.
The Holy Spirit saves us from the
threat of a Church that is Gnostic and
self-referential, closed in on itself, he said.
This is Part II of the new movements
gathering for the Year of Faith. The evening
before, the Pope encourages them to risk
moving out towards others, even if that
provokes the occasional mistake.
Ill tell you, the Pope says animatedly, I
prefer a thousand times an accident-prone
Church to one that is sick because its closed
in on itself. And there are other memorable
one-liners. You were all screaming in the
square, Francesco! But Id rather youd yell,
Jesus! he says at one point. So from now
on, no more Francesco, but Jesus!
Sure enough, after the Pentecost Mass,
the throngs are screaming, Jesus! while
Papa Francesco circles the square for nearly
an hour atop his jeep. When he climbs down
to greet some disabled people, a Legionary
of Christ priest presents him with a young
man in a wheelchair. The Pope places both
his hands on the youths head and appears
to pray intensely over him. The prayer lasts
all of 20 seconds, but many people
including the Italian bishops TV network
believe theyve witnessed an exorcism.
The Legionary priest later said the Pope
offered a prayer of liberation and the head
of the Italian TV network apologised for
suggesting it was an exorcism.
A
rchbishop David Moxon, one of the
most senior Anglican clerics in New
Zealand and Polynesia, was to take
up formally his new duties this week as
director of the Anglican Centre in Rome
(ACR) and personal representative of the
Archbishop of Canterbury to the Holy See.
The chairman of the ACR board of
governors, Bishop Stephen Platten of
Wakefield, was to install him on Thursday
evening at a Liturgy of Welcome at the
Oratory of Caravita. That, of course, is where
English-speaking Catholics celebrate the
Eucharist each Sunday according to the
liturgical reforms of Vatican II.
The choice of venue is significant because
it highlights the ecumenical dimension that
will be part and parcel of Archbishop
Moxons new job. Its one that the
Oxford-trained prelate is particularly suited
for. Since 2010 he has been co-chairman,
along with Archbishop Bernard Longley of
Birmingham, of the third phase of the
Anglican-Roman Catholic International
Commission, commonly known as Arcic III.
Archbishop David, 61, was ordained New
Zealands youngest Anglican bishop in 1993
and in 2006 was appointed co-presiding
bishop of the Church in Aotearoa, New
Zealand and the Pacific. He has authored
several books. When his appointment to the
Rome position was announced last
December, he said he saw it as a call for the
last stipended phase of my ministry.
He is married to Tureiti, who serves as
director of Te Kohao Health Ltd in
Hamilton (NZ), and they have four adult
children. The archbishop and his wife were
actually visiting the Eternal City in March
during the last papal conclave. Incidentally,
he is the second consecutive David from
Oceania to head the Anglican Centre.
Canon David Richardson of Australia had
been in the post since 2007.
T
he Vaticans Financial Intelligence
Authority (AIF), which Benedict XVI
established in 2010 with the stated
purpose of countering in-house money
laundering and the financing of terrorism,
has issued its first annual report. And
according to Ren Brlhart, the Swiss
banker who became the AIFs director last
November, the agency uncovered six suspect
transactions in 2012.
He noted the figure was five more than
the previous year, saying it showed the Vatican
was serious about bringing greater
transparency and rigour to its financial
operations. That would include the scandal-
tainted Institute for the Works of Religion,
which is more commonly called the Vatican
Bank. The Vatican set up the AIF shortly after
it signed European anti-money laundering
treaties at the end of 2009, pacts that were
required for the continued minting of its
own euro coins. And so, nearly three years
later, the AIF has issued the first of what will
now be an annual report.
This years was brief, speaking more about
the nature of the AIF than any of its findings.
Then there were two addenda the AIF
statutes and a 33-page list of updated
criminal legislation for Vatican City State.
Most have to do with money laundering and
financing terrorism, but there are some other
crimes that seem somewhat curious for the
papal enclave. They include human
trafficking, the sale of industrial products
with false labels, illicit trafficking of waste
and environmental crimes. And they all
carry prison sentences and monetary fines.
The crime of piracy was most interesting.
It includes kidnapping, depredation, and
any other act of violence committed against
persons on private ships or aircrafts. Not
many boats and planes navigating these
days in Vatican territory. Unless they mean
the Barque of Peter.
Robert Mickens
Letter from Rome
Blasphemy laws target Christians
Egypts Christians are being dispropor-
tionately targeted by the bringing of
blasphemy cases, rights groups say. At least
36 cases were filed between early 2011 and
the end of 2012, according to a report from
the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights
due for release at the end of May. A dis-
proportionate number were against
Christians, who make up just 10 per cent
of Egypts 84 million population, said Ishak
Ibrahim, a researcher at the Cairo-based
group. Criminalisation of blasphemy was
enshrined in the countrys Islamist-backed
constitution, approved last December.
Caritas is tenderness says Pope
Pope Francis has urged the Caritas network
of Catholic charities to help the Church
revive her tender and motherly dimen-
sion towards those in need. Caritas is the
caress of the Church to its people, the
caress of the Mother Church to her chil-
dren, the Pope said on 16 May in an
informal meeting with regional leaders of
Caritas Internationalis, the Rome-based
coordinating group of national Caritas
agencies. The spirituality of Caritas is the
spirituality of tenderness.
Christian minister shot in Nigeria
Gunmen believed to be members of the
Islamist Boko Haram terrorist group have
murdered the secretary of the Borno State
branch of the Christian Association of
Nigeria, that brings together the leading
Nigerian Christian denominations. Killers
followed the Revd Faye Pama Musa, 47,
from his Pentecostal church in Maiduguri,
the state capital, to his home on 14 May.
There he was shot at close range in the
presence of his daughter, who pleaded
with them to spare her fathers life.
March for kidnapped bishops
A silent march with candles organised
by the Assembly of the Heads of Churches
was held in Amman on Tuesday to demand
the release of two Orthodox bishops kid-
napped in Syria a month ago. Bishop Mar
Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim heads the
Syriac Orthodox Church in Aleppo, while
Bishop Boulos al-Yazigi leads the citys
Greek Orthodox Church.
Not homophobia
Speaking out against same-sex marriage
or against allowing homosexuals to adopt
children is legitimate and not a sign of
homophobia as long as it is respectful
of homosexuals, Bishop Klaus Kng of
Sankt Plten, who is responsible for
marriage and family affairs in Austrias
bishops conference, said on the
International Day of Families, 15 May.
IN BRIEF
For daily news updates visit
www.thetablet.co.uk
NEWS
FROM BRITAIN AND IRELAND
Public inquiry into abuse
urged by safeguarding chief
Sam Adams
THE CHAIRMAN of the National Catholic
Safeguarding Commission for England and
Wales (NCSC) and leading victims groups
have backed The Tablets call for a public inquiry
into child sexual abuse.
The NCSC chairman Danny Sullivan said
that a national inquiry would give victims of
abuse in any institution the chance to be
heard and offer a genuine calling to account
of those responsible.
Anne Lawrence, spokeswoman for Minister
and Clergy Sex Abuse Survivors, and Peter
Saunders, chief executive of the National
Association of People Abused in Childhood
,have also backed the idea of a public inquiry.
They were responding to a leader in last
weeks edition of The Tablet that called for
Britain to follow Australias example of setting
up a royal commission to examine the causes
of sexual abuse against children, and possible
solutions. The call comes after recent high-
profile scandals involving institutions including
the BBC, the Catholic Church and Church of
England and the failure of agencies to inter-
vene to stop the abuse of young girls in Oxford
and Rochdale.
The leader suggested this inquiry focus par-
ticularly on cases of institutional abuse, to
examine whether the culture in these bodies
needs to change, and whether it should be
made a legal obligation to report suspected
abuse to the police.
Mr Sullivan said a royal commission would
enable genuine healing to take place. He said
it was only right and just that such a com-
mission should involve institutions other than
the major Churches, and that by supporting
the inquiry, the Catholic Bishops Conference
of England and Wales and the Conference of
Religious would send a significant message
to victims and survivors [of abuse] about a
genuine new beginning.
Mr Sullivan said that while the Catholic
Church in Britain has made progress in ensur-
ing that national procedures are in place to
protect children, young people and vulnerable
adults, there is much yet to be done to convince
victims and survivors that there is an openness
to authentic healing and reconciliation.
