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6 APRIL 2013 2.90

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PLUS Peter Hennessy Valery Gergiev Rose Prince Clifford Longley
The Jesuits
and the
papacy
Relations between popes and the
Society of Jesus have long been
dramatic. Historian Jonathan Wright
sifts the facts from the myth-making
Bergoglio -
the man I know
Francis former aide,
Guillermo Marc, talks to
Isabel de Bertodano about
the new successor to St Peter
Lost - and found
The spiritual needs and
journeys of the homeless
06 April 2013_Cover 03/04/2013 18:49 Page 1
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6 April 2013
SPEAK AND BE PERSECUTED
L
ord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has
complained that Christians in Britain have become a
persecuted minority. But what if being on the wrong
end of persecution is the right place to be? What if
mockery and insults are being hurled at Christians precisely
because they are standing up for the poor and vulnerable who
are having a rough time?
The abuse aimed at the present Archbishop, Justin Welby,
when he recently spoke out against cuts to the benefits paid
to the poorest in society may simply be confirmation that he
was doing his job. The same process may be at work when the
Chancellor of the Exchequer rages at what he called vested
interests.
The Governments programme of welfare reform, the biggest
shake-up of the Welfare State since its inception, has revealed
an uncomfortable truth about the state of British society. An
effective system of welfare provision depends on a minimum
degree of solidarity. That seems to have shrunk. The Government
has chosen to undermine it further. It found it was pushing at
an open door, due to a rising culture of individualism.
Ministers produced a poisonous narrative of skivers and
strivers, those who go to work in the morning and those who
lie in bed with the blinds closed, confident that their daily
bread will be paid for by the labour of others. In reality the
great majority of those on benefit are in work, for wages well
short of what a family needs to live on, and most of the rest
are desperate for a job.
Under such conditions, people eye each other suspiciously.
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The Government has also abandoned the comprehensive
principle, by which every section of society had some stake in
the Welfare State and hence something to lose if it was
weakened. Perhaps only the state pension still enjoys a wide
measure of support, which may be why the Prime Minister
has treated the remaining universal benefits for the elderly as
sacrosanct.
The range of cuts now being implemented on almost every
other form of welfare entitlement have loosely been justified
by the Government as making work pay. But that elusive
goal, which it has yet to prove it can deliver to ensure there is
always a financial incentive to work, lies ahead. The new
Universal Credit, still untried and untested, is not being
introduced until later this year. The present round of cuts are
just cuts except for the very wealthy, who will find a
reduction in their taxes.
This is not only unjust politics but poor economics. The
economy badly needs a boost to domestic demand, by people
going into shops and spending their money. If they have less
they will spend less. Far from the slack in the economy being
taken up, generating income both for welfare purposes and
infrastructure investment, it will remain stagnant. Unable to
achieve its strategic aim of paying down the national deficit,
the Government will sooner or later look for even more cuts,
and take even more money out of the economy.
If persecution is the price for saying all this, the Churches
should not flinch. It is they who have the interests of the
whole community at heart.
SPRING IN THE AIR
P
ope Francis has begun his pontificate or as he
might prefer to say, his ministry as Bishop of Rome
with a master class in symbolism. Even his choice
of only one of many languages for his Easter Urbi et
Orbi blessing, the language of the people of Rome, said
something about how he saw his mission.
It was to be more obviously local, less universal; yet in doing
so it acquires a particular potency, the power of leadership by
example. This is how to be a bishop, he seemed to be saying
implicitly to his brothers in the worldwide episcopate. And at
the Chrism Mass he told 1,600 priests from his diocese that
they had to be like real shepherds, who live with the smell of
the sheep. That is how he worked in Buenos Aires and how
he wants them to work with him in Rome.
Nowhere was this subliminal lesson in how to be a bishop
more telling than in his visit to an institution for young
offenders on Maundy Thursday, when he washed the feet of
12 inmates. Yet the choice of young offenders, instead of the
more traditional fellow clergy, even the choice of two Muslims,
was less eloquent than the fact that two of the chosen
inmates were female.
Foot-washing in the Old and New Testaments was a
symbolic form of service, often performed by a lowly female
servant for a male visitor of status. It is both menial and
intimate. Indeed, no doubt for such reasons the Maundy
Thursday rubrics expressly prescribe males so the Popes
washing of women was transgressing one of the taboos that
surround compulsory clerical celibacy. He may even have
been asking whether a custom that requires such taboos to
protect it is worth preserving. Other shibboleths associated
with clerical celibacy, such as the ritual dressing up in
elaborate lace and similar finery, and an obsession with the
meticulous performance of church ceremonial, also seem to
hold little interest for him.
He has already accepted that celibacy is a matter of
discipline, not of doctrine. This is a psychologically healthy
Pope, comfortable in his skin. It will be an early test of his
thinking if and when he responds to a letter from 21 British
Catholic parliamentarians, asking, on the basis of the
successful addition of ex-Anglican married clergy to the
ranks of the Catholic priesthood in England and Wales, that
the rule should be further relaxed to allow the ordination of
other suitable married men.
His central theme of reconciliation is bound to face tests
more severe than that, given how many of the Catholic
Churchs contemporary problems are rooted in a habitual state
of distance, even alienation, between hierarchy and people.
There is a painful divide, almost an undeclared schism,
arising from traditional church teachings on sexuality, gender,
marriage and related issues, which has not been resolved by
one change of papacy and which will take more than potent
papal symbolism to address.
Conservative as Pope Francis is by instinct, so high are the
hopes his election has created he is bound to dash some of
them. But hope is one of his favourite words. Under his
leadership, the Church is beginning to emerge from a period
of neuralgic pessimism. All manner of things seem possible,
even if only some of them really are.
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4 I could see this amazing transformation in his face
Isabel de Bertodano
A priest who was press officer for the then Bishop Bergoglio for
eight years talks to The Tablet about the man he calls his friend
4 We discussed justice issues at length
Michael Campbell-Johnston
The former provincial of the British Jesuits describes how his debates
with the future pope about the dictatorship were inconclusive
6 From Bellarmine to Bergoglio Jonathan Wright
The relationship between the papacy and the Society of Jesus has long
been dramatic. A historian sifts the facts from the myth-making
8 A refuge in faith Carwyn Gravell
While agencies that deal with the homeless ban any mention of religion,
a new survey shows that many on the streets would welcome it
10 My poetic path to the Virgin Sally Read
It took one poet 20 years to try to understand the mother of God.
Here she describes the process of deciphering her
6 April 2013
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CONTENTS
6 APRIL 2013
12 PARISH PRACTICE
13 NOTEBOOK
14 LETTERS
15 THE LIVING SPIRIT
16 PUZZLES
23 THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD
Church urged to get out of the sacristy
26 LETTER FROM ROME
27 NEWS FROM BRITAIN AND IRELAND
Parliamentarians call on Pope to lift priestly celibacy rule
COLUMNS
7 PETER HENNESSY S
THE LION AND THE UNICORN
My triple-deck election manifesto for a
plausible tart
11 CLIFFORD LONGLEY
The welfare measures amount to dictation
about how people should live their lives
BOOKS
17 JIMMY BURNS
Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the
Cold War and the twilight of Empire
Calder Walton
DAVID PLATZER
Carnival
Compton Mackenzie
The Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett
Compton Mackenzie
EDMUND CAMPION
A Midlife Journey
Gerald OCollins
ARTS
20 FEATURE
Rick Jones
Valery Gergiev
CINEMA
Francine Stock
A Late Quartet
OPERA
Robert Thicknesse
The Importance of Being Earnest
TELEVISION
John Morrish
Hillsborough: Never Forgotten
FEATURES
COVER IMAGE: CNS
03 Tablet 6 Apr 13 Cont_P3 contents 03/04/2013 18:54 Page 3
ISABEL DE BERTODANO
I could see this amazing
transformation in his face
Back in the 1990s, Guillermo Marc, a priest in the diocese of Buenos Aires, was press officer for
Bishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio. In his eight years at the future Popes side, the spokesman gained
unique insights into the man he calls his friend, and whom he saw again briefly after his election
W
hen Guillermo Marc visited
Pope Francis last week at the
Vatican, he noticed a remark-
able change in his old friend.
In Buenos Aires, when I saw him before
the conclave, he looked really tired. He was
anticipating his retirement, preparing himself
for that, not for taking on a new job, said Fr
Marc. Of course, we know that the Holy
Spirit works through the conclave, but really
Ive now seen the effects of that because I
know him so well, said the Popes former
press officer, who had five minutes with his
old boss at the Vatican last month.
I could see this amazing transformation
in his face; he was glowing and happy and
his eyes had this special light in them. He
seemed to have an extra strength and without
any doubt this is a change brought about by
the force of God.
The friendship between Fr Marc and Pope
Francis goes back to the early 1990s when
Jorge Mario Bergoglio became an auxiliary
bishop in the diocese of Buenos Aires, where
Fr Marc was a priest. The young bishop was
already in the habit of going out among the
people of the diocese. He often asked me to
go walking with him and we would have dis-
cussions, said Fr Marc. Twice, he invited
me to have lunch with him. I mention this
because it was very unusual for him to have
lunch with people.
At the time, Fr Marc was presenting a
radio programme while also serving as a parish
priest. The two men became good friends over
the six years it took Bishop Bergoglio to be
appointed Archbishop of Buenos Aires upon
the death of Cardinal Antonio Quarracino in
1998.
If it hadnt been for Cardinal Quarracino,
he wouldnt have been made Archbishop of
Buenos Aires, said Fr Marc. He loved and
admired Bergoglio very much and designated
him as his coadjutor in the diocese and let
Rome know that he wanted him to be his suc-
cessor. Otherwise, another bishop with more
experience would have been brought from
another part of the country. It was a big
upgrade.
However, Cardinal Quarracino left his pro-
tg with a hornets nest of problems in
Buenos Aires. A huge fraud in which the arch-
diocese had borrowed US$10 million from
the Banco de Crdito Provincial was uncov-
ered. The money never made its way into the
archdiocesan coffers but documents appar-
ently showed that Cardinal Quarracino had
signed off the loan.
Bergoglio called me in my parish, Fr Marc
explained. He was very calm and he asked
me, Are you busy? I said, Not really, why?
He said, Because there are 15 journalists at
the door of Archbishops House and I dont
know what to do.
Fr Marc slipped into Archbishops House
through the cathedral, met Archbishop
Bergoglio and then held a press conference.
I told them that we had all the information
to prove that this money never entered the
The Bergoglio I knew
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I remember Pope Francis, or Jorge Mario
Bergoglio as I knew him, when he was
provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina,
writes Michael Campbell-Johnston.
I first met him in Buenos Aires in 1977.
Those were the days when the three
Southern Cone countries, Chile,
Argentina and Brazil, were ruled by
harsh, right-wing military regimes known
as National Security States. These were
based on the principle that The nation is
absolute or it is nothing. A nation can
accept no limitation of its absolute
power.
On the pretext of combating
international communism, the state
assumed total control over all dimensions
of public life including education,
communications, labour relations, the
judiciary and many other organisms
designed to safeguard basic human rights.
Anyone questioning the status quo was
automatically considered subversive and
such measures as arbitrary arrest and
even torture were justified. This posed
acute problems for the Church since the
governments advocating such policies
themselves claimed to be Catholic and
acting according to the principles of the
Gospel.
This was the situation in Argentina
when I first met Fr Bergoglio. I was
visiting our Jesuit social institutes
throughout Latin America where, in many
of the countries, they were facing
opposition and even persecution.
In some, they were forced to act
underground and in secrecy. But this was
not the situation for our institute in
Buenos Aires, which was able to function
freely because it never criticised or
opposed the Government. As a result,
We discussed justice issues at length but we
never reached an agreement
Jorge
Mario
Bergoglio
following
his
election
as Pope
Francis.
Photo:
CNS
and goes to bed early. He avoids going to eat
dinner with people at their home. Hes always
been a person whom Id describe as monkish
in his lifestyle.
I ask Fr Marc what he has learned from
his old friend and he grins. Reaching into
his jacket, he takes out a small, slim black
diary, not much larger than a cigarette packet.
This is what he taught me, he said. He has
a tiny diary like this and he organises it all
himself. If you want an interview, you call.
He ll answer the phone because he doesnt
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He says you must go out to
the fringes of life and see
what is going on. You should
not wait for the world to
come to you
diocese and that the information had already
been freely offered to the judge in the case
but that she had refused to look at it, said Fr
Marc. The next day, the newspapers were
all quoting me as the press spokesman for
the archdiocese. So I had a job all of a sudden,
but I was never officially named as the
spokesman. Bergoglio was always joking about
this he thought it was really funny.
Eventually, the archdiocese and Cardinal
Quarracino were absolved of responsibility
and it was proved that three men, including
the cardinals private secretary, had perpe-
trated the fraud and forged the cardinals
signature on the bank papers.
In the meantime, Fr Marc set up a press
office at Archbishops House and worked there
for eight years, travelling annually to Rome
with his boss, who was elevated to cardinal
in 2001. He also went to Rome for the 2005
conclave when Cardinal Bergoglio was among
the papabile cardinals and is widely thought
to have come second behind Cardinal
Ratzinger.
But when Cardinal Bergoglio travelled to
Rome this year he went alone.
Fr Marc smiled ruefully. He went by him-
self this time because he had absolutely no
idea what was going to happen. I dont know,
I guess its just one of those things in life its
Gods doing but it was a big surprise.
The cardinal expected to return to Buenos
Aires, where he was already preparing to move
to his retirement room at a priests house in
the city.
It seems really terrible that he leaves
Argentina for a couple of weeks with only a
suitcase and then this happens and he can
never go back to his old room and his belong-
ings, said Fr Marc. I suppose when he visits
Argentina he might go there, but not to stay.
Of course, following the Gospel, as priests,
we dont have many belongings, but hell miss
his books.
The new pope is accustomed to an austere
lifestyle and although he has good friends he
does not socialise.
Hes always been quite a solitary person,
said Fr Marc. He looks after his interior
life; he gets up at about 5 a.m. to pray. So, at
night, he eats an apple, drinks a cup of tea
have a receptionist, and he ll make an
appointment for you. He said it was easier
like this.
Nevertheless, media interviews have been
off-limits for some time.
We agreed that he would not do interviews
with journalists he spoke through his ges-
tures and homilies, said Fr Marc. He had
had some negative experiences. We noticed
that, when he gave an interview, the journalist
would start by talking about the Virgin Mary
and end up talking about politics. The next
day, the newspaper would focus exclusively
on the politics of Cardinal Bergoglio.
He wasnt interested in having a political
profile, said Fr Marc. We decided that it
was better for me to speak on his behalf
because I simply wasnt as interesting, being
only the press officer.
He may have tried to avoid politics but,
while he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires,
relations with President Nstor Kirchner and,
later, his wife, the current president Cristina
Fernndez Kirchner, were tense, marked by
clashes over same-sex marriage, among other
issues.
It was never, therefore, the Buenos Aires
political elite in whose company Cardinal
Bergoglio felt comfortable. He preferred to
visit the poor of the city, something that
became a feature of his tenure as archbishop
he is credited with doubling the number of
priests visiting the poor barrios of the city.
He says you must go out to the fringes of
life and see what is going on. You should not
wait for the world to come to you, said Fr
Marc. He doesnt see the poor as people he
can help but rather as people from whom he
can learn. He believes the poor are closer to
God than the rest of us; they have a very per-
sonal experience of him.
Beyond that, Cardinal Bergoglio allowed
people to get on with their jobs in the arch-
diocese.
Hes good at trusting people and giving
them space to get on with their work, said
Fr Marc. Hes not the kind of person whos
determined to do everything himself; hes
good at delegating. I would often make a state-
ment on his behalf and he wouldnt even check
it because there wasnt time, but he trusted
me to do it in the right way. He gave me a lot
of freedom and hes the same way with every-
body.
Perhaps they both regret this measure of
freedom eventually, Fr Marcs job at
Archbishops House came to an end over a
controversial interview in which he appeared
to insinuate that Nstor Kirchner was foment-
ing hate and division in the country.
Fr Marc maintains that he was misquoted
but he is sanguine now about the episode.
He is now director of the Pastoral University
of Buenos Aires and continues to present a
radio programme, a television programme
and is a contributor to various newspapers.
It was my job to absorb blows for the
cardinal, so I resigned, he said. Thats life.
Isabel de Bertodano is a
freelance journalist and a former
Home News Editor of The Tablet.
there were justice issues it could not
address or even mention. This was the
topic I remember discussing at length
with Fr Bergoglio.
He naturally defended the existing
situation though I tried to show him how
it was out of step with our other social
institutes on the continent. Our
discussion was lengthy and inconclusive
since we never reached an agreement.
At the time there were an estimated
6,000 political prisoners in Argentina
and another 20,000 desaparecidos,
people who had been disappeared. And
there was widespread evidence of torture
and assassination.
On returning to Rome, I received a copy
of a letter addressed to the Pope and
signed by more than 400 Argentinian
mothers and grandmothers who had
lost children or other relatives and were
begging the Vatican to exert some
pressure on the military junta. I took it
into the Secretariat of State but never
received any acknowledgement.
This is not to blame Fr Bergoglio but
rather to show the sort of situation in
which he was living at the time. Although
certainly not accepting it, there seems to
be little he or our social institute could do
to change it. For himself, he led a poor
and simple life and was well respected by
his fellow Jesuits.
Fr Michael Campbell-Johnston SJ is a
former provincial of the British Jesuits.
Fr Guillermo Marc, who became press
spokesman for the then Bishop
Bergoglio when he was called upon at
short notice to address the media on the
bishops behalf
JONATHAN WRIGHT
From Bellarmine
to Bergoglio
The relationship between the Society of Jesus and the papacy has been an eventful
and dramatic one, culminating in the election of Francis, the first-ever Jesuit pope. A
historian sifts the facts about the controversial order from the myth-making
O
n the morning of 9 February 1621
a septuagenarian Jesuit received
a substantial number of votes in
the ballot to elect a new pope.
Some had regarded Robert Bellarmine as
papabile at the two conclaves back in 1605,
and this time around, although blighted by
illness, he stood a fighting chance. We will
never know if Bellarmine could have tri-
umphed because he quickly made it
abundantly clear, just as in 1605, that he had
no desire to become the successor of St Peter.
Still, given what has recently happened in
Rome, it is interesting to note that we could
possibly, just possibly, have had the first Jesuit
pope almost 400 years ago.
Now, as then, the word Jesuit causes a great
deal of commotion. Over the past few weeks,
there has been a great deal of talk about the
turbulent historical relationship between the
Holy See and the Society of Jesus since it was
founded by Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth
century, and much speculation about what
having a Jesuit pope will mean for the Church.
This is perfectly reasonable the history is
messy and the significance of the latest papal
election should not be underestimated but
one cannot help but grumble when op-ed
analyses of a complex 500-year-old religious
order have so frequently lapsed into caricature.
This helps no one, least of all the new Bishop
of Rome. A calm look at how the papacy and
the society have muddled through is in order
and Bellarmine can help us here.
On the one hand, he was a pillar of the
Catholic Church: a gifted theologian, a key
player in the early stages of the Galileo affair
and, tellingly, someone who was both detested
and feared by his Protestant adversaries. One
of them described him as an invincible cham-
pion, as one with whom none of our men
would dare to engage, whom nobody can
answer, and if anyone should hope to con-
quer [him] in debate they should be regarded
as an utter madman.
Bellarmine also inspired heartfelt devotion.
When he died, only a few months after that
1621 conclave, his corpse required bodyguards.
As one contemporary reported, Many were
present with towels, handkerchiefs, sponges,
and other linen to save the blood and preserve
it for relics and it was not long before cloth
that had touched the cardinals skin was earn-
ing a reputation for healing broken bones.
One of his physicians had, in lieu of reward,
cut away a little piece of Bellarmines skull,
while his medical colleagues had secured
keepsakes (samples of blood) during the leech-
ing process.
On the other hand, Bellarmine was a deeply
controversial figure, largely because of his
musings on the limits of the popes temporal
power but also and there is no avoiding this
because he was a Jesuit. It was less than
100 years since the orders foundation and
many suggested it had done far too well, far
too quickly, in far too many spheres. Such
resentment on the part of other religious
orders, fellow educators, and the secular clergy
routinely inspired name-calling and anti-
Jesuit myth-making and this would never
fall out of fashion.
Bellarmines image and reputation encap-
sulated this ambivalence. Some, like those
relic-hunters, saw the saint in him: others
were less convinced. This surely goes some
way towards explaining why his canonisation
took more than 300 years to arrive. It also
makes one wonder if Bellarmine could have
secured the top job even if he had wanted it.
This is all part of the Jesuit story, but is it
the marrow? Were the Jesuits destined to be
at the heart of things but never quite able to
fit in; sometimes admired but frequently mis-
trusted? There is evidence aplenty to support
this, but the thesis can easily be exaggerated,
especially when it comes to the relationship
between the society and the Vatican.
Let us be frank: the papacy and the Jesuits
have had their share of squabbles, and there
is a striking thematic continuity. When, in
1981, John Paul II intervened in the societys
internal politics in the wake of Superior
General Pedro Arrupes stroke, historically
well-informed Jesuits must have considered
the appointment of Tirso Gonzlez, the
orders thirteenth superior general and very
much Innocent XIs man, back in 1687 a
figure whose resistance to prevailing Jesuit
moral theology caused endless internecine
bickering and someone who annoyed Louis
XIV so much that the king forbade French
members of the society from communicating
with their leader.
When the writings of recent Jesuits, such
as Anthony de Mello and Jacques Dupuis,
were criticised for their musings on religious
pluralism and interfaith relationships by the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
(headed by the future Benedict XVI during
the pontificate of John Paul II), the memory
of popes denouncing accommodationist
missionary methods in eighteenth-century
China and India must have entered some
Jesuit minds.
The list of scuffles goes on, but let us not
forget the happier times. Rome has often sup-
ported the societys positions; some popes
have enjoyed Jesuit educations (including the
man who was elected at that 1621 conclave,
Gregory XV); and while it took Bellarmine
an inordinately long time to be raised to the
altars, no few Jesuits have followed him
(beginning with Ignatius Loyola and Francis
Xavier, canonised during the pontificate of
the self same Gregory XV). And let us not
forget that this year marks the 300th anniver-
sary of the bull Unigenitus, which condemned
Jansenism always a Jesuit bte noire and
reminds us that Rome and the society have
Engraved portrait of Robert Bellarmine
(1542-1621). Photo: Bridgeman
Jesuits and the papacy
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frequently got along terribly well.
Even when things went awry, this was not
symptomatic of some inevitable conflict
between Jesuits and the bishops of Rome. We
have heard a great deal about a pope sup-
pressing the society in 1773, of the jokes that
Francis should have called himself Clement
XV to seek revenge on Clement XIV who
sought to destroy the order, but the historical
reportage has often been woefully inaccurate.
Clement was hardly the societys greatest fan
but the suppression was forced upon him by
bullying monarchs and he did not enjoy the
process one bit: indeed, he delayed it for as
long as he possibly could. It is also worth not-
ing that the Jesuits, for the most part, took
their destruction on the chin, which is what
one might expect from loyal sons of Rome.
All these bygone tales must be swimming
around the new Popes mind, but if we have
the slightest chance of understanding how
his Jesuit identity will influence his reign we
really must do a better job of getting the history
right. In recent weeks, I have often recalled
the words of a lawyer who, back in the early
twentieth century, acted for a Jesuit in a libel
case: I think it is perhaps desirable, in dealing
with a matter of this kind, to point out to you
at once exactly what a Jesuit is.
If only it were that simple. There is no sen-
sible way of summing up the Society of Jesus.
For 500 years its members have taken different
positions on every issue imaginable and this,
surely, is what we should expect (even
demand) from a multifaceted, global religious
order. Stereotypes of what a Jesuit is are a
hindrance. The relationship between the
Jesuits and Rome has been just as jumbled
(the society has irritated some popes and
delighted others) but the arrival of a Jesuit
pope is not nearly as bizarre as some would
have us believe.
I
offer a seemingly dull but hopefully
cheerful prediction. The fact that Francis
is a Jesuit will offer all sorts of oppor-
tunities. His will be a truly global papacy
and will be profoundly influenced by Ignatian
spirituality, and who could object to that?
There will be grumbles old rivalries die hard
but his Jesuit status is unlikely to be a major
stumbling block.
If I have done my maths correctly, there
have been fewer than 500 Jesuit cardinals in
the entire history of the Society of Jesus, and
now that one of them has finally made it to
the pinnacle I am sure he will reflect on both
the glories and the gaffes of his orders extraor-
dinary history, its curious relationship with
Rome, and relish the fact that some people
think he has a lot to prove.
Bellarmine would have made an interesting,
if controversial, pope. Francis could be even
more fascinating. My advice is to enjoy the
show and put away the silly caricatures.
Jonathan Wright is author of The Jesuits:
missions, myths and histories (HarperCollins,
new edition, 2010) and editor of The Jesuit
Suppression: causes, events and
consequences (Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming, 2014).
PETER HENNESSYS
THE LION AND THE UNICORN
My triple-deck
election
manifesto for a
plausible tart
In two years time, the 2015 general
election campaign will be nearing
its full threnody. We will be about to
endure the party leaders debates in
which, I fear, David Cameron, Ed
Miliband and Nick Clegg will hurl
anathemas at each other with much
heat for them and scant light for us.
I was deeply ambivalent about
the 2010 debates; a novelty in the
history of British electoral
competition. Part of me was truly
pleased that they kindled more
interest in politics among the
18-to-35-year-old voters the most
sluggish in getting to the polls.
Another bit of me recoiled at the
oversimplifications and the Blue
Peter-style (heres one I made
earlier) answers.
To shine in such circumstances,
you need to be a plausible tart and
such a characteristic is about 10 per
cent of what is required in a
competent prime minister. Yet I
suspect parties will choose their
future leaders very much with those
debates in mind, thereby ruling out
the gifted but unflash from reaching
10 Downing Street.
I doubt, too, whether such
debates do anything to ease one of
our profoundest national problems
a deep distrust of the British
political class. The latest edition of
Ipsos MORIs veracity index
illustrates its magnitude. Between
9 and 11 February this year, the
companys interviewers said to 1,018
British adults: I am going to read
out some different types of people.
For each, please tell me if you would
generally trust them to tell the truth
or not. Here is the league table that
resulted with trust expressed in
percentages:
Doctors 89
Teachers 86
Scientists 83
Judges 82
TV newsreaders 69
Clergymen/priests 66
Police 65
Civil servants 53
Trade union officials 41
Business leaders 34
Estate agents 24
MPs in general 23
Journalists 21
Bankers 21
Politicians generally 18
It is not good for politicians, or
for those they serve, to carry a trust
rating of lower than a fifth of our
people.
What can be done? Part of the
problem is a hostility that lingers
from the 2009 MPs expenses
scandal. No doubt, too, the surge in
mutual political scapegoating that
accompanies disappointing
economic performance further
depresses esteem. But there might
be a flicker of hope.
Could it help if political parties, in
the run-up to May 2015, gave us an
entirely different kind of election
manifesto? How about a
triple-decker version based on
economic growth prospects? If I
was a party leader (something, you
will be relieved to read, to which I
have never aspired) I would do just
that. And my first paragraph would
read as follows:
The growth pattern of the UK
economy in the period following the
Second World War normally
fluctuated between 2 and 2.5 per
cent a year. Since the great financial
crash of 2008, we have been
hovering between no growth and
about 1 per cent. I shall lay out this
manifesto in three parts: If we form
a government, what we would hope
to do for the country over five years
if growth spurts back to 2-2.5 per
cent; if it improves to between 1 and
2 per cent; if it hovers above 0 but
below 1 per cent.
The danger is that all three
parties will claim to know how to
surge to 2 per cent and beyond
and very few, apart from the most
loyal will believe them. The
leaders debates come after the
manifestos have been published.
The party leader who had put
candour and humility between their
manifesto pages could, if he wished,
display the same qualities at the
podium during the debates, leaving
the other two appearing
unconvincing, sounding shrill and
looking like implausible tarts.
The candour/humility approach
would require bravery and a new
tone and pitch in the political
language that conveyed it. But a
great prize just might await the
leader who tried it and how the
rest of us would relish the attempt.
Peter Hennessy is Attlee Professor
of Contemporary British History at
Queen Mary, University of London
and an independent crossbench
peer.
CARWYN GRAVELL
A refuge in faith
Deep distaste for proselytising and a focus on satisfying peoples
material needs have largely banished religion and spirituality
from the provision of services for homeless people. But as a new
study shows, this is not enough for a fulfilling life, as many on
the streets acknowledge
B
ritain is commonly described as a
secular society, yet religion continues
to give many people in their private
lives significant psychological, social
and emotional benefits. Open expression of
faith in public and professional life is largely
frowned upon, although many charities in
this country including some of the most
notable owe their origins to the work of
committed believers of previous generations
who expressed their faith through mission to
people such as the poor and the homeless.
Yet in spite of this, faith and the spiritual can
today be routinely ignored.
This became apparent in a recent study
into the work of organisations dealing with
the homeless. Many of the long-term homeless
people interviewed for Lost and Found, my
report on an in-depth survey of 75 service
users from seven London-based homelessness
agencies, found that religious belief and spir-
itual practice could help them come to terms
with a past characterised by profound loss,
enhance the present where time can hang
heavy and create a meaningful future built
on hope, fellowship and purpose.
Despite these benefits, however, we found
that homeless people are hardly ever asked
about faith and spirituality by providers of
support be these faith-based or secular
let alone encouraged, when they have a faith,
to attend places of worship, or to explore their
spiritual insights and curiosities more gen-
erally. Why does this silence exist on such a
powerful source of personal strength and sup-
port?
Many religious groups still help the poor
and homeless as part of their mission, through
soup runs and night shelters. Some of todays
major providers of homelessness services,
such as the Cardinal Hume Centre (one of
the organisations involved in the study that
also included non-faith-based agencies such
as Thames Reach and St Mungos), have deep
religious roots. However, from the 1960s
onwards and in response to public concern
about rising homelessness the state began
to fund social housing, hostels and other sup-
port services for homeless people.
In the spirit of the times, these services
adopted a secular and mechanical world
view, inspired in particular by the achieve-
ments of the National Health Service and the
part it played in a major historical shift in the
treatment of the sick, from spiritual care in
the Victorian age to modern medical science.
These services saw the homeless person as
someone who could be signed up for material
support and prescribed a flat, benefits, job
training and treatment for addiction if needed.
A rights-based approach replaced religiously
motivated notions of charity for homeless
people, which had aimed at alleviation of mis-
ery, at comfort and consolation, rather than
outright cure.
This secular shift also sought to banish
proselytising, the force-feeding of religion to
a captive audience of homeless people so
famously exposed by George Orwell in Down
and Out in Paris and London. New secular
organisations emerged to deliver this version
of homelessness services but older faith-based
organisations were also commissioned, having
first erased religion as a defining and visible
element of their service as a condition for
accessing public funds.
Now the mainstream service model for
homeless people has evolved to focus almost
exclusively on fixing physical problems and
meeting material needs, which are necessary
but not sufficient for a fulfilling life. And with
many faith-based organisations going out of
their way to prohibit the promotion of religion
by their staff, faith and spirituality are largely
absent from todays services on offer to home-
less people.
The situation is exacerbated by many in
the sector with atheist views, including local
government commissioners, who consider
religion as a distinctly unpalatable subject,
to be avoided at all costs. It is too personal
and intrusive for the client; too difficult to
handle for the support worker; and there is
the risk of it being misunderstood as an
attempt to proselytise, and unlikely to yield
anything of value.
Yet the vast majority of long-term homeless
people interviewed for my report found the
experience of talking about their lives, their
past, and their faith and spirituality, to be
stimulating and thought-provoking. Some
felt that the discussion validated their identity
as people in their own right, not just service
users with problems.
The interviews highlighted the importance
for people of coming to terms with the painful
experience of loss in the past in order to move
forward in their lives. A few had arrived at a
profoundly spiritual perspective on their loss,
embodying the Franciscan ideals of poverty,
humility and simplicity, regarding their pres-
ent situation free from material ties as being
the happiest time of their life, with no desire
to return to the world of work and money.
One said: Never been happier than now. Had
thousands of pounds and it didnt get me any-
where. Had more money than sense and I
felt so alone.
The interviews also revealed that peoples
present circumstances (cash-poor but time-
rich) was the spur in many cases for a rich
array of interests, pastimes and blues-beating
activities with a strong and timeless spiritual
dimension: reading, music, art, helping others.
Walking was often mentioned as a means of
dealing with troubles and sorrows, and as an
aid to meditation, akin to a pilgrimage or walk-
ing a labyrinth in a medieval cathedral. The
pursuit of oblivion through drink, drugs or
sleeping pills was far less frequently mentioned.
Fifty-two per cent of people interviewed
described themselves as conventionally reli-
Religious belief and the destitute
8
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6 April 2013
Silence in the City
Metropolitan
Kallistos Ware
Word and Silence in
Orthodox Prayer
Westminster Cathedral Hall,
Ambrosden Avenue, London SW1.
Wednesday 10 April 2013,
7pm - 9pm
(refreshments available
from 6.30pm)
10 suggested donation
www.silenceinthecity.org.uk
020 7252 2453 or 020 7231 6278
open conversation with service users about
spiritual matters.
There is little to fear for service providers
in talking with their clients about faith and
spirituality; indeed, quite the opposite.
Couched as life interviews and managed
properly to avoid the risk of inappropriate
promotion of religion, such discussions are
generally welcomed and may reveal rich
insights and aspirations that can be incorpo-
rated into support plans. Where interviews
reveal an active interest in an organised faith
or religion, service users should be matched
up with churches, faith groups and places of
worship. (On the other side of the coin, faith
groups should engage more with homeless
people and make connections with service
providers, building on the work in London
of the Manna Centre near London Bridge, St
Patricks Soho, and the Robes Project in south-
east London, among others.) Books and other
resources on spiritual matters should be made
freely available at hostels and drop-in centres.
My report recommends that all homeless-
ness service providers set up spirituality
discussion groups, as are run by West London
Mission and the Connection at St Martin-in-
the-Fields. These groups should be for people
of all faiths and no faiths and should present
a wide range of religious beliefs and practices
to satisfy many homeless peoples spiritual
hunger for fruitful discussion about purpose
and meaning in life. They would have the
Fordham University welcomes Clare Asquith,
Countess of Oxford and Asquith, as she delivers
the inaugural Hobart-Ives Lecture.
Tuesday, 16 April 2013 | 6 p.m.
Flom Auditorium | William D. Walsh Family Library
Rose Hill Campus | Fordham University
Bronx | New York
For more information
visit www.fordham.edu/hobartives
or e-mail John Ryle Kezel, Ph.D., at kezel@fordham.edu.
S
hakespeare and the
Image of Holiness
THE INAUGURAL HOBART-IVES LECTURE
6 April 2013
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9
gious; they were mostly born into their reli-
gious identity and had an intrinsic or extrinsic
faith. One person described himself as
Baptised and confirmed Anglican faith, then
challenged by science and university. A
Methodist minister has brought me back to
faith. Science hasnt got all the answers.
Another said: Getting on drugs was 13 when
I got on heroin. Smoked cannabis from nine.
Being kidnapped and raped, that was in 2005,
and then finding my faith again. I reaffirmed
in April and gave my life to Christ again.
A further 19 per cent described themselves
as religious or spiritual in a broader sense,
sampling different faiths in a questing fash-
ion. Only a third of those describing
themselves as religious had recently attended
a place of worship suggesting perhaps an
opportunity for religious groups to engage
with the other two-thirds. But where they
had done so, they described their experience
in overwhelmingly positive terms, in particular
the sense of welcome and belonging it gen-
erated. One commented: Was nice, peace
and quiet, people seemed quite spiritual. Felt
happy after praying and definitely feel like
going back again. Another said: I got respect
from people in the church. Lots of nice people
I met. Peace of mind out of them.
Yet only five people had ever been asked
by the organisation about their religion, faith
or spirituality. The majority thought that serv-
ice providers should at the very least have an
additional benefit for homeless people of cre-
ating a community of inquiry, the fresh
expression of fellowship that established reli-
gions have offered for centuries.
Everyone involved in working with home-
less people can benefit from seeing beyond
and beneath their basic needs once crises have
abated, and engaging with their faith and
spiritual identities. In an age of austerity, there
is much to learn from, without wishing to
romanticise, their experience of loss, tragedy
and misfortune. They know that the material
comfort and security that so many of us enjoy
cannot be taken for granted; they have felt
the ground beneath their feet quake, and seen
the roof above their head cave in. Many have
come through this experience with their faith
intact or new-found, or with profound spir-
itual insights; some have learned to live on
less, on next to nothing, in as full a way as is
possible to imagine. They have found what
many of us have lost sight of.
Carwyn Gravell, an atheist, is a partner at
social research organisation Lemos&Crane.
Lost and Found is based on research
conducted with the Connection at St
Martins and other homelessness agencies
in London, supported by the St John
Southworth Fund on behalf of the
Archdiocese of Westminster, among other
funders. Download for free at
www.lemosandcrane.co.uk from 10 April.
a psychological level to make it credible.
The upshot was, I thought Mary had to be
something like me.
Colm Tibns new novel The Testament of
Mary portrays a woman who ran from the
cross before Jesus died, to save her own skin.
This, arguably, makes it easier for the reader
to believe in her the instinct for survival is
commonplace; brimming with grace is not.
Naomi Wolf in her book, Vagina: a new biog-
raphy, dismisses Marys virginity as a handy
Christian invention to keep women in their
place. Like Tibn and Wolf, I felt that Marys
untroubled expression had to be masking
some very human story. And, like Wolf, I
thought it was sexual.
These days, were defined by sex. Brought
up seeing Madonna Ciccone decked with a
rosary (the first I ever saw was hung between
her breasts), I thought virginity was something
to grow out of, like knee-length socks. A
woman who was celibate by choice was not
a real woman.
For an atheist, my first slim volume of
poems was heavy with references to the
Mother of God. In one poem, Annunciation,
I imagined Fra Angelicos virgin remembering
herself as a real girl, frantically in love. By
describing an earthly passion, I thought Id
get to the truth. The Mary of this poem recalls
combing the streets for her lover; imprisoned,
now, in a painting, she nonetheless remembers
the taste of a mouth.
In my late twenties and living alone, Mary
didn t go away. Those days, I favoured a
Raphael above my mantelpiece a cosier,
more capable-looking woman, though still
bafflingly submissive. When I heard about a
new sculpture of a naked Mary at a church
in London, I thought, At last! the stifling
decay of Catholic tradition has been scraped
off her; now well get to the guts of the woman.
I took down the sculptors name from the
radio and the next day I was at St Matthews
in Westminster, with Guy Reid. We talked
about his take on the Madonna as we walked
into the church. Then, there she was: small,
naked, with a baby on her lap, looking straight
ahead. She seemed tense, somehow blind.
Her nudity had the unselfconsciousness of a
woman in a lost African tribe. I felt let down.
Id spent so long looking for the un-maidenly
Madonna with the direct gaze. Here she was.
But something was lacking, and I didnt know
what it could be.
I read Robert Graves The White Goddess,
and wondered if Christian displacement of
SALLY READ
My poetic path to the Virgin
It has taken many pieces of writing and 20 years for one poet to try to
understand the mother of God. Here she describes the process of
deciphering her and making sense of the feast of the Annunciation
E
ven as an atheist, I always kept an
image of the Madonna on my wall.
I dont get it; shes such a drip, one
friend told me. Mary symbolised
everything we liberated women were supposed
to reject: modesty, chastity, submission.
I remember my first Mary very well: Lippis
Madonna with Child and Two Angels. It hung
in my grandmothers spare room and, when
she died, I took it home. I was fascinated by
the eggshell complexion, the lashless eyes. As
a student nurse, I encountered that face again
in the eerie composure of a young woman
whose husband was dying of cancer. The
womans unbroken grace was Marys. I didnt
understand it.
In the years to come, that calm possessed
me, gently but firmly. I began to collect images
of Mary. I sought out pictures that did away
with the downcast gaze and looked you
straight in the eye. Friends sent me Indian-
American Madonnas from South Dakota, La
Guadalupes from Mexico. One friend dutifully
brought back icons from wherever she went.
But, when I took a plaster statuette from
Greece straight to Oxfam, she snapped, What
exactly are you looking for?
I wanted to give back Mary a story I thought
she had been robbed of by a patriarchal
Church. Writers work with commonality
the fact that were all, at heart, the same. When
were faced with something extraordinary, we
wrestle it to a common ground at least at
Detail of The Annunciationby Bernard
van Orley, c. 1518. The work is included
in the exhibition Doorways to the
Sacred at the National Gallery, Oslo,
until 12 May. www.nasjonalmuseet.no
Inspired by Mary
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6 April 2013
Annunciation
Lady, still as a well under almond blossom.
Lady, still as a harp-string
ready for the fngers touch.
Woman, stepping inside to eye-bruising dark
with a jug of water.
Only your lush ear could catch
the angels words,
and only you could make them fesh.
What stillness. In stillness
beyond tissue of thought
He formed. Lady, closest to God,
pray that we make the ground inside us
rich enough for this formation,
that we always wear the anatomy of His death.
Lady, still as a well, turning hurt and consolation,
show us how to listen in our emptiness.
pagan goddesses explained my need to re-
arm Mary. The Madonna, I argued, was
emblematic of divine feminine power that
the Church had suppressed. Still essentially
atheist, but charmed by ritual, I performed
spells to the goddess of poetry, Bridget. I loved
the wreaths and candles but I was repelled
by the female godhead that Graves described
a triple goddess with a malicious bent.
Anyway, candles, spells and pagan rhymes
didnt satisfy me at any level. My rational soul
wanted truth. Writing my second book, I con-
templated what happened to the real
14-year-old girl and came up with a rape sce-
nario the angel was a boy; the violated
Mary used her journey to Elizabeth as time
to concoct an outlandish story. I based the
form, loosely, on Yeats Leda and the Swan.
It was brutal, and realistic; I liked it.
By now, I was married with a daughter and
living in Italy. The Madonna was everywhere
behind the till at the grocers, in the doctors,
at roadside shrines. Yet I was uninterested.
After almost 20 years of fascination, I thought
I had finally killed her off in my unconscious.
But there was still one poem about Mary
to be written for that book. Two years before
my conversion to Catholicism, I attended a
baptism at St Peters. My daughter and I were
part of a very small group admitted through
a side-door at 8 a.m. as thousands of pilgrims
amassed in the square for a papal Mass. The
empty basilica breathed differently. Without
the confusion of tourists, there was room for
God, though I did not put it that way then.
After the baptism, I walked over to the Piet
and saw Mary as though for the first time. In
the last Marian poem that I would write as
an atheist, I describe her with awe: the son
caught in her lap as if hed fallen out of the
CLIFFORD LONGLEY
The welfare measures
amount to dictation
about how people
should live their lives
The biggest upheaval in the Welfare
State since its inception in 1948 got
under way on Monday, hailed by the
cabinet minister responsible, Iain
Duncan Smith, as an assault on
dependency. It is predicted to cut the
welfare budget by 2.3 billion in the
first year and by 28 billion by 2015,
and it is supposed to do this not by
making people poorer but by
helping them his word to find
work where they would be better off.
Helping in fact means facing them
with a choice between work or
poverty, and hoping that, in their
own financial interests, they will
choose the former. This is known as
making work pay and it presupposes,
despite the gloomy economic
situation, that work is available.
All the predictions that these
changes will actually increase
poverty are based on the supposition
that these incentives will not achieve
their object, and people will continue
relying on benefits through
necessity rather than choice even
though their value is shrinking. In
that case, the saving of 28 billion
will simply be taken from the
pockets of the poor. But they will be
told they have deserved their fate by
their idleness.
There is an unstated premise
behind government policy, which
perhaps reveals its origins in Tory
philosophy applied to both rich and
poor that financial self-interest is
the one reliable human motivator.
But there is another hidden premise
behind these changes that is very
un-Tory-like, more Joseph Stalin
than Friedrich von Hayek. It is that
the Government knows best how
poor people should live their lives
and, if they do not comply with the
central government blueprint, they
must expect to suffer.
Thus housing benefit will be cut
for those with a spare bedroom and
for those living in the most expensive
neighbourhoods, forcing both
categories to move. Help for families
will be targeted at women who work,
away from those who stay home to
care for their children. Unemployed
people may not choose their job, but
must do any work available indeed
must work without pay if paid work
is not there. The moderately unfit or
disabled will be reclassified as
available for work or penalised
accordingly. There is even talk of
limiting child benefit to the first two
children. And so on across the board.
Each of those measures has its own
logic, concerned with addressing
specific ways in which the system has
become unbalanced. The poverty
trap, whereby benefits are reduced as
soon as a person starts to earn a
living, thus taking away with one
hand what is given by the other, is a
reality. But, cumulatively, these
measures amount to authoritarian
dictation about how people should
live their lives. And nobody in
Government appears to be conscious
of the overall effect. Good tactics
often make bad strategy.
Attaching a financial disincentive
to all these freedoms how and
where to live, what work to do, how
many children to have, even what
use to make of the rooms of ones
house is creating another, more
sinister kind of dependency culture,
more anthropological than financial.
It turns the working class into a vast
client class, the shape of whose lives
is dictated more and more by central
government. Serfdom is what
Hayek would have called it.
Well, if the Government pays the
piper, oughtnt it to call the tune? But
that is to forget why the welfare state
exists at all. It exists because the way
we organise our economy does not
deliver an acceptable degree of
fairness. It makes the rich richer and
the poor poorer, and it comes
alongside a morality which blames
the poor for their poverty. As a
nation, we had our fill of that in the
inter-war years and, in 1948, we
decided to put a stop to it.
In fact, most of the problems that
Mr Duncan Smith labels dependency
are what economists call market
failures. Housing benefit is so high
and needs to be reduced not because
the poor are greedy for unearned cash
and wanton in their child-bearing,
but because the supply of houses is
nowhere near being adequate to
meet the demand. The benefits paid
to those actually in work, who
constitute about 60 per cent of
work-related recipients, go towards
making good poor wages. They are
thus the result of a failure of the
labour market to deliver a living wage.
Far from being subsidies for skivers
and scroungers, therefore, these
welfare payments are effectively
subsidising rapacious landlords and
exploitative employers. It is
ultimately they who are dependent
on the state for their living. It is
surely they who most need what Mr
Duncan Smith calls help, otherwise
known as a whack round the head.
6 April 2013
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11
sky; the vacuum of her silence, so immense
it could have swallowed the world.
Marys part in my conversion was silent.
Though her face followed me through two
decades, I thought little about her when I
came to Christ, even when I chose Catholicism.
Her presence was so insistent through the
lonely and faithless terrain of my twenties
and thirties, I did not think for a second that
she the Mother of God had really been
there at my back. It took a long time to under-
stand that my relationship with her did not
begin with my belief in Christ, but long before.
I had to digest the fact that I had added to
the list of lies about her.
Then, two summers after my conversion,
I was contacted by Paul Flynn, a young Irish
Catholic composer with a particular devotion
to Mary. He wondered if I would write a poem
for him to set to choral music.
Of course I would.
Once again, I was up against writing this
woman, but with a new kind of knowledge
one enlightened by faith. We cannot under-
stand Mary without faith and what it gives
us: the smallest inkling of her faith the
most radical in history and the sublime
trust and courage necessary for her leap into
the invisible arms of God. This leap asked
everything of her, including her sexuality, and
a singular stillness.
Silence is not an absence, I wrote about a
statue of Mary in my first book, it seeps
through skin like water through silk. Now I
understood something of that silence.
Theodotus of Ancyra described the
Annunciation as an act of hearing. An angel
didnt leap at Mary from nowhere; Mary was
already listening to God, albeit with no clue
as to what would happen. Her prayer was the
most receptive and fertile of any human that
has ever lived. To write Mary, I had to learn
from her and listen. I had to understand that,
in Gods narrative, the humble are the pro-
tagonists. Mary, I realised, subverts what it
means to be powerful: God always had Marys
ear; now she has his.
Gerard Manley Hopkins likened Mary to
the air we breathe. Thomas Merton likened
her to a pane of glass. Both of these metaphors
tell us she is a medium through which we
receive God. As a younger writer, I had seen
her as a projection screen, and projected my
ambitions and frustrations, my victimhood
and outrage on to her. It is ironic that a sup-
posedly feminist culture would so
misunderstand the most powerful person in
history, who also happens to be a woman.
I had to cast off presumption, ego, and
agenda in the composition of my latest
Annunciation poem. In this way, the process
has been more like prayer. The poem is quiet,
and simple a very small beginning in my
writing of Mary. But I hope it leaves enough
space both for the music and for her listening.
Sally Read is a poet based in Italy. Her most
recent collection is The Day Hospital (Bloodaxe
Books). Lady, a choral setting by Paul Flynn
of Sally Reads new poem Annunciation,
will be performed by the PalestrinaChoir at
StMarys Pro-Cathedral, Dublin, in May.
children. The Hispanic community here loves
the custom of blessings. The parish will
have many baptisms in the months ahead.
When the rite is celebrated at Mass, the
presidential prayers and readings of the day
remain in force. If it is a weekday on which
other options may be used, the rite suggests
something from the Masses for Various Needs
and Occasions. It does not suggest which,
but there are many possibilities, including
one for the Church, 10 for the laity, 12 for the
family, 41 for relatives and friends, and 49 for
giving thanks to God. In the United States,
the Missal also includes prayers for giving
thanks to God for the gift of human life. The
rite includes several recommended petitions
for the Universal Prayer, including examples
for civic leaders, all expectant mothers, all
families, and for all children. The prayer of
blessing concludes these petitions.
The mother, father, and other family mem-
bers may come forward. As the priest or
deacon says the prayer for constant protection
and a healthy birth, he makes the sign of the
cross over the unborn child.
The blessing includes the
mother, asking God to grant
her comfort in all anxiety and
make her determined to lead
her child along the ways of sal-
vation.
The prayer may be extended
with a blessing for the father,
that he may have courage in
this new responsibility. It may
be extended further to include
other children, with a request
that the family be endowed
with sincere and enduring love. The priest
or deacon may sprinkle the family with holy
water. For the Procession of the Gifts, the rite
suggests including other gifts to relieve the
needs of families in difficulty. Here, a com-
munity could bring the fruits of a special
collection of funds or products for organisations
helping women through a pregnancy that is
causing more stress than joy. A solemn
blessing may conclude the Mass, including
petitions for Gods protection; the gifts of
faith, hope and love; and children who are
strong in body and in spirit. A colleague in
a much larger parish than mine tells me he
offers this blessing four times a year. These
are joyful occasions for his community.
T
he United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops takes a vigorous
pro-life stance that ranges from
opposing abortions to decrying the
death penalty. Now, instead of making news
for battling those opinions contrary to their
own, the bishops are upholding the dignity
of the unborn by joining the celebratory
spirit of those anticipating a new birth.
As a pregnancy advances, parents are
usually full of wonder and awe; they are
looking forward to welcoming this child into
a loving home. Even people who dont
normally pray much will pray for the safe
arrival of their baby. Now some parishes in
the United States are offering parents-to-be
an extra opportunity for prayer: The Rite for
the Blessing of a Child in the Womb.
The booklet containing this rite is only 43
pages long, but it includes various options
for the blessing: during or outside Mass, for
several mothers or just one, with a priest or
a deacon presiding, in English or in Spanish.
In my parish, I recently designated a day to
offer the blessing. We celebrate
two Masses in English and
two in Spanish each weekend.
News of the event appeared
in the parish bulletin, which
the secretary prints and posts
online, and I included it in
the spoken announcements
the weekend before.
The parish Masses in
English draw some of the older
members of the community.
We do have young Anglo cou-
ples but not many. Still, on a
given weekend, any expectant mother may
walk into any church. At one Mass, at the
time for the blessing, a couple came forward
and surprised everyone. Although they are
regular participants, they had not yet broken
the news that they were expecting their first
child. The blessing changed the whole
character of the Mass that day, lifting higher
the spirits of the whole community. The
Spanish Masses draw a number of immigrant
families of all ages. Most are from Mexico
but other nationalities are represented. Many
live in the neighbourhood but others travel
some distance because the options for praying
in their own language are few. As expected,
several couples came forward many with
PARISH PRACTICE
Blessed before birth
PAUL TURNER
Expectant mothers appear frequently in Scripture, not least Mary, whose feast of the
Annunciation is marked this year on 8 April. A new rite of blessing is a way that the
Church marks the gift of a child while still growing in the womb
In a different venue, I asked some friends
if we could share this prayer in their home.
They are expecting their third child, whom,
they admitted, was a surprise to them. When
I arrived at their home, the older son was in
boisterous play, and his brothers runny nose
required frequent parental attention. But
these parents are skilled at prayer so the dis-
tractions did not obstruct. Father and mother
each gladly took turns with scripture readings
and petitions.
Outside Mass, recommended readings
include Luke 1:39-45 (the Visitation); Genesis
18:1-15 (the prophecy of Sarahs conception
of Isaac); 1 Samuel 1:9-20 (Hannahs con-
ception and birth of Samuel); Ruth 2:1-3,
8-11; 4:13-17 (the birth of Obed, father of
Jesse, father of David); and Luke 1:26-38
(the Annunciation). Psalm 34 is also suggested,
with its opening line, I will bless the Lord at
all times.
The Rite for the Blessing of a Child in the
Womb has already proven to be a practical
prayer for a pivotal moment in the life of
parents. Sadly, some women today are made
to feel awkward because they are pregnant
as if they should have been more careful. Ive
even heard complaints that, in some parishes,
when parents call for baptism information,
they are asked whether they live in the
parish, if they are registered parishioners,
part of the planned giving and what the
requirements are to attend preparation pro-
grammes. What they dont hear is the word,
Congratulations!
Some children are unwanted. Some are
fathered by careless and now-absent men.
Others are conceived under force, rather than
love. Some are brought into homes where
parents are unprepared to care for them.
Some become pawns in a battle not their
own. But its never the childs fault. Every
child is a gift and this ceremony offers
parishes another way to celebrate the gift of
life. The blessing gathers the parents together
with a community to greet the unborn child.
Paul Turner is a pastor of St Munchin
parish in Cameron, Missouri, and its mission,
St Aloysius in Maysville. Copies of the Rite of
Blessing of a Child in the Womb can be
found on: http://www.usccb.org/about/pro-
life-activities/prayers/upload/Rite-for-the-
Blessing-of-a-Child-in-the-Womb.pdf
TO DO
Designate a weekend for
the blessing of a child in
the womb
Invite the community to
bring gifts for social agencies
helping needy mothers
Invite mothers, fathers
and families to receive the
blessing at church or
at home
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12 Tablet 6 Apr 13 PP_P27 parish practice 03/04/2013 12:37 Page 14
NOTEBOOK
What profit a man?
JUSTIN WELBY is not the first Archbishop
of Canterbury to have had a life outside the
Church of England: Robert Runcie was a
decorated officer who gained the Military
Cross for his efforts in the Second World
War; George Carey worked as an office boy
at the London Electricity Board and was an
RAF wireless operator.
But the 105th holder of the office has a
unique distinction: his previous career in
the oil business, particularly his time as
treasurer of Enterprise Oil, has given him an
understanding of money. And we hear that
that knowledge is sending a collective shiver
down the spines of the Church Commissioners.
The commissioners are responsible for the
Church of Englands vast assets of 5.2
billion, including a huge land and property
portfolio, on which Anglican clergy rely for
their pay and pensions. There has previously
been controversy over the commissioners
judgements such as their investments in
Israel but these have tended to be political
and ethical rather than about financial adroit-
ness or irregularity.
Their most recent annual return, for 2011,
explains, somewhat defensively, about the
total return on the 5.2bn being 2.9 per
cent, but then in the economy at large
wages and salaries rose by only 2 per cent
last year, and we did succeed in edging
ahead even though our portfolio contained
none of the types of assets that are favoured
when fear displaces optimism.
Indeed, a certain fear is said to have
displaced optimism when First Estates
Commissioner Andreas Whittam Smith was
heard to say, Welby can read a balance
sheet. Its not what were used to.
Papal tastes
WHEN CARDINAL Jorge Bergoglio boarded
the plane from Buenos Aires to Rome for last
months papal conclave, he was sure he would
return. Not only did he have a return ticket,
but he also took with him the keys to his
apartment. Of course, a few days later the
Archbishop of Buenos Aires appeared on the
balcony of St Peters as Pope Francis.
Since then, the locked apartment has frus-
trated journalists who have descended on the
Argentinian capital to find out more about
the new Pope. Many have been keen to film
inside the simple rooms to give a sense of the
lifestyle Cardinal Bergoglio lived as archbishop.
Among them has been a BBC team, in
Argentina to broadcast a profile of the Pope
for the World Service and another programme
for Radio 4s The Report series. These are to
be presented by Catholic journalist and broad-
caster Mark Dowd, who told us he has also
found out about two of the Popes passions:
birds and opera.
It seems that Cardinal Bergoglio had a
particular affection for the garden birds pop-
ularly known as cardinals because of the
males red plumage. His operatic tastes appar-
ently include Puccini and Wagner. Given
Pope Emeritus Benedicts love of music, in
this instance, at least, there is a hermeneutic
of continuity.
In a class of his own
THE INFLUENCE of Peter Hardwick, who
died in February, stretched far and wide
during nearly 40 years as an English teacher
at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. One of
those touched by his life is Mark Thompson,
former director general of the BBC and now
chief executive of The New York Times.
After my immediate family, Peter Hardwick
has been the biggest influence of my life,
Thompson told us. The 55-year-old media
executive was taught by Hardwick at the
Jesuit run school and later went on to take a
first in English at Merton College, Oxford.
The two men were part of a walking party
a few years ago along the Dales Way in
Yorkshire. We wafted up Wharfedale on a
wave of discussion about everything from
Shakespeare to tropical diseases. At Bolton
Abbey, Peter stopped to ponder the desecra-
tions of the Reformation with a (rare)
undertow of anger in his voice at the wan-
tonness of it all, Thompson recalled. The
image I want to remember him by is as a
companion on the Dales Way in his inap-
propriate footwear (plain Oxfords), his
minuscule backpack with secret pockets full
of unpromising-looking but in fact delicious
dried fruit; a thin, upright jaunty figure in
tweed, travelling light and happy.
Choice of prayer
GIVEN THE arguments that can arise over
the wording of liturgies, Westminster Abbey
has come up with a compromise over the
phrasing of a prayer to be used in thanksgiving
for the sixtieth anniversary of the Queens
coronation on 2 June 1953.
The abbey has produced two versions: one
using traditional language and the other
modern. In the traditional version, the prayer
asks God to receive our humble prayer that,
by renewing thy blessings, thou wilt pour
upon her thy choicest gifts, and upon all thy
people the spirit of humility and service,
while the newer version has: Renewing your
blessings, pour on her your choicest gifts,
and on all your people the spirit of humility
and mutual service.
Both versions of the prayer have been
authorised for use throughout the Church of
England on 4 June. A spokesman for
Westminster Abbey says they will be using
the traditional wording for their service,
which will be attended by the Queen.
To be restored
HOLY WEEK in the tiny Colombian
mountain town of San Andrs de Pisimbal
was marked by a sad event. On Maundy
Thursday night, the towns chapel, declared
a world heritage site by Unesco, was almost
completely destroyed by a fire, in which
mercifully there were no injuries.
The eighteenth-century chapel, built by
the Spanish conquistadores, is on an indige-
nous reserve, where local people from the
Nasa community have been in a three-year
dispute with farmers. It is uncertain what
caused the fire but indications suggest it was
deliberately started in the middle of the
night. The governor of Cauca department,
Temstocles Ortega Narvez, has committed
to restore the chapel. Its thatched roof made
the building particularly susceptible to fire.
Spin redeemed
IN PUBLIC life, falling from grace is easy
but redemption is more difficult.
Someone seeking to achieve the latter is
Damian McBride. The former press adviser
to Gordon Brown resigned in 2009 when
leaked emails revealed his part in a plot to
discredit senior figures in the Conservative
party.
Since then he has worked at his former
school Finchley Catholic High School in
north London and is now head of commu-
nications at Cafod, the Church in England
and Wales aid agency.
McBride has now written the behind-the-
scenes story of his time working with the
former Prime Minister in a book that will be
published in September, Power Trip: a decade
of policy, plots and spin. McBride says he
plans to donate any proceeds to his former
school and Cafod. He said the book was a
chance to show that he was willing to own
up to, and learn from his mistakes.
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Pope Francis agenda
Fr Mark Woodruff (My brother Andrew, 30
March) explores the possibility of full com-
munion between the Catholic and Orthodox
Churches. We dont know what Pope Francis
may do in the future, but the main obstacle
is papal infallibility and primacy of jurisdic-
tion especially as defined by Vatican I.
Otherwise the two Churches are very close.
Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Ut Unum
Sint, admitted that papal authority was a prob-
lem and invited ideas from other Churches
on how to resolve it. Although he liked to state
that the Church breathes with two lungs he
never brought himself to put his ideas and
aspir ations into practice.
Perhaps now is the time for the two sides
to get together in a serious attempt at unity,
though not uniformity. At the heart of a solu-
tion may lie the attempt to marry the principle
of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome (rather
than papal primacy/infallibility) with that of
collegiality (not only of bishops but the rest
of the faithful as well).
(Dr) Joseph Seferta
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands
Much has been written since Pope Francis
washed the feet of two women on Maundy
Thursday. It was felt necessary that a Vatican
spokesperson explain that due to pastoral rea-
sons, it would have been inappropriate if the
two women had been excluded, as the Pope
wished to communicate a message of love.
However, many priests are faced with the same
situation every year. In some parishes there
are people who read the liturgical rubrics before
they have had their Weetabix for breakfast.
Is it time for this regulation to be changed so
as to be more inclusive? It personally causes
me pain that woman are excluded from hav-
ing their feet washed. It further reinforces the
message that woman are not fully welcome,
respected and valued in the Church.
Women were the first witnesses of the
Resurrection. May we reflect on the role of
woman in the Church and not be afraid of
where the Holy Spirit may lead us.
(Fr) Francis Kemsley, O.Carm.
Aylesford, Kent
How accurately Peter Stanford (23 March)
expressed my own joy on the election of
Francis. I can well remember the keen sense
of anticipation I felt as a 15-year-old when
John Paul I was elected in 1978, and while
there will always be the memory of seeing John
Paul II waving out of his bedroom window
in Archbishop Derek Worlocks house, just
a stones throw from where I lived in Liverpool
in 1982, it wasnt until I heard the name
Francis announced that I realised how much
I had missed that feeling that I could still
Married clergy case for caution
While Clifford Poole and Janet Vickers-
Reynolds (Letters, 30 March) provide a
moving insight into the life of married clergy,
such is not the experience of several clergy wives
of our acquaintance (one Anglican, one
Church of Scotland) who strongly support the
Churchs present stance.
Clearly the Church will have to address this
issue and its starting point must surely be a
deep examination of and reflection on the
sacramental character of marriage and priest-
hood. The Churchs understanding of these
sacraments has developed significantly since
priestly celibacy was introduced. The priest
is called to be a sacrament, a living, effective
sign of Christs presence and activity. The cou-
ple is also called, as two people committed to
one another, to be a living, effective sign of
Christs presence and activity. Without a
fuller understanding of the nature of each
sacrament it would be unwise for the Church
to make a radical change.
Peter Simmons
North Berwick, East Lothian
In a lecture which he gave at Bristol University
on 7 November 1967 entitled The Role and
Responsibility of the Judge my late father,
Sir Frederick Lawton, himself a judge, com-
mented as follows: In an ideal world, besides
a sensible wife and a good clerk, a judge should
have living with him at least one daughter in
her late teens and one son aged between 21
and 25. Such children should be able to make
him appreciate that the social order was not
brought to static perfection when he was called
to the Bar. In my opinion a judge who does
not know what is going on around him can-
not do his job properly.
From my own experience of family life, I
would certainly endorse that recommenda-
tion, and not only for judges. It is a desirable
reality check for us all which celibate clergy
often tend to lack. I agree that extensive pas-
toral experience as a parish priest can provide
a reasonably effective antidote but too many
bishops seem somehow to avoid that too and
simply do not know what is going on
around them. Some are aware of this lacuna
and consciously do their best to take appro-
priate remedial action but it is a very human
failing to remain ignorant of what we have not
personally experienced.
Tony Lawton
York
Strange silence
Pope Francis and the leaders of the Anglican
and Reform Churches in this country call for
a preferential option for the poor. However,
not a sign of a formal statement from the lead-
ers of the Catholic Church in England and
Wales when the very rich are having their taxes
belong to a Church that was full of surprises.
As a teacher of religious education in a
Catholic school I have become used to defend-
ing a Church especially in lessons where
many children do not understand its relevance
in the twenty-first century. How refreshing it
is to have children of all ages, but especially
15- and 16-year-olds, stop me in the corridors
or ask me in class what I think of the new Pope
and whether I have read what he has most
recently said or done. This man has already
touched a chord with the young people I am
with every day and they seem to appreciate
that he wants people to reconnect with the
Church in a way that is relevant to them.
Nick McLeod
Liverpool
Congratulations on a very informative issue
(23 March) on our new Bishop of Rome
Francis background and ministry. Apparent
throughout is his commitment to the poor and
the marginalised. Daniel OLearys beautiful
reflection Power on its knees begins by
recounting how Francis has washed and
kissed the feet of people with Aids. Widely
reported through mainstream media, I have
received numerous favourable comments.
Colleagues in secular HIV agencies are some-
times surprised, always impressed. Bishop
Francis has given a sign of the Gospel prior-
ity of solidarity with those who remain
stigmatised in society. People living with
HIV and Aids have been greatly encouraged.
It is our cautious hope that the example of
Francis will inspire and encourage our own
bishops. The sign we give will be judged by
others, through action more than words.
Francis challenges us all to re-orientate the
church towards the poorest in our midst. Our
bishops will need the prayers and active sup-
port of the lay faithful to make our mission
of humble service more visible in the world.
Vincent Manning
Chairman, Catholics for Aids Prevention
and Support (Caps), London SW9
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.
Pope Francis washes the foot of a
prisoner during the Maundy Thursday
Mass at a prison in Rome. Photo: CNS
6 April 2013
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15
cut and the poor are being subjected to a raft
of cuts in benefits by our Coalition
Government. What has happened to the
leadership of the Church of Cardinal Manning
and Catholic Social Teaching?
Michael D. Phelan
Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire
Fishing village
According to John Morrishs review of Melvyn
Braggs television documentary The Mystery
of Mary Magdalene (Arts, 30 March), the town
of Magdala did not exist in the first century.
However, according to Sean Freyne (Jesus,
a Jewish Galilean, T. and T. Clark
International, London and New York, 2004),
Magdala in the time of Jesus was an impor-
tant centre for salting fish, a form of value
adding in the fishing industry in Galilee that
enabled a fish export industry to develop.
Professor Freyne is emeritus professor of the-
ology at Trinity College, Dublin, and a noted
authority on the history and archaeology of
Galilee in the time of Jesus.
So there may be a more obvious meaning
to the tag Magdalene than Braggs musings
about her strength or height!
(Br) Tony Shanahan CFC
Tamale, Ghana
Ideal of the gentleman
Sally Read (Miss Havishams blasphemy, 23
March) seems surprised that Dickens Great
Expectations feels so Catholic. Its inspiration
was Catholic. John Henry Newmans Scope and
Nature of University Educationwas published
in London in 1859. In 1860 Great Expectations
was serialised inHousehold Words. What had
caught the national fancy was Newmans def-
inition of a gentleman: one who never
knowingly gives pain and in Great
Expectations Dickens examined the gentle-
man Miss Havishams concept, Bentley
Drummles, Compeysons, Sarah Pockets,
Matthew Pockets, Pumblechooks and the trag-
ical Magwitchs. Dickens understood what
Newman was about. Most people did not.
What Newman said was that for the Christian
the gentleman, beau-idal of the world con-
cerned with setting right the surface of
things was neither here nor there. The Church
aims at regenerating the very depths of the
heart. The first and chief and direct object
[of the Pope], Newman wrote, in suggest-
ing the establishment of a Catholic University
is some benefit to accrue by means of lit-
erature and science to his own children; not
indeed their formation on any narrow or fan-
tastic type as, for instance, that of the English
Gentleman may be called
In Great Expectations Pip, critically ill,
deserted by his gentlemen friends, is nursed
to health by his uneducated boyhood guardian,
Joe Gargery. Critics sometimes misquote
Dickens here as calling Joe a Christian gen-
tleman. Dickens actually makes Newmans
distinction: Joe, antithesis of the selfishness
that Sally Read defines in Miss Havisham, is
a a gentle Christian man.
Tom McIntyre
Frome, Somerset
Other ranks
When we came to the Passion Gospel at Mass
on Palm Sunday I was at pains to point out
to the people, following the advice given by
your contributor to Parish Practice (23
March), that they were not expressing their
own sentiments in declaiming this part: they
themselves were not wishing the death of
Christ.
We then proceeded to the reading. Or
rather, we didnt. Because on opening up our
new booklets (obtained for the new trans-
lation) we discovered that the peoples part
had been transferred to the reader referred
to as other. Result: total chaos at all
Masses, especially as the individual readers
were using large-print books with the for-
mer arrangement of the parts. On ringing
our supplier on Monday morning, and
being about fiftieth in a line of complaining
priests, I was told apologetically that this
change had been insisted on by the bishops
conference liturgy office in Eccleston Square.
Had anybody at that office thought it appro-
priate to notify parish clergy, in good time,
that this important change would be hap-
pening? Of course not.
(Fr) David Sillince
Southampton
Piece of cake
Last Tuesday, heeding the advice of Bishop
Kieran Conry of Arundel to bake a cake to cel-
ebrate the new Pope, I decided to bake four
of them. That same day had also brought a
new nephew into the world, Xavier Joseph
Edward Coley. One cake went to my GP prac-
tice where I work. It went down well. They
all now know I am Catholic and an uncle. The
next went to the athletics track for my
triathlon club to share in the good news. Mum
and dad (grandparents) took the third to
church and the fourth went to my brother and
his newly enlarged family. My sister-in-law
doesnt usually like Victoria sandwich cakes
but she had several pieces of this one. Cake
baking may not be a traditional approach to
evangelisation but it certainly generates inter-
esting conversation!
(Dr) Mark Coley
Wilmslow, Cheshire
For more of your correspondence,
go to the new Letters Extra section of
The Tablets expanded website:
www.thetablet.co.uk
I have often been threatened with death.
I have to say, as a Christian, that I dont
believe in death without resurrection: if
they kill me, I will rise again with the
Salvadorean people. I tell you this with-
out any boasting, with the greatest
humility. As pastor, I am obliged, by divine
command, to give my life for those I love,
who are all Salvadoreans, even for those
who are going to assassinate me May
my death, if accepted by God be for the
freedom of my people and as a witness
to hope in the future. You can say, if they
come to kill me, that I forgive and bless
those who do it. Hopefully they may
realise that they will be wasting their time.
A bishop will die, but the Church of God,
which is the people, will never perish.
Oscar Romero (1917-80)
When he [Jesus] was at the table with
them, he took bread, blessed and broke
it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes
were opened, and they recognised him;
and he vanished from their sight. They
said to each other were not our hearts
burning within us while he was talking
to us on the road, while he was opening
the scriptures to us? That same hour they
got up and returned to Jerusalem; and
they found the eleven and their com-
panions gathered together. They were
saying, the Lord has risen indeed Then
they told what had happened on the road,
and how he had been made known to
them in the breaking of bread.
Luke 24:30-35
Brothers and Sisters, Gods face is the
face of a merciful father who is always
patient. Have you thought about Gods
patience, the patience he has with each
one of us? That is his mercy. He always
has patience, patience with us, he
understands us, he waits for us, he does
not tire of forgiving us if we are able to
return to him with a contrite heart.
Great is Gods mercy, says the Psalm.
Pope Francis
Angelus, Sunday 17 March 2013
Tomorrow is Divine Mercy Sunday
and Monday is the Feast of the
Annunciation
The living Spirit
PUZZLES
The answers to this weeks puzzles and
the crossword winners name will appear in
the 27 April issue.
Crossword competition
Please send your answers to:
Crossword Competition 6 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 bottle of wine courtesy of J. Chandler & Co.
Ltd will go to the sender of the first correct entry
drawn at randomon Friday 19 April.
Down
1 Loose hood worn by some monks (4)
2 Women Religious (7)
3 Abode of souls excluded from the full
blessedness of the Beatific Vision, but
otherwise unpunished (5)
4 Let us be glad and joyful and give glory to
God, because this is the time for the
-------- of the Lamb [Rev/Jerusalem
Bible] (8)
6 Residents of 9? (9)
7 King of Zobah defeated by David (9)
11 Christian in communion with the see of
Canterbury (8)
13 (Judaism) not conforming to dietary
laws (7)
16 A ----- of one that cries in the desert
[Mark/Jerusalem Bible] (5)
18 Alternative spelling of a Syrian people
whose religion contains elements of the
Quran, the Bible, Gnosticism, etc (4)
CROSSWORD No. 354
Compiled by Axe
SUDOKU
Level: Tough
Each 3 x 3 box, each
row and each column
must contain all the
numbers 1 to 9.
Solution to the
16 Marchpuzzle
There was no winner of the 16 March crossword competition.
Solution to the 16 March crossword No. 351
Across: 1 Marist; 4 Targum; 8 Leper; 9 Cranmer; 10 Heathen; 11 Derry; 12 Salome; 14 Israel; 18 Micah;
20 Remnant; 22 Dorothy; 23 Spire; 24 Siloam; 25 Lassus. Down: 1 Malchus; 2 Raphael; 3 Sarah; 5 Amandus;
6 Gomer; 7 Mercy; 9 Cana; 13 Mahatma; 15 Ananias; 16 Letters; 17 Pray; 18 Medes; 19 Carol; 21 Missa.
Across
5 Catholic friar wearing a black mantle (9)
8 Fertility god, a deity of convenience for
the Canaanites (4)
9 Town founded by Herod Antipas on the
Sea of Galilee (8)
10 Priest and teacher of Erasmus and
Thomas More (7)
12 Deborahs commander who defeated
Sisera (5)
14 Place Paul visited in Turkey on his arrival
from Cyprus (5)
15 Father of James and John (7)
17 Pontiff set up in opposition, resident in
thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Avignon
(8)
18 Sauls agent against priests at Nob (4)
19 Jerichos tree-climbing tax collector (9)
A long-established Catholic family firm
of wine merchants specialising in the
supply of Altar Wines to the
Clergy and Convents
SANCTANA & SANCTIFEX Brands
J. CHANDLER & CO. LTD
New Abbey House
Fyfield Road, Weyhill
Andover, Hants, SP11 8DN
Tel: 01264 774700
Fax: 01264 774747
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16 Tablet 6 Apr 13 Puzzles_34 Puzzles 03/04/2013 12:38 Page 22
6 April 2013
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17
BOOKS
have known a few romantic spooks
in my life as a journalist; I have
written about my own fathers
larger-than-life exploits in the
Second World War in Papa Spy but the
truth is, the world of intelligence is inhabited
mostly by discreet, grey men: bureaucrats
and agents of dubious moral credentials, more
John Le Carr than John Buchan or Ian
Fleming.
The spies are on high alert but unprepared
when, in the dramatic opening episode of
Empire of Secrets, a female terrorist from
Palestine slips into the Colonial Office building
in Whitehall and plants a bomb. The terrorist
is no post 9/11 al-Qaeda suicide bomber, but
a member of the Zionist Stern gang, fighting
the British presence in Palestine in 1947.
Luckily, the bomb fails to go off. It reads like
the first pages of a novel, but this is the intro-
duction to Calder Waltons fascinating if not
flawless contribution to intelligence history.
Understandable sensitivities have contributed
to the belated release of intelligence files that
shed a light on this controversial episode. The
successful bombing a year earlier of the King
David Hotel in Jerusalem by another Zionist
gang had lead to the death of 91 people of
I
JIMMY BURNS
SPOOKS, SPIES
AND DOUBLE
AGENTS
Empire of Secrets: British
Intelligence, the Cold War and the
twilight of Empire
Calder Walton
HARPERPRESS, 448PP, 25
Tablet bookshop price 22.50 Tel 01420 592974
various nationalities, including Arabs, British
citizens and Jews. Walton quotes from a con-
temporary MI5 report which compared an
extremist Zionist youth group operating in
post-war UK to the Hitler Youth movement.
He argues that, given that some of the Zionist
terrorist gangs were influenced by non-demo-
cratic ideologies in Eastern Europe, the
parallel is not as outlandish as it might first
appear. Walton does not shy away from con-
troversy, even at the possible risk of biting off
the hand that fed him.
Walton, who helped research Christopher
Andrews authorised history of MI5, the
British Governments internal counter-intel-
ligence and security agency, is a successful
and highly intelligent Cambridge graduate
who belongs to a new generation of intelli-
gence historians. He has been given privileged
access to files kept for many years from public
view and indeed from the eyes of other his-
torians and journalists negatively vetted by
MI5. Nevertheless, there is a very little in this
account of the role of the intelligence services
in the demise of Britains empire to suggest
that this former academic turned barrister
has become a tool of official propaganda. He
details the discreet but important role that
MI5 officials played in Palestine, India, Kenya,
and Malaya in particular, first in combating
anti-colonial insurgencies and insurrections,
then in creating robust intelligence liaison
with the emerging independent states. Calder
moves the spooks from the periphery of history
to its heart.
One of the spies he names is the late Walter
Bell, who was posted by MI5 as their its man
in post-colonial New Delhi and Nairobi. Bell
forged strong ties with Nehrus security chief
B.N. Mullick and with Kenyas first Prime
Minister, Jomo Kenyatta. Bell, identified for
many years in Whos Who only as a retired
Foreign Office official, was a Catholic who
contributed regularly to The Tablet as a book
reviewer and commentator on international
affairs under the editorship of my late father,
Tom Burns. We are told little about Bell but
enough to suggest that, unlike many of his
colleagues, he was a genuine believer in con-
flict resolution and reconcilia-
tion with the leadership of the
emerging post-colonial states.
While there are other examples of MI5 secretly
smoothing the passage to independence, much
of this book is taken up in exposing the ques-
tionable counter-terrorist methods and
disastrous intelligence failures that were preva-
lent in the post-war years, long before the
Iraq and Afghan wars of the new century
exposed so much human folly, not least in the
world of the secret services.
Walton does not shy away from cataloguing
the torture, illegal detentions and summary
executions carried out in the closing years of
British rule in Malaya and Kenya. He exposes
the cynicism with which the secret intelligence
service (MI6) cooperated with the CIA in
bringing the Shah of Iran to power in the
early 1950s not for the sake of any future
democratic spring in the Middle East but in
order to protect Western economic interests
and to get one up on the Soviets. He does,
though, fall into the self-protective state of
denial that spies themselves often sink into
when he argues that the brutality perpetrated
by British agents was largely the result of
army officers and police ignoring MI5 guide-
lines on softer interrogation techniques that
dated back to the Second World War. This is
Walton at his least convincing. Given the scale
of the officially sanctioned repression against
alleged terrorists and anti-colonial sympa-
thisers, it is hard not to believe that MI5s
complicity in torture was far greater than this
book suggests.
The full scope and scale of the British double
agent Kim Philbys work for the Soviet Union,
and the depth of its infiltration of MI5 and
MI6, remain to be told, as does the full story
behind British intelligence successes and fail-
ures in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq
and Afghanistan. But this is on balance a well-
documented, courageous and incisive first
book by an author who has inhabited the real
world of intelligence rather than a James
Bond fantasy, during a critical period in
Britains history. Even if the spies do not
emerge covered in glory, Empire of Secrets is
required reading for spy watchers and those
interested in the unravelling of the Empire
and its aftermath.
OUR REVIEWERS
Jimmy Burns is the author of Papa Spy: a true
story of love, wartime espionage in Madrid, and
the treachery of the Cambridge spies.
Julia Langdonis a political journalist.
David Platzer is a freelance writer and
journalist living between London and Paris.
Edmund Campion is a Sydney priest.
Terry Philpot is the author of 31 London
Cemeteries to Visit Before You Die, to be
published in May.
Mau Mau suspects detained
in a prison camp. Officials in
Whitehall may have known
more about instances of
torture of Mau Mau
suspects by security forces
than was previously
supposed
18
|
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6 April 2013
Redemptorist Publications will endeavour to sell you the book at the price
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THE TABLET BOOKSHOP
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Chawton, Hampshire GU34 3HQ
Keeper of the flame
In the Corridors of Power:
an autobiography
David Lipsey
BITEBACK, 312PP, 25
Tablet bookshop price 22.50 Tel 01420 592974
T
he title is, of course, an irresistible steal
from C.P. Snow, who used the phrase
first in 1956 in his book Homecomings. By
the time he borrowed it for the title of his
later novel, Corridors of Power had already
become a clich. But, as Snow pointed
out,If a man hasnt the right to his own
clich, who has?
Snows fictional hero was in the Cabinet,
in the front line and in the room, rather
than the corridor. David Lipsey does make
it into the room from time to time, but this
is really a memoir as seen from the
corridors, even though Lipsey has now been
rewarded for a career on the political
sidelines with a seat in the House of Lords
and membership of a host of wholly worthy,
if largely unproductive, public bodies,
commissions and well-intentioned
inquiries.
And Lipsey does not pretend to any
personal role in changing the face of
Britain, despite having been probably one
of the first special advisers to government
ministers, and thus having helped create
what has become a new political class. He
shares with Snow a charming ability to be
self-deprecating, his political life having
been spent almost entirely in the shadow of
his mentor, Tony Crosland, and, after
Croslands tragic early death, in the
continuing shadow of his memory. Try this:
In The Future of SocialismCrosland had
erected a towering castle. The rest of his life
was devoted to defending it against all
comers, Lipsey writes, before adding: I
suppose much the same was true of my own
writings, though it was less a case of a
towering castle and more of a flimsy
palisade.
Its an amusing read, particularly
entertaining for a bit of score-settling. He
supplies delightful and gossipy pen
portraits of life in the largely forgotten
cushioned comforts of the trade-union
movement in the 1970s, when the research
staff, all well-educated middle-class
academics on their way to distinction in
their fields, held a regular competition for
The Keeper of the Cloth Cap, and of the
social life of the social democratic wing of
the Labour Party. Lipsey ruefully attributes
his failure to secure a job with Roy Jenkins
in his youth to having despatched his hosts
croquet ball to a far flower bed at East
Hendred. A child of the croquet-playing
classes himself, Lipsey records: I had yet to
learn the art of losing deliberately.
And theres another link to Snow. Lipsey,
as a speech writer, claims authorship of
three seminal phrases that, like the
corridors of power, have passed into the
political vernacular: the party is over, of
local government spending; the winter of
discontent, which he allegedly
appropriated (no doubt hoping to evoke the
prospect of a glorious summer) when
briefing James Callaghan; and, yes, New
Labour. He quotes from an early article:
Labour needed somehow to symbolise the
fact that it had changed The word new
would do no harm. He disagreed, however,
with what the Blair Government did with
the phrase. Why? Because his hero Crosland
wouldnt have liked it. Julia Langdon
BACK IN THE BOOKSHOPS
A star is reborn
Carnival
Compton Mackenzie
JOHN MURRAY, 528PP, 9.99
Tablet bookshop price 9 Tel 01420 592974
The Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett
Compton Mackenzie
JOHN MURRAY, 608PP, 9.99
Tablet bookshop price 9 Tel 01420 592974
A
century ago, Compton Mackenzies
Carnival, published in 1912, was the
book to read. Mackenzie, born to an acting
family, possessed perfect pitch in accents of
different classes and nationalities. The
young fashionable set, soon to be ravaged in
the First World War, adopted Jenny Pearls
Cockney slang and the book and its
successor, Sinister Street, led to Mackenzie
being hailed by Henry James and Edmund
Gosse as the coming literary talent of the
day.
Carnival remained popular for years
afterwards before disappearing, its last
appearance in print a 1961 Panther
paperback. Now, at long last, here it is again,
together with The Adventures of Sylvia
Scarlett, another early Mackenzie gem.
Henry James described Carnival as all
roses and sweet champagne and young
love. Jenny Pearl is a ballet girl in a
Piccadilly music hall. Her instinct tells her
that men are walking cigarettes and the
dirtiest rotters on earth. Nevertheless, she
falls in love with Maurice Avery, who
appears again in Mackenzies Sinister
Street. The two are fundamentally
mismatched by class and by temperament.
Maurice is a handsome dilettante, his
charm sometimes marred by a spoilt child's
capricious petulance; Jenny, though
plucky, is entirely uneducated and still
unformed. We learn that freedom was
Jennys religion; Mackenzie hints that
Catholicism might have moved her had
someone introduced it to her.
Everything goes well for a time until
Maurices attempts to press Jenny into
becoming his mistress, and her reluctance
to agree, sour the relationship. Such
frankness about matters sexual was then
daring in English literature. In painting
this star-crossed love, Mackenzie shows
here, as he will again three years later in
Guy and Pauline, an acute sense of how
one fatal slip can prove the turning point
after which love is forever lost.
The Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett,
picaresque and Dickensian in its variety of
comical characters, is shorn of the lyrical
lushness found in earlier Mackenzie novels.
Jenny Pearls freedom is hampered by her
working-class family. Sylvia Scarlett, by
contrast, is free of family and even of class.
A failed marriage is followed by all kinds of
adventures, including becoming the toast
of London, singing in a one-woman show.
No longer a star, Sylvia finds herself
working in a seedy cabaret in Russia when
war breaks out in 1914. The world has
suddenly changed into a maze of red tape
unknown to the comparatively carefree
pre-1914 Europe. In the middle of all this
turmoil, Sylvia begins to move towards
Catholicism.
D.H. Lawrence described The Adventures
of Sylvia Scarlett as so like life, praise that
goes for Carnival too. John Murray
deserves applause for reissuing these two
forgotten masterpieces, neither of which
has lost its freshness and sparkle.
David Platzer
6 April 2013
|
THE TABLET
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19
Rubbing shoulders
with Ratzinger
A Midlife Journey
Gerald OCollins SJ
GRACEWING, 442PP, 15.99
Tablet bookshop price 14.40 Tel 01420 592974
T
he Jesuit theologian Gerald OCollins
is well known to readers of The Tablet.
A frequent contributor to these pages, he
has put his name to some 60 books and
has now published this first volume of his
autobiography. Written over four decades,
it covers his growth through an Australian
boyhood, his becoming a Jesuit and
maturation as a theologian until he is
offered a post at Romes Gregorian
University. He would teach there for 32
fertile years, which may well be the subject
of a subsequent volume.
He was not always the man we know
today. Son of a rock-solid Catholic family,
with one uncle a bishop, another a
missionary, and another a secular priest,
Gerald OCollins absorbed
Counter-Reformation Catholicism as
easily as he did the bush air where he grew
up. Educated by Jesuits, he entered the
society after a year at Melbourne
University.
Acute readers may notice that he calls
the chapter on his early experience as a
Jesuit scholastic Seven Years Hard. Still,
the society enabled him to return to the
university, where he excelled in classics, a
good foundation for his theological
studies.
Priested in 1963, Fr OCollins was
observant, scrupulous, even somewhat
rigid a by-the-book priest. As he
matured, however, he came to see that
priesthood meant he should reveal more of
himself to people and so enter into the real
concerns of their lives. Cambridge, where
he spent a big part of the Vatican II years
working for a PhD, was decisive. It helped
him to find and express his real self and
gave him welcoming colleagues in the
international theological world.
He did not turn his back on the Jesuits;
indeed, one of the signal successes of A
Midlife Journey is that it is a reliable
account of the Jesuit mystique. Someone
said of Gerald OCollins that he put down
roots fast and it is noticeable that
wherever he goes, he finds a ready
camaraderie with fellow Jesuits, whether
in India, Campion Hall or Boston.
Behind his writing sits a well-kept diary;
but, unlike other memoirists, OCollins
does not allow his diary to weigh down
and sink the narrative with a constant
ticking off of names, dates and facts. There
are some big names here but, Protestant
and Catholic, they are here as necessary
parts of his story. Students of theology will
enjoy meeting them in this setting.
Joseph Ratzinger is the biggest name of
all. In Tbingen, where OCollins liked to
go during the Cambridge long vacation,
they lived next door to each other. Friendly
but somewhat reserved, the future Pope
could be found at long lunches in a local
restaurant with his graduate students.
Unlike some of the local professors,
writes OCollins, he never seemed too big
for his boots. Quiet on the street, he spoke
with energetic authority in a lecture hall: a
man not at all afraid to nail his colours to
the mast, according to OCollins.
The years after Vatican II were turbulent
times, when teaching stints in the United
States exposed OCollins to some of the
turbulence. He got to know people who
wrote their own Mass texts and tried out
experimental liturgies, priests and nuns
who demonstrated in the streets for justice
and Catholics whose respect for authority
was being qualified. One anecdote tells a
broad story: demonstrating against
brutality in a US prison, Fr OCollins (in
clericals) was shouted at by a passing
motorist, What the hell do you think you
are doing, Father? Are you a proper priest,
who would get up and give me the last
sacraments at three in the morning?
Knowing his Australian accent would
betray him as a foreigner, the priest kept
silent. Then behind him another Jesuit (in
mufti) shouted back, Why dont you sell
your Cadillac and give the money to the
poor?
The turbulence of the post-Vatican II
decade destabilised many, emptying
convents and presbyteries. Gerald
OCollins challenge came at Cambridge
where he met a young American woman
whose smile touched him in an
unexpected way. As he finished his PhD
she became more important in his life. His
confusion was mixed with the possibility of
staying on at Cambridge as a divinity
lecturer. This was a crossroad in his life,
demanding mature judgement and
self-analysis; he chose the harder option
but there is no doubt that he knew what he
was giving up. Now he tells this sensitive
story with honesty and courage.
Such qualities make A Midlife Journey a
welcome addition to the crowded shelf of
recent clerical biographies. One looks
forward to its sequel.
Edmund Campion
Elegy to a church
The Undelivered Mardle: a memoir
of belief, doubt and delight
John Rogers
DARTON, LONGMAN AND TODD, 160PP, 12.99
Tablet bookshop price 11.70 Tel 01420 592974
F
ew more eloquent places exist than an
English rural parish church. They
speak not only of a peculiarly English past
but also, as John Rogers asserts, of the
people who from ancient times have come
to kneel to find the meaning of life, as
distinct from purpose, and to express their
attachment to that which is beyond
themselves.
There are few churches more evocative of
this than those of Suffolk, where they range
from hidden, small, lonely and ancient
ones, like Letheringham, to Blythburgh, the
great cathedral of the marshes, all set in
the flat and comparatively still unspoiled
landscape of Ronald Blythes Akenfield.
Rogers was due to deliver a mardle a
talk of local interest at St Marys,
Letheringham, when he was felled by a heart
attack.
This book is that mardle, greatly
expanded; discursive, informed by what
happened to him, considering the church,
its history (and pre-history) and those who
have
passed
through
its doors,
and
asking
why far
fewer do
so today.
St
Marys is
800 years
old, built
by the
monks as
an outpost
of the rich
abbey at
Ipswich 10 miles to the south, sequestered
during the Reformation, and despoiled by
the Commonwealth. It is set amid ruins and
farms that have appeared as woodland has
receded. There are 65 people 16 on the
roll in a parish of 12,000 acres, which
shares a priest with six other parishes.
Rogers writes movingly about hymns,
arguing that they may express faith better
than creedal statements. His book is a
delight, a provocation, an evocation. He is
just the sort of intelligent, informed, deeply
feeling man, who would hold ones attention
all afternoon were one lucky enough to
meet him on a visit to Letheringham or
any other church. Terry Philpot
Gerald
OCollins:
he gives a
reliable
account of
the Jesuit
mystique
20
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6 April 2013
ARTS
RICK JONES
mong the three Russian represen-
tatives at Pope Francis
in aug uration was the conductor
Valery Gergiev in his official role
as artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre
in St Petersburg. The guest list reflected the
new Popes interests, one of which is music.
Gergievs other job is principal conductor of
the London Symphony Orchestra and he was
to be found interpreting the Brahms Requiem
with the players last weekend. I spoke to him
in his dressing room during a break in
rehearsal, standing up because he was wearing
formal attire for a French film and did not
want to bend his starched waistcoat. I ask
whether he played any active role in Rome
and he makes a gesture of prayer to indi-
cate the silent reverence in which he
attended the papal enthronement.
I think this is a man for changes in
the Roman Catholic Church, Gergiev
says sotto voce, as if revealing a confi-
dence. A minion puts on a recording of
Szymanowskis Stabat Mater for
research purposes quietly; in the back-
ground, please. The maestro is one of
the great multi-taskers. His example
is modesty, humility, involvement. We
all long for changes in our lives, we all
hope, but here I think is someone to
deliver. This is from my observation. It
is an impression.
Gergiev is Russian Orthodox by background
and heritage and it was the Moscow patriar-
chate that proposed him. I ask him how his
own faith affected his attitude to the papacy.
We are a brotherhood, he says, stretching
out his arms demonstratively. We embrace
in Christianity. I think this Pope, this leader,
this holy sage, is one to heal divisions. He too
is an outsider. I think he will concentrate on
the fundamental things, on love, on sacrifice.
Talk of sages and sacrifice is pertinent as
Gergiev is to conduct the centenary perform-
ance of Stravinskys Rite of Spring in Paris
next month. Hence the French film crew at
the rehearsal. With an eye to symmetry, the
Theatre des Champs Elyses, where the cel-
ebrated premiere took place on a sweltering
29 May, 1913, has booked the same date for
a re-enactment of the ballet with, as before,
Russian artists Gergiev conducts the
Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra in place of
Diaghilevs Ballets Russes but without the
shouts and fisticuffs. Some say the violence
was caused by incomprehension, but on the
contrary, the audience understood the music
all too well and reacted out of anxiety for the
forces that were being unleashed.
I ask Gergiev what this most thrilling of
twentieth-century scores means to him and
whether he senses in its powerful reiteration
of folk tunes some haunting reference to his
homeland of Ossetia, in the Caucasus. I am
close to this work, he says, but there are
many who can say the same. I do not think
it is about Ossetia, or Scythia, or other parts
of Russia but it is about Stravinskys view of
the pagan, the pre-Christian. The Western
titles miss the religious element in the work.
In Russian it is Vesna Svyashchennaya, Holy
Spring. It celebrates the savage energy of
nature and links it to ancient priestly rituals
which many in the concert hall found too
much, too frightening. You see, it is a work
of great fear. Fear of God. Fear of nature. Fear
in the audience for the future.
Yet the Russian provenance of many of the
tunes stirs the maestro who was born in
Moscow but grew up in the land of his fore-
fathers. The music has great theatre, great
drama, of time and place, scene and ritual. I
think Ossetia, for example, is still pagan today,
he says and, sensing my alarm, adds, in some
places, some far corners. He tells me his
maternal grandfather lived to 106 and lived
at a time when they still would bring a spring
lamb to kill for sacrifice.
Whether or not the sacrifice is for a
Christian deity seems immaterial. It is the
brutality of the moment which impresses.
After all, Christianity can hardly place itself
above the barbarity of the blood sacrifice as
the Old Testament is full of it and Christ him-
self is portrayed in these terms. The work not
only points towards the awesome future, it
also reminds us of our past. I see my grand-
father in the music of the Sage, he says. I ask
him if he means the seven bar stretch that
ends with a chord rich in harmonics of
uncanny beauty, a moment of insight in
the score, and he assents with a wink.
And before that the two stumbling con-
trafagotti double bassoons, he says.
What could be more like an old man!
But it is not a lamb they slay; its a
young girl, who dances herself to death.
This is truly horrifying, says Gergiev.
Why does she die? Why does she dance
to death? Is there willingness in her self-
sacrifice? Is she acting nobly on societys
behalf? Or is this child abuse, which is
the defining sin of our age? These
unknown questions are part of the fas-
cination of the work.
Stravinsky touched a nerve and it is no coin-
cidence that the opposing forces seen in
microcosm among the audience that day,
worked themselves out bloodily on the world
stage over the following four years. So much
for those who thought Western civilisation
above slaughter. Soon the original choreog-
raphy was forgotten, its creator Nijinsky
mentally ill and living in South America. The
score came to be performed more often as a
concert piece than as a ballet. In 1987, however,
an attempt was made to re-create Nijinskys
original by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth
Archer, and it is their evocation which will
pass for authentic next month in Paris. No
one can know, says Gergiev somewhat dis-
missively. Most conductors prefer to conduct
ballet scores without the ballet. Even the great-
est corps can never fully muffle the sound of
a human being landing on the floor.
OF RITES AND RITUALS
Valery Gergiev is a formidable force in Russian music: distinguished conductor, confidante of
Vladimir Putin and artistic director of the worlds greatest lyric theatre. Last weekend our
music critic met him in London
A
Valery Gergiev: I think this Pope, this
holy sage, is one to heal divisions
CINEMA
Closing movement
A Late Quartet
DIRECTOR: YARON ZILBERMAN
A
quirk of cinema distribution means that
two feature films about professional
musical foursomes come along within a few
months. Quartet, directed by Dustin Hoffman,
was a pleasant if underpowered entertainment
about retired British opera singers that was
notable for its strong cast. Its main purpose
was to touch and amuse. A Late Quartet, how-
ever, is an altogether more ambitious project
about a string ensemble in New York, a close
group thrown into crisis by the illness (and
imminent retirement) of Peter, the cellist
who holds everything together, both musi-
cally and emotionally.
It begins with a concert performance
of Beethoven. It is the kind of perform-
ance that a Woody Allen character might
attend: the emphasis here may be all on
the players but the betrayals and misun-
derstandings have something of his light
and shade. Cool perfectionist Daniel
is the quartets first violinist; he is
play the husband and wife, Mark Ivanir broods
as Daniel, young British actress Imogen Poots
ably keeps up with the band as the daughter,
Alexandra and even the supporting roles are
taken by screen presences as strong as Wallace
Shawn and Madhur Jaffrey.
But as Peter, it is Christopher Walken who
soars. After years of playing weirdos and psy-
chopaths (a fact humorously acknowledged
in Martin McDonaghs Seven Psychopaths)
he is here cast as a dedicated artist who suffers
yet also manages to be a wise and generous
friend. This could be an implausibly virtuous
role, even antiseptic, yet it convinces. It may
in fact be more persuasive precisely because
we know of Walkens screen tendency for
volatility, just as all those crazed maniacs were
also enriched and made believable by his
underlying sensitivity.
The ability to reconcile contradictory forces
is also essential to the power of the music and
it is here that A Late Quartet excels. The sto-
ryline cannot, despite the cast, altogether
avoid mawkish moments but the evocation
of the musical process is deft and moving.
When the last movement arrives, its emotion
is deserved.
Christopher Walken has just
turned 70. This is no bad
way to celebrate his
career so far, while
hoping for more
roles of this stature
ahead. Francine Stock
also tutor to the promising 22-year-old who
is the daughter of Juliette (viola) and Robert
(second violin). The retirement of one member
will affect the whole ensemble. How will the
dynamic change? Will weakness be exposed?
Should a man play second fiddle for ever? Is
it possible during a long unbroken passage
of playing for all four players to harmonise,
given that they will each in their own way fall
out of tune?
We know these are the issues because at
various points in the narrative the characters
are each given a speech to develop their theme,
rather in the manner of music for a string
quartet. This makes for a film that seems
rather formal in composition (musical
metaphors are inevitable, even when describ-
ing it) but director Yaron Zilberman, whose
previous work has been in doc-
umentary, has such a
powerful cast that it is no
ordeal. Philip Seymour
Hoffman and Catherine
Keener
6 April 2013
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21
This is extreme opera: everyday banali-
ties set to the music of the characters
profound weirdness, PAGE 22
Imogen Poots as Alexandra in
A Late Quartet
RADIO
From the awkward
squad
Great Lives
BBC RADIO 4
I
t is a mark of the intelligence that Matthew
Parris brings to his long-running Great
Lives franchise that the opening instalment
of its new series (2 April) should operate both
as informed biographical excursus and gen-
uine moral debate. Parris subject was Bishop
George Bell (1883-1958), who famously rose
to his feet in the House of Lords in 1944 to
denounce the saturation bombing of Nazi
Germany. The nominating celebrity was the
journalist Peter Hitchens, and what followed
seemed quite as relevant to the military coun-
sels of the twenty-first century as to the
deliberations of Churchills war cabinet.
Bells speech, the latest salvo in a sustained
campaign in defence of German civilians in
against the people he or she is venerating.
Parris, who conducted this part of the endeav-
our with immense skill, began with the war
is not a cricket match argument and the idea
that an enemy has to be an enemy or wars
may not be won. He then moved on to the
putative opinions that Bell might have held
about modern warfare, its drones, stealth-
bombers and collateral damage. Hitchens
conceded that these views would doubtless
have been inconvenient, but inconvenience
and the ability to cry unregarded in the
wilderness, were all part of the prophets job.
Surely, Parris went on, the readers of the
Mail on Sunday would side with Churchill,
while tapping a responsive toe to Noel Cowards
1943 number Dont Lets Be Beastly to the
Germans which contains a withering line
about sending some bishops over as part of
lend lease? Again, Hitchens admitted that
they probably would. If the Church of England
had forfeited most of its moral authority by
way of its cheer-leading in the Great War, he
maintained, then the Second World War had
finished it off: the symbolic value of an awk-
ward-squad contrarian like Bishop Bell could
not be overstated. D.J. Taylor
working-class areas who in all probability had
voted against Hitler, was widely criticised
even by his fellow-bishops, appalled Churchill,
and is supposed to have denied him the chance
of succeeding William Temple as Archbishop
of Canterbury. And the biographical garnishes
brought to the table by Parris expert witness,
Andrew Chandler of the George Bell Institute,
quickly established how absolutely in keeping
these remarks were with the kind of clergyman
that Bell imagined himself to be.
Scholar of Westminster and Christ Church,
Oxford, disciple of Archbishop Davidson, an
almost quintessential Edwardian divine an
archive recording from 1957 made him sound
pretty Edwardian, too he belonged to a cler-
ical generation that took social and political
problems with immense seriousness. By the
early 1930s, he was a leading light of the ecu-
menical movement and an active supporter
of German church opposition to Hitler. He
was so close to Bonhoeffer, in fact, that he
contrived a meeting with him in neutral
Sweden in 1942 and was kept in touch with
the various assassination plots.
A feature of the Great Lives format is that
certain of the guests opinions are weighed
ments careering about at the
extremes of instrumental envelopes
for example, two horns trilling at
the top of their range for 30 seconds.
Vast phalanxes of brass march about
in parallel harmonies, the entire
orchestra takes an excursion from
the bottom of its range to the top
and back again; its not exactly easy
listening, though again it feels
exactly right for the material.
Performances of this incredibly
demanding music were superlative,
from conductor Tito Muozs con-
trol of the wild score to singers
prepared to push their voices
beyond the limits.
The best literary operas Figaro, The Turn
of the Screw edit their sources more or less
savagely (Barry chucks out about two-thirds
of the text) and add, through music, something
completely new that honours the original
while revealing things about it you never knew
before. This may not be Figaro, but with its
exhilaration and brilliant sophistication worn
with raucous joy, it certainly joins that happy
band.
Robert Thicknesse
22
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6 April 2013
The Importance of Being Earnest: exhilaration
and brilliant sophistication worn with raucous joy
plates. Then they shoot each other, playing
out the rest of the opera as undead. When
Chasuble bemoans the cancellation of the
christenings the entire cast begins to wail and
yelp like tormented sea lions. Lady Bracknell
(a bass, naturally, marvellously performed by
Alan Ewing) drops into German at the slight-
est provocation and launches into a Hitlerian
rant on the subject of how chins are being
worn this season.
Musically it rampages around, the instru-
TELEVISION
Breach of trust
Hillsborough: Never Forgotten
BBC2
F
or a while, it seemed as though the
Hillsborough disaster of 1989 would fol-
low the same trajectory as most other great
national tragedies: shock; mourning; an
inquiry followed by legal action, blame and
recommendations; a slow healing; a fading
into history.
Hillsborough, however, has not turned out
like that. Increasingly, the disaster, in which
96 Liverpool football fans were crushed to
death, has caused a major fracture in the trust
between ordinary people and the Estab -
lishment. Hillsborough: Never Forgotten (3
April) recounted the causes of that loss of
trust, the pain and bitterness it has left, and
the efforts that have been made to establish
the real truth about what happened that day.
At the centre of those efforts has been the
Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones.
For 20 years, relatives of those who died, and
survivors of the disaster, believed that they
had been blamed for the disaster. They
insisted that police dishonesty and failures
by the emergency services had been covered
up. They resented that false stories, of fans
rifling the bodies of the dying, had been pub-
lished by The Sun. Jones heard this sense of
grievance, kept alive by a families support
group, and agreed to head an independent
panel of inquiry.
People were saying, Whats a bishop doing,
chairing a panel like this? he recalled. If
police, press, politicians, judiciary come under
scrutiny, who does society turn to at that
moment; what institution can they turn to
that has some respect within the community?
He was warned, he said, that it might be a
poisoned chalice, because the family members
might turn on him if his inquiry did not give
them the result they wanted.
It did not turn out that way. The panel found
police falsification of evidence, exonerated
fans from blame and, most shockingly, sug-
gested that 41 of the fans might have lived if
proper efforts had been made to resuscitate
them. When he revealed its findings at the
gargantuan Anglican cathedral, two of the
bereaved came to the podium in thanks.
This film was not a narrative of the disaster:
that was brilliantly done in Jimmy McGoverns
1996 docudrama. Instead, it gave us the
accounts of witnesses, a police officer coerced
to disown her statement of the time and
grieving parents. It was a passionate, one-
sided affair, with an coldly angry voice-over
written by film-maker Kevin Sim.
At one point, the story slipped sideways
into an account of Liverpools sufferings in
the 1980s, when it was dubbed the Bermuda
Triangle of British capitalism. This, it was
suggested, led to the bad reputation of
Liverpudlians, and to the blaming of the fans
for their own deaths. All this came close to
what you might call Liverpudlian exception-
alism: the idea that residents of that city are,
on the one hand, particularly witty and tal-
ented and, on the other, particularly hard
done by. Would football fans from any other
city, crushed to death one Saturday afternoon
in the presence of a panicky, inept, self-pro-
tective police force, really have been treated
any differently? I doubt it.
John Morrish
Sunday 7 April 2013
Mass Times:
Vigil: Saturday 6pm
Sunday: 8am, 9.30am (Family Mass),
11am (sung Latin),
Hassler, Bruckner, Philips, Bach
12.30pm, 4.15pm, 6.15pm
www.farmstreet.org.uk
JESUIT CHURCH
FARM STREET, MAYFAIR
OPERA
Wilde extremes
The Importance of Being Earnest
OPRA NATIONALE DE LORRAINE, NANCY
A
s we know, Oscar Wildes comedy opens
with the butler pouring tea while
Algernon tinkles upon the piano. Atomised
in the imagination of Irish composer Gerald
Barry, this becomes a wild, atonal crashing
dimly recognisable as Auld Lang Syne; direc-
tions in the score are equally alarming:
Frenzy! Bombs! Under Fire! Lightning!
Feverish!
Welcome to Barrys brilliantly mad inven-
tion: this was the first stage outing for his fifth
opera (a new staging comes belatedly to Covent
Gardens Linbury Theatre in June). Barrys
comedy-nightmare vision is a marvellous hom-
age that produces something violently different
and spiritually precisely in tune with a play
whose jovial surface conceals a commentary
on appetite for food, sex, money double
lives and much besides: Algys Bunburying
was very much a part of Oscars life, too. Barrys
characters are far beyond the brink of nervous
breakdowns: they are like shell-shocked sur-
vivors of a Rossini finale, their minds shot to
pieces. Caught in a whirlwind, they yell at each
other over the storm, ostensibly discussing
tea but actually unburdening souls under con-
siderable stress. This is extreme opera:
everyday banalities set to the music of the
characters profound weirdness.
Sam Browns staging sets the piece amid
cosy Woosterish stereotypes of aunts, gad-
abouts and flittery girls, a few decades later
than Wilde. Astonishing, pervasive greed is
emphasised by its being set on a vast three-
tiered tea-tray, and neurotic eating is the
leitmotif of a work that introduces previously
unknown, existential angst into the choice
between crumpet, muffin, tea-cake and bread-
and-butter. But you dont need to delve to
enjoy this: Barrys eye and ear for outrageous
comedy is as untrammelled as the implacable
muse that furiously drives everything else.
Jack and Algy make christening appointments
with Canon Chasuble over an orchestral tem-
pest complete with wind-machine. Cecily and
Gwendolen, when their conversation cools
as they find they seem to be engaged to the
same man, squabble through megaphones to
the accompaniment of 48 smashed dinner
THE CHURCH IN THE
WORLD
Church urged to get out of the sacristy
Robert Mickens
In Rome
IN A SERIES of compelling homilies and ges-
tures during his first Holy Week and Easter
as Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis has chal-
lenged Catholics both clergy and people
to be less preoccupied by non-essential rituals
and more focused on being agents of Gods
mercy to the poor, the suffering and those
alienated from the Church.
The mercy of God is always victorious!
the Pope told more than 250,000 people gath-
ered in and around St Peters Square last
Sunday for his Easter morning Mass and
noontime Urbi et Orbi blessing. Let us
become agents of this mercy, channels through
which God can water the earth, protect all
Creation and make justice and peace flourish,
he said from the central balcony of St Peters
Basilica just after the outdoor Mass.
Like his predecessors the Argentinian-born
Pope used his Easter message to appeal for
peace in the worlds troubled regions, includ-
ing the Middle East, Africa and the Korean
Peninsula. However, he discontinued the pre-
vious popes custom of offering Easter
greetings in some 65 languages and, instead,
spoke only in Italian.
Dear brothers and sisters in Rome and
throughout the world, Happy Easter! he said.
It was the last of six ceremonies that the
76-year-old Francis led over the course of four
days, all aimed at commemorating the suf-
fering, death and the Resurrection of Jesus.
Perhaps the most stirring image of Easter day
came after Mass when the Pope, moving
through the square on a jeep, stopped to call
forth a boy with cerebral palsy and cradled
him in his arms.
Let us not be closed to the newness that
God wants to bring into our lives, the Pope
said the night before at the Easter Vigil. In
our lives we are afraid of Gods surprises! he
emphatically told worshippers crowded into
St Peters Basilica for the holiest night on the
Churchs calendar.
Christs Resurrection, he said, brings victory
over sin, evil and death, and over everything
that crushes life and makes it less human.
He urged those who felt estranged from Jesus
or indifferent to him to take a risk and step
forward, promising that they would not be
disappointed. He will receive you with open
arms, the Pope said at the two-and-half-hour-
long liturgy, which was slightly scaled down
but still included the baptism and confirma-
tion of four young men. Let us not close our
hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never
give up, he said. There are no situations God
cannot change and there is no sin he cannot
forgive if we only open ourselves up to him.
Pope Francis made that point even more
poignantly on Maundy Thursday when he
went to a juvenile prison on the outskirts of
Rome to celebrate the Mass of the Lords
Supper. In one of the most moving gestures
of his fledgling pontificate he washed and
kissed the feet of 12 inmates, including two
women. Among them were two Muslims and
other non-Catholics. As a priest and bishop
I have to be at your service and I am so will-
ingly, the Pope told nearly 60 young inmates
at the Casal del Marmo corrections facility.
But you, too, help each other! By helping
each other we will be doing something good!
he said during the emotional visit. Do not
let yourselves be robbed of hope! Keep going
forward, the Pope encouraged them.
The prison visit punctuated the message
Pope Francis gave earlier that morning to
priests at the annual Chrism Mass at St
Peters to bless oils used for anointing
throughout the year. We [priests] need to
go out in order to experience our own
anointing, its power and its efficacy: to the
outskirts where there is suffering, bloodshed,
blindness that longs for sight and prisoners
in thrall to many evil masters, he told some
1,600 priests ministering and studying in
Rome. The Jesuit Pope said a priest who
never puts his own skin and heart on the
line deprived himself of the love and grat-
itude of his people. This is precisely the
reason why some priests grow dissatisfied,
lose heart and become in a sense collectors
of antiques or novelties, instead of being
shepherds that live with the smell of the
sheep, in the midst of their flock, he said.
The Argentinian Pope also presided at the
torchlit Via Crucis on Good Friday night at
Romes Colosseum. Earlier at St Peters
Basilica, he led the Commemoration of Christs
Passion. At that liturgy, the preacher of the
papal household, Capuchin Fr Raniero
Cantalamessa, called for the courage to return
to simpler church structures. He said bureau-
cracy and the residue of past ceremonials,
laws and disputes between various Christian
communities was blocking evangelisation.
Conclave criticism revealed
IT HAS BEENrevealed that, in
meetings held before the conclave
that elected him Pope, Cardinal
Jorge Mario Bergoglio criticised the
Church for being overly
self-referential and theologically
narcissistic, writes Robert Mickens.
The future Pope told his fellow
cardinals the Church needed to
come out of herself to the
existential peripheries where one
fnds the mystery of sin, pain,
injustice, ignorance and lack of
religion, thought and complete
misery.
The future Popes remarks were
revealed at a Mass in Havana on 23
March by Cardinal Jaime Ortega,
who said the former Archbishop of
Buenos Aires had given him a
handwritten copy of the outline of
his pre-conclave talk and, as Pope
Francis, permission to publish it.
The evils that happen in
ecclesial institutions over the course
of time have their root in
self-referentialism and a sort of
theological narcissism, the then
Cardinal Bergoglio told the other
cardinals. The self-referential
Church keeps Jesus inside herself
and does not let him come out.
6 April 2013
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23
POPE FRANCIS has approved the
beatifcation of 58 martyrs of
Spains Civil War in his frst direct
involvement as Pope in the
Vaticans saint-making process,
writes Robert Mickens.
He signed decrees on 27 March
that will allow a Spanish bishop,
three priests and 54 of their
companions killed between 1936
and 1938 by anti-clerical forces to
be declared blessed.
The previous two popes
beatifed nearly 1,000 other
Spanish Martyrs. In the new set of
decrees, Pope Francis also
approved the beatifcation of Fr
Giuseppe Girotti, an Italian
Dominican who died a martyr at
the Nazi concentration camp in
Dachau, and Rolando Rivi, a
seminarian killed by anti-Fascist
partisans in Northern Italy.
The Pope also recognised the
martyrdom of Br Istvn Sndor, a
Hungarian Salesian brother who
was killed in 1953 by Communist
authorities in Budapest. He
similarly decreed that Fr Vladimir
Ghika, a Romanian prince and
priest, died a martyr at the hands
of Communists in Bucharest.
Beatification for 58 martyrs
Pope Francis
pictured as he
delivers his Easter
blessing Urbi et
Orbi at the Vatican
on Sunday. Photo:
CNS/Reuters,
Stefano Rellandini
THE PREFECT of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Gerhard
Ludwig Mller, has insisted that the Churchs
position on liberation theology will not
change following the election of a Latin
American Pope, writes Christa Pongratz-
Lippitt.
Archbishop Mller, was a pupil and is a
longtime friend of the liberation theologian
Gustavo Gutirrez.
The Churchs 1986 declaration on liberation
theology carefully assesses what can be seen
as positive [about it] in the Catholic sense,
Archbishop Mller, told Kathpress.
Liberation theology was about a concrete
commitment to the poor but it must not be
based on a Marxist or atheist concept,
Archbishop Mller said. We must show up
unjust structures and actively combat them
as they diametrically contradict the Christian
image of humanity. No one may be excluded
from the goods of the world and that goes for
the relationship between peoples.
With a thinly veiled reference to relations
between the US and South America, he went
on: We cannot accept that some countries
regard a whole continent as their backyard.
Asked what would now happen to the
Society of St Pius X, Archbishop Mller
recalled that the SSPX had been sent a pre-
amble requiring its members to recognise all
Church Councils including the Second Vatican
Council and all the Churchs teaching that fol-
lowed it.
Signing the preamble was a prerequisite
for reconciliation. Every Pope must insist
that all councils are recognised as an expression
of the highest church Magisterium. Anyone
who does not recognise this is not Catholic,
he explained.
Tom Heneghan
In Paris
TENSIONS OVER religion are mounting in
France as the socialist Government presses
ahead with a promise to loosen embryonic
stem-cell research limits against church oppo-
sition. Meanwhile mostly Catholic activists
have vowed to continue their protests against
plans to legalise same-sex marriage.
The Government has also raised concerns
among the large Muslim minority by signalling
it will tighten laws on lacit, Frances official
secularism, after the constitutional court ruled
a woman was unfairly fired from a private
creche for wearing an Islamic headscarf.
Paris Cardinal Andr Vingt-Trois, head of
the bishops conference, has protested against
a government decision to drop legal restric-
tions on research on embryonic stem cells
without the broad public debate on the issue
stipulated in the last bioethics law in 2011.
The French law, passed after a vigorous
church campaign to limit its scope, allows
such research only on imported embryos not
used for in vitro fertilisation in other countries.
The National Assembly and Senate have
scheduled abbreviated debates on the change
in order to rush through legislation, he said.
In another dispute, the church-backed lay
organisers of two Paris marches of half a mil-
lion protesters against gay marriage say they
plan another demonstration, probably in May,
following the latest one on 24 March.
In a television interview last week, President
Franois Hollande appealed to the activists
to respect the will of parliament as protesters
stood outside the broadcasting centre
demanding he withdraw the draft law.
Civitas, a far-right Catholic group with links
to the Society of St Pius X, announced it would
stage its own protests outside the Senate,
which took up the bill on 4 April.
Muslims expressed concern about a pro-
posed law extending bans on headscarves
until now reserved for the public sector to
private establishments such as creches that
enjoy some state subsidies and effectively
replace public services in some areas.
A survey showed 84 per cent of those polled
supported tighter rules for the creche.
Cardinal Reinhard Marx of
Munich this week insisted that
courtly practices have no
place in the Vatican, since the
Pope is not a monarch, writes
Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.
The successor of St Peter
cannot be a monarch. That
would contradict the Petrine
ofce, he said in an interview
with the German Press Agency
Dpa. The Vatican City State is
not a state in the real sense of
the word but rather a legal
construction to keep the Holy
Father free from all external
infuence, he continued.
Courtly mannerisms are
therefore not appropriate.
One of the basic feelings
among the cardinals when
they were in Rome was that
things in the Vatican would
have to change. He was sure
that under Pope Francis
competences would be
reconsidered so that
responsibility for recent
scandals could be taken. The
VatiLeaks scandal of last year
described power struggles and
a lack of fnancial transparency
in the Roman Curia. Minor
matters such as the Swiss
Guard and Vatican postage
stamps must not be allowed to
obscure what was really
important, namely to talk
about Christ, the cardinal said.
24
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6 April 2013
A six-month survey of more
than 22,000 French last year
showed that only 56 per cent
self-identifed as Catholics,
down from 69 per cent in 2002,
the CSA polling institute said,
writes Tom Heneghan.
In the same period, those
proclaiming no religion rose
from 22 to 32 per cent of the
overall population, rising to 47
per cent of the 18-24 age
group. Two-thirds of practising
Catholics are women and just
under half are over 65 years old,
the survey said. CSA estimated
the total of Catholics in France
dropped by 4.2 million
between 2001 and 2012, from
30.7 to 26.5 million.
The proportion of Catholics
among adults could fall under
the symbolic 50 per cent level
during the next 10 years,
pollster Yves-Marie Cann said.
It is probable that the no
religion group will constitute
the largest group in the next 20
to 30 years.
At the same time, church
fgures showed adult baptisms
this year rose to 3,220 from
2,958 last year.
Government clashes with religions
FRANCE
IN THE FIRST major appointment of his
pontificate, Pope Francis has named one of
his closest former aides Bishop Mario
Aurelio Poli to succeed him as Archbishop
of Buenos Aires, writes Robert Mickens.
The 65-year-old prelate was an auxiliary
bishop of the archdiocese for six years
under then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio before
being named ordinary of the Diocese of
Santa Rosa in 2008. Archbishop-elect Poli,
a native of Buenos Aires, has degrees in law
and social service and a doctorate in
theology. His appointment was announced
on 27 March in Rome and Buenos Aires
just two weeks after Francis election.
Meanwhile, newspapers in Buenos Aires,
are anticipating a December visit from Pope
Francis. El Clarn, the countrys largest
daily, said last week that it understood from
church sources that the Pope would delay
the visit to avoid a clash with legislative
elections, the first round of which are in
August and the second in October.
It has also been decided that he will not
combine a visit to Argentina with his trip to
Brazil for World Youth Day in July, as the
Church wants to encourage young people
from Argentina to go to Brazil. The
proposed visit to Argentina could take in
Chile and Uruguay, according to the paper.
GERMANY
No change on liberation theology
ARGENTINA
Francis names former
aide as Archbishop
of Buenos Aires
6 April 2013
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25
PERU
EGYPTIAN AUTHORITIES have been
accused of failing to protect the countrys
Copts in the face of attacks on Christian prop-
erty and enforced closures of businesses in a
town south of Cairo, writes Michael Gunn.
Protests erupted in Wasta, 100 kilometres
from the capital, in February after a Muslim
girl was reported missing and ultra-conser-
vative Salafi Islamists blamed a local church
for persuading her to convert to Christianity.
The church denies the charge.
Taking to the streets, some Muslims called
for the womans return, chanting let the
Christian die from fear and she returns or
[the Copts] leave, according to a statement
from Amnesty International. The situation
escalated when Salafists forced Christian busi-
nesses in the town to close and used violence
against anyone who resisted. Residents said
security forces failed to intervene, with police
stations refusing to acknowledge events. Only
when a group of men threw Molotov cocktails
inside a church, starting a fire, did authorities
step in, Amnesty said. No arrests were made.
A reconciliation meeting between Muslim
and Christian communities was held in late
March. Copts, however, have been warned of
dire consequences if the allegedly missing
woman does not return by 24 April.
Time and time again, President Mursi
claimed to be president of all Egyptians,
Amnestys Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui said. Now,
he needs to take action to ensure that sectarian
violence is prevented.
Cipriani requests
pardon for
Fujimori
UGANDA: On Easter Sunday
Catholic Archbishop Cyprian
Lwanga of Kampala apologised
to Ugandans who may have
fallen victim to sexual
misconduct by priests, writes
Fredrick Nzwili. The
archbishops apology followed
allegations by a Catholic priest
that some bishops and priests
had broken the celibacy vow,
and had fathered children.
Fr Anthony Musaala of
Kampala Diocese, who has since
been suspended, made the
allegations in a 12 March letter
circulated widely on the
internet. It called for the
abolition of celibacy within the
Church, saying it was more
forced than consented to.
It is sad there has been
misbehaving we apologise
to those who may have fallen
victim of what happened, but I
assure you the Church is doing
its duty and we dont give up
hope,Archbishop Lwanga told
journalists. He said anecdotes
about sexual exploits by some
priests were correct, but their
indiscretions were not
condoned by the Church.
THE ARCHBISHOPof Lima has pressed
Perus President to make up his mind over
whether to pardon the disgraced former
President Alberto Fujimori, writes Isabel
de Bertodano.
In a message to Ollanta Humala,
Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani said it was
time for a decision on the future of Mr
Fujimori, who is in prison and suffering
from ill health.
The pardon was requested long enough
ago for a decision to have been made,
Cardinal Cipriani told the Peruvian
newspaper Correo, adding that the
division created by terrorism will not end
until we have some reconciliation and
forgiveness.
Mr Fujimori, who is serving a 25-year jail
sentence for corruption and human-rights
offences, was president of Peru from 1990
to 2000. His family requested an official
pardon in October last year, citing his
deteriorating health following several
operations on a mouth tumor thought to be
cancerous. However, a recent medical
report found that his life was not at risk.
We should not hide behind the medical
report and the minister of justice, said
Cardinal Cipriani in the interview last
weekend.
Mr Fujimori, who is now 74, oversaw a
bloody conflict betweenMaoist insurgents
and the Peruvian military during the
1990s. Cardinal Cipriani was Archbishop
of Ayacucho at the time and the indigenous
population of his diocese was caught in the
crossfire. The cardinal, a member of Opus
Dei, has been criticised in Peru for his open
support of the Fujimori regime, though he
denies that this compromised his moral
authority and judgements.
In elections held in Peru in 2011, Keiko
Fujimori, daughter of the former president,
narrowly lost the vote.
Meanwhile, Cardinal Cipriani also said
that he hoped Pope Francis would
intervene in the dispute over the university
formerly known as the Pontifical Catholic
University of Peru. The Vatican withdrew
the titles Catholic and Pontifical last
year after long-running tensions over the
way it is managed. I hope that he will be
able to help us to ensure that the Catholic
University of Lima does not continue to
move away from the Church, he said. We
must hope that it can be freed from the
group which has taken control of it.
In the same interview, the cardinal
commented on the absence of Mr Humala
from the inauguration of Pope Francis last
month. Maybe nobody let him know how
important this moment was for Latin
America, said the cardinal.
Sarah Mac Donald
THE NATIONAL director of the Zimbabwe
Peace Project, a non-profit organisation that
monitors political violence in the southern
African state, has welcomed the countrys new
draft constitution and particularly its women-
friendly provisions.
However, Jestina Mukoko also warned that
all the constitutions provisions must be fully
implemented. It is my hope and dream that
this new constitution will be implemented to
the letter and spirit. But it remains to be seen
if all the proposals are fully carried forward,
she said.
Zimbabwes new draft constitution was
approved by 95 per cent of the three million
voters who participated in the 16 March poll.
One provision sets a limit of two five-year
terms on the presidency. It also guarantees
freedom of expression and belief; forbids all
forms of torture and requires the state to
ensure access to shelter, health education,
food and legal aid for its citizens as well as
addressing some of the discriminatory cultural
practices towards women.
Speaking toThe Tablet inDublin, the former
journalist who founded the Zimbabwe Peace
Project (ZPP) 13 years ago with the help of
human-rights and faith-based organisations,
including the Zimbabwe Catholic Commission
for Justice and Peace, said the ZPP really
sense that our work is not liked by the system.
It is proving difficult for us to operate because
we are touching on very sensitive issues in
talking about political violence.
In 2008, when Ms Mukoko was detained
for three months by state security over her
monitoring of abuses by the Mugabe regime,
the levels of political violence spiked. However,
since 2010 we have seen the levels go down
significantly. Last year, incidents of political
violence averaged 300 to 500 a month.
Ms Mukoko, who is a 2009 Laureate of the
Weimar Human Rights Prize and a 2010
recipient of the US Secretary of States
International Women of Courage Award,
warned that the ZPP was also concerned about
the way that food was being used as a tool of
coercion by particular political parties.
While people are being told that every
Zimbabwean has a right to get humanitarian
aid, on the ground that is not the situation.
There is discrimination according to political
affiliation. You have to belong to a particular
political party to get humanitarian assistance
or government-subsidised food, she said.
ZIMBABWE
Wide approval
for draft
constitution
EGYPT
Copts under attack as police stand by
26
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6 April 2013
P
ope Francis continues to show the
world that hes a man of surprises and
someone who commands mass
appeal. At his general audience this past
Wednesday he must have sent shockwaves
through a few of the old monsignori in the
Roman Curia when he continuously put
aside his prepared text and passionately
praised women and young people as the
most credible witnesses of the Gospel.
The apostles and disciples find it more
difficult to believe in the Risen Christ, but
not the women! the Pope animatedly told a
large crowd in St Peters Square. The first
witnesses of the Resurrection are women!
This is beautiful! he exclaimed with a
broad smile and off-the-cuff remarks.
The people in the square were delighted
and interrupted him several times with
thundering applause and shouts of
approval. This is the mission of women of
mothers, of women to give witness to their
children and grandchildren that Christ is
Risen! the Pope continued forcefully.
I see there are a lot of young people in
the square, he said a few moments later in
another departure from his written talk.
Young men and young women, I say to
you, Bring forth this certainty to the world:
the Lord is alive and walks beside us on lifes
journey! he exclaimed, almost in a shout.
Bring forth this hope, be anchored in this
hope! Go forward, young people! he said
as if he were a coach trying to motivate them.
The Pope was also a big hit driving
though the square beforehand, bantering
with people, giving the thumbs up and
kissing babies. His current secretary, Mgr
Alfred Xuereb (the Maltese priest he
inherited from Benedict XVI), looked a bit
bemused by all of this. But also quite pleased.
N
ot everyone seems to be thrilled
with the simpler, less monarchical
style that Pope Francis is employing
as Bishop of Rome. His routine abandonment
of protocols that have been in place for
decades has alarmed a good number of
people. For example, not a few diplomats
were shocked that he recently addressed
them in Italian rather than French during
their first formal audience.
And liturgically sensitive Catholics, both
those of the post-Vatican II and the
neo-Tridentinist camps, are not exactly
thrilled, either especially by the way the
Jesuit Pope celebrates Mass and leads other
ceremonies.
First of all, he cant sing. And sometimes it
seems as if hes mumbling the Latin prayers.
One group is upset that he has gone
overboard in his minimalist liturgical attire,
while the other is disturbed because he
never distributes Holy Communion to the
faithful.
Vatican spokesman, Fr Federico
Lombardi SJ, has jokingly recalled that
Jesuits, after all, have a reputation for not
being overly observant of liturgical rubrics
or fond of chanting (non rubricant, nec
cantant)! But, other than that, he has only
been able to make educated guesses to
explain Francis actions. As Fr Lombardi
admitted on Good Friday, hes not yet had a
proper meeting with the Pope.
By far the biggest criticism levelled at
Papa Bergoglio has been his decision to
wash the feet of two young women during
the Maundy Thursday Mass in a juvenile
prison. Conservatives, especially, claimed
the Pope was breaking liturgical law. They
are the same people opposed to female altar
servers. Curiously, they were mostly silent
about the fact that Pope Francis also
washed the feet of Muslims at that Mass.
M
any thanks to Quentin de la
Bdoyre for his letter last week
regarding an article I wrote in
October 2001 on the synod dealing with the
role of bishops in the Church. He notes that
then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos
Aires delivered the mid-synod paper
(relatio) summing up the other bishops
interventions and correctly states that it
firmly rejected calls for less centralisation
and a reform of the synods structures.
What he fails to mention, however, was
that Cardinal Edward Egan of New York
probably wrote that report, as my 2001
article had suggested not Bergoglio.
Heres the story: Pope John Paul II had
chosen Egan to be the relator general or
recording secretary several months before
the synod assembly took place. Thus it was
his task to write the relatio. But several days
after the meetings began, the Pope named
Bergoglio as adjunct-relator general. The
reason? The Archbishop of New York was
under intense pressure to return to his
diocese to preside at a memorial service
marking the one-month anniversary of the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
Cardinal Egan had been fiercely criticised
for going to Rome in the first place as coldly
leaving his grieving flock. So he went back
to New York for just a few days, and then
returned to the synod. It was later
confirmed that he had written the relatio
before his 10 October departure to America.
Cardinal Bergoglio read it to the general
assembly two days later. Mr Bdoyre notes,
rightly in my estimation, that the mid-synod
report, records the firm shutting of the
window which John XXIII had opened.
But it is clear that the former curialist,
Cardinal Egan, was the one who shut that
window. Papa Francesco seems to be
prising it back open.
Robert Mickens
Letter from Rome
Ecumenical pilgrimage mooted
Asked in an interview on Deutschlandfunk
radio how he would like to celebrate the
500th anniversary of the Reformation
together with the Protestant Churches in
Germany in 2017, the president of the
German bishops conference, Archbishop
Robert Zollitsch, suggested the Catholic
and Protestant bishops in Germany under-
take a joint ecumenical pilgrimage to the
Holy Land in order to be as close to Jesus
and to the gospels as possible and clearly
demonstrate that we have the same roots.
Australian Servant of God
Another Australian Mary may be bound
for sainthood, following the canonisation
of St Mary of the Cross MacKillop in 2010.
On 27 March Bishop Gali Bali of Guntur,
India, declared Sr Mary Glowrey, a med-
ical missionary who worked in India for
37 years, a Servant of God as the com-
mencement of the diocesan phase of the
process for possible beatification. Sr
Glowrey, like St Mary MacKillop, was born
in Victoria and worked as a doctor in
Melbourne hospitals before sailing for
India in 1920, after reading of the appalling
death rate among babies there.
Rectors murder shocks Church
The Church in India has been stunned by
the murder of the rector of the major
regional seminary in Bangalore, capital
of southern Karnataka state. Fr K.J.
Thomas, rector of St Peters major semi-
nary where he had been in the faculty for
three decades, was found murdered,
according to police investigators, who sus-
pect he fell victim to would-be thieves who
entered the compound under the cover of
heavy rain on Easter Sunday night.
Kenyatta urges unity
A day after the Supreme Court upheld his
election as Kenyas fourth President, Uhuru
Kenyatta, attended Easter Sunday Mass
at his former high school church. On
Sunday, referring to the Mass at the church
of St Marys Catholic School in Nairobi as
my home worship, Mr Kenyatta urged
Kenyans to keep peace and pray for unity.
Can Belgium rename Christmas?
Brussels Archbishop Andr-Joseph
Lonard ironically wished good luck to
Belgian bureaucrats and ministers who
he called the new iconoclasts for sug-
gesting renaming the Christmas break the
winter vacation and the Carnival hol-
iday at the start of Lent the leisure
vacation. People will continue to talk like
theyve always talked, he said, after Belgian
newspapers said the education ministry
wanted to make the changes.
IN BRIEF
For daily news updates visit
www.thetablet.co.uk
NEWS
FROM BRITAIN AND IRELAND
Parliamentarians call on Pope
to lift priestly celibacy rule
Christopher Lamb andSam Adams
CATHOLIC MPS and peers have written to
Pope Francis urging him to allow married
men to be ordained as Catholic priests.
The 21 parliamentarians say that the pos-
itive experience in Britain of married former
Anglican clergy who have been ordained
Catholic priests is a compelling reason for
lifting the celibacy rule.
The letter was organised by prominent
Catholic peer Lord Alton of Liverpool, a friend
of the Archbishop of Westminster, and Rob
Flello, a Labour MP. It has also been launched
as an online petition.
The signatories argue that the Bishops
Conferences of England and Wales and of
Scotland should be allowed to ordain married
men where pastoral needs require it.
Your two predecessors, Pope John Paul II
and Pope Benedict, guided, we are sure by
the Holy Spirit, generously permitted the ordi-
nation of married Anglican clergy as Roman
Catholic priests. These men and their families
have proved to be a great blessing to our
parishes, the letter states. If the celibacy rule
were relaxed, there would be many others
who would seek ordination, bringing great
gifts to the priesthood.
Other signatories include Baroness
(Patricia) Scotland, the former Attorney
General who is a patron of Missio, the Churchs
overseas mission charity, and Baroness (Sheila)
Hollins, president of the British Medical
Association who has worked with the Bishops
Conference of England and Wales on men-
tal-health projects.
We recognise that the Church is serious
about the New Evangelisation and the need
to renew the Christian faith in our secular
societies. As such one of our priorities must
be to ensure that parishes have priests to
administer the sacraments, therefore we
believe that allowing married priests is desir-
able and imperative, the letter goes on to say.
In a 2012 interview Pope Francis then
Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio said he was happy
to keep celibacy for the moment as we have
10 centuries of good experiences rather than
failures. However, he added: It is a matter
of discipline, not of faith. It can change.
Lord Alton told The Tablet that leaving
parishes without priests and people without
access to the sacraments is entirely mis-
placed. However, he said that the letters
signatories respect priestly celibacy as a
high calling though not one that all can
follow. He added that ending mandatory
priestly celibacy would be a small tool for
renewal which I hope will be given serious
consideration.
The Labour peer Lord Touhig said the
group was simply inviting the Pope to consider
that an anomaly has been created in the
Church by ordaining married former Anglican
priests and that ordaining married men as
Catholic priests could be developed as a fur-
ther blessing for the Church.
A spokesman for the group said that further
steps would be announced soon. The level
of support of the letter has come as quite a
surprise [to us] and I am confident those
involved [with this] will want to build on this
support including closely involving the laity
in what they obviously see as a very important
issue, he said. The obligation of mandatory
celibacy for priests was introduced in 1123
following the First Lateran Council. In
England and Wales around 200 former
Anglicans have become Catholic priests,
including many who are married.
To access the petition visit: www.petition
buzz.com/petitions/marriedmenaspriests
The following MPs signed the letter: Rob
Flello, John Pugh, Stephen Pound, William
Cash, Thomas Docherty, Michael Dugher,
Tom Blenkinsop, Chris Ruane, Patricia Glass,
Ronnie Campbell, Paul Murphy, Meg Hillier,
Jonathan Evans, Alasdair McDonnell.
Peers who signed were: Lord Alton,
Baroness Hollins, Baroness Goudie, Lord
Hylton, Lord McAvoy, Baroness Scotland,
Lord Touhig.
Tartaglia: Church in Scotland has been humbled
SCOTLANDS MOST senior bishop
has apologised for the distress and
embarrassment caused following
the resignation of Cardinal Keith
OBrien and said it will take time for
the Church to climb out of the hole
it is in, writes Sam Adams.
In his Easter Triduum homilies, the
Archbishop of Glasgow, Philip
Tartaglia, repeatedly apologised to
the laity of Scotland and said the
Churchs ability to witness had been
damaged.
Last February Cardinal OBriens
resignation was accepted early
following allegations of
inappropriate sexual conduct made
by four current and one former
priest.
In his homily on Good Friday
Archbishop Tartaglia who was
appointed apostolic administrator in
the Archdiocese of St Andrews and
Edinburgh following Cardinal
OBriens departure said the Church
inScotland had been humbled and