The Tablet - Abril 2013

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The Pope and the rabbi Abraham Skorka talks exclusively to The Tablet about his friendship with Francis that could transform Catholic-Jewish relations

Reform club - Robert Mickens on the new pontiff’s advisers - and what they mean for the Vatican Ties that bind and divide - Linda Woodhead, John Milbank and Steve Chalke debate gay marriage PLUS: Sara Maitland - don’t let doctors turn bereavement into a mental illness

02 Tablet 20 Apr 13 Leaders_Leaders 17/04/2013 18:34 Page 2

THE TABLET T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L CAT H O L I C W E E K LY Founded in 1840

SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

I

n what may turn out to be a momentous change in way the Catholic Church is run, Pope Francis has announced that he is assembling a team of eight cardinal-advisers to assist him, including helping him reform the Roman Curia.

Some of them were among the Curia’s most forthright critics in the discussions that preceded the recent conclave, and none of them is technically from the Curia itself. This move represents a highly significant rebalancing of forces within the government of the Catholic Church, and may pave the way for a form of representative Cabinet-type government instead of the model of an absolute monarchy that many believe has gone beyond the end of its useful life.

The Pope’s intention appears to be to translate into action the Second Vatican Council’s desire for a realignment of forces within the Church that has remained largely theoretical over the last half-century. So far, most of Pope Francis’ actions have been symbolic of his much less grandiose interpretation of the personal role of the papacy than all recent Popes have followed, and he has now given that style of approach some embryonic structural shape.

The new team of eight will not meet as such until the autumn, though it is said the Pope intends to begin consulting them individually immediately. What is more significant is that they have been carefully chosen so that virtually every part of the world is represented, and in most cases by men who have themselves been selected for leadership positions by their episcopal colleagues. Thus the European representative is the German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who is president of

the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community and hence can speak for the Catholic hierarchies of Europe. Similar qualifications – and a similar democratic mandate – apply to most of the others.

This shifts the balance of power in the Church in favour of national or regional conferences of bishops. They have hitherto suffered from lack of status as a result of the ruling by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, that episcopal conferences “had no theological significance”. They were mere collections of bishops, and their theological weight was merely the sum of their parts.

If they have now been recognised as key components in the Church’s new architecture, that may go a long way to incorporating the idea of episcopal collegiality at the heart of the Church. The Vatican II decree Lumen Gentium declared that the primary responsibility for the government of the Church lay with the college of bishops with the Pope at its head. Hence the Curia’s role should be as a civil service answering to the college of bishops headed by the Pope, not to govern the bishops on behalf of the Pope – which has been the pattern so far.

This is where putting together a team of eight to advise him, and reforming the Curia, are two parts of the same project. If the team is really the beginning of Cabinet government under a “constitutional papacy”, particularly if the principle of subsidiarity is also to be followed, then the Curia will have to be reshaped and scaled back to provide appropriate structures. Clearly a period of upheaval has begun in Rome, with implications worldwide.

SUBJECT TO COMMON DESTINY

T

he public funeral of Baroness Thatcher was an unusual challenge to the British genius for great ceremonial and religious occasions. It required that the marking and mourning of her departure from this life should be separated from the political controversy around her legacy and philosophy – the separation of Margaret Thatcher the person from all that is represented by the word Thatcherism.

As the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, put it in his sermon: “The storm of conflicting opinions centres on the Mrs Thatcher who became a symbolic figure – even an ‘ism’. Today the remains of the real Margaret Hilda Thatcher are here at her funeral service. Lying here, she is one of us, subject to the common destiny of all human beings.” Indeed, the tolling of the funeral bell as her coffin arrived at St Paul’s Cathedral must have reminded many present of the words of a former dean of St Paul’s, John Donne: “Therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” The star of the show, in effect, was Death, the great leveller, in whose presence all political storms must subside, all knees bend in prayer to plead for mercy.

This was the true significance of her own decision, nearly a decade ago, to have a traditional Christian funeral rather than a memorial or thanksgiving service. She wished to be commended to the mercy of God, before whose Judgement Seat she was destined to stand, in the hope of resurrection.

Roman emperors were required to listen to the words “memento mori” – “remember death” – as they rode in triumph after great victories. A Christian funeral has to remind the

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entire congregation of that common destiny they share with the deceased. In her choice of service that also seemed to be her wish, preferring the stark message that in the grave there is nothing more that fame, power or wealth can do for you.

The bishop recalled that Baroness Thatcher had referred, in a sermon of her own, to the Christian doctrine “that we are all members one of another, expressed in the concept of the Church on earth as the Body of Christ. From this we learn our interdependence and the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of society.” That seemed to be the fruit of her mature reflection on the controversy she once stirred up with her famous remark “there is no such thing as society”, which she afterwards felt had been misrepresented.

The origins of her funeral service go back to the planning done under the Labour Prime Ministerships of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which provides some protection for the current Prime Minister, David Cameron, against the criticism that the event was excessive and an unjustified expenditure of public money. The military component of the event, though carried out with the usual dignity and skill, was the one discordant element because it focused attention too much on the Falklands campaign as if that was the defining moment of her political life. But it was noticeable that the Church of England, through the Bishop of London, had the last word on a matter that had created much tension between them at the time – by not even mentioning it.

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CONTENTS 20 APRIL 2013

CO LU M N S 5

F E AT U R E S

CLIFFORD LONGLEY

Top row: Cardinals Bertello, Gracias, Marx, Monsengwo Pasinya.

Bottom row: Cardinals O’Malley, Errázuriz Ossa, Pell, Rodríguez Maradiaga.

Photos: CNS

‘Capping housing benefit is treating the symptom while blaming the victim’

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SA R A M A I T L A N D ‘Anyone having trouble after a major loss can be deemed “mad” and can be “treated”’

1 1 C RO SS W O R D 1 2 PA R I S H P R AC T I C E 1 3 N OT E B O O K 1 4 L E T T E RS 15 THE LIVING SPIRIT

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Francis’ reform club Robert Mickens The Pope’s appointment of a group to study how the Church is governed is a radical move, argues our Rome correspondent

SPRING BOOKS 1 6 C H R I STO P H E R H OW S E A Very Personal Method: anthropological writings drawn from life Mary Douglas (ed. Richard Fardon)

ADRIAN BREWER

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Cruel Crossing: escaping Hitler across the Pyrenees Edward Stourton

‘Jews now have a good partner in the Vatican’ Isabel de Bertodano

A leading Argentinian rabbi tells us about his friend Jorge Bergoglio and a relationship built on humour and mutual understanding

S U Z I F E AY Binocular Vision Edith Pearlman

THEO HOBSON Archbishop Justin Welby: the road to Canterbury Andrew Atherstone

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As Iraqis prepare to go to the polls, a senior diplomat who supported the war explains why he was falsely persuaded

A RT S 10 2 1 F E AT U R E Laura Gascoigne R.B. Kitaj: Obsessions

This was no just war Ivor Roberts

Ties that bind and divide Linda Woodhead, Steve Chalke, John Milbank

Over the issue of same-sex marriage, British Catholics are split between the desire for equality and the belief in difference

OPERA Robert Thicknesse The Firework-Maker’s Daughter

T H E AT R E Mark Lawson The Low Road and Molly Sweeney

TELEVISION John Morrish The Prisoners

24 THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD Elite group chosen to help Pope govern 2 7 L E T T E R F RO M RO M E 2 8 N E W S F RO M B R I TA I N A N D I R E L A N D Bishops’ first meeting with Pope Francis

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‘Cleaning up’ the Curia ROBERT MICKENS

Francis’ reform club The new Pope’s unprecedented decision to create a commission of cardinals to study how the Catholic Church is governed has been seen by many observers as a response to recent Vatican scandals. But it is a far more radical move than that, as analysis of his choice of commissioners shows

“R

evolution does not easily come to mind when we think of the papacy.” Those words appeared in the opening lines of a book that Archbishop Emeritus John R. Quinn of San Francisco published in 1999.

The Reform of the Papacy: the costly call to Christian unity (Crossroads, New York) was a response of the former president of the US bishops’ conference to John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical, Ut Unum Sint, in which the late Pope asked Christian leaders to help him find a new “way of exercising (papal) primacy”.

Archbishop Quinn said that, similar to the Second Vatican Council, the encyclical was a “revolution”. As he writes in the book, “For the first time it is the Pope himself who raises and legitimises the question of reform and change in the papal office in the Church.” But nearly two decades later, no such reform or change has been seriously discussed in Rome, let alone put into motion.

Pope Francis may have just changed that.

In an announcement last week that should not have come as a complete surprise, the new Pope sparked fresh hope that reforming the way in which the Bishop of Rome exercises his global ministry was now back on the agenda. “The Holy Father Francis, taking up a suggestion that emerged during the general congregations preceding the conclave, has established a group of [eight] cardinals to advise him in the government of the Universal Church and to study a plan for revising the apostolic constitution on the Roman Curia, Pastor Bonus,” said a communiqué on Saturday from the Vatican.

Most commentators interpreted this almost exclusively as the Pope’s response to the VatiLeaks scandal – the launching of an operation to “clean up” the corruption, careerism and inefficiency that the leaks highlighted in the Church’s central bureaucracy. The pundits even suggested that what prompted him to take such action was a large, top-secret report drawn up by three elderly cardinals who investigated the scandal. Only Francis and his predecessor, Benedict XVI, have seen the classified dossier.

However, this seems to be a simplistic reading of the new initiative and one that overlooks its more radical or, as Archbishop Quinn 4

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would say, “revolutionary” intention; that is, fundamentally to change the way the Universal Church is governed. More profound thinkers have read the Pope’s creation of a group of advisers as a bold new step towards fully implementing a model of ecclesial government evoked by the Second Vatican Council – one that is less centralised, more collegial and based on the principles of subsidiarity.

“What Pope Francis has announced is the most important step in the history of the Church of the last 10 centuries and in the 50year period of reception of Vatican II,” said the noted church historian Alberto Melloni. Writing in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, he said the Pope had “created a synodal organ of bishops that must experiment with the exercise of the consilium”. In other words, shared governance of the Church between the Bishop of Rome and all the world’s bishops.

Detailed proposals for this were put forth in Archbishop Quinn’s book, which in 2005 appeared in Spanish. Pope Francis read that work when he was still just a cardinal in Argentina and, at around that time, he reportedly expressed his conviction that at least some of its ideas should be adopted.

The Pope’s decision to name eight senior bishops to “advise him in the government of the Universal Church” is a sign which points in that direction. They represent all the continents. Five of the eight have been or currently are elected heads of national or international episcopal conferences; one headed his international religious order and once worked in the Roman Curia. Only two (a German and an Italian) are European. Only one is currently working at the Vatican, though technically not part of the Curia.

Pope Francis chose Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga SDB to be the group’s coordinator. The charismatic 70-yearold Archbishop of Tegucigalpa (1993-present) is considered a church moderate with a formidable social justice sense. A former president of the Episcopal Conference of Latin America (Celam), he is in his second term as president of Caritas Internationalis (CI), the vast and professionally organised network of the Church’s national and regional charity agencies. His experience of subsidiary forms

of administration in the CI confederation and his mastery of six languages strongly recommend him for the coordinating role. He is one of only three members of the group who were created cardinals by John Paul II, getting his red hat in the same 2001 consistory as the former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope.

Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa of Chile is the representative from South America. He’s another of the Pope’s 2001 consistory classmates and also a past president of Celam. The Archbishop Emeritus of Santiago de Chile (1998-2010) will be 80 in September. A member of the Schönstatt Fathers, he was elected in 1974 to the first of three consecutive terms as the institute’s international superior general. Immediately afterwards he was appointed archbishopsecretary at the Congregation for Religious (1990-96). Two terms as president of Chile’s episcopal conference are also part of his leadership experience.

Australian Cardinal George Pell, who will be 72 in June, is the final member of the group that got their red hats from John Paul II (2003). Archbishop of Sydney since 2001, he is arguably the most conservative of the eight advisers. He has never been elected to any major leadership position, but he has received several papal appointments, most notably as head of the Vox Clara Committee that supervised the English translation of the Missal.

Pell is a no-nonsense, straight-talking critic of the Italian-dominated and inefficient Roman Curia. He represents Oceania as its only active cardinal.

Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley, who turns 69 in June, brings impressive credentials to the group as North America’s representative, especially in dealing with sexual-abuse crises. After highly praised “clean-up and healing” missions as bishop in three smaller dioceses, he was appointed Archbishop of Boston in 2003 and was made cardinal three

years later. Although he has never been elected to major office, his Franciscan simplicity, knowledge of Latin America and close friendship with Pope Francis and Cardinal Rodríguez make him a valued adviser.

Cardinal Oswald Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay since 2006 and the current president of India’s episcopal conference, is also secretary general of the larger Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences. The 68-year-old’s training as a canon lawyer and his experience at several Vatican-held synods are part of his skill-set. He was created cardinal in 2007.

The African member of the group, Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa (since 1998), served for several years as parliamentary leader of the former Zaire during its transition into the Democratic Republic of Congo. A Rome-trained biblical scholar, he has been elected president of the national bishops’ conference, as well as head of the large continent-wide symposium of all of Africa’s episcopal conferences. In addition, he once served as co-president of Pax Christi International. He will be 74 in October; and was created cardinal in 2010.

Europe’s principal representative in the group of advisers is German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, president of the Commission of the Episcopates of the European Community. Conservative doctrinally but a strong proponent of the Church’s social teaching, he has been Archbishop of Munich since 2009. The youngest member of the Pope’s advisers, he turns 60 in September. He was created cardinal in 2010.

C

ardinal Giuseppe Bertello, a career papal diplomat, is the only member of the group who has not been a diocesan bishop. After serving as nuncio in several African countries, the United Nations in Geneva, Mexico and finally in Italy, he was named “governor” of Vatican City State in 2011. Technically he is not part of the Roman Curia, but oversees the administrative and technical services inside the papal enclave. Ordained priest for the Diocese of Ivrea, he will be 71 in October, and some believe he could be the next Vatican Secretary of State. He was made a cardinal last year.

Pope Francis also selected Italian Bishop Marcello Semeraro, 65, to be the secretary of the group. Bishop of Albano (where the Castel Gandolfo papal summer residence is located) since 2004, he worked as an assistant to thenCardinal Bergoglio at the 2001 Synod.

The Vatican said the eight advisers would not hold their first joint meeting until next October. But the Pope is already consulting with them, probably by telephone and mail, as well meeting them during their frequent visits to Rome. No doubt he is also consulting with several others who are already living in the Eternal City – cardinals such as Walter Kasper, Cláudio Hummes OFM and João Cardinal Bráz de Aviz. Certainly, Pope Francis is not expected to postpone all significant decisions or appointments until the autumn.

Rather, he’s likely to discuss them with his consultants in Rome and his G8 abroad.

(See The Church in the World, page 24.)

CLIFFORD LONGLEY

‘Capping housing benefit is treating the symptom while blaming the victim’ For some in the Tory Party, the year Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, 1979, was the moment when the British historical clock was reset to zero. The Conservative Party would do better to delve further back, to the year 1951 for example, when Harold Macmillan became Housing Minister with the promise to build 300,000 houses a year. The task would make him or break him, Churchill told him, and make him it did. It wasn’t just that he began to meet the need for decent housing to replace that destroyed in the war, or to get rid of the inner-city slums. The construction industry received a boost that lifted the economy out of the doldrums to the point where Macmillan, Prime Minister by then, explained his 1959 election victory by saying “they” – the people – “had never had it so good”. It was all sound Keynesian stuff, and it worked.

Compare that with now. One of the reasons why the cost of housing benefit or income support is so high is because rents are so high and wages so low. These payments need to be understood as subsidies to rapacious landlords and exploitative employers; tenants and workers are merely the conduit. Another reason why the housing benefit bill is too high, of course, is because scarcity forces up prices, and there are severe housing shortages in many parts of the country. So capping housing benefit, as the Government has just begun to do, is treating the symptom, not the cause, while blaming the victim. And the price of a house is way beyond the reach of the average working couple. Similarly, endless government talk about “making work pay” would be unnecessary if work really did pay, that is to say, if wages were significantly higher and therefore less in need of topping up by the state.

And there is a Keynesian “multiplier” in this as well. Lower-paid people spend their money in the shops as soon as they get it; they do not invest it in Swiss gold watches. Thus shops prosper, but so do their suppliers and manufacturers. Macmillan would have seen the point. The argument against a “living wage” is identical to that against the idea of a minimum

wage in 1997, namely that it would force up unemployment. It didn’t, providing further evidence that the logic of market forces doesn’t always work when applied to human beings.

“We’ve found that paying the living wage has reduced staff turnover and absenteeism, while productivity and professionalism have subsequently increased,” said Guy Stallard, head of facilities at the accountancy firm KPMG, one of the Living Wage campaign’s most stalwart supporters.

Proof, if any were needed, that if you treat people like human beings, they act like human beings. The campaign, supported by London Mayor Boris Johnson and Ed Miliband, was launched initially by the group London Citizens, whose ideas are rooted in Catholic Social Teaching.

So here are two policies going begging that can be picked up either by the Coalition Government or by Labour, which is daily being assailed for criticising the Government without offering alternatives. Neither of these solutions is entirely consistent with the free-market ideology that still governs Treasury thinking, because neither of them will happen if the market for housing or jobs is left to its own devices. They require intervention.

Which brings us back to Harold Macmillan. As Housing Minister he had to override the market, investing public money where necessary. He knew a newly built house is not money wasted, but money turned into bricks and mortar with a socially useful purpose and added long-term value. They can be rented or sold to recoup that investment. And with higher wages, they can be affordable again. Meanwhile, building them and fitting them out provides jobs and lifts the economy. Herein lies the answer to one of the Government’s greatest imponderables – how to stimulate growth.

This Government or the next needs to promise, first, a living wage enforced throughout the public sector, with a sustained campaign to raise wages in the private sector.

Hence a Minister of Labour, with a seat in the Cabinet. Secondly, a 300,000-a-year house-building target to be delivered by a Minister of Housing and Local Government – thus responsible also for town planning – and also sitting in the Cabinet. Then, and only then, can we start to talk about people who “saved the nation”. Saved it from aimless adherence to blind market forces that are taking us nowhere. Saved it from an ever-burgeoning benefits budget the nation cannot afford. And saved many people from much misery.

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The Tablet Interview

‘Jews now have a good partner in the Vatican’ When he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the future Pope Francis got to know a leading rabbi, Abraham Skorka. Rabbi Skorka talks to Isabel de Bertodano about the pair’s friendship and the ‘revolutionary’ at the helm of the Catholic Church

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n the evening before his inauguration last month, Pope Francis made a telephone call to an old friend in Buenos Aires.

“Hello, it’s Bergoglio. They trapped me here in Rome and they won’t let me come home,”

he told Rabbi Abraham Skorka, whom he has known for 20 years. It was, said the rabbi, a characteristic opening from the Pope, whom he describes as “modest and direct”, but ready with a joke.

In fact, thinking back to the early days when

Catholic Schools Identity and Mission rd

th

Monday 3 – Tuesday 4 June 2013 Worth Abbey

What is distinctive about Catholic schools? How have they adapted to the contemporary educational and political terrain? What is their mission?

Do they have a future?

A conference for Catholic school leaders, governors and policy makers, jointly organised by Worth School and the Jesuit Institute.

Mr Gino Carminati, Worth School Professor Gerald Grace KHS, Institute of Education, London Fr Christopher Jamison OSB, National Office for Vocation Rev Gordon Parry, Bloxham Project Fr Adrian Porter SJ, Jesuit Institute Information at jesuitinstitute.org

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the two men hardly knew each other, it is another joke that the rabbi most vividly recalls.

They first met in the mid-1990s when members of different faiths were invited each year to the Catholic cathedral in Buenos Aires to celebrate Argentinian independence. “We began to get to know each other a bit and then I remember that he made a joke before the Te Deum when he came to say hello,” said Rabbi Skorka, who is now rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Argentina.

In Buenos Aires, football is important and everybody follows a club. The Pope supports San Lorenzo and Rabbi Skorka supports River Plate, known as “Chickens” to rivals. “Bergoglio looked at me and said, ‘I think this year we’re going to eat chicken soup,’” Rabbi Skorka revealed. “It was funny and, after that, we began to get to know each other better.”

In the decades since then, the two men have been instrumental in improving relations between Catholics and Jews in Argentina, which has the largest Jewish population in Latin America. It has been an era in which conventions have been broken and precedents set. In 2004 and 2007, for example, Rabbi Skorka invited Cardinal Bergoglio to attend the Selichot services before Rosh Hashanah (penitential prayers for the Jewish New Year).

“I asked Bergoglio to give us his message for Jewish New Year. It was historic because it was the first time an Archbishop of Buenos Aires had been to a synagogue to give his reflections to a Jewish community.”

Then, last year, Cardinal Bergoglio awarded Rabbi Skorka an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Buenos Aires. “This was the first time it had been awarded to a Jew or a rabbi in the whole of Latin America,” said Skorka. “It was Bergoglio’s move, he promoted it and it was a very strong sign.” Another unusual step was the decision made by Cardinal Bergoglio that Rabbi Skorka, rather than a fellow Catholic, should write the prologue to El Jesuita, the book of interviews of

Bergoglio, published in 2010. “I asked him why he had made this decision and he said ‘Because that is what came from my heart’.

That touched me deeply.” It was around this time that the two men decided to collaborate on a book, On Heaven and Earth, which is due to be published by Bloomsbury in the UK next month. “It was just like him to say that it should be a book of questions that any man on the street would ask,” said Rabbi Skorka. “He believes you can say the most profound things in a very simple way.”

The resulting book is presented as a series of conversations between Rabbi Skorka and Cardinal Bergoglio on topics ranging from clerical celibacy to the Holocaust. “Of course we have a lot in common in our points of view,” said Rabbi Skorka who, at 62, is 14 years younger than the Pope. “But there are also obviously shades that separate us.”

I asked how the new Pope responds to a debate – whether he can be persuaded by what he hears to change his opinion. “Bergoglio is a person who listens very carefully,” said the rabbi. “He analyses everything and is forceful in a discussion. Essentially, when he’s arrived at a conclusion after meditating deeply, he’s unlikely to change his mind.” Among the topics on which the Pope is absolutely unwavering is his refusal to tolerate anti-Semitism of any kind, particularly clerical anti-Semitism. “This is the only kind of thing that makes him really angry – anti-Semitism, any kind of fanaticism.”

Have the two ever argued? “No, never. It’s a question of respect. It’s one thing to disagree on something in a debate and another to argue. We try to see where we agree and how we agree and we’re clear that there are points on which we won’t coincide – on theological positions, for example. But we have so much respect for each other and we understand how to draw near to each other through discussion.”

Rabbi Skorka happened to be at home when he saw on the internet the white smoke signalling the election of a new pope. “I turned on the television, just out of interest,” he said.

“It was a huge excitement to see him come out on to that balcony. But, in truth, I can tell you that it was a double feeling: of happiness, but also a great pain in my heart that my friend was gone.”

However, in terms of Jewish-Catholic relations, the outlook could not be brighter. “There is a lot of hope around now,” said Rabbi Skorka. He recognises that much work has been done already, mentioning the Second Vatican Council and, in particular, Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council declaration proclaimed by Pope Paul VI in 1965, on the relationship of the Church to other faiths. He added that John Paul II’s visit to Rome’s main synagogue in 1986, and later to Israel, were important. “These were giant steps,” he said.

One matter on which light is likely to be shed during this pontificate, according to Rabbi Skorka, is the question over how much action Pope Pius XII took to protect Jews during the Second World War. Pope Francis is keen to open documents held in the Vatican archives to public scrutiny, said the rabbi.

“It’s a terribly sensitive issue, but he says that

it must be investigated thoroughly,” he explained. “I have no doubt that he will move to open the archives.” Another controversy is the Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews to Christianity approved by Pope Benedict XVI for Mass in the Tridentine Rite.

Rabbi Skorka said he never discussed the issue with Bergoglio, but added: “I know his great sensitivity to anything which can hurt or offend.”

The rabbi was also reluctant to discuss other potential changes during a Francis papacy.

“We have talked about these things, but they were private conversations between friends,” he said. “I think he’s going to change everything that he believes needs to be changed.

He is not a person to take on this role in a passive way. He’s not a person who stays quiet when he knows that there is work to be done.”

He added that the new Pope has little time for the more glamorous aspects of the job.

“On the Catholic Church, its morals and ethics, yes, he’s traditional,” said the rabbi.

“On matters of customs, protocol, flamboyance, luxury, as well as in his approach to the poor, he is a revolutionary.”

Rabbi Skorka spoke to the Pope a second time last month, when his friend rang at the start of Passover. “I said ‘Hey, how are you, how’s it going?’ and he replied ‘I’ve got so much work on’,” the rabbi said. “It’s a stressful job, of course, very difficult and he mustn’t trip up because everybody is watching him. But

I think he’s prepared for that. He’s a strong person spiritually and it’s the spirit that drives the body.” Rabbi Skorka is confident that the dialogue will progress with the newly appointed Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Mario Poli. “Yes, of course I expect the good relations to continue, after all, Bergoglio appointed Poli and I’m sure he is a good man. But, with Bergoglio and me, it’s a story of friendship rather than dialogue.”

As an illustration, the rabbi described his recordings for a weekly television programme with Cardinal Bergoglio, broadcast on the Archbishopric of Buenos Aires channel. The shows were pre-recorded in a series; they met about every month.

“We would look into each other’s eyes and know exactly how to proceed,” recalled the rabbi. “We would have a theme and we’d reach an unspoken understanding. This is something that is only achieved over many years of friendship.”

Although Rabbi Skorka hopes to see the Pope again at some point, for now he will be watching events in Rome from afar.

“We’ll wait to see what comes next, what issues Bergoglio chooses to address,” he said.

“But what is certain is that the Jews now have a very good partner in the Vatican.”

■ Isabel de Bertodano is a freelance journalist and former home news editor of The Tablet.

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20 April 2013

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Iraq 10 years on IVOR ROBERTS

This was no just war A series of car bombs exploded across Iraq this week as the country prepares for its first elections since the withdrawal of US troops. Here, in a devastating critique, a former senior diplomat who supported the decision to go to war against Saddam explains why he was falsely persuaded

S

hortly after I arrived in Italy as British ambassador in May 2003, I was invited to give a talk on foreign affairs to university students in Bologna.

When I arrived there by train, I was met by the police, who warned me of a demonstration at the university. “About what?” I asked naively.

“Your visit,” came the reply. It was some three months after the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq.

Eventually, I gave my talk, despite the rioting and the tear gas.

At the time, I believed that the war was, on balance, just, but in the intervening decade, as more material has emerged, it has become increasingly clear that it was not only unjust but also immoral and illegal as well. Some, but not all, of this material has come to light in the evidence submitted to the inquiry, led

by Sir John Chilcot, which is seeking to identify lessons from the conflict.

Chilcot has yet to publish his report. But we already know enough to conclude that we went to war on a false prospectus which deceived erstwhile supporters of the war and made those of us who were paid to defend the Government’s position complicit in a wrong. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about just war theory – from Augustine and Aquinas through Gentili and Grotius. Yet there is a wide consensus about the conditions for a just war, of which, first and foremost, is just cause.

The prime reason for the Iraq war was said to be the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s inventory of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Most of the “evidence” for this came from tainted sources, exiles with a vested interest in seeing Saddam deposed.

The initial September and subsequent “dodgy” dossiers – compiled and edited by John Scarlett, subsequently “C” of MI6, and issued

by Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, to persuade a doubting public of the case for war – drew on these sources.

What emerged was a deeply flawed document. Most of its key claims have been demonstrated as palpably false, particularly Iraq’s possession of WMD and Blair’s claim in the foreword that Saddam had the capacity to deliver a WMD attack on Britain within 45 minutes. This claim led to the allegation that Iraq had sought “significant quantities of uranium from Africa”, an allegation shown to have been based on forged documents.

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duce the September dossier, wrote to the Chilcot inquiry to say that “the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.” In June 2011, The Guardian printed details of a memo from John Scarlett to Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, that referred to “the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional” – an unambiguous suggestion that the dossier should be doctored so as to mislead.

The US administration made it clear from the start that regime change was its real objective and that whether the UN inspectors discovered WMD or not they proposed to act to remove Saddam, with or without UK support. The Blair inner Cabinet was aware of this as early as July 2002, some nine months before the invasion. The secret memorandum of a meeting in Downing Street that month revealed that senior officials were told of a visit to Washington by Sir Richard Dearlove, the then head of MI6. Dearlove reported that there was “a perceptible shift in attitude.

Military action was now seen as inevitable.

[President George W.] Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy [my emphasis].

The National Security Council had no patience with the UN route.”

The then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, expressed his misgivings: “The desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [United Nations Security Council] authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR [United Nations Security Council Resolution] 1205 of three years ago would be difficult.”

On Bush’s hopes to justify the attack, not only was the claim of WMD found to be false but the alleged link between Saddam and alQaeda and other international terrorists was proved by the US’ own 9/11 Commission Report to be bogus. So another criterion of just war, right intention, where force may be used only in a truly just cause, was violated.

One more condition of just war, last resort, went by the board. When the UN weapons inspectors who had found no evidence of a WMD programme said that they needed more time, this was rejected by the Bush administration. Washington had assembled a substantial military force in the Persian Gulf: they could not keep the soldiers hanging around in the extreme heat while the inspectors completed their work.

Most of the international community, however, declined to support a new UN Security Council Resolution authorising the use of force. To the fury of the US and UK Governments, the French proved particularly obdurate (remember them being dubbed “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” on Capitol Hill). So without a current UN resolution, the two Governments fell back on dubious argument, justifying their use of force by referring to historical UN resolutions.

The British Government’s international lawyers at the Foreign Office strongly disagreed and made clear their view that to proceed without a fresh UN resolution would render military action illegal. The senior legal adviser, Michael Wood, made this clear at Chilcot. His senior deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, had been outraged when her views were ignored, and resigned. Indeed, one of the most shocking aspects of the whole saga is the way that Lord Goldsmith – a commercial lawyer, who had originally accepted the advice on illegality – not only changed his view after a visit to Washington but also concealed the Foreign Office’s lawyers’ advice from the Cabinet.

Another person who had the benefit of a Damascene conversion was Tony Blair.

Although he had been told, according to recently released documents, that Iraq possessed a relatively trivial amount of WMD and that Libya posed by far a greater threat, he returned from a crucial stay with Bush at his Texas ranch in April 2002, nearly a year before the war, convinced, cajoled or flattered into believing in regime change in Iraq.

Lastly, in terms of the bases of a just war, comes proportionality. The anticipated benefits of waging a war must be proportionate to its expected evils or harms. Tony Blair is frequently quoted as saying that even without the discovery of WMD he believes the world is a better place without Saddam.

Of course, without dictators and tyrants, the world is a better place. But at what cost? Well over 100,000 Iraqis, mainly civilians, died in the Iraq war and continue to die at the hands of largely Sunni insurgents, displaced as the governing power in the land. How many of those and their families would think it was worth it? Coalition forces losses amounted to some 4,800. The disproportionate loss of life alone for a dubious and discredited cause makes the war immoral.

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s Iraqis prepare to go to the polls – in the first elections since the departure of US combat forces – the prospects for a stable and prosperous post-war Iraq do not look encouraging.

Violence has already led to the postponement of elections in two largely Sunni provinces following protests against the Shiite dominated Government. Only three weeks ago, more than 20 people were killed by a suicide bomber at a largely Sunni political rally. Most analysts believe it to be the work of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which is keen to disrupt the elections and prepared to attack not just the Shiite but also Sunni parties cooperating with the Government.

Only two bodies can claim satisfaction from the mess left behind by the US/UK invasion: Iran, which now sees a Shiite dominated, proIranian government in power, and the Kurds, who have largely got what they wanted in terms of autonomy. Otherwise, the invasion has left a legacy of sectarian division. The invaders missed an opportunity to support the secular parties, which might have been better placed to bridge the gulf between Sunni and Shiite and which could have stemmed the setback to women’s rights that has followed the Shiite takeover.

Should the West stand idly by? Given our track record, including the egregious example of human-rights abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere, it is impossible to imagine that we would be welcome. The prize that Bush and Blair sought was achieved in the shape of the overthrow of Saddam’s regime.

But at the cost of a cataclysm. Once more unto the breach? I think not.

■ Sir Ivor Roberts is a former British ambassador to Yugoslavia, Ireland and Italy.

He is currently President of Trinity College, Oxford.

SARA MAITLAND

‘Anyone having trouble after a major loss can be deemed “mad” and can be “treated”’ We live in a culture so terrified of death that it seems to be in a state of acute denial. It crops up everywhere, even in the implication that if you eat all the right things, or more commonly don’t eat any of the wrong things, you could live forever – so if you freely put cream on your strawberries (or whatever) it is all your own fault if you die. I am increasingly coming to believe that people are frightened of silence and solitude because it puts them in mind of death.

And now, in a move that seems to me deeply scary, that fear and denial of the reality and devastation of death is driving so-called experts (possibly unconsciously) towards defining grief as a mental illness and offering to treat it. Next month the American Psychiatric Association will publish the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). For those not acquainted with this tome, it is important to know that it has global reach; it offers diagnostic criteria for all known mental illness (and some pretty dubious ones too – as of next month, severe pre-menstrual tension will be classified as a mental illness) and treatment guides.

DSM-4 (the present edition) excluded a quick diagnosis of a major depressive episode “in the presence of bereavement”. DSM-5 is withdrawing that exclusion. From 13 May, anyone who is having trouble managing their sadness within months, even weeks, of a major loss can be deemed “mad” and should be “treated” – not with love and attention and tenderness, but with serotonin uplift inhibitors.

It is not difficult to see in whose interests this is. Since most adults will experience at least one incident of major bereavement in their lives – sometimes shockingly sudden and violent like Boston last Sunday; sometimes public and contentious like the Thatchers – and more than half of them experience depressionlike symptoms of unhappiness at some point in the first year, there are – to be cynical – an enormous number of drugs to be sold here.

There will also be something that

hard-pressed doctors can do: they can write a prescription and feel they have addressed the patient’s problem. And it lets all of us off the hook. It is so hard and painful to stay with the grief of another, never mind one’s own. It brings our own death and loss too close, it absorbs energy and demands sensitivity and self-control, it is tiring and oddly embarrassing. It is scary. Now we can just tell them to “buck up” and get down to the doctors’ surgery – phew, what a relief.

And since, as a society, we stigmatise those with mental illnesses, we will be justified in turning our backs on those who insist by their grief that there is something to be sad about – that at both a personal and social level we are “diminished by death”.

This issue ought to be a special concern for Christians. This is partly because our founder members and most of the major mystics ever since would be slapped with a psychosis diagnosis today, given they claim to hear the voice of God. So in self-protection if nothing else we need to challenge psychiatric dominance whenever possible. But even more because we are in some ways culturally responsible for this sorry development, through preaching too often a pie-in-the-sky trivialisation of death. We should know better.

If death is not a dark and horrible thing, then why does the “right to life” matter? If death is a minor episode, a bit like a bad cold, through which we can pass smoothly enough if we keep warm and drink lots of fluids, then what is so generous and loving and beautiful about a God who is willing to go there? If death is just something you should shrug off and if you can’t you are sick, then what is so exciting about the Resurrection?

In John’s gospel we see something different. Jesus, at the risk of his life, comes back across the River Jordan to comfort Martha and Mary because their brother has died. In what cannot be more than an hour he declares resoundingly that “I am the Resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me shall never die” and then he goes directly to Lazarus’ grave and weeps. He weeps because his friend is dead. Because death is the “last enemy”. Because he is very sad.

I do not believe that offering him Prozac is called for.

(More information and a petition about DSM-5 and its deficiencies can be found at http://dsm5response.com) 20 April 2013

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Westminster Faith Debates

Ties that bind and divide Despite the Church’s strong condemnation of same-sex marriage, a YouGov survey commissioned for this week’s debate on the issue finds that it splits British Catholics down the middle between a desire for equality and abiding belief in difference Overall, the YouGov survey concludes that 44 per cent of Catholics say same-sex couples should be allowed to get married, and 41 per cent say they should not, writes Linda Woodhead.

The remaining 15 per cent don’t know.

When asked the related question about whether same-sex marriage is right or wrong, the proportions reverse: 44 per cent say it is wrong and 36 per cent that it is right. A larger 20 per cent don’t know. In other words, a minority of Catholics who, despite their personal belief that same-sex marriage is wrong, think it should be allowed. One of the Catholic contributors to our debate, Lord Deben (John Gummer), holds this opinion. He argues that the Churches should not attempt to impose their stricter Christian understanding of marriage upon “state marriage”.

How do Catholics compare with others?

When it comes to allowing same-sex marriage,

The Government believes that extending marriage to same-sex couples will ensure the ancient institution “is relevant for our century”, writes Steve Chalke.

But I’m worried that the noise of the arguments around gay marriage is clouding the real question for the Church: the nature of inclusion. I am convinced that it is only as the Christian community grapples with this that we will find wise answers, not only regarding gay marriage, but also to related questions around the Church’s wider attitude to gay people.

One tragic result of the Church’s historical rejection of faithful gay relationships is our failure to provide homosexual people with any model of how to cope with their sexuality, except for those who have the gift of, or capacity for, celibacy. In this way we have left countless people vulnerable and isolated. Promiscuity is always damaging and dehumanising.

Casual and self-centred expressions of sexuality – homosexual or heterosexual – never reflect God’s faithfulness, grace and self-giving love. Only

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Catholics are identical to Anglicans, more permissive than Methodists, Baptists and Muslims, and more restrictive than Jews, Hindus and those of “no religion”. Overall, our survey finds that 52 per cent of the population are in favour and 34 per cent against – so Catholics are a little less permissive than the general public.

Among Catholics, who is most opposed to allowing same-sex marriage? The factors that count most are: (1) age – young people are three times more likely to be in favour than those aged 60-plus; (2) believing that there is “definitely” a God; (3) gender – 40 per cent of men are against same-sex marriage, compared with 27 per cent of women; (4) taking most authority from God or other religious sources.

In other words, older men who are most certain there is a God, and who regard God, religious teachings, leaders and Scriptures as most authoritative, are the strongest opponents of the proposal to allow same-sex marriage.

The most common reason given by those who say same-sex marriage is right is that “people should be treated equally whatever their sexual orientation” (77 per cent). The most common reason given by those who say same-sex marriage is wrong is that “marriage should be between a man and a woman” (79 per cent). This is a debate which pivots around the question of whether men and women are basically equal and similar, or abidingly different.

■ Linda Woodhead is professor of the sociology of religion at Lancaster University.

She organises the Westminster Faith Debates with the Rt Hon. Charles Clarke; the debates are funded by Lancaster University, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council. Videos and podcasts can be viewed at www.religionandsociety.org.uk

‘Shouldn’t the Church consider nurturing positive models for consensual and monogamous homosexual relationships?’ stable relationships can offer the security in which well-being and love can thrive. When we refuse to make room for gay people to live in loving, permanent relationships, we consign them to lives of loneliness and fear. Shouldn’t the Church consider nurturing positive models for consensual and monogamous homosexual relationships?

I have formed my view not out of any disregard for the Bible’s authority, but, through prayerful reflection, seeking to take it seriously. Minority interpretations of Scripture often struggle for decades before becoming accepted. Take the example of slavery. William Wilberforce and friends were condemned by the Church as they fought for abolition. On the basis of a straightforward biblical exegesis of the Bible’s text, their critics were right. However, Wilberforce and his friends reached their conclusions by building their stance around the deeper resonance of Scripture, the compass for which is Jesus, who was radically inclusive of social outcasts of his day,

challenging perceived orthodoxy.

Wilberforce recognised that it was thoughtful conformity to Christ – not unthinking conformity to either culture or textual prohibitions – that should be the Church’s unchanging reference point.

Shouldn’t we take the same principle that we now readily apply to slavery, and numerous other issues, and apply it to our understanding of faithful homosexual relationships?

Numerous studies show that suicide rates among gay people, especially young people, are comparatively high. Church leaders sometimes use this data to argue that homosexuality is unhealthy when, tragically, it’s anti-gay stigma, propped up by church attitudes, that all too often drives these statistics. When we push homosexual people outside our communities and Churches; when we blame them for what they are; when we deny them our blessing on their commitment to lifelong, faithful relationships, we make them doubt whether they are children of God, made in his image.

Rather than continue to condemn and exclude, can we dare to create an environment for homosexual people where issues of self-esteem and well-being can be talked about; where the virtues of loyalty, respect, interdependence and faithfulness can be nurtured; and where exclusive, permanent same-sex relationships can be supported?

Over the coming months, the often heated debate around gay marriage will continue. I am committed to trying to understand the intricacies of the arguments on both sides. But whichever side of the debate we find ourselves on, my hope is that the Church will face what I think is the central issue – what does real, Christ-like inclusion of the gay community look like?

■ Steve Chalke is a Baptist minister and founder of the Oasis global family of charities. An article which deals more fully with the exegesis of the relevant biblical texts, together with a 15-minute video, is available at www.oasisuk.org

During the course of the recent government attempt to legalise gay marriage, it has emerged that this proposal is impossible, writes John Milbank. It would be intolerable to define gay marriage as an equivalent to “consummation”, or to allow “adultery” as grounds for gay divorce.

Thus despite the squeamishness of discussions of homosexuality, which steer away from its physical aspects, the legislators have been forced tacitly to admit both the different nature of gay sexuality and the different nature of gay relationships. But this admission wrecks both the assumption behind the legislation and the coherence of what the legislation proposes to enact. The assumption behind the legislation is that “fairness” must involve the application of universal rights to each individual in the same way. But the admission reveals that in the current instance such application would be unfair, inappropriate and unrealistic.

The coherence of the legislation depends on making a clear distinction between civil union, which is already allowed for both straight and gay people, and marriage. Yet if the binding and unloosing of gay and straight marriage are stipulated in different ways, then in effect such a distinction has been reinstated. The suspicion arises that the proposed bill desires only an empty change in nomenclature and this is borne out by the fact that the intended circumscription of gay marriage is so diluted as to render it

‘The joining and harmonising of the asymmetrical perspectives of the two sexes is crucial to kinship relations over time and to social peace’ indistinguishable from gay civil partnership.

But why then should Christians worry, if this is all merely a matter of words? Perhaps, in order to safeguard the Churches from pressures to conform to the norm, we should now welcome a withdrawal from the Churches of their rights as a civil-marriage broker. This would leave the Churches free to claim that only natural and sacramental marriage is genuinely “marriage”, while state marriage is mere civil union. They could trump secularisation by declaring that the era of merely civil marriage had been a failed experiment. This may, indeed, be the direction that the Churches now need to take. However, the graver fear is that secular thought will not so readily let go of the demand for absolutely equal rights based on identical definitions.

In that case we face a more drastic prospect.

Not only would marriage have been redefined so as to include gay marriage, it would inevitably be redefined even for heterosexual people in homosexual terms. Thus consummation and adultery would cease to be seen as of any relevance to the binding and unloosing of straight

unions. Many might welcome this as a further removal of state intrusion into our private lives.

But that would be to fail to consider all the implications. In the first place, it would end public recognition of the importance of marriage as a union of sexual difference. Yet the joining and harmonising of the asymmetrical perspectives of the two sexes is crucial to kinship relations over time and to social peace. Where the reality of sexual difference is denied, it gets reinvented in perverse ways as the oversexualisation of women and the confinement of men to a marginalised machismo.

In the second place, it would end the public legal recognition of a social reality defined in terms of the natural link between sex and procreation. In consequence, the natural children of heterosexual couples would then legally be their children only if the state decided that they might be legally “adopted” by them.

And this reveals what is really at issue. There was no widespread demand for “gay marriage” in Europe and it has nothing to do with gays or their rights. Instead, it is a crucial move in the state and economy’s drive to assume direct control over the reproduction of the population.

We are not talking about natural justice, but about the desire of biopolitical tyranny to destroy marriage and the family as the most basic and crucial mediating social institution.

■ John Milbank is professor of religion, politics and ethics at Nottingham University.

CROSSWORD No. 356: Alanus 1

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Across 7 Changed robe working as Shakespearean king (6) 8 End letters after most of the county provides popular red wine (6) 10 Reset rite set for end of the “Iron Curtain” (7) 11 Soft redistribution of alms as in example of “The Lord is My Shepherd (5) 12 & 19 Down: Fate of dashed hopes and conclave ballot papers! (2,2,5) 13 Foreigner in hospital I encounter (5) 17 Made choice for Black Friar along with Edward (5) 18 Nature of awakening that is shocking (4) 22 Atoms arranged around castles (5) 23 Old piano with correct moral standing? (7) 24 Victory in the ring upsets lady composer (6)

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Down 1 First name of one who upset soup tin and washed his hands (7) 2 Twice I’m involved in new deals for clergy seating in the sanctuary (7) 3 See 4 Down 4 & 3 Down: Part of cathedral dealing with book sections? (7,5) 5 Daughter-in-law of Naomi in love with harp variation (5) 6 End letters and hear why I bring forth unleavened bread (5) 9 Prince of demons for whom bubble bursts with end of American letters (9) 14 Poe linked creatively with last recipient of tongue of fire (7) 15 Glue (with VAT) in a novel way reveals original Bible translation (7) 16 Luke, e.g., was a man with a corrected presentation of a false statement (7) 19 See 12 Across 20 Office at cricket headquarters we hear (5) 21 Attempted to be judged (5)

Please send your answers to: Crossword Competition 20 April, 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 hardback Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus (second edition, RRP £30) will go to the sender of the first correct entry drawn at random on Friday 3 May. The answers to this week’s crossword and the winner’s name will appear in the 11 May issue.

Solution to the 30 March sudoku puzzle

Solution to the 30 March crossword No. 353 Across: 7 Mayne; 8 Neology; 10 Triduum; 11 Zenas; 12 Palestrina; 16 Provincial; 20 Caeli; 21 Allegri; 23 Sistine; 24 Adela.

Down: 1 Amity; 2 Cyril; 3 Jehu; 4 Anomie; 5 Mozzetta; 6 Council; 9 Yes-man; 13 Ab Initio; 14 Spices; 15 Not Easy; 17 Chapel; 18 Agley; 19 Aidan; 22 Leah.

Winner: Dr Jean van Altena, of Osmotherley, Northallerton.

20 April 2013

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12 Tablet 20 Apr 13 PP_P27 parish practice 17/04/2013 12:15 Page 14

PARISH PRACTICE JAMES LEACHMAN

Church of the senses When Pope Francis blessed the oils used in baptism, confirmation, ordination and the anointing of the sick on Maundy Thursday, he asked priests to be ‘shepherds with the smell of sheep’.

The rich symbolism of anointing deserves better understanding

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mother lovingly remembers the and to appreciate more fully our own bapsmell of her baby – and the scent tism. of all she uses to wash the baby, to The anointing of the Spirit proclaimed oil and powder her. The child is Christ as prophet, priest and king. Christ dependent on her mother and bonds with assumed our humanity and shared his her and slowly learns that mother will return ministry with us – so, when we consider the if she has to leave her. The infant learns that, risen Christ through the lens of this prayer though still dependent in many ways, she is and the experience of our own baptism, we a separate person – yet, she will have man- understand our life in Christ as a divinenerisms and ways of behaving she learned human exchange. We are bonded with the from family, and will continue to follow their divine through the Incarnation, and in traditions. response to the gift to God of our humanity Mother Church, like any mother, lovingly we receive new life in return, strength to live remembers the smell of her new offspring in a new way, support from others and a new too. The Church washes her children and identity. Jesus is the “one anointed by the anoints them with the oil of chrism. She Spirit” – Christos in Greek. dresses the child in a new garment and feeds The odour of a Christian is their character the child day by day and week by week. They as members of Christ, prophet, priest and will develop a resemblance to other Christians, king and is proper to all the baptised; they with traditions and stories inherited from should have a smell, an odour, a perfume the church family and with ways of behaving that gives them away. The baptised exercise they learn from the Christian family. their share in the one priesthood of Christ by Many who were at the Easter Vigil this their full, conscious and active participation year saw candidates baptised and anointed. in the liturgy and by giving themselves with After baptism, infants and young children Christ to God and neighbour. They exercise are anointed with chrism at their prophetic office when the font; older children and Christians act with courage to TO DO adults are anointed with bring about God’s kingdom of chrism in confirmation. The Give a secure, illuminated justice, love and peace. They and prominent place of oil of chrism is perfumed and, exercise their royal office in like the ordained, they will be honour in the Church to the humble service, as the shepherd recognised as Christians by three oils consecrated by the who lays down his life for the bishop their scent, their taste, their sheep. The sacrifices we offer behaviour. This chrism oil is Mark a place of honour on include our prayers and aposconsecrated by the bishop in the floor near the font where tolic works, our married and Holy Week, together with the the newly baptised infants family lives, our “daily work, will be anointed oil of catechumens and oil of mental and physical recreation, the sick, and it is distributed Betray yourself as a Christian and even life’s troubles if they to the parishes to be used in in the way you live as Jesus, are patiently borne” (Lumen the infant baptism, in confir- prophets, priests and in royal Gentium 32-34). All these proservice of all people mation and in ordination. vide the odour of the Christian After an infant is baptised, as we live and work with others. he or she is anointed with a prayer that conThe earliest church buildings in Rome cludes: “Almighty God, the Father of our were named “basilicas”, and would have Lord Jesus Christ himself anoints you with several distinct areas: the entrance porch or the oil of salvation in Christ Jesus our Lord narthex, the baptistry, the main hall and the that you may remain members of Christ dais for the altar. The baptistry is the place priest, prophet and king unto eternal life.” of “becoming Christian”, where the elect are We hear about these three ministries in the washed and anointed – becoming the priestly, Second Vatican Council Dogmatic Constitution prophetic and royal people of God. They are Lumen Gentium 31 and the 1988 apostolic illuminated and come to see themselves in a exhortation Christifideles Laici 14; they are a new light. The altar is where the baptised part of the Church’s doctrine and help us come to be fed and are renewed in their bapreflect upon the rites celebrated at the font tismal character.

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There are two strategies for enhancing the ritual visibility of the holy oils: architecturally and ritually. In considering the architecture of the church building, a parish could first decide, instead of keeping them hidden away in the sacristy, as happens so often, to keep these precious oils in a prominent and secure place near the font. In some parishes I have visited, such as Troy, Kansas, and Potters Bar (Westminster), the oils are reserved in a secure cabinet near the font at the entrance of the church. The cabinet can be locked, and yet be illuminated and visible to those who enter the church building.

A parish may mark a place on the floor of the church near the font with a six-petalled symbol, reminding worshippers of the ChiRho, where parents will stand to hold their newly baptised infants as they are anointed.

A parish may mark a circle on the floor of the church under the dome to show worshippers that this is the spot (between Heaven and earth) where they receive the Sacraments of Confirmation and Holy Communion.

In considering the ritual of church celebrations, the diocesan bishop could ensure that sufficient balsam-perfume is added to the chrism at the consecration of the oils – and the priest can be generous in the pouring and smearing of the oil of chrism – so that parents will continue to smell the newly baptised for several days after the baptism.

This anointing of infants after baptism does not refer primarily to our resurrection after natural death, but to the character of all the baptised who have arisen from the waters of baptism to a new identity in Christ.

The implication is that when we emerge from the baptismal font and are anointed, we already share in our future glory with Christ as sharers in his prophetic, priestly and royal nature and that we are already becoming what will be fully revealed in us. We are ready to appear in public and betray ourselves as Christians in the way we live as Jesus, prophets, priests and in royal service of all people.

■ James Leachman is a Benedictine monk-priest of Ealing Abbey in London.

He writes on and teaches liturgy in Rome and London. With Daniel McCarthy, he edited a book, Transitions in the Easter Vigil: becoming Christians, which will be published later this year.

13 Tablet 20 Apr 13 Notebook _P28 notebook 17/04/2013 16:00 Page 14

NOTEBOOK Heavenly Father led her

King of the hill

THE ANGLICAN funeral of Lady Thatcher at St Paul’s Cathedral this week was a reminder of how far the Methodist schoolgirl had moved theologically over the years.

Growing up in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Margaret Hilda Roberts had an austere childhood, much of it centred on the Methodist chapel, which gave her a lifelong love of hymns, particularly those of Charles Wesley.

Later at Oxford University, she joined the Wesleyan Chapel and would sometimes preach in the chapels of surrounding towns, where she honed her oratorical skills.

One of the greatest religious influences on her in later years, when she had become accustomed to attending Anglican services, particularly when she stayed at Chequers, was her private parliamentary secretary, the late Michael Alison, an Evangelical Anglican.

In his later post, as Second Church Commissioner, he is said to have persuaded Mrs Thatcher to put the Evangelical George Carey forward as the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

According to Alison’s son, the Catholic theologian James Alison, in later years his father would visit the former Prime Minister to read psalms to her. Quite what Lady Thatcher made of Alison Jnr’s conversion is not known.

But she did recall that she and her sister used to envy the Catholic girls of Grantham in their First Communion dresses. According to Eliza Filby, author of the forthcoming God and Mrs Thatcher, a chapelgoer warned the young Margaret that a ribboned dress was “the first step to Rome”, while her father condemned her own marriage service, with “Lead Us, Heavenly Father, Lead Us”, as “halfway to Rome”.

THE PONTIFICAL North American College (NAC), the Roman residence for seminarians from the United States, will soon be the undisputed King of the Janiculum Hill. At a ceremony a week ago on Friday that was led

by Archbishop John Myers of Newark, New Jersey, president of the NAC board of directors, the college broke ground on a US$7 million (£4,554,000) project to add a 10-storey tower to its compound on the hill that overlooks the Vatican. Mr and Mrs James Mulva of Oklahoma (he recently retired as chief executive of ConocoPhillips, one of the world’s largest oil refiners) have funded the building project.

It will provide administrative offices, hi-tech classrooms and “practice” chapels. The Mulvas also gave an additional US$1.5m (£976,000) to pay for technology updates and other necessary improvements on the existing sixstorey complex, built in 1953. The expansion and touch-up were needed to accommodate the more than 250 seminarians who now live at the NAC. When the college was originally founded in 1859, they lived in a smaller seventeenth-century building near the Gregorian University, which is now a residence for American student-priests. It is much smaller and quainter than the imposing travertine citadel on the Janiculum. As an old NAC saying goes, “It’s not home, but it’s much!”

Worthwhile goals DURING HIS short time in office, Pope Francis has already begun accumulating sporting memorabilia.

This week the Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, gave him a shirt signed by the star players of Spain’s national football team. Francis has also been given a shirt signed by the Argentinian team he supports, San Lorenzo, the local club of the neighbourhood of Almagro in Buenos Aires where he was born.

San Lorenzo owes its origins to the Church, in particular to one Fr Lorenzo Massa, the parish priest who in the 1900s allowed the first organised kick-about in the neighbourhood to take place in the backyard of his church. It was his way of keeping youths out of trouble after a boy was run over by a tram during a street football match between rival gangs.

In his book on Spanish football, La Roja,

Jimmy Burns notes that during its tour of Spain, San Lorenzo’s style of playing, with short, elaborate passing, left a big impression at a time when a more direct style was favoured there.

Burns also points out that Pope Francis has an invitation from the president of Barcelona FC, Sandro Rosell, to visit the Nou Camp, the club’s home ground. An invitation to Spain has also been extended to Francis by Rajoy, a supporter of Barcelona’s arch-rivals Real Madrid. It will be a tough choice to decide which stadium to visit.

(See Isabel de Bertodano, page 6.)

Back into the lions’ den IN NOVEMBER 2009, Catholic speakers were roundly beaten in a debate about whether the Church is a force for good in the world.

The late polemicist Christopher Hitchens and the writer and boulevardier Stephen Fry won convincingly against Ann Widdecombe, the Catholic former MP, and then Archbishop (now Cardinal) John Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria.

Now Intelligence Squared, the organiser of that debate, has set up what could be seen as round two. Next Wednesday a debate entitled “The Catholic Church is beyond redemption: Pope Francis cannot save it” is due to take place at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, central London.

Colm O’Gorman, a survivor of clerical sexual abuse and the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland, along with Ronan McCrea, a barrister and humanrights expert, will speak in favour of the motion.

Speaking against the motion is Peter Stanford, the Catholic journalist and columnist for The Tablet. However, organisers have yet to announce a second speaker to argue against the motion. A spokeswoman for Intelligence Squared said one would be confirmed soon.

Hospice heroine AS BRITAIN’S leading lay Catholic, Miles, Seventeenth Duke of Norfolk, was active in church affairs and a trenchant critic of the Church’s teaching on birth control. His widow, Anne, who died last week, preferred to work quietly behind the scenes, championing the cause of the hospice movement.

In 1984 she founded a charity, Help the Hospices, after visiting St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney, north-east London, then struggling financially. According to the former Home Secretary Lord (Michael) Howard, the national charity’s chairman, she lost her heart to hospice care after that first visit.

“Anne steered our ambitious goal to transform the way people affected by terminal illness are cared for and her vision will remain the cornerstone of everything we do at Help the Hospices,” he said.

An accomplished artist, the duchess painted snow scenes for the charity’s Christmas cards, such as the Changing of the Guard in London and even a playful journey of the Magi with a recalcitrant camel.

She married Miles Fitzalan-Howard, then a career army officer, at the Brompton Oratory in 1949 when she was 22 and he was 34.

The duchess died on 8 April at her home in Oxfordshire surrounded by her family.

Her husband died in 2002.

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LETTERS

The Editor of The Tablet 1 King Street Cloisters, Clifton Walk, London W6 0GY 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.

No consent to gay marriage You reported (The Church in the World, 13 April) on the lecture Cardinal Schönborn gave at the National Gallery in London on 8 April, claiming in your headline that “Schönborn leads rethink on same-sex civil unions”. To call Cardinal Schönborn a “leading rethinker” is highly flattering but in this case a gross misinterpretation. The cardinal does not lead, neither intends to do so in the future, any rethink on this matter. He stands clearly by the Church’s consistent and unwavering teaching on homosexuality and has repeated this on many an occasion. The words used by the cardinal in the lecture were in the defence of marriage.

What the cardinal did recount during his lecture on “Christianity: Alien Presence or Foundation of the West?” is what he tells Austrian schoolchildren when they ask him why the Church opposes “gay marriage”. His answer is always that marriage is by definition and exclusively the union between one man and one woman that is open to life.

So “gay marriage” is a contradiction in itself – and in consequence the Church cannot oppose what does not exist, no matter what is being claimed or legislated upon to the contrary. To make this very clear, the cardinal said in a side note to this statement that, as the state may choose to respect certain choices made by its citizens, it may as a consequence legislate upon them, but it must never equate marriage with non-marriage. This cannot be seen as an endorsement of same-sex civil unions, neither in a legal sense, nor in a moral sense.

And it is true that the cardinal sees the need to give thought to the question of pastoral care for people living in irregular situations – to truly apply, not to rethink, what the Church has to say about a life in Christ.

Michael Prüller Spokesman of the Archdiocese of Vienna (See News from Britain and Ireland, page 30.)

Margaret Thatcher’s legacy Be fair! Your leader (“Lessons in conviction politics”, 13 April) speaks of “Big Bang” deregulation with horrendous consequences for the national economy two decades later.

During that time, a Labour Government was in power for 13 years and went to sleep on the job. There were lots of opportunities to tighten regulation, as there were to build more council houses. “Big Bang”, properly regulated, would have been of great and lasting benefit to this country.

Brian Toomey Taunton, Somerset In many ways Lady Thatcher’s Methodist faith was the basis of everything she did. Methodism 14

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and highly profitable companies in the ITV network, in effect putting thousands of skilled people on to the street, and neutering public service broadcasting. This was part of her attack on alternative power bases.

Bernard Cartwright Stourbridge, West Midlands

For men only?

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference in 1988: ‘a dissenter with the lonely zeal of the outsider’.

Photo: Reuters deliberately shuns the pomp and ritual of organised religion, emphasising the value of personal communion with God. She didn’t conform; she was a dissenter with the lonely zeal of the outsider. She was, in effect, the most un-conservative of Conservatives.

Ralph Rolls London SW20 With regard to Archbishop Runcie’s description of Mrs Thatcher’s ethics as “Hebrew” (Clifford Longley, 13 April), they were only halfHebrew. She was correct, in Jewish eyes, to see helping people to be self-supporting as the finest kind of charity, but wrong in failing to see helping those who cannot support themselves as equally essential.

Margaret Shenfield Lesser Bowdon, Altrincham, Cheshire Margaret Thatcher was indeed a carnivore as Peter Hennessy suggested (“Exit the tigress”, 13 April). When I worked for ITV, I covered the miners’ strike and saw at first hand how she starved the miners and their families back to work – no words of St Francis here. I well remember going into a bar in the Nottinghamshire coalfield to buy double steak sandwiches for hungry people.

One of the finest pieces of work ever produced by the Church of England – the “Faith in the City” report – was an analysis of some of her corrosive policies. At about the same time I chaired a Churches’ Council for Health and Healing committee on depression which concluded that government policies were a principal factor in people’s mental suffering.

The document was returned to me by Mrs Thatcher’s advisers covered in red ink.

Regarding ITV, when it broadcast the politically embarrassing documentary Death on the Rock about the SAS shootings on Gibraltar, and in spite of the film being exonerated by the good Tory (and Catholic peer) Lord Windlesham, Mrs Thatcher passed the 1990 Broadcasting Act to stymie the private

I do not wish to take issue with my brother, Dom Paul Gunter, but according to News from Britain and Ireland (13 April) he is quoted as saying that parish priests should not wash the feet of women on Maundy Thursday because it is intrinsically attached to the office of the priesthood.

Does this ruling now mean that I cannot give the Eucharist to women on Maundy Thursday – or, for that matter, on any day?

The Eucharist is intrinsically attached to the priesthood. Admittedly, Scripture does not record that Jesus actually shared his Last Supper with women – even though one has to ask who had cooked and prepared the family meal of the Passover. Therefore, just as we are told that women did not have their feet washed by Jesus, they could not have received the Eucharist from Jesus. A sacrament reserved for men as is the sacramental of the washing of feet?

(Fr) Gordon Beattie OSB Parbold, Lancashire Would Fr Paul now like to urge the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales to direct that women should leave Mass immediately after the Gospel on Maundy Thursday and not come back? Either this or omit the words of Jesus from John’s gospel of the day, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me” (John 13:8).

(Dr) Anne Inman St Mary’s University College, Twickenham A review of the history of the mandatum at the Maundy Thursday Mass shows that over time the focus of the practice has changed.

Until the fifteenth century the focus was on service and humility, and the celebrant usually washed the feet of 12 poor men (and sometimes gave them alms as well). The rubric of the 1474 Missal was the first to specify that it should be a wholly clerical affair, and hence presumably the inference grew that the new focus was on the priesthood of the Apostles.

(See P.J. Goddard, Festa Paschalia [2011], for a very detailed history of the rite.)

It seems that Pope Francis would like the focus to be shifted back to the original idea of service, so the inclusion of women among the twelve seems logical. Taboos which forbade women to enter the sanctuary (except to clean it) were abandoned many years ago, so they should take their place as members

of the Church, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, and in which we are all called to serve one another.

Ruth Dipple Lechlade, Gloucestershire Fr Paul Gunter tells us that the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday is limited to men, and that only the Pope may do otherwise. He must be unaware that the Pope was this year continuing his practice as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. On one occasion, for example, he washed the feet of newborn infants and pregnant women. The difference is that then he was setting an example for priests of his own diocese; now he has set an example for bishops and priests throughout the Church, including Fr Gunter.

(Dr) Michael Hoskin Cambridge Fr Gunter suggests that it is wrong to wash women’s feet during the Holy Thursday liturgy. The gesture, he tells us, is “intrinsically attached” to the priesthood, because the rite is mimetic. By contrast, papal liturgy cannot be an exemplar for other liturgies. Do I detect a lack of logic?

Benedict XVI’s liturgical practice was adopted as normative among restorationists who emptied their closets of candlestick, lace, brocaded “fiddlebacks” and arcane ceremonial. The mimetic principle has been liberally applied to “Benedictine” liturgy, even though Fr Gunter insists that local churches cannot use papal liturgy as precedent.

If it is permissible to imitate the liturgical use and practice of one Pope, why cannot we use the same mimetic principle in respect of the practice of another?

(Fr) Jim Lawlor Glasgow

Why Cardinal O’Brien should return I have followed with interest the various letters that have appeared in the press, about Cardinal Keith O’Brien. There has been a considerable polarisation of views. On reflection, it is like a grieving process. We initially go into shock and we do not want to believe that it has happened. It is common to even deny that it has happened. Then we look for answers, perhaps it could have been prevented, and we can also look to blame somebody. We can even blame the person who has left us grieving. We get angry, before beginning to accept what has For more of your correspondence, go to the new Letters Extra section of The Tablet’s expanded website: www.thetablet.co.uk

happened. That acceptance recognises the strengths and weaknesses of the person who has left us, and the fact that they were a flawed human being.

We can see this same process in relation to Cardinal O’Brien. We were shocked, and we did not want to believe the allegations. We looked for answers, we blamed the accusers, because we felt that they had caused the pain we were feeling. We are still grappling with many of these feelings, and we have not yet reached a position of full understanding or acceptance.

What is the reality of the situation? Cardinal O’Brien was much loved by many for his commitment to all and for his defence of our faith.

He was well respected by many outside the Catholic community. There were, however, certain aspects of his personality which have been exposed and which have caused concern. It is not the lapses in his commitment to celibacy, but the potential abuse of power. He was in a position of power in relation to seminarians, and young priests. If he did abuse his position then that was a betrayal.

Forgiveness is important for all those involved, but we are taught that repairing the damage caused and hopefully achieving reconciliation is key to forgiveness. Perhaps it is only then that we can reach understanding and acceptance.

Cardinal O’Brien should accept the part he has played and seek to repair the damage caused by his abuse of power. This should involve mediation with the priests involved.

The cardinal needs to be open with the Catholic community. The prodigal son returned to face his father and brother and turned his back on his previous behaviour. The cardinal needs to return with humility Alan Draper Kingoldrum, Kirriemuir, Angus

Pope Francis prefers the milonga When your writer Margaret Hebblethwaite met Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio in Argentina, she discovered from him that he was a lover of music (“From dark days to spring”, 23 March). In the book El Papa Francisco (publisher: Salani Editore) by the two journalists Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, the cardinal, when asked about his musical tastes, replied, “Among my favourites is Beethoven’s overture Leonore No. 3 in Furtwängler’s version. For me he is the best conductor of some of his symphonies and of the works of Wagner” (page 116).

He added, “Oh, yes, I like tango moltissimo.

It is something within me … ” And then he added, “Yes, as a youth I used to dance the tango, but I prefer the milonga.” However, like most Jesuits I know, I have not heard him chant the Mass.

(Mgr) Charles G. Vella Milan, Italy

The living Spirit God’s will. How do we know it? If we are silent within ourselves, and quieten all our desires and all our opinions, and if we think lovingly, with all our soul and without words, “may your will be done”, what we then feel without any uncertainty that we must do (even if, in some ways, it may be wrong) is God’s will. If we ask him for bread, he does not give us stones … The real greatness of Christianity lies in that it does not look for a supernatural cure for suffering, but a supernatural use for suffering …

Simone Weil Women Mystics of the Contemporary Era (St Pauls, 2003) Whenever the truth is preached against injustices, oppression and the abuse of power, that truth is going to cause pain.

I know I’ve already mentioned this simple comparison that campesino [peasant] made on day. He said to me, “Monseñor, if you put your hand into a pot of salty water and your hand is healthy, nothing happens. But if you have a scratch or sore of some kind, ouch, it hurts! The Church is the salt of the world, and naturally where there are wounds, the salt is going to burn …”

Oscar Romero Monseñor Romero

by Maria Lopez Vigil (Orbis Books, 2013) St George was a man who abandoned one army for another: he gave up the rank of tribune to enlist as a soldier for Christ.

Eager to encounter the enemy, he first stripped away his worldly wealth by giving all he had to the poor. Then, free and unencumbered, bearing the shield of faith, he plunged into the thick of the battle, an ardent soldier for Christ. Clearly what he did serves to teach us a valuable lesson: if we are afraid to strip ourselves of our worldly possessions, then we are unfit to make a strong defence of the faith … Dear brothers, let us not only admire the courage of this fighter in Heaven’s army but follow his example. Let us be inspired to strive for the reward of heavenly glory, keeping in mind his example, so that we will not be swayed from our path.

St Peter Damian Tuesday is the Solemnity of St George

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SPRING BOOKS CHRISTOPHER HOWSE

WHITE GLOVES, OR BROWN? A Very Personal Method: anthropological writings drawn from life Mary Douglas (ed. Richard Fardon) SAGE, 328PP, £85 (CASED), £29.99 (PAPER) ■ Tablet bookshop price £76.50; £27 Tel 01420 592974

ary Douglas, seen by many as the leading British anthropologist of the second half of the twentieth century, came to the attention of the general reader through her study of the “abominations” of Leviticus, a chapter in her 1966 book Purity and Danger. Animals with cloven hooves that did not chew the cud were forbidden as food, she argued then, because they were anomalies viewed as out of place in an ordered world. They were thus both dangerous and an assertion of the holy.

It happened that her restless mind arrived at a quite different account of Leviticus later in her career (related to the universalism of God’s love), but she had made a start at searching for structure and sense, rather than leaving

M

OUR REVIEWERS Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.

Adrian Brewer left The Daily Telegraph to farm in East Sussex.

Lynn Roberts is the author of the poetry sequence Rosa Mundi.

Suzi Feay is a writer and broadcaster who was literary editor of The Independent on Sunday for 11 years.

Theo Hobson is a writer on religious affairs.

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Leviticus and Numbers as neglected heaps of arbitrary laws.

In 1970, a chapter called “The Bog Irish” in her book Natural Symbols made an even more striking claim about the Catholic Church and ritual. She argued that Friday abstinence “was the only ritual which brought Christian symbols down into the kitchen and on to the dinner table in the manner of Jewish rules of impurity”. She questioned the decision of the bishops of England and Wales in 1967 to end obligatory abstinence. “People who have become unritualistic in every other way”, she wrote, “will eventually lose their capacity for responding to condensed symbols such as that of the Blessed Sacrament.”

Two papers from which that chapter grew are now published in A Very Personal Method.

The first, published in New Society in 1966, was called “The contempt of ritual”. It discussed antecedents of modern denigration of ritual as worthless and “primitive”. Calvin thought the papists had gone after the shadow of empty ritual, and the nineteenth-century biblical scholar Robertson Smith traced a path of progress from superstitious Catholic formulas to a religion of spirit and truth with “a personal relation with Christ”. As for Sir James Frazer, he defined primitive cultures as those that were magic-ridden.

In 1968, Mary Douglas used the same title “The contempt of ritual” for a lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford, later published in New Blackfriars. Here the “Bog Irishman” (her forebear) made his entrance to introduce the theory of elaborated and restricted speech codes, ideas she developed from Basil Bernstein. Restricted codes are generated in the sort of family where the question, “Why can’t I do that?” is answered by “Because he’s your father” or “Because you’re the youngest”.

In other types of family the answer is elaborated: “Think what it would feel like if someone did that to you” or “Because your father is worried”. The restricted speech code went with positional systems (as seen in “working-

class” families); the elaborated code with personal systems of a “middle-class” kind. Mary Douglas does not despise the restricted code.

It can say as much tacitly as the elaborated code. (As liturgy says more than words.) She found in her own hierarchical family and school upbringing that the child “does not have to imagine the sufferings of the toad under the harrow. The home is more full of wit and laughter, for a strict set of categories is the basis for endless banter about attempts to evade or usurp obligation.”

Mary Douglas died in 2007, aged 86, still bright of eye and ready to be mischievous in argument. One of her latest papers appears first in this new collection, edited by Richard Fardon, the professor of West African anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, whose intellectual biography of Douglas was published in 1999. Called “A feeling for hierarchy”, it elucidates engagingly the nature of hierarchy, illustrated from her own life. At the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton (where Antonia White had been so unhappy), Douglas found times and spaces loaded with meanings, and clothes too (brown gloves for calling on Reverend Mother; white gloves for holy days). By hierarchy, Mary Douglas did not mean a tyranny. One of the 10 rules of hierarchy in this paper is: “The top position is more ritual than effective or political.

Power is so diffused that the husband, chief or king has little of it.” She liked hierarchies that functioned in a balanced way, and she recognised hierarchy in the Catholic Church.

Having done her fieldwork among the Lele in Congo, whom she revisited, she was horrified by the use of sorcery accusations in the 1980s and after. In old Lele society, no child was accused of witchcraft; it was a means to even out unwonted concentrations of power.

She was disgusted by Lele who had become Christians going on witch-hunts, encouraged by some clergy, with incidental cruelty. This new cultural role for witchcraft followed on, she saw, from regarding old Lele minor deities as devils. The Lele had been essentially monotheists, with lesser deities of a status like that of djinns. Her creative solution was to recognise these preternatural entities in Christian teaching as angelic powers.

In Culture and Crises, a companion volume to A Very Personal Method, Richard Fardon has collected papers less autobiographical or related to Catholic concerns. It includes, though, her “Cultural theory”, which applies crucially to the position of al-Qaeda, for example, in the modern world, and must be of importance to any thoughtful reader, Christian or not.

Mary Douglas worked not as a Catholic anthropologist, but as an anthropologist whom some colleagues were shocked to find was a Catholic. Many ideas here could help her co-religionists in attempting to understand what they do, and what they should do.

‘I have never encountered any book closer to the Sleeping Beauty’s briar hedge: a bramble bush of narrative, powdered with roses of complacency and interminable extracts,’ PAGE 18

Hard roads to freedom Cruel Crossing: escaping Hitler across the Pyrenees Edward Stourton DOUBLEDAY, 335PP, £20 ■ Tablet bookshop price £18

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Tel 01420 592974

he Freedom Trail, or Chemin de la Liberté, is a hard four-day trek over the Pyrenees from St-Girons in France to Esterri d’Aneu in neutral Spain, retracing one of the toughest wartime escape routes.

In July each year, over four days and 40 miles, walkers climb 15,000ft and descend 11,000ft. In 2011, Edward Stourton joined them to make a series of radio programmes, which has now been turned into an engrossing book that uncovers a complex and relatively neglected chapter of the Second World War. Charming but astute, Stourton captures not only the extraordinary courage of the escapers and the passeurs, or guides, who helped them, but the sense of danger and excitement as they evaded their pursuers. “It was an adventure, and they were young.”

Stourton begins by introducing us to his his fellow walkers, some of them descendants of those who made the perilous trek during wartime. They of course had relied on the passeurs who guided them, and their stories in turn lead to other comrades, and to greater events. Thus a tightly twisted episode of twentieth-century history unfolds.

In this corner of France, which Stourton knows well, the war was a convoluted and grubby affair. Occupied France was the north of the country; here in the south, the free zone was administered from Vichy.

“Part of the purpose of this book”, says Stourton, “is to unlock the secrets of this most secretive region.” I’m not sure he opens many locked chests, but he skilfully weaves intimate, compelling personal accounts into the broad historical canvas, to show why in this area of France a kind of silence still reigns. For every act of courage there seems to be an act of perfidy; for every résistant, a milicien or pro-German militiaman; for every kind policeman, an agent de passage with dubious motives.

“Killed by the enemies of France” is a common obfuscation on memorials.

From the British perspective, the escape lines that lead to and over the Pyrenees were an escape route for downed Allied airmen, soldiers and PoWs. In the early months of the conflict, the War Office established MI9 to aid evaders and escapers. It was MI9 that made sure airmen were provided with

miniature compasses, hidden maps printed on silk and bootlace chainsaws. They arranged payment for taking men across the mountains (said to be the equivalent of £40 for an officer, £20 for other ranks).

Norman Crockatt, head of MI9, was clear: it was every man’s duty to evade capture or escape and rejoin his unit. So for the stranded airmen, trying to get back to England was a duty; but for those who helped them, it was a choice, often a deadly one. Capture meant torture, execution or the death camps. As one would expect, Stourton, one of the BBC’s big beasts, marshalls his facts with care. Boys' Own Adventure is tempered with harrowing accounts from the concentration camps.

What became known as the escape lines – some of them now famous, such as the Comet line – emerged spontaneously. The high proportion of women who were prepared to risk their lives to help people to freedom is striking. “Dédée” de Jongh, a Belgian in her early twenties, started helping escapers when she was a nurse in Bruges.

She made her first journey south in 1941, escorting a group of Belgians wanted by the Gestapo and a “mysterious English woman” called Miss Richards. (De Jongh proved her legendary toughness swimming back and forth across the Somme for an hour and a half. Miss Richards, who refused to remove her panama hat or her white bloomers, was pushed over in an inner tube.) De Jongh died in 2007, a famous woman, and rightly so.

But Edward Stourton has spoken to many almost forgotten heroes who made the crossing as “parcels” or as postmen. Jeanne Rogalle, a passeur in her teens, told him, “We felt that in the mountains we were untouchable.”

Alas, the truth was very different. The crossing was desperately tough. Many recount how impossible it was to get into the rhythm of walking; one serviceman ruefully describes wading through snow “up to his testicles”. Another recounts: “It started to rain and in 10 minutes we were soaked to the skin, it simply poured down with the wind driving great gusts into our faces which stung like so much rice. Towards midnight I felt that I was finished …”

Although we think of the chemins as escape routes for our fighting men, only 1,500 Allied servicemen took this route; an estimated 30,000 French and Belgian men, women and children made the crossing. Much of the demand came from the notorious rafles or round-ups of Jewish refugees.

There are some truly harrowing descriptions of families crossing: grandmothers left behind on the mountainside, a crying baby that the passeur was minded to suffocate rather than risk attracting the enemy. But there

are uplifting outcomes, too. Jeanne Rogalle was reunited after 60 years with the baby she carried over the mountains in 1942.

The roll of honour for the Comet line alone remembers 155 dead. Thirty-seven of those died in the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Why did they do it?

“To free my country,” said de Jongh. Perhaps.

Stourton gets closer to the heart of things, I think, with this description of an arrest in the French capital: “The heat of a Parisian June in wartime, the knock on the door, and the excitement of a secret life of resistance suddenly dissolving into the shock of arrest and the ominous sense of what was to come.” One of Stourton’s chemin-hiking companions, Bernard Holvoet, grandson of a Belgian count who played a key role in keeping the Comet line open, asks himself every time he lays a wreath in his grandfather’s honour, the obvious and most unsettling question. “What would I have done?” One can never know, but joining Edward Stourton’s evocative personal pilgrimage as he makes the Cruel Crossing takes us a step closer. Adrian Brewer

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ir Roy Strong: director of the National Portrait Gallery at 31, director of the V&A at 38, curator of exhibitions such as 1974’s “The Destruction of the Country House”, which changed national attitudes to the buildings we were losing; author of books such as Lost Treasures of Britain; creator of an extraordinary Renaissanceesque garden; High Anglican; camp macaroni; and sporter of some very strange moustaches … I pounced on this memoir of his early life with huge curiosity and interest.

Bits of it are very interesting, and if the whole book had been presented in a series of fiercely edited articles (“How I fled the curse of my AWFUL [sic] family”, Daily Mail, 2 March) it would probably be a more consistently entertaining and enlightening experience. As it is, I have never encountered any book closer in structure to the Sleeping Beauty’s briar hedge: an interwoven bramble bush of narrative, lightly powdered with roses of complacency and interminable extracts from letters and diaries.

This is the life of a shy, gawky academic duckling, from egg to swanhood, and from the suburbs of north London to the “letters of congratulation … from a whole gamut of national museum directors” when he succeeded in 1967 to the throne of the National Portrait Gallery. His path, however, goes from A to B via Gee! Oh! and I. We get his wife’s sad death in 2003, his accession to the V&A, the house bought after his marriage, his weekends at Gianni Versace’s villa in the 1990s, the death of Jean Muir in 1995, his meeting with Hardy Amies in 1970, his elopement, and the requiem for his confessor in 2010 … Strong takes time by the scruff of the neck and shakes it into a mad mosaic, punctuated by a continual coy “of whom more later”, and “as we shall see”, so that reading his life is like being buttonholed by the pre- and post-swan, both talking at once, one invoking a sepia and one a Technicolor world.

His early life sounds drab and miserable, with a tyrannical father and a feral brother, later the bane of his life; however, he stayed at home until he was 28, his parents bought him a desk when he graduated, and he turned his bedroom into a Grand Tourist’s study, so it can’t have been all gloom. He did work extremely hard, clambering from the “unutterable greyness” of his childhood (full of visits to the theatre, opera and V&A) to a stratum of academic rigour and possibility.

His further ascent into a world of “burgeoning … connection”, “visual flourish” and catty obits cannot negate his achievements, but it does temper them with a glaze of smuggery. Lynn Roberts

FICTION OF THE WEEK

Magic conjured with words Binocular Vision Edith Pearlman PUSHKIN PRESS, 384PP, £16.99 ■ Tablet bookshop price £15.30

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he novelist Ann Patchett makes high claims for Edith Pearlman. “Put her stories beside those of John Updike and Alice Munro. That’s where they belong,” she announces in her introduction. Of one story, “Self-Reliance”, she relates: “I knew the story was good when I first read it, but when I had read it 20 times I could see that it was flawless … I felt like a junior watchmaker taking apart a Vacherin Constantin.” A few stories into this compendious volume, which covers work from 1977 to 2010, and you realise Patchett is not exaggerating.

Pearlman doesn’t go in for flashy sentences or narrative tricks. She’s like a magician with few props, and those the plainest: the cup, the box, the ball. This is concentrated writing, where complex information is signalled by a mere

Edith Pearlman adjective, and some paragraphs bear rereading to extract their essence. Take “Day of Awe”, which begins: “He was the last Jew in a cursed land. A cursed country, a country of tricksters.” Robert is visiting his son Lex, who lives in “the capital city of a Jewless country” in South America. The repetition conjures up this elderly grump, suspicious alike of Lex’s homosexuality (he notes a “faggy lift of one shoulder”) and Jaime (“it was pronounced Hymie”), Lex’s adopted son, meeting Robert for the first time. It reveals Robert’s unease among gentiles, and his unspoken fears about his son’s assimilation. The boy’s scribbled artworks, stuck to the fridge door, are described as “unambitious efforts” and the unkindness of the adjective is striking. By the very last line, via Robert’s minor epiphany in a Catholic church, the disappointing boy has become his

“grandson”. This little miracle takes place over a mere 12 pages, among topics such as travellers’ bowels, colonial history and bird life.

South America also features in “Vaquita” (1996), where Señora Marta Perera de Lefkowitz, originally Polish, is the ageing Minister of Health, urging a return to breastfeeding (and hence natural contraception) among the population. On a trip to a remote area, Señora Perera spots a young Indian girl suckling a child in the woods. “Jew and Indian. Queen Isabella’s favourite victims.” The encounter prompts an impulsive gesture.

Jewishness forms an important, although unemphatic thread. “If Love Were All” is a novel in miniature, as American Sonya finds herself in London during the Blitz, helping waifs and strays, attracted alike to a German refugee and a French teenager. “Mama!” cries a distraught Polish boy, “though his mother was no doubt dead”. Pearlman conjures up a tragedy in a brisk phrase, where another writer would elaborate.

In the title story, a mere four pages long, a 10-year-old girl spies on the couple next door, seeing almost all but understanding nothing. Unlike the child, Pearlman always notes the crucial detail that reveals the most. There’s a sharp wit, an aching compassion and a hard-won humanism in these elegant tales. Suzi Feay

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Bloomsbury Spring Books Spiritual Letters

How to Read a Graveyard

Sister Wendy Beckett

Travels in the Company of the Dead

Apart from her celebrity status as 'the art nun', Sister Wendy has been approached throughout her life for counsel on the spiritual life and the life of prayer. Here, for the first time, are collected some of the finest of her responses in the form of letters. This little book is a treasure trove of wisdom and sound simple advice.

Peter Stanford

HARDBACK | 9781408188439 | £14.99

Why Rousseau Was Wrong Christianity and the Secular Soul

Frances Ward Tracing the impact of key Enlightenment philosophers on our increasingly secular society, Frances Ward outlines an alternative model of citizenship based on character and virtue rather than ‘identity.’ Ward shows how the Church can help to shape national corporate life by strengthening bonds of hospitality and trust.

PAPERBACK | 9781441115539 | £14.99

www.bloomsbury.com

A taboo-breaking exploration of what graveyards and memorials to the dead can tell our secular, scientific and sceptical age about our eternal fate. From Roman catacombs to ecoburials, via municipal cemeteries, war graves and Days of the Dead, Peter Stanford has handpicked 10 graveyards to show us how to read graves, what to look out for and how even the most initially unpromising exploration can enthrall.

HARDBACK | 9781441179777 | £16.99

PUBLISHED MAY 2013

On Heaven and Earth Pope Francis on Faith, Family and the Church in the 21st Century

Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Abraham Skorka The first English language book by the new Pope is an open and frank conversation on faith and reason between Pope Francis and Rabbi Skorka. These personal dialogues, addressing atheism, abortion, homosexuality and other issues, give a first-hand account of Pope Francis’ views and what these mean for his Papacy.

HARDBACK | 9781472903815 | £14.99

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Unasked questions Archbishop Justin Welby: the road to Canterbury Andrew Atherstone DARTON, LONGMAN AND TODD, 152PP, £7.99 ■ Tablet bookshop price £7.20

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he Church of England has very strong historic links with the public schools.

Various Archbishops of Canterbury were former headmasters. On one level, of course, “public school” is an annoying misnomer. On another level it tells a truth: these schools were deeply imbued with a public-service ethos. They aimed to teach privileged young men how to serve their nation, and its empire – and rooted such service in Anglican faith. In the 1960s, this ethos began to seem dubious, nostalgic, out of touch: surely the national Church had to move away from its public-school aura, in order to find new relevance. But instead of fading away, public-school religion became central to an Evangelical revival. And it gradually became clear that this revival was the main source of vitality in British Anglicanism.

Justin Welby emerges from Andrew Atherstone’s highly sympathetic biographical sketch as deeply involved in

Tradition and Modernity Christian and Muslim Perspectives David Marshall, Editor Afterword

by Rowan Williams “ . . . genuinely important.”

—David Martin, Fellow of the British Academy and Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics

978-1-58901-949-2, paperback, $24.95 / £19.50

AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS FROM SELECT EBOOK RETAILERS. FOLLOW US @GUPRESS

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this story. He went to Eton, but only began serious engagement with religion when, in 1974, he went to teach in Kenya on his gap year (a relic of imperial service). At Cambridge he joined the Christian Union, and, more tellingly, attended holiday camps, or “house parties”, for public schoolboys and former public schoolboys (they were held in vacant boarding schools).

When in London, he attended Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), the centre of public-school religion; he met his wife there. This church was gently expanding under the leadership of the Revd Sandy Millar (Eton, Cambridge); in 1990, Nicky Gumbel (Eton, Cambridge) transformed the Alpha course there, which replicated large elements of the house-party format.

Welby, now a young oil-company executive, was involved. It’s important to note that Alpha was not just about providing a niche form of Anglicanism for former public schoolboys. Its strange genius was to seek the spread of public-school Evangelicalism throughout the land, to universalise the house-party spirit, of informality, fellowship and a slightly old-fashioned sense of order and duty. Of course this entails a haven from the bloodthirsty perpetual sexual revolution of our time.

Atherstone supplies no evidence that the young Welby had any interest in theology, beyond the pious formulas of the house parties, designed for spotty adolescents. He later recounted that his university years grounded him “in a clear and simple understanding of the Gospel”. This religious tradition is wary of any analysis of Christianity that is not safely rooted in the community of like minds. It looks over at theology students (and professors) succumbing to doubt and liberal vagueness, and determines to keep its distance.

Well, not everyone has to be Rowan Williams. But there is strikingly little evidence of the young Welby wrestling with any aspect of this creed, attending to liberal objections to its conservatism in doctrine, politics and gender politics. Did he discover complexity amid his “clear and simple understanding of the Gospel”? On one level, he doubtless did: life’s practical challenges included the death of his baby daughter in a car accident. But on another level, no: he seems never to have been seriously bothered by the obvious liberal objections to the clarity and simplicity of Evangelicalism (that, for example, it tends to moral legalism and to biblical literalism, and, in the case of the Alpha course, that it is prone to slightly reactionary bourgeois smugness). Public-school Evangelicalism sees little merit in such self-doubt: the point is to get out there and bring people to Christ. Less analysis, more fellowship.

In the 1990s he was a parish priest in the Midlands (he promoted the Alpha course, of course), and also began to be known as a financial ethicist. Then he started working with Coventry Cathedral’s International Centre for Reconciliation, including

The Archbishop of Canterbury: his ‘public-school Evangelicalism is the Church of England’s only real source of coherence and energy’ travelling to danger spots in Africa and the Middle East. He proved a natural diplomat, full of self-deprecating charm and steely determination. He was appointed Dean of Liverpool in 2007, where he launched a confident fusion of traditional and modern worship styles. In 2011 he was appointed Bishop of Durham; the following year he sat on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, and his calm acuity impressed many. He occasionally reaffirmed his commitment to the Evangelical position on sexuality, but in a muted way, stressing the need for careful, respectful engagement with the other point of view.

His rise exemplifies the core Evangelical strengths of can-do confidence and cheerful practicality. This confidence is rooted in experience of the Church as a coherent, distinctive culture, full of dynamism.

Non-Evangelical Anglicans are less familiar with this experience; their sense of fellowship, of unity in a distinctive common identity, is patchy. Are they united by their acceptance of liberal values, including the validity of homosexuality? Up to a point, but this does not confer distinctness from secular normality. When they seek sharper identity here, they weaken their Christian distinctiveness: it’s a conundrum that has paralysed the rest of Anglicanism for decades. Their crisis is even starker after Rowan Williams: he was vaguely expected to revive liberal Anglo-Catholicism, but in effect declared it a dubious hybrid.

It might sound hyperbolic, but non-Evangelical British Anglicanism is now weaker than it has ever been. One sign of this was Giles Fraser’s interview with Justin Welby for The Guardian last summer.

Fraser – liberal Anglicanism’s fluent poster boy – avoided any awkward mention of the crisis over homosexuality (the conversation was almost entirely focused on reform of the banking system) and warmly endorsed Welby for Canterbury. Between the lines was written: we liberals have lost, at least for now; let’s admit that public-school Evangelicalism is the Church’s only real source of coherence and energy.

Theo Hobson

ARTS LAURA GASCOIGNE

OUTSIDE THE WALLS R.B. Kitaj created a Jewish modern art which he described as ‘diasporic’. Two major retrospectives explore the work of one of the most significant painters of the post-war period n the autumn of 1959, an unusually exotic and sophisticated student appeared at the Royal College of Art. At 27 years old, the American Ronald Brooks Kitaj had a wife, a child, a house and a car. He had studied art at Cooper Union in New York, the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna and the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford – and in between, more impressively, had travelled widely in the merchant marine and the US army.

Among a stellar generation of RCA students including David Hockney, Kitaj stood out not just for his maturity but for his draughtsmanship. The art critic Robert Hughes stated simply in the 1970s that Kitaj “draws better than almost anyone else”, and any doubts about his judgement must evaporate before the masterful drawings in two new exhibitions that together form the artist’s first retrospective since his suicide in California in 2007.

Under the joint title “R.B. Kitaj: Obsessions”, the two shows (until 16 June) trace slightly different paths through the artist’s career.

“Analyst for Our Time” at Pallant House, Chichester, looks at his broader preoccupation with culture, politics and society, while “The Art of Identity” at London’s Jewish Museum focuses on his growing concern with what it meant to be a Jewish painter. By the mid 1980s it had become his obsession “to do for Jews what Morandi did for jars”.

His interest in Judaism developed late.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932 to an atheist Russian-Jewish mother, Jeanne Brooks, and a Hungarian father who left when he was one (the surname Kitaj was his Viennese-Jewish stepfather’s), he was not brought up in the Jewish faith, and although he married his second wife, Sandra Fisher, in a London synagogue, he remained intensely uncomfortable with organised ritual. He had been known to walk out of Yom Kippur ceremonies, and once sent a note to his friend the theologian Rabbi Friedlander asking: “Can you put the case for a Supreme Being on a postcard while standing on one leg?” He got no reply.

It was Hannah Arendt’s controversial account of the Eichmann trial in the early 1970s that awakened Kitaj’s consciousness of

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his Jewish heritage; it was the Jew as social outsider that he identified with. “Jews fascinate me,” he later told the critic Andrew Lambirth.

“I want to know why they are always in trouble.” The concept of a “Diasporist” art that he developed gradually expanded to embrace other persecuted outsiders: African Americans, Palestinians, homosexuals, women.

The fixed point in a Diasporist existence, for Kitaj, was literature. Books appear everywhere in his paintings. In Unpacking My Library (1990/91), we see the artist huddled possessively over open boxes, putting down books like roots in a new home. Books also feature as Diasporist travel companions. A volume sits on the window ledge beside Kitaj’s friend the art historian Michael Podro, pictured as The Jewish Rider (1984/85) travelling by train from Budapest to Auschwitz, past a blasted landscape where smoke rises from a gas-oven chimney to drift across a blackened crucifix.

“Andy [Warhol] came from soup cans and I came from books,” he explained to Lambirth.

“Books and book learning are for me what trees and woods are for a landscape painter.”

He worked with piles of books around his easel and collaged handwritten passages on to his paintings, seeing his compulsion for verbal commentary as part of the Jewish Rabbinical tradition of interpretation: his first solo show at Marlborough Fine Art in 1963 was titled “Pictures with Commentary, Pictures without Commentary”. His web of references certainly benefits from explication. His commentary on his Holocaust painting If Not, Not (1975/76) reveals the literary influences of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the artistic inspirations of Giorgione, Matisse and Bassano. Dominated by the gatehouse at Auschwitz, this painting still manages, like many of his most difficult images, to seduce the viewer through the beauty of its forms and colours.

His colours, his collage technique and his mix of high and low cultural sources have sometimes led to Kitaj’s mislabelling as a pop artist, but he was really a Symbolist in Sixties’ dress with a Renaissance taste in iconography.

Kitaj’s If Not, Not, of 1975/76. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Unlike the common iconographic language of Renaissance, however, Kitaj’s language was private and obscure, and the complexity that intrigued earlier audiences struck later ones as pretentious. When in 1994 the Tate paid him the signal honour for a living artist of a major retrospective, what should have been his moment of glory became his undoing. The critics panned the exhibition, subjecting his paintings and accompanying commentaries to savage and highly personal attacks. “The wandering Jew, the T.S. Eliot of painting?” asked The Independent’s Andrew GrahamDixon. “Kitaj turns out instead to be the Wizard of Oz: a small man with a megaphone held to his lips.” When the artist’s wife, Sandra, suffered an aneurysm two weeks after the show closed, he blamed the critics for her death. Three years later, he abandoned England for California.

Seeing his work today, the vitriol it aroused is hard to comprehend. But the 1990s were a different era, when Kitaj’s form of “conviction art”, so in tune with the 1960s zeitgeist, had begun to look dated. Six years before his Tate show, a new generation of young British artists had been launched in Damien Hirst’s gamechanging exhibition “Freeze”. The artist who in 1962 had “singlehandedly and with one exhibition brought the intellect back into the forum of British art”, in the words of Tom Phillips RA, became a casualty of a new postmodern intellectualism detached from personal conviction.

The pendulum is now swinging the other way. Postmodernism hasn’t stopped persecution and displacement; rather, Kitaj’s concept of Diasporism is acquiring ever-wider application. The evident seriousness with which visitors to these new shows are approaching his work seems, in fact, to justify his belief that “there will always be pictures whose complexity, difficulty, mystery will be ambitious enough to resemble the patterns of human existence” – and even, perhaps, his hope that “art can mend the world a little”.

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RADIO

Beyond redemption Norway’s Soul: Re-evaluating Knut Hamsun BBC RADIO 4

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he issues arising out of Per Kristian Olsen’s punctilious dissection of Knut Hamsun (11 April) will have occurred to most people keen on great artists with skeletons in their closets. The second-best bed left to Mrs Shakespeare in her husband’s will may not, as Orwell once put it, necessarily invalidate Hamlet, but what about the distinguished philosopher who endorses genocide, the eminent librettist who collaborates with his country’s enemies or, to use the far from hypothetical subject of Olsen’s enquiry, the world-famous novelist who writes a sorrowing obituary of Hitler, having previously sent Goebbels his Nobel medal as a token of esteem?

Until at least the mid-1930s, Hamsun (1859-1952) looked a sure-fire candidate for

posterity’s smile. Hemingway declared that the author of Hunger (1890) had taught him to write; Henry Miller called him “the Dickens of my generation”; there were approving notices from everyone from Herman Hesse to H.G. Wells, and a tide of media interest that, here in out-of-the-way Scandinavia, catapulted the Hamsun clan into a life of wellnigh Kennedyesque celebrity. Then came Naziism, the war, occupation, a series of inflammatory letters to Norwegian newspapers, and – eventually – reparation. The standard post-war domestic riposte to Hamsun’s fascism, it turns out, was for former admirers to hurl copies of his books over the garden wall.

The link between reactionary political opinions and art is never as clear-cut as it sounds.

There have, after all, been plenty of rightwing modernists – T.S. Eliot, say, or Anthony Powell among home-grown writers – and the books by which Hamsun made his name in the 1890s were ferociously avant-garde. He disliked realism, thought artists should concentrate on the complexities of the human mind, criticised Ibsen to his face and, his biographer Robert Ferguson told the programme, was introducing stream-of-consciousness

OPERA

techniques into his fiction a quarter-of-acentury before Joyce.

The private life, alas, seems as self-willed as the politics: an impoverished, autodidact’s childhood, a second marriage to a woman first met with the salutation, “What a beautiful young lady you are,” and a working routine in which interruption was kept resolutely at bay. A grandson, taken to the Norwegian state library and confronted with the stormy letter Hamsun filed to the press when it was revealed that Rudolf Hess had flown to England, could only murmur that he did not understand it.

What was there, in the end, to understand?

Ferguson made the unexceptionable point that, just as a plumber is judged by his ability to put in a sink, so a writer is judged by the words he arranges on the page. Yet no critic in history has ever quite managed to convince the public that the words on the page enjoy a hermetically sealed existence, altogether cut off from that elemental human curiosity about who wrote them. Ezra Pound’s reputation never recovered from the stink surrounding his anti-Semitic broadcasts on Rome radio. On this evidence, neither will Hamsun’s.

D.J. Taylor

The Firework-Maker’s Daughter: ‘a delightful show, sweetly told’

Straight to the heart The Firework-Maker’s Daughter THE OPERA GROUP, LINBURY THEATRE, ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON

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ontemporary opera is a peculiar beast, using a language hardly anyone understands to tell a story of direct emotional impact. Sometimes, through a weird alchemy and sheer conviction, it works – as with Gerald Barry’s Importance of Being Earnest, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. More often, you just feel the story wants to be told in another medium altogether. These things are rare and expensive enough for us always to have unrealistic expectations, which is unfair on composers of an art form that has yielded only a few score, gold-plated masterworks from countless thousands of attempts over 400 years – and barely a handful since 1945.

One reason for this might be that “serious” modern composers look down their noses at colleagues who write music people actually like. David Bruce has never been too bothered by that, and is further freed from modernist tyranny in this work with words by Glyn Maxwell, taken from a Philip Pullman story, by the fact that it’s written for children. Given licence to write approachable music, Bruce and the Opera Group (theoperagroup.co.uk; on tour until June) have made an enchanting evening that should return for many a Christmas show.

It’s a pretty myth about growing up. We are

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in a storybook East of Chinese hats, gnomic wisdom and long, thin beards; Lila (Mary Bevan) is a 13-year-old girl whose father – like many fathers – feels firework-making is no career for a woman, so she sets off with her friend, the lovelorn elephant Hamlet (James Laing), to steal Royal Sulphur from the fearsome Fire-Fiend on Mount Merapi.

Pullman’s imagination furnishes plenty of colourful obstacles (pirates, jungle) on the way, and the story ends with a fireworkmaking competition and a moral about the qualities – courage and faith – we all need.

It is as much a visual as it is a musical treat.

Designer Dick Bird works with two geniuses of puppetry, Sally Todd and Steve Tiplady of Indefinite Articles, and lighting designer Guy Hoare, to conjure an enchanted world with magic lanterns and shadow puppets; firework displays are created with brilliantly clever projections of sand and coloured liquids.

Town, jungle, river, mountain and prison are

wrought out of mere light and air.

The same resourcefulness extends to the performers: five singers and an orchestra of nine.

Bruce uses an unusual band – including horn, accordion, harp and two percussionists – to create a wonderfully varied world that feels like many more players, and imitates the sounds of other instruments – banjo, gamelan orchestra – as well as the natural noises of the jungle. Eastern scales and the hieratic sounds of temple bells complete the picture in an amazingly deft score, which finally lets itself off the leash for the firework show featuring comedy German and Italian, set to workshop pastiches of Wagner – and Neapolitan ice-cream music.

There is some real and tuneful singing called for, too. Mary Bevan, whose headlong young career snaps at the heels of her sister Sophie’s, performs Lila with bouncy, eager naivety, an immensely attractive stage manner and her usual musical intelligence. Backed up by the lyric tenor of Amar Muchhala, the comic talents of Andrew Slater (equally jolly as unsuccessful pirate and bloodthirsty king) and Wyn Pencarreg, and James Laing’s haunting counter-tenor elephant – who is finally reunited with his lady love in the zoo – this is a delightful show, sweetly told and with just the right amount of seriousness to ballast its charm. Robert Thicknesse

THEATRE

Closing the circle The Low Road JERWOOD THEATRE DOWNSTAIRS, ROYAL COURT, LONDON

Molly Sweeney THE PRINT ROOM, LONDON

The Low Road: energetic and nuanced performances

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nevitably, the first and last productions that artistic directors stage have a symbolic power, with the opener taken as a statement of how they plan to run the place and the closer as a clue to their future intentions.

Dominic Cooke, who left the Royal Court in London last week after an impressive sevenyear tenure, has neatly closed the circle with a new play by Bruce Norris, an American dramatist whom his regime has championed from the start, through earlier productions of The Pain and the Itch and Clybourne Park.

It is fitting too that the new Norris piece, The Low Road, tackles directly the histories of capitalism and taxation, which have recently resulted in the cultural funding crisis with which Cooke and other theatre bosses have had to cope.

The Low Road is also pointedly unlike anything Cooke has previously done at the Court, being a three-hour historical costume drama, set largely in the late eighteenth century with only a brief contemporary interlude. My cynical journalistic assumption was that Cooke was demonstrating his ability to direct the sort of epic public play that is required in the Olivier auditorium of the National Theatre, where the announcement of Sir Nicholas Hytner’s departure neatly coincided with Cooke’s availability. However, the latter insisted, during our interview on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, that he is organisationally exhausted after the Court and will not be seeking the NT job this time round.

So The Low Road must be taken simply as a summation of the incumbency that it concludes. And it continues the strengths of Cooke’s regime. The multi-location staging (set design Tom Pye) inventively suggests a far bigger budget than there can actually have been and high-calibre actors give energetic and nuanced performances: especially Bill Paterson as Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist who narrates the Henry Fieldingesque tale of Jim Trumpett (Johnny Flynn), a young lad who goes in search of his fortune in colonial America. There is also versatile work from Elizabeth Berrington, who vividly plays roles including a Massachusetts Puritan and, in the modern scene, the harassed chairwoman of an international conference of corporate bosses. The time-jump cleverly depicts the consequences of the rise of greed and anti-government sentiments that the historical sequences chart.

Overall, though, the play is far inferior to Norris’ earlier Court plays. The employment of a lengthy on-stage narration can be a sign of structural problems and Paterson’s Smith

often seems here to be yoking together a set of sketches that vary hugely in relevance and interest. But Cooke directs with his usual panache and attention to textual nuance. He will be a tough act to follow at the Court (where Vicky Featherstone takes over) but will be worth following wherever his career takes him next.

At one of London’s newer studio theatres – the Print Room in Notting Hill – I was pleased to see a Brian Friel play that I had only previously read. Molly Sweeney was pre-

TELEVISION

Fragile souls The Prisoners BBC1

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he prospect of a night in the cells is terrifying to most people. But there are those, especially some inmates of women’s prisons, for whom jail offers structure, security and even a kind of rough-and-ready affection, things they have lacked in their disordered lives.

The Prisoners (15 April) looked at three young women released from Holloway and struggling to stay out. “I’m not going to lie,” said Jade, a “prolific offender” with six burglary charges. “I do love prison, and I do miss it.”

Jade is 18, though she behaves with the emotional incontinence of a toddler. Her mother has spent a lot of time in prison and Jade has spent most of her life in institutions.

In Holloway, we learned, she makes ligatures to tie around the neck. The staff, firm but patient, knew she was doing it, but weren’t allowed to search her. They had to wait until she was on the ground, gasping for air, at which point it became an emergency and they were able to intervene. In the four months we followed Jade, she was in and out of Holloway three times. When she wasn’t there, she sat in her council flat with her dog, turned up to meet her probation officer with half a bottle of vodka inside her, and sent a sad letter to her favourite prison officer, Miss Kelly. “I miss you and love you loads,” it said.

Another who loved prison was Crystal, 23, jailed for drug offences, a heavy drinker and, for good measure, a manic depressive. “The best times I’ve had have been in prison,” she told us. Inside, she said, she had “loads of

miered in 1994 but suffered then and since from its formal similarity to Friel’s celebrated Faith Healer, from which it borrows the device of interlocking the monologues of three participants in a situation.

With greater distance, this constructional overlap feels no more relevant than, say, that between two four-act plays about different subjects. In Molly Sweeney, the device of three people describing what they saw and felt is given an extra dimension by the subtraction of a sense: Molly (Dorothy Duffy) was born blind but is restored to sight by an apparently miraculous operation performed by Mr Rice (Stuart Graham), a drunken and cuckolded Dublin surgeon. The memories of patient and physician are mediated by those of Frank (Ruairi Conaghan), Molly’s husband.

Monologues risk being static on stage but director Abigail Graham introduces welljudged moves and Friel’s selection of telling detail is typically adept in a piece that alludes to classic representations of blindness (the seer Tiresias, Lear’s Gloucester) while bringing new insights to the themes of sense and observation. Mark Lawson

decent friends. Outside they’ve been more like associates.” During her last spell in Holloway, she had formed a romantic attachment to another inmate, Toni. Now her plan was to return to Southend, where all her troubles began, and try to stay clean while waiting for Toni to be released.

Crystal relapsed, then signed up for rehab, 250 miles away. Before she went, she showed us her little collection of certificates from prison courses: literacy, numeracy, “crack awareness”. Holloway had taught her to read and write. She particularly liked reading her Valentine card from Toni. But then it all went wrong. She dropped out of rehab, then took an overdose, at which point Toni disappeared.

The programme ended with Crystal in another kind of incarceration: sectioned under the Mental Health Act. On the whole, she preferred Holloway.

Meanwhile, Emma, 23, was rather different.

Serving her third sentence for shoplifting when we met her, she had led a stable and privileged life, with a private education, loving parents and violin lessons to grade 7. Then her father had died, and the music had stopped. She went to a sixth-form college, discovered drugs, and was soon thieving to support her habit. Released from Holloway, she was collected by her mum, but preferred more dangerous company. “My other half is on the streets,” she explained. “We’ve been together for six years and I have a lot of feelings for him.” Soon she was back to using drugs every day and shoplifting. Drugs, she said, are like when you are on a diet and you see a piece of chocolate cake: “You have a little bit … and you end up eating the whole cake.”

And then she made herself scarce.

This was an excellent documentary, directed with a sympathetic and patient touch by Louise Malkinson. It was difficult, though, to watch it without a sinking feeling. John Morrish 20 April 2013

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THE CHURCH IN THE

WORLD

Elite group chosen to help Pope govern Robert Mickens In Rome

POPE FRANCIS has called the Second Vatican Council a “beautiful work of the Holy Spirit” from which only the foolish and those lacking belief would want to retreat.

He made his comments days after taking a decisive step to implement a key teaching of Vatican II – episcopal collegiality – by selecting eight cardinal-advisers from around the world to help him govern the Universal Church and reform its much-criticised central bureaucracy, the Roman Curia.

“After 50 years, have we done everything the Spirit told us in the council?” he asked during a brief homily at Mass on Tuesday morning. “No. We celebrate this anniversary by practically erecting a monument to the council, but we are more concerned that it doesn’t cause us any bother. We don’t want to change,” he told a small group of Vatican employees inside the chapel at his Santa Marta residence.

“But there’s even more – there are those who want to go back,” he said. “This is called ‘being stiff-necked’; this is called wanting to ‘tame the Holy Spirit’; this is called becoming ‘fools and slow of heart’,” he said in his unscripted remarks, which were part of a reflection on the temptation to resist the often unsettling promptings of the Holy Spirit.

It was the first time in a little over a month since he was elected Bishop of Rome that Pope Francis had spoken specifically about Vatican II. Only two other times has he

even quoted any of the conciliar documents.

The Vatican said the Pope’s decision to form the elite papal “group of eight” came from suggestions that cardinals had made in meetings before the conclave. Pope Francis named fellow Latin American, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, to coordinate the group.

Although its first joint meeting is not scheduled to take place until 1-3 October, the Vatican said the Pope had already begun his contacts with individual members of the group.

The new cardinal-advisers include a representative from each of the six continents, as well as the “governor” of Vatican City State, Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, who is the lone Italian cardinal. Pope Francis also chose an Italian bishop – Marcello Semeraro of the Diocese of Albano – to be the group’s secretary.

The other advisers include Cardinals Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich (Europe); Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, Archbishop Emeritus of Santiago de Chile (South America); Seán Patrick O’Malley, OFM Cap., Archbishop of Boston (North America); Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya, Archbishop of Kinshasa (Africa); Oswald Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay (Asia); and George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney (Oceania).

Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, head of the Holy See press office, stressed that the group of eight papal advisers could not properly be called a “committee”, “commission” or a “council”. He said it was a group with “rather open designation” that allows the Pope to “seek advice from authoritative members of the

episcopacy, and more specifically even from the College of Cardinals, at the universal level”.

Fr Lombardi underlined that this new group in no way represented a diminishment of the function of the Roman Curia. He said the Curia still “preserves all of its fundamental functions of closely assisting the Pope in his daily governance of the Universal Church” and the heads of the Curia offices remained his “primary collaborators”. Cardinal Rodríguez told Italian media that among the items the group of eight would advise the Pope on would certainly be “all the issues regarding the Institute for the Works of Religion”, commonly called the Vatican Bank.

“I believe the Pope is looking to the future with great faith, courage and decisiveness,” the Honduran cardinal said.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, the former head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, praised Francis’ “prophetic interpretation of the council” and said he had launched a new phase of its reception.

Speaking on 12 April at a conference on Vatican II in northern Italy, he said the Pope had “changed the agenda” and put the issues of the southern hemisphere – especially the challenge of poverty – at the forefront of the Church’s attention. “Pope Francis, with his option for a poor Church for the poor, recalled that to mind,” the cardinal said. In Chile, Juan Carlos Cruz, a victim of a priest found guilty of abuse by a Vatican investigation in 2011, said it was “shameful” that Cardinal Errázuriz, who is accused of covering up the abuse, should have been included in the group.

Bishops bar priests from adopting Missal translation DESPITE POPE BENEDICT XVI one year ago informing the German-speaking bishops that their new translation of the Missal would use the phrase “for many”, the Austrian bishops have stipulated that the only permitted translation of the Latin words “pro multis” in the Eucharistic Prayer is “for all”, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.

The Austrian bishops’ conference issued the clarification in the 14 April edition of its official gazette.

A German translation of the Missal is being prepared. Last April, Pope Benedict XVI wrote to the German bishops to inform

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20 April 2013

them of his personal decision to have the words “für viele” (for many) rather than “für alle (for all) to translate “pro multis” in the new text. The Austrian bishops are keen that no priest starts saying “for many” while the text is still being worked on.

The Austrian bishops said that with their clarification, they were “expressly drawing attention to the fact that Benedict XVI’s decision is only valid for the new translation of the Mass and [they] would like to underline that the corresponding church procedure on this subject has not yet been concluded. It is for this reason that the Missal of

1975 remains binding.”

In his letter a year ago, the German Pope said he had written “to avoid a split” in the Church, after the president of the German bishops’ conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch had told him the bishops in the German-speaking world were still divided on the translation of “pro multis”. Pope Benedict acknowledged that the change would be a “huge challenge” for clergy and laity and asked the bishops to work out a thorough exegesis that would make the new translation understandable to the faithful.

In October, Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz said Rome

had “pettily censored” the German translation of the Missal, which was a “breach of the right to liturgy”. And Archbishop Alois Kothgasser of Salzburg, who is responsible for liturgical matters in the Austrian bishops’ conference, told a meeting of deans at Brixen on the Italian border that Pope Benedict’s decision to revert to “for many” was not an “official decision” and that he would prefer to go on using “for all”.

Some 3.5 million copies of the new German translation are due to be printed and come into use in all German-speaking countries on the first Sunday of Advent this year.

Have your say on the week’s big issues on The Tablet blog at www.thetablet.co.uk

UNITED STATES

Grieving Bostonians urged to combat evil with good Ellie Clayton and Michael Sean Winters IN THE WAKE of the fatal bombings at the

Boston Marathon on Monday, the Archbishop of Boston has expressed his “deep sorrow” over the tragic loss of life.

The two explosions that went off near the finishing line killed three people, including an eight-year-old boy, and injured more than 170 others, including 17 critically.

In a statement released hours after the blasts, Cardinal Seán O’Malley said: “Our prayers and concern are with so many who experienced the trauma of these acts,” and praised the work of those who had helped in the aftermath of the attack.

He added: “We stand in solidarity with our ecumenical and interfaith colleagues in the commitment to witness the greater power of good in our society and to work together for healing.” Pope Francis sent a telegram to the cardinal in which he urged all Bostonians “not to be overcome by evil, but to combat evil with good”.

■ The Vatican’s doctrinal chief says Pope Francis has given his office a go-ahead to continue the crackdown it launched last year against a major association of nuns in the United States, writes Robert Mickens.

Archbishop Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), made the announcement on

On Thursday, President Barack Obama was due to attend an interfaith service at the city’s Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the US bishops’ conference, noted on Tuesday in a statement that the tragedy occurred on Patriots’ Day. He urged Catholics to pray for the dead, the injured and the emergency services, and added that “the growing culture of violence … calls for both wise security measures by government officials and an examination by all of us to see what we can personally do to enhance peace and respect for one another in our world.”

Among the dead was Martin Richard, aged eight, from the Boston suburb of Dorchester.

The explosion severely injured his mother, and his six-year-old sister lost a leg. The boy’s school, Pope John Paul II Catholic Academy, said it was “offering its every prayer for the Richard family”. The family worshipped at St Ann’s Church in Dorchester and Martin had made his first Holy Communion there last year.

Martin’s father, Bill, is a community leader.

Monday after meeting the top three officials of the association, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) – its president, Sr Florence Deacon, its vice president Carol Zinn and executive director Sr Janet Mock.

In a CDF communiqué, the German prefect said Pope Francis had reaffirmed the

findings issued last April in a harshly worded assessment of the LCWR. That evaluation, written by Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo (Ohio), accused the conference of failing to promote church teaching on life issues, the family and human sexuality.

“The conversation was open and frank,” the LCWR said in a statement.

FRANCE

Gay-marriage law ‘risks violence’ CARDINAL André Vingt-Trois, Archbishop

of Paris, has warned that legalising gay marriage and adoption would deny the fundamental human trait of sexual difference and could lead to violence by people frustrated by the official rejection of part of their identity, writes Tom Heneghan.

Addressing the spring session of the French bishops’ conference, he said the reform was a sign that France had lost its capacity to integrate differences peacefully among its people.

“This is the way a violent society develops,” he said. “Society has lost its capacity of inte-

gration and especially its ability to blend differences in a common project.”

Under pressure from the reform’s opponents, the Government in Paris has speeded up the legislative process so the National Assembly can give final approval to the law on 23 April, weeks earlier than intended.

Debate has been limited to 25 hours, to avoid giving the opposition and protest groups more time to campaign against the measure.

Cardinal Vingt-Trois said the Government’s decision to rush the law through showed it had been embarrassed by the public debate.

Turkson says self-interest is undermining UN CARDINAL Peter Turkson, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said that the aims of the United Nations have been undermined by nations pursuing their own interests, writes Michael Sean Winters. He also implicitly criticised the UN for including access to abortion as part of its efforts to reduce poverty.

The cardinal was giving the keynote address at a conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris, at the Catholic University of America. He said peace is frustrated because “the building block of nation has persistently been a stumbling block … a nation will pursue its interests above those of any set of nations.”

Cardinal Turkson said that when, in 2010, he led the Holy See delegation to the UN to discuss Millennium Development Goals to halve global poverty by 2015, “some of the methods of the anti-poverty campaign tended to target the poor in ways that suggest that the solution to global poverty is to eliminate the poor”. The UN Human Rights Council has released a report equating restrictions and bans on abortion with “torture and ill-treatment” of women.

(To read the cardinal’s speech, visit www.thetablet.co.uk)

JESUIT CHURCH FARM STREET, MAYFAIR Sunday 21 April 2013

Mass Times: Vigil: Saturday 6pm Sunday: 8am, 9.30am (Family Mass), 11am (sung Latin), Jackson, Malcolm, Mendelssohn, Howells 12.30pm, 4.15pm, 6.15pm

www.farmstreet.org.uk

20 April 2013

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20 April 2013

ROME

Growth of new movements prompts soul-searching Christa Pongratz-Lippitt THE NEW PENTECOSTAL movements that

are burgeoning across the world require a new kind of recognition, according to a senior church leader. The President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Kurt Koch, said that these movements have grown to such an extent that they now constitute a “fourth form of Christianity” after the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox/Old Oriental Churches, especially in the southern hemisphere.

Cardinal Koch was addressing a conference in Rome entitled “Evangelicals – Pentecostals – Charismatics – New Religious Movements as Challenge for the Catholic Church”, hosted by the German bishops’ conference.

The cardinal said that the Evangelical, Charismatic and Pentecostal movements, together with the many indigenous Free Churches, were now the second-largest Christian community in the world after the Catholic Church. He added that these new movements were growing so fast that it was

necessary to speak of the “Pentecostalisation of Christianity”. Their rapid expansion had “radically changed the geography of Christianity worldwide”.

Cardinal Koch said that the success of the new movements obliged the Catholic Church to ask itself, “What are we doing wrong and why are the faithful deserting us?”, though he added that there were no simple answers.

He warned against seeing these new forms of Christianity solely as a threat to the Church.

It was obvious that there was a “great hunger and thirst for spiritual experiences” in these movements which should make the historic Christian Churches question the “churchifying” (“Verkirchlichung”) of the faith and of Christian life, Cardinal Koch said.

The new movements were characterised by the immediate proximity of the faithful to one another and to the community. Archbishop Ludwig Schick of Bamberg, who as head of the Commission for the World Church in the German bishops’ conference was the conference organiser, underlined how crucial it was to intensify dialogue with these movements.

ZIMBABWE

Elections plea to Mugabe’s neighbours THE BISHOPS of Southern Africa are visiting

the heads of nations in the region to ask them to use their influence to help ensure that presidential and parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe later this year are “free of violence and intimidation”, writes Ellen Teague.

A delegation of the Inter-Regional Meeting of Bishops of Southern Africa (Imbisa) last week met Armando Guebuza, President of Mozambique and president of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC).

The delegation – representing Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, São Tomé e Príncipe, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe – told President Guebuza: “We have decided to make this request to you and other SADC leaders to avoid the rude awakening we had in 2008 when unprece■ SUDAN: A senior Sudanese Catholic priest and two foreign Brothers on Friday became the latest of around 100 Christian leaders to be expelled from Sudan in the last few months, writes Fredrick Nzwili.

Fr Santino Morokomomo Maurino, general secretary of the Sudan Catholic Bishops’ Conference, was forced to

dented violence was unleashed on the nation in the June presidential run-off elections.”

The bishops want SADC to push for all Zimbabwean parties to sign up to the Zimbabwe Political Parties Code of Conduct.

Botswanan Bishop Frank Atese Nubuasah, who heads Imbisa, told The Tablet that Imbisa delegations will be visiting the heads of all the SADC. He said they had a “good and friendly” meeting with President Robert Mugabe in Harare last month.

In elections in March 2008 neither Mr Mugabe nor his main rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, won an outright majority. A runoff was scheduled for June, but after a wave of violent attacks on opposition supporters Mr Tsvangirai pulled out of the second round and accepted the post of Prime Minister.

leave on 12 April, the same day that Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir visited South Sudan for the first time since the region became an independent state in 2011.

The priest’s expulsion has called into question the announcement by Mr Bashir and his South Sudanese counterpart, Salva Kiir, that

relations between the two countries are to be normalised.

Mr Bashir says he wants Sudan to be a purely Muslim nation.

Also expelled with Fr Maurino were two Religious: French Br Michel Fleury and an Egyptian known only as Br Hossam. Both were working at the Catholic Language Institute, Khartoum.

IN BRIEF

Letter from Rome

Saudi crackdown on foreigners The Church in the southern Indian state of Kerala has urged the state and federal Governments to negotiate with the Saudi Arabian Government and provide financial assistance for migrant workers and their families forced to leave the oil-rich Gulf country in its clampdown on unauthorised foreign labourers. Any of the almost 2.5 million (mainly low-paid) Indians, including 500,000 from Kerala, who have changed jobs illegally in Saudi or do not have a valid work permit, will face deportation. Last week officials at the Philippines consulate in Jeddah set up tents for some 675 undocumented Filipino workers who had fled there seeking help.

Syria reduced to ‘battlefield’ Two years of civil conflict have turned the whole of Syria into a “battlefield”, Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregory III Laham warned this week. In a message sent from Damascus to the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, the patriarch added that up to 400,000 Syrian Christians – possibly more than 25 per cent of the total – have been displaced internally or have fled abroad.

Olive branch for Kirchner The newly appointed Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Mario Aurelio Poli, has publicly invited President Cristina Fernández Kirchner to attend the traditional annual Te Deum service at the city’s cathedral in May. She last attended the service with her husband Nestor, the former president, in 2005, when in his homily then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, questioned the “exhibitionism and strident rhetoric of those governing the country”.

Ex-Benedictine head charged The former head teacher of a prestigious boys’ boarding school at the Benedictine Kremsmünster Abbey in Upper Austria has been charged with offences relating to the abuse of 15 pupils between 1973 and 1993. The allegations of abuse by August Mandorfer, 79, formerly Fr Alfons OSB until he was laicised by the Vatican, surfaced in 2010.

Mass for Pope Emeritus’ birthday Pope Francis marked the eighty-sixth birthday of Benedict XVI on Tuesday by offering morning Mass for his retired predecessor and telephoning him at his temporary residence at Castel Gandolfo.

The Vatican recently denied that the former Pope was suffering from any ill health other than the effects of old age.

He is to move into his newly refurbished residence in the Vatican next month.

For daily news updates visit www.thetablet.co.uk

A

month into his pontificate, Pope Francis has been drawing unusually large crowds at all his public appearances. At his midday blessing this past Sunday there were nearly as many people as turned up in and around St Peter’s Square for the last Angelus of Benedict XVI. And this past Wednesday more than 80,000 people – some said as many as 100,000 – came to listen to Papa Bergoglio give his weekly catechesis at the general audience. And at each gathering the excitement is palpable. No doubt about it, there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the new Pope, whose relaxed and spontaneous manner is strikingly different from that of his more reserved and professorial predecessor.

But the enthusiasm waned a bit in some quarters this week after the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) said the Latin American Pope had told him to proceed with a controversial reform of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in the United States. As one leading woman Religious suggested publicly, it’s hard to know how much he has really studied the CDF-sponsored assessment of the situation. Usually, the Holy See press office issues statements on the Pope’s meetings and positions, but this was the second time since Francis became Pope that the CDF issued a communiqué after a meeting between Pope Francis and the CDF prefect. Perhaps Francis instructed Archbishop Gerhard Müller to do so. If so, the difference between him and Benedict may be more a matter of style than of substance.

That would be good news for proponents of the Tridentine Mass and other conservative Catholics. They weren’t very happy, either, this week after the Pope said people who wanted to turn back Vatican Council II were “stiff-necked” and fools.

P

ope Francis made his comments about the council during one of the morning Masses he’s been celebrating each weekday in the chapel of the Santa Marta residence where he lives.

As noted last week, he invites various groups of Vatican employees to join him for these liturgies. And he always offers some brief, spontaneous reflections on the day’s readings. At first, most people were not giving much weight to these unscripted “homilettes”, but more and more they are starting to sit up and listen. And now they have begun looking for the transcribed texts of the daily exhortations. The only problem is, they don’t exist; at least, not in their entirety. Vatican Radio and L’Osservatore Romano publish written summaries, but they are often slightly different. And there are also minor discrepancies among

the various language translations, too.

Vatican Radio tapes Papa Francesco’s reflections, but does not make the audio available to the public. Evidently, someone is “cleaning up” his remarks, because he’s not quite as fluent in Italian as in his native Spanish. The Italiani love his Latin American accent, but they jokingly say that when he speaks in their language it’s really “Itaniolo” – a combination of Italiano and Spagnolo (Spanish). Perhaps the Argentine Pope also speaks “Spanglish”. It’s hard to tell, because he’s only ever uttered but a few public words in English. He really hasn’t spoken in public much in his native tongue, either; that is, until this past Wednesday.

For the first time ever, he actually read the Spanish summary of his weekly catechesis, rather than leaving the task to an aide as he does with all the other languages.

No one seemed offended that he’s decided to “play favourites” – or use common sense.

I

taly is soon to have a new president to replace 87-year-old Giorgio Napolitano whose seven-year term has come to an end. Just over 1,000 delegates from the two houses of parliament and regional assemblies were to begin the voting process on Thursday. Like a papal conclave, a two-thirds majority is required for election – but only during the first three rounds of voting. After that, only a simple majority is needed. There is usually one voting session in the morning and one in the afternoon.

Normally, a large number of empty ballots are cast in those first three rounds, as parties and factions make deals and then push for quick election in round four. That might not happen this time. No single party or coalition had enough votes to form a government after political elections two months ago and there are fears that this could also lead to a long-drawn-out process to choose the president, a revered figure who represents national unity and guarantees compliance with the constitution.

Many people are wondering if the new head of state will be a Catholic. Mr Napolitano, a long-time leader in Italy’s former Communist Party, was not. But he had a warm relationship with Benedict XVI. The hierarchs may not be so lucky with his successor, especially if it’s two-time former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who has emerged as a strong candidate. Even though a fervent, church-going Catholic, Mr Prodi refused to bow to the bishops’ demands on a number of pieces of legislation while in office. He said a “grown-up Catholic” should follow his conscience on political issues.

It’s commonly held that they, in turn, helped topple his government in 2008.

Robert Mickens 20 April 2013

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NEWS

FROM BRITAIN AND IRELAND PHOTO: MAZUR/CATHOLICNEWS.ORG.UK

Bishops’ first meeting with Pope Francis

Pope Francis, centre, flanked left to right by Archbishop Vincent Nichols, Bishop Kieran Conry, Archbishop Arthur Roche and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor

Abigail Frymann and Christopher Lamb THE BISHOPS of England and Wales had their

first private meeting with Pope Francis on Wednesday.

Along with Cardinal Cormac MurphyO’Connor, the bishops spent last week on retreat in the Villa Palazzola, the summer villa of the Venerable English College, 18 miles south of Rome. They travelled to the Vatican on Wednesday to attend the general audience and afterwards were granted an impromptu private meeting with Pope Francis in the Paul VI hall.

During the meeting, Cardinal MurphyO’Connor told the Pope that his election and the first weeks of his papacy had “brought fresh hope to the Church”. Each bishop then individually greeted the Pope.

Early on Wednesday morning the bishops celebrated Mass in St Peter’s Basilica where they offered prayers for Baroness Thatcher (see page 29). They then went to the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the guest house where Pope Francis has been living since before his election last month. The bishops had hoped to meet the Pope over breakfast but unfortunately he

had left by the time they arrived. At the Wednesday general audience, Pope Francis offered a “cordial greeting to the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales” and assured them of his prayers for their “episcopal ministry”.

On Sunday, the bishops celebrated Mass with Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, in the Palazzola chapel. Seminarians from the English College in Rome attended and met their respective bishops at the Mass.

Cardinal Ouellet will be taking a leading role in the appointment of a number of new bishops in England and Wales. Six dioceses are in need of new bishops: East Anglia, Brentwood, Hallam, Liverpool, Leeds and Plymouth.

The bishops’ retreat has been led by Fr Paul Murray, a Dominican priest from the “Angelicum” – the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in Rome. The Irish priest teaches spiritual theology and is the author of numerous books. A spokesman for the bishops said: “Cardinal Ouellet presided and preached at a concelebrated Mass with the bishops of England and Wales at Palazzola. Seminarians currently studying at the English College, and staff, were also present.”

The bishops usually meet twice a year at Hinsley Hall, Leeds: once in November and again after Easter. Every few years they travel overseas for a retreat. In 2006 they met at the English College in the Spanish city of Valladolid but plans for the subsequent retreat abroad were delayed because of the 2010 papal visit to Britain. Today, following the end of the retreat, the bishops are meeting to discuss church business.

More choose religious life

Chale leaves after five months

THE NUMBER of people

THE DIRECTOR of one of Britain’s leading Catholic development charities is leaving her role five months after she was appointed, writes Christopher Lamb.

Patricia Chale started as director of the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (Sciaf), the official aid agency of the Church in Scotland, on 1 December 2012.

But in a statement this week the charity said: “Patricia Chale’s employment with Sciaf will end on 2 May. She is presently on leave.

The board will consider appointing a new chief officer in due course.

For the time being Sciaf will be led by the members of the senior management team working together.”

Before Ms Chale’s appointment, Sciaf had been without a leader for 18 months following the departure

entering religious life in England and Wales has risen to its highest level in almost 15 years, writes Liz Dodd.

The National Office for Vocation, part of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, announced this week that 53 men and women opted to become nuns, monks and friars in 2012, an increase of almost 20 in one year. The figure is the highest since 1996, when there were 58 entrants.

Twenty-three of those joining religious communities in 2012 were women, the highest in almost 20 years.

But compared to 30 years ago, the figures show how vocations have been in decline. In 1982, 217 people entered religious life 28

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20 April 2013

including 60 women.

The increase in 2012 continues an upward trend since 2004, when vocations were at their lowest: in that year, only 19 people entered religious life.

The number of ordinations to the diocesan priesthood this year are also set to be the highest in over a decade, with 41 men due to be ordained.

Fr Christopher Jamison, the director of the national vocation office, said: “I think the rise in numbers reflects a change in approach by many religious communities: rather than trying to recruit them, they are now reaching out to young people and helping them to discover their vocation.”

But he added that the increase would not continue forever.

of Paul Chitnis after 15 years.

Sciaf is overseen by a board of trustees – all of them Scottish bishops – whose president is Peter Moran, the Bishop Emeritus of Aberdeen. The charity does not have a chairman of trustees following the resignation of Cardinal Keith O’Brien in February.

Before taking up her Sciaf role, Ms Chale had been executive director of Caritas Westminster, a newly created social action arm of the Archdiocese of Westminster, for seven months.

Sciaf appointed Ms Chale with the assistance of recruitment consultants, Munro Consulting.

The charity, which was founded in 1965 and is based in Glasgow, has a staff of 34, a budget of £5.3 million and works in 15 of the world’s poorest countries.

Have your say on the week’s big issues on The Tablet blog at www.thetablet.co.uk

Chartres pays tribute to Thatcher’s Methodism owed a huge debt to the Methodism Margaret Thatcher was brought up in, during her funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, London.

Addressing a congregation of more than 2,000 guests, including the Queen, Prime Minister David Cameron and almost the entire British political establishment, Bishop Richard Chartres praised Baroness Thatcher’s “perseverance in struggle and … courage” as characteristic of her time as Prime Minister.

He quoted her as saying that her Methodist upbringing taught her to “never take the easy way out”.

Bishop Chartres said Methodism had helped “challenge the political and economic status quo” during the nineteenth century.

He gave the example of the Tolpuddle Martyrs – a group of agricultural workers believed to be the founding fathers of trade unions – who he said “were led not by proto-Marxists but

by Methodist lay preachers”.

Bishop Chartres, who was a friend of Lady Thatcher, spoke of the importance she placed

on the family, which he quoted her as saying was “at the heart of society and the very nursery of civic virtue”.

He said her often-quoted comment that there is “no such thing as society” had been “misunderstood”, and she was referring to “some impersonal entity to which we are tempted to surrender our independence”.

However, the bishop said she believed that “interdependence” was a crucial element in happiness. The Archbishop Emeritus of Liverpool Patrick Kelly represented the bishops of England and Wales and led prayers in the funeral service. The apostolic nuncio to Great Britain, Archbishop Antonio Mennini, was due to attend on behalf of the Holy See. The Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, was in Rome this week (see page 28).

■ The First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, has said he is confident that the Catholic Church in the country will recover from its current difficulties. Speaking to The Tablet following the funeral of Lady Thatcher, Mr Salmond praised the Church for being at the “heart of the independence movement in Scotland” and that “without the Catholic Church there would be no Scotland”.

■ IRELAND: Pay cuts imposed on staff by the Archdiocese of Dublin in a bid to ease its financial difficulties have been found to be in breach of Irish employment law, writes Sarah Mac Donald.

The Employment Rights Commissioner ruled in favour of three members of the Archdiocese of Dublin’s central administration staff who refused to sign up to the cuts, the only ones to do so out of a total of around 55 staff.

Adjudicating on the three women’s appeal for a reimbursement of the deductions made since the cuts came into force last year, the commissioner, John Walsh, deemed them illegal under the Payment of Wages Act. He said they had not consented in writing to the deductions.

However, the commissioner also ruled that the archdiocese did not have to compensate the three in view of the poor state of its finances.

The three are expected to take their case to the Employment Appeals Tribunal. The pay cuts totalled between 5 per cent and 5.8 per cent on their salaries which were under €25,000 (£21,527).

The Archdiocese of Dublin has been trying to plug a €500,000 (£430,543) deficit in its wage bill through savings from pay cuts and non-replacement of retiring staff. Pay cuts, the sale of assets, an increase in bequests and fund-raising have seen the overall finances of the archdiocese improve over 12 months from 2011 to 2012, according to figures released at the weekend.

Sam Adams In St Paul’s Cathedral

THE BISHOP of London said that Britain

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IN BRIEF Church unaware of abuse inquiry The Church has said it is not aware of any current police investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, or into an individual bishop. The ExaroNews website reported that the Metropolitan Police were investigating the Church and said that a bishop had been drawn into their inquries. Danny Sullivan, chairman of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission, said police had told him that “they do not investigate institutions but individuals. If the police come forward with allegations against a bishop, national procedures will be rigorously applied and we will cooperate fully with the police.”

MPs urge action on abortion MPs are calling on the Department of Health to record the gender of aborted foetuses in a move to stamp out illegal “sex-selection abortion”. Conservative backbencher Fiona Bruce and Labour MP Jim Dobbin introduced a private bill in Parliament on Tuesday.

Bishop visits Zimbabwe The Bishop of Clifton has praised the vitality of the Church in Africa following a week-long visit to South Africa and Zimbabwe. Bishop Declan Lang met with the presidents of the Zimbabwean Bishops’ Conference and the Southern African Bishops’ Conference and made a number of pastoral visits.

Downside appoints first lay head A leading Benedictine public school has appointed its first lay headmaster.

Downside School, in Stratton-on-theFosse, Somerset, has announced that Dr James Whitehead will take over from Dom Leo Maidlow Davis at Easter next year.

Dr Whitehead is the deputy headmaster of Worth School, in West Sussex, also a Benedictine school. Downside Abbey was founded in Douai, France, in 1606.

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20 April 2013

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Catholics divided over gay marriage Sam Adams CATHOLICS IN Britain are split over the ques-

tion of same-sex marriage, a new survey has found.

Despite the Church’s strong condemnation of the Government’s plan to introduce samesex marriage in England and Wales, a YouGov poll found that 44 per cent of Catholics support the idea while 41 per cent oppose it.

However, when asked whether they think same-sex marriage is right or wrong, 44 per cent of Catholic respondents to the survey – which was commissioned to support this week’s Westminster Faith Debate on the issue – said it is wrong, while 36 per cent said it is right. This means a significant number of Catholics think same-sex marriage should be made legal, despite their personal belief that it is wrong.

MPs voted overwhelmingly in favour of permitting same-sex marriage in the House

of Commons in February in the form of the Government’s Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. The legislation has been examined by a parliamentary committee and its next step will be to go before the House of Commons for a third reading.

The YouGov survey, which questioned 4,000 people, found that more than half, 52 per cent, of the population are in favour of allowing same-sex couples to marry, compared to 34 per cent who are against.

Catholic respondents to the poll were split on the issue in the same proportions as Anglicans, but were more permissive than Methodists, Baptists and Muslims.

The young people surveyed were three times more likely to be in favour of same-sex marriage than those aged 60 and over, while men (40 per cent) were far more likely to oppose it than women (27 per cent).

The most common reason given by those who say same-sex marriage should be allowed is that people should be treated equally “whatever their sexual orientation” (77 per cent), while the most common reason given by those who say same-sex marriage is wrong said marriage “should be between a man and a woman” (79 per cent). The Westminster Faith Debate on same-sex marriage was due to take place on Thursday.

(See Linda Woodhead, pages 10-11.)

Nichols: regulation alone will not reform City THE ARCHBISHOP of Westminster has questioned the effectiveness of increasing regulation in the City as part of attempts to introduce more ethical business practices, saying that rules alone “become a lazy proxy for morality”, writes Abigail Frymann.

“Of course, law and regulation matter, but they are not sufficient,” said Archbishop Vincent Nichols. “New rules usually deal with the last problem, not the next one.”

The archbishop was giving the keynote address in the first of a three-part debate at St Paul’s Cathedral entitled “The City and the Common Good: what kind of City do we want?” organised by the St Paul’s Institute.

He went on: “A compliance mentality typically creates perverse incentives and increasing bureaucracy. Rules become a lazy proxy for morality: people think if it’s not against some rule then it’s okay. Such a society is inherently fragile.”

Archbishop Nichols gave his talk before a ■ A Catholic private school in Ealing has come joint first in a national review of school safeguarding policies, writes Ellie Clayton.

St Augustine’s Priory, an all-girls school, was one of only two schools to conform to the 10 criteria set out by independent safeguarding campaigner Jonathan West.

Sixty schools had been

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panel that comprised Tracey McDermott, director of enforcement and financial crime at the Financial Conduct Authority, human rights lawyer Baroness (Helena) Kennedy and Anglican Bishop Peter Selby. Ms McDermott rejected the archbishop’s view, saying that rules were crucial for society when ethical behaviour was not followed.

Archbishop Nichols said what was needed was “good people bound by good purpose” – centred on traditional virtues – and that employers should encourage the potential for good in their staff rather than make employees feel the need to leave their values at home.

Questioned by The Tablet about how the City can retain its competitiveness while espousing such values, Archbishop Nichols said that such values would make a business more competitive because staff would be motivated not by salary but by a sense of purpose.

(The full text of the archbishop’s speech is available at www.thetablet.co.uk/texts)

randomly selected for the study, which formed part of research for a BBC radio programme.

Head teacher Sarah Raffray, who was appointed last year, said that she has made safeguarding a priority.

The school was linked to allegations of sexual abuse at Ealing Abbey and nearby St Benedict’s School. St

20 April 2013

Benedict’s revealed this month that buildings named after monks who were alleged to have sexually abused children have been renamed. The Soper Pavilion, named after Fr Laurence Soper, a former abbot who was arrested in 2010 and has failed to return to London to answer police bail, has been renamed the Centenary Pavilion.

FROM THE ARCHIVE 50 YEARS AGO Rightly or wrongly, Milan has become to many the symbol of modern urban civilisation—rich, clean, productive, full of diversions and amenities, but soulless and leaning to neurosis and despair. Whether this attitude is due to Antonioni’s films, or to the grimaces that Italians (even Milanese) usually make when the city is mentioned, or because it really is more depressing than other modern cities, is hard to tell. But … the Church is making an effort to break down the isolation caused by the separate cell-like existences of people living in the monolithic slabs of flats characteristic of the town, which were so relentlessly portrayed in La Notte. Under Cardinal Montini’s development plan, eight central chapels have been built in the cooperative blocks of flats in the town, and architects are now beginning to include chapels in their plans of buildings, with the idea that the tenants will pay for the maintenance of the chapel monthly, together with their other expenses. Besides their convenience and the fact that the chapels might make a kind of parish out of each block, practical considerations made the plans almost inevitable, as there were often 100 families in each new block, and sometimes even 1,000, which added to the already serious problem in Milan of a shortage of churches.

The Tablet, 20 April 1963 100 YEARS AGO The cardinal’s rising was greeted with cheers. In the course of a brief address he observed that nothing afforded him greater satisfaction than to participate in the opening of a new Catholic school … They must not relax their efforts in the work of providing Catholic schools under the charge of Catholic teachers for Catholic children, without exception … . He prayed that every success would attend the work of the fathers of St Francis Xavier’s, and he begged God’s blessing on the new schools, which would be the means of bringing up many generations of Catholic children in the knowledge and love of their holy faith. The Archbishop of Liverpool thanked the people of Liverpool for the manner in which they had rallied to the call of the Jesuit Fathers, who had done such good work in Liverpool for many years past in helping them to liquidate the debt on the new school. Most of the churches and schools belonging to the Catholic body in England had been built out of the pence of the poor, and he was quite sure that the working-class parishioners of St Francis Xavier’s would not be backward in raising the £8,000 which was still needed.

The Tablet, 19 April 1913

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Applications are invited for the post of Head of More House School, London, with effect from 1 September 2014 (or earlier by agreement), consequent upon the retirement of Mr Robert Carlysle. The Governors are seeking a candidate who can build upon the considerable achievements of Robert Carlysle over the last seven years.

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20 April 2013

Touches of class JOHN MORRISH THE PERENNIAL subject of class was in the news again recently when the BBC published some new research, proposing a whole new set of social gradations. With it was a two-minute online questionnaire that told you where you stand. I am, it turns out, a “new affluent worker”, which is wrong on at least one count.

“Class” is a venerable idea, and an ancient word. The Romans, in the days of the city’s sixth king, Servius Tullius, divided their citizenry into five groups according to their wealth.

Each of these was known as a classis. When the word came into English in the sixteenth century, via the medieval French classe, it was used in historical accounts of the Roman system but also as a term for categories of things with something in common, such as plants.

The notion of “classes” as a hierarchy of categories came later. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation is from a 1616 Ben Jonson masque called Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court, in which Vulcan, representing the alchemists, tries to bind the volatile element Mercury. “Call forth the creatures of the first class,” says Vulcan, demonstrating his power to create life.

The application of this hierarchical idea to social strata is from the seventeenth century.

It largely superseded the word “order” – as in “lower orders” – which had been in use since the fifteenth century. The use of “class” to refer to the abstract idea of social rankings did not come in until the start of the turbulent nineteenth century. It was followed by such telling combinations as “class division” (1841), “class struggle” (1839), “class hatred” (1842) and “class consciousness” (1887, in the first translation of Das Kapital). (The use of “class” as a term of approval – “you’ve got class” – is American, from the turn of the twentieth century.)

In his 1753 Essay on the Government of

Children, Britain’s first childcare manual, James Nelson referred to five classes: the “nobility” (from the Latin nobilitas); the “gentry” (those of “gentle” birth); the “genteel trades” (also derived from “gentle”); the “common trades”; and the “peasantry” (ultimately derived from the Latin pagus, meaning “country district”).

Subsequently, things tended to be simplified. Aristocracy at the top; middle class, where you might expect; the common people, or working class (from 1789), at the bottom. Marx recognised only two classes: bourgeoisie and proletariat. This latter word comes from the Latin proletarius, which was the term used in Rome for an impoverished man whose only contribution to society was the fathering of proles, meaning “offspring”.

In our own times, class has become more complicated again. The widely used National Readership Survey (NRS) social grades divide everyone up into grades A, B, C1, C2, D and E. The BBC’s study questioned 161,000 people about their lives, occupations, incomes and cultural activities. Then, because those surveyed (online) were all too middle-class, it asked 1,000 more in interviews. Seven social classes were identified, from “the elite” at the top to “the precariat” at the bottom.

This ugly portmanteau, hammered together out of “precarious” and “proletariat”, was apparently coined by French sociologists in the 1980s, but it was popularised in a 2011 book by British economist Guy Standing, called Precariat: the new dangerous class. It means those who live in a permanent state of employment insecurity, shuttling between poor jobs and no jobs. Their household incomes are about £8,000 a year, they have no cultural lives at all, and their few friends are all similarly impoverished and excluded. Perhaps being a proletarius wasn’t so bad.

Glimpses of Eden IT’S ONLY a few short miles from our back door but the journey takes you into the last century, and deeper.

At seven in the morning, there were few cars, that indicator species of modern times, and making good time on our bikes, we were soon lost in a land of small but sudden hills, hidden villages and tall woods beneath the escarpment of the moors.

As though sketched by an artist’s hand, the light mist was just lifting as we reached the valley so that, freewheeling through the gatehouse, the broken arch of Byland Abbey showed like a wolf ’s tooth. But we weren’t in search of ruins: our way lay up the steep plunge

of Wass Bank to a living abbey. In a late spring the sun comes even later to North Yorkshire’s low but rugged hills, which rise and fall like the backs of resting fallow does.

And on one of these hills, beyond the road’s last curve, you’ll find the newly founded Stanbrook Abbey. No need for stained glass windows in the chapel here: a buzzard soaring above woods under a blue-eyed sky graced the window behind the altar. Lambs provided the bells. Even the wind played its music, from the austere plainchant in the roof, to the polyphony of the spring sigh carrying a brimstone butterfly past, a living brushstroke, painting its fresco on the walls of the world.

Jonathan Tulloch