He said: Yes, our bishops have to take due
notice of their trustees and insurance agencies
but the heart of the Gospel must direct all we
do in relation to those who have been so seri-
ously damaged and personally devastated by
those abusing their
power and posi-
tion within the
Church.
Ms Lawrence
said the Catholic Church and the Church of
England should welcome an inquiry because
much of the Churches response so far had
been reactive and this would be a proactive
step. Her organisation first suggested a public
inquiry into child sexual abuse two years ago.
A spokesman for the Bishops Conference of
England and Wales said the bishops next
opportunity to monitor progress on safeguard-
ing and the priorities agreed with the NCSC
will be at their next plenary meeting in
November when the latest safeguarding report
is presented and discussed.
(See Letters, page 15.)
Irelands prelates at odds over denying Communion to politicians
TWO OF THE most prominent leaders of the
Church in Ireland appear to be at odds over
whether to deny Communion to Catholic politi-
cians who vote for abortion legislation currently
under consideration in the country, writes
Sarah Mac Donald.
The future Primate of All Ireland,
Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, warned
Irish politicians last weekend: You cannot
regard yourself as a person of faith and support
abortion.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, the
coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh, who will
succeed Cardinal Sen Brady, described politi-
cians who vote for the Governments proposed
legislation, which allows for limited abortion,
as aiding and abetting abortion.
If a legislator comes to me and says, Can
I be a faithful Catholic and support abortion?
I would say no. Your Communion is ruptured
if you support abortion, he said. You are
excommunicating yourself, he said, adding
that any legislator who backed abortion should
not approach a priest looking for Communion.
Responding to his comments, the Archbishop
of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, agreed that politi-
cians needed to examine their coherence
between their faith and what they proposed
in the legislation.
But he said that the Eucharist should not
become a place of debate and contrast and be
used for publicity reasons by anybody.
Earlier this year the Bishop of Elphin,
Christopher Jones, said he and fellow bishops
did not want to see the Eucharist used as a
political issue by anyone.
Archbishop Martin of Dublin also stressed
that excommunication is a very specific meas-
ure under canon law and suggested that his
brother bishop must have been using the term
in a rather large way.
The suggestion that politicians who vote in
favour of abortion are excommunicated appears
at odds with Canon 1398 which states that
only a person who procures an abortion is
automatically excommunicated.
However, Canon 915 says that those who
persevere in manifest grave sin should not
receive Communion. This has been interpreted
to apply to politicians who vote in favour of
abortion legislation.
25 May 2013
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THE TABLET
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27
A former child-protection
adviser to the Scottish bishops
has called on the hierarchy
to establish an independent
commission to review
allegations of clerical
sexual abuse, writes
Christopher Lamb.
In an open letter, Alan
Draper calls on the bishops to
establish a commission of
three professionals to examine
all allegations against living
and deceased clergy from
1963 to 2013.
The rationale for doing so is
to ensure compliance with
agreed policies and
procedures that were in place
at the time and to be satisfed
that current safeguarding
practices are of the highest
standard.
Mr Draper also produces a
list of questions that he says
should be answered in order to
restore the credibility of the
hierarchy.
His questions include
whether the number of
allegations against priests
recently will be published, how
many safeguarding audits and
annual reviews have taken
place and how many victims
have been supported.
A spokesman for the
Scottish bishops said
safeguarding statistics would
be made public. Once these
fgures are published,
it will be clear that concerns
of widespread failures
are not well-founded,
he said.
Danny Sullivan:
an inquiry offers
a genuine
calling to
account of those
responsible
MAZUR/CATHOLICNEWS.ORG.UK
28
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25 May 2013
cafod.org.uk/syriacrisis or call 0500 85 88 85
Conict in Syria has forced more than ve million terried people from their homes, and killed
70,000. Many people are in urgent need of food, water and shelter.
CAFOD is appealing for funds. We urgently need your support.
Please make a donation today.
Your gift will help local church partners to give a safe place to stay for people displaced within
Syria and in neighbouring countries. It will also provide essential food parcels, blankets, clothes
and relief supplies to the most vulnerable.
This is a humanitarian crisis on a staggering scale. We are facing a crisis as big as the one in
Haiti after the earthquake, says Mike Noyes, CAFODs Head of Humanitarian Programmes.
Please give to the Syria Crisis appeal. Your gift will help to provide food and
medical supplies to the most vulnerable, as well as ensuring that people who
have lost their homes have a safe place to stay.
Gift Aid Declaration (only valid with full name and address as lled out above) please tick as appropriate:
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I conrmI have paid or will pay an amount of Income Tax and/or Capital Gains Tax for each tax year (6 April to 5 April) that is at least equal
to the amount of tax that all the charities or Community Amateur Sports Clubs that I donate to will reclaimon my gifts for that tax year. I
understand that other taxes such as VAT and Council Tax do not qualify. I understand CAFOD will reclaim25p of tax on every 1 that I give on or
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SYRIA CRISIS APPEAL
R44269
Catherine Pepinster
A SERIES of briefings given by American car-
dinals in the run-up to the papal conclave
that elected Pope Francis, which were stopped
by the Vatican, were praised by the Vaticans
own media adviser as a huge success last
week.
Greg Burke, senior communications adviser
for the Secretary of State, backed the US car-
dinals approach during a talk to British
journalists at an event held at Heythrop
College, University of London, on Friday to
mark World Communications Day.
Asked whether the blackout of the US
gatherings was a good idea, Mr Burke
himself an American said that he was very
happy that the cardinals managed to speak
to the press without giving anything away
from the confidential general congregations
which took place before the conclave and
involved both voting and retired cardinals.
These briefings were a huge success, he
said. You have to give people something.
The United States cardinals stopped their
regular briefings in the pre-conclave period
after concerns about leaks to Italian papers
of confidential discussions.
Mr Burke, a former Fox News correspon-
dent in Rome, talked to British journalists,
priests and bishops, about the Vaticans
approach to the media and the efforts being
made to synchronise the work of the various
media outlets, including Vatican Radio and
TV, its press office, website and LOsservatore
Romano. He said that the Catholic Church
had received a huge boost from the election
of Pope Francis and that there was enormous
interest in him from around the world. His
approach to people, particularly his concern
for disabled people, was, said Mr Burke, faith
put into practice, faith you can believe in.
But, he said, I would not call Pope Francis
a communicator. I would call him a Christian.
Mr Burke also revealed that he, Vatican
spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi and
LOsservatore Romano editor Giovanni Maria
Vian were told in advance of Pope Benedicts
resignation but all had to swear an oath of
secrecy even though it was just a few hours
before Benedict XVI revealed it to a gathering
in the Vatican.
IN BRIEF
Toal listens to OBrien complainants
The Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, Joseph
Toal, has been in contact with those who
alleged sexual misconduct against Cardinal
OBrien. It is understood that the bishop has
asked to be a contact point for the com-
plainants. He told The Scotsman that it was
important to hear what they were saying.
Meanwhile, vandals have attacked a
Catholic church in Dunbar, close to the house
where Cardinal Keith OBrien was planning
to retire before being ordered to go abroad.
Several windows were broken on Wednesday
last week at Our Lady of the Waves.
Kirk allows gay ministers
The Church of Scotland has voted to allow
the ordination of openly gay men and women.
The General Assembly of the Kirk took what
is being described as a step-change decision
last Monday. The assembly voted in favour
of allowing ordination of ministers in civil
partnerships and gave permission to parishes
to appoint actively gay clergy if they wish.
Correction
Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran will pray for peace
alongside representatives of other religions
on 13 June at Westminster Cathedral Hall.
This is a Thursday, and not a Friday as we
reported last week.
Charities warn over
legal-aid cut
THE GOVERNMENTS plans to cut legal aid
could endanger victims of human trafficking
and domestic violence, Catholic charities have
warned, writes Liz Dodd.
The Bishops Conference of England and
Wales migration adviser Bishop Patrick Lynch
and the chief executive of the Caritas Social
Action Network, Helen OBrien, have written
to the Justice Secretary arguing that new pro-
posals to limit legal aid to people who have
lived in the UK for at least a year could harm
vulnerable and trafficked women.
In a letter to Chris Grayling, which was also
signed by the heads of the Cardinal Hume
Centre, Women@thewell a drop-in centre
in London for vulnerable women and the
Jesuit Refugee Service, they said that no pro-
vision was being made for people from abroad
trapped in a violent relationship.
Failing to replicate [existing provisions]
under the new system will mean that victims
of these appalling crimes will either be
deprived of the legal support they need or be
forced to wait up to 12 months with significant
consequences for their safety and well-being,
the letter said.
The reforms mean legal aid applicants will
need to prove that they have lawfully resided
in the UK for a year. The proposals exempt
asylum seekers, but do not make provision
for victims of trafficking or domestic abuse.
Cardinals briefings before
pre-conclave ban a success
Christopher Lamb
THE BISHOP of Lancaster has said the
Church needs to become smaller but more
missionary focused.
In a passionately argued pastoral letter for
Pentecost last Sunday, Bishop
Michael Campbell said the dioceses
parishes, schools and ecclesial move-
ments would be fewer but
re-formed and marked by zeal for
Jesus Christ, a well-formed laity and
clergy and an excellence in liturgy.
The bishop said that recent clergy
retirements and deaths and dimin-
ished and ageing congregations
mean the diocese must regroup our
smaller numbers and resources.
Bishop Campbell explained: I
sense more and more that as the Church we
are being chastened and purified at this par-
ticular time in our history; thus being prepared
so as to embrace a clear and honest view of
our pastoral realities more focused on our
mission as the Lords disciples and leaving
behind our preoccupation with buildings,
Mass times, narrow identities and our other
man-made structures; to a joyful new vision
tempered by love, ruled by fidelity, but unen-
cumbered by legacy, bits of the past, or an
investment in keeping things the way they
currently are.
Urging his diocese to adopt a more mis-
sionary approach he said: No more merely
basking in the great things the Church has
accomplished in history! As individuals,
schools, parishes, groups, associations and
movements, fear has to be replaced by bold-
ness, cynicism by confidence; hand-wringing
by hand-folding; dullness by daring.
Peter and his companions, we are
told, put fresh heart into the young
Churches, and that precisely is the
work of the Holy Spirit.
Last January, in another pastoral
letter, Bishop Campbell, an
Augustinian friar, asked whether it
was possible for the diocese to
continue to support schools which
were Catholic in name only.
His predecessor Bishop Emeritus
Patrick ODonoghue instituted a
restructuring of parishes as part of a diocese-
wide review Fit for Mission?
To read Bishop Campbells letter in full,
visit www.thetablet.co.uk/texts
25 May 2013
|
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29
50 YEARS AGO
The conference of Spanish cardinals and
archbishops which met in Madrid at the
end of last week discussed the question of
the status of Protestants in Spain, and it
was thought that the basis of their discus-
sions would be provided by a bill on this
subject which has been drafted by the
Ministry for Foreign Affairs. On Thursday
evening last week, 16 May, Bishop
Cantero Cuadrado of Huelva discussed the
subject in a lecture given in Madrid.
Warning his fellow-countrymen not to be
over-hasty in granting more freedom to
Protestants, he said: Spain today is neither
mentally nor psychologically nor socially
prepared for the exercise of religious free-
dom in the way that in other countries is
normal and even indispensable. ... The
states official recognition of the Catholic
religion was not a denial of the right to
other beliefs, but rather the recognition of
a historical situation. If this situation were
not borne in mind in making a greater
degree of religious freedom legal, there
would be a danger to peace and public
order. Past history and present experience
make us aware of this objective reality:
religious freedom to advertise and prose-
lytise in Spain by more or less authorised
persons of non-Catholic faiths, except in
a few cases, turns out in fact to be not only
indiscreet but even aggressive and injurious
to the deepest religious feelings of the
Spanish people.
The Tablet, 25 May 1963
100 YEARS AGO
Of the sorrows of the railway companies
there is no end. When, after the last great
strike, they were forced or cajoled into
granting a large increase in wages, they
were invited to find consolation in the
promise of the Government to secure
parliamentary power to raise their scale
of charges. The promise was kept, and the
railway rates have been raised. The imme-
diate result is the diversion of traffic to the
roads. The difference between the cost of
rail and road haulage was, in any case, in
many districts small, and under the new
conditions is tending to disappear. In many
districts it is now cheaper to take coal from
the collieries to the great distributing mer-
chants by road. In the same way, road
transport by means of motor wagons is
finding favour in the cotton trade. The raw
cotton is so taken from the seaboard to the
manufacturing centre, and the finished
goods travel back in the same way to the
coast or to some distributing centre. Again,
the great London stores find it cheaper to
send goods out by road motors to all places
within 100 miles.
The Tablet, 24 May 1913
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Church-backed marriage bill changes rejected
MPs VOTED overwhelmingly in favour of
legislation for same-sex marriage this week
while rejecting church-backed amendments
to the bill, writes Liz Dodd.
The gay-marriage bill passed its third and
final reading in the House of Commons with
a majority of 205 and will now be debated in
the House of Lords on 3 June.
Among the amendments defeated during
debate on Monday and Tuesday were clauses
to allow registrars with a conscientious objec-
tion to opt out of performing same-sex
marriage ceremonies, legal protection for
Churches that refuse to perform gay weddings
and assurances that faith schools do not have
to promote gay marriage. The Bishops
Conference of England and Wales had earlier
sent a briefing paper to every MP detailing
the amendments they would like to see in the
bill. The Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent
Nichols, also wrote to leaders of the three
main political parties saying that without
amendments, the bill threatened freedom of
speech and freedom of religion.
At least 22 Catholic MPs voted against the
bill, slightly fewer than the 28 who opposed
it at its last reading in February. During the
debate, Catholic MP Edward Leigh, who voted
against the bill, said gay marriage was becoming
a new orthodoxy. Catholic Liberal Democrat
MP Greg Mulholland, who supported the bill
but who voiced some concerns, said: I have
been called anti-gay rights and anti-Christian;
I have been called homophobic and at the same
time accused of not being a proper Catholic.
I have been accused of being worryingly
conservative, yet at the same time dangerously
libertarian. I am none of those things.
The Church of England has
accused Barclays bank of
repeatedly letting down
society with its conduct and
said it is working with the bank
to change its operating
culture, writes Sam Adams.
In its annual report the
Church Commissioners, which
manages the Churchs
1.6 billion assets and
investment portfolio, said it
had commenced an intensive
engagement with Barclays
in which it holds a small stake
and was seeking robust
assurance that the bank was
making a determined and
successful efort to efect a
fundamental turnaround in
[its] culture.
This follows the 290 million
fne Barclays received in June
last year after some of its
derivative traders were found
to have attempted to rig the
London inter-bank lending
rate (Libor) further
undermining public
confdence in the banking
system.
In its annual report the
Commissioners, which also
manages an endowment fund
for retired church employees,
said its discussions with
Barclays will be reviewed in
July. A spokeswoman for
Barclays declined to comment.
Smaller,
missionary
Church urged
M
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T
H
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S
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Bishop Michael
Campbell
30
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THE TABLET
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25 May 2013
I
n his seminal work, Jesus the Jew(1973),
Gza Vermes presented us with a Jesus
who is a thoroughly Jewish person, with
Jewish ideas and a religion that belonged in
the Palestinian Judaism of the first century
of our era. This book brought to a wider public
the great work done by Vermes in reminding
New Testament scholars of the need to place
Jesus against his all-important background
of Galilean Aramaic Judaism.
Vermes was (for a while) a Catholic priest,
but his real vocation was to apply his rigorous
and questing intellect to the study of the
Jewish world in the centuries either side of
the birth of Jesus. His doctorate was on the
origins of the community that produced the
Dead Sea Scrolls, and he produced the often-
reprinted English translation of the scrolls,
recently published (to his great delight) as a
Penguin Classic. He was also co-editor of the
revised Schrer work, The History of the
Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, which
is still an essential resource for those working
in the field.
He spent most of his academic career at
Oxford, where he was reader in Jewish studies
from 1965 and promoted to full professor in
1989. His lectures were always a breathtaking
tour de force, with an effortless command of
English, delivered in a light Hungarian accent
that added to the charm. His output was
prodigious; he was indeed still writing just a
few days before his death, and it is hoped that
some of it will be published posthumously.
Vermes was born to intellectually inclined
and thoroughly assimilated Jewish parents,
in Mak in Hungary; in 1930 his parents con-
verted to Catholicism, in which his mother
became very devout. Vermes turned out to
be a highly academic child, and in 1939 he
entered a seminary. He was turned down by
both the Jesuits and the Dominicans
possibly because of the anti-Jewish sentiment
that disfigured the European Church in those
years but he was eventually accepted by the
Fathers of Sion, an order that had been
founded by two converts from Judaism. They
encouraged him in his academic studies,
including his doctorate from the Catholic
University in Louvain, Belgium.
Priesthood had never, however, really
bitten with him, as he once shared in the
course of a reflective conversation, and in
1955 he met and fell in love with Pam, his
first wife. Domestic life was of immense
importance to him, and some years after Pams
death in 1993 he married Margaret, who with
her son, Ian, survives him. It was an idyllically
happy setting for him, and gave him the
resources he needed to continue his academic
vocation, writing again and again about the
Dead Sea Scrolls and about Jesus.
An eminent Jesuit biblical scholar once
described the intense emotion he experienced
on listening to Vermes speak about Jesus with
such passion. After he left the priesthood and
the Catholic Church, Vermes eventually
returned to a liberal Judaism, although he
freely admitted that he did not have much
time for organised religion and actually pre-
ferred his garden as a place to pray. But it
was fitting that his funeral took place in the
Anglican church where Pam is buried, and
was conducted by the vicar of that church
and by two of his former pupils, one a Reform
rabbi and the other a Jesuit priest.
Nicholas King
Professor Gza Vermes: born 22 June
1924, Mak, Hungary; died 8 May 2013,
Oxford.
Nicholas King SJ teaches theology at
Oxford University.
Obituary
Gza Vermes
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St. Patricks College, Maynooth
Pontifcal University: Faculty of Teology
Applications from suitably qualied candidates are invited
for the following posts:
Professorship in Systematic Theology
Contract Lectureship in Systematic Theology
(3 Years)
Contract Programmes Co-ordinator with some
Lecturing duties in Moral Theology (3 Years)
Contract Lectureship in Sacred Scripture/
Biblical Studies (3 Years)
Prior to application, further information on these posts
should be sought from the Presidents Ofce, St Patricks
College, Maynooth, Co Kildare, Ireland. Tel. 01-7083958
Fax 01-7083959, e-mail: president@spcm.ie
Latest date for applications Friday 7 June 2013. Interviews for
Lectureships likely to be held week beginning 17 June 2013
and Professorship week beginning 8 July 2013.
The post of Lay Chaplain is a newly created role to meet the growing needs of our
College and to support our frst intake of sixth form students in September. This is
a very exciting time in the life of St Gregorys Catholic College and the role of Lay
Chaplain is central to our plans.
Our new sixth form college, The New Sixth will open in September 2013 with
mainly students from St Gregorys, but as part of our federation with St Marks
Church of England School, there will be some students from that school also, as
well as external students. The successful candidate will therefore be working as
part of a team of chaplains from diferent Christian traditions.
If you are successful you will be joining a warm and welcoming team that is highly
skilled and motivated with an excellent track record.
An application pack is available from www.st-gregorys.bathnes.sch.uk
alternatively you may contact the College at stgregorys_sec@bathnes.gov.
uk or telephone 01225 832873. Applications should be posted or emailed for
the attention of The Personnel Manager.
Please note that the deadline for
applications is 4:00pm on Monday 10 June 2013.
Interviews will be held in the week beginning 17 June.
www.newsixthbath.org.uk
www.st-gregorys.bathnes.sch.uk
St. Gregorys Catholic College is an equal opportunities employer. We are
committed to the safeguarding and welfare of our students and expect
all staf to share this commitment. An enhanced DBS check is required
for all successful applicants.
The Governing Body of St Gregorys Catholic College require
from September 2013 a:
LAY CHAPLAIN
Salary: Grade M (21,734 23,945 full-time equivalent,
actual: 19,174 21,124). 37 hours per week
(Term time only plus 10 days).
Classified 25 May.indd 31 21/05/2013 08:51
32
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THE TABLET
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25 May 2013
Volume 267 No. 8999 ISSN: 0039 8837
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CALENDAR
Sunday 26 May:
The Most Holy Trinity (Year C)
Monday 27 May:
St Augustine of Canterbury, Bishop
Tuesday 28 May:
Feria
Wednesday 29 May:
Feria
Thursday 30 May:
Feria
Friday 31 May:
The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Saturday 1 June:
St Justin, Martyr
Sunday 2 June:
The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
(Corpus Christi)
21
9 770039 883202
For the Extraordinary Form calendar go to
www.lms.org.uk and look under Find a Mass
LOOK FOR a stick, the
man said, gazing into the
pool. A floating twig. We
peered into the water. No
twig. Diving beetles, yes,
and watchful pond skaters. The sky too, its vast-
ness dandled in the willowy wands of
waterweed. And then: There, a floating twig.
Rising from the ponds womblike mystery, the
stick became a rune of ancient bog oak fretted
with gold, and then a great crested newt.
Large-eyed, copiously crested, dinosaur-
thumbed, the 15cm-long amphibian has a touch
of the Doctor Who. It certainly has immense
powers. Mascot of many conservationist
protests, great crested newts, with protection
from European directives, can stop a
Glimpses of Eden
developers bulldozer with a flick of its tail.
Once gloriously common, with the loss of
habitat, they now require special safeguards.
Its the newts habitat that conservationists work
so hard to preserve. Meditative dwellers in
drowsy cattle ponds, frequenters of flushes and
connoisseurs of otherwise unwitnessed waters,
there are ever fewer suitable places. Moving
colonies doesnt always work: these are
homing creatures, and car parks dont make
good homes for anyone. Like their own
looking-glass ponds, the eventual plight of these
animals will be a mirror in which to see
ourselves. Do we really want to concrete
everything over, or is there room in our hearts
for mires ored with great crested newts?
Jonathan Tulloch
GUY CONSOLMAGNO
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
On our forebears shoulders
CYGNUS OB2 is an association of perhaps
1,000 young, massive stars some of them
100 times more massive than the Sun and a
million times brighter immersed in a much
larger molecular cloud known as Cygnus X.
Because it is so close to us (only 4,700 light
years away), we can study Cygnus OB2 in detail,
comparing model predictions about the
formation of such massive stars with actual
observations. These studies might help us
understand how such stars are born, not only
in our galaxy but also in more distant ones.
But that mass of data can overwhelm our
understanding. Its impossible for any one
astronomer to keep track of all the latest devel-
opments. And so earlier this month we held
a workshop at the Vatican Observatory in Castel
Gandolfo where two dozen scientists could
compare notes about this star formation
region. Every scientist had a different set of
data, and a different take on how the cluster
of stars was put together and what makes it
tick. That variety, of course, is what makes small
workshops like this so important.
By an odd coincidence, earlier that week I
had come across a photograph from a simi-
lar astronomy workshop, held at the Vatican
in 1957. The participants 55 years ago are now
names that fill our astronomy books: Georges
Lematre invented the Big Bang and Fred
Hoyle named it; the (Jan) Oort cloud is where
comets reside; the (Karl) Schwarzschild
radius defines a black hole; the (Lyman) Spitzer
Space Telescope is one of the instruments
observing Cygnus OB2.
Some differences between the workshops
were notable. None of the 1957 astronomers
was a woman, unlike a third of this years cur-
rent meeting, including one of its organisers.
Nearly all the 1957 participants had north
European names; the current workshop was
co-organised by a Spaniard living in Chile and
included participants from Eastern Europe,
which would have been impossible for a meet-
ing held at the Vatican during the Cold War.
But other aspects remained the same. In
1957, the participants compared notes about
the relative populations of stars in order to get
at much bigger questions ranging from how
the chemical elements in those different
stars were formed, to the bigger picture of how
the Universe itself was made. By bringing
together experts in diverse fields to sit and talk,
each side learned important things and new
collaborations emerged. In the same way, one
participant this year commented: Every
paper I have ever published started out as a
conversation in a setting like this.
Will someone 50 years from now look at our
group photo with the same sense of awe?
Probably not. The field of astronomy has grown
large enough now that it is no longer domin -
ated by a few big names. But that does not
dilute the genius or the accomplishment of
the modern participants any more than nam-
ing 800 martyrs as saints (as Pope Francis did
this month) somehow dilutes their sacrifice
or accomplishment. As saints and scientists,
we are the product of those who have come
before us, standing on their shoulders; and
our duty is to lift those who will follow.
Appropriately, the attendees at our work-
shop this month ranged from recent PhDs to
Per Olof Lindblad, now 85 years old. I noticed
him examining the photograph of the 1957
meeting. I would have been 30 years old then,
he mused. And then he pointed to a man in the
front row of that photograph. That was my
father.
Guy Consolmagno SJ is the curator of
meteorites at the Vatican Observatory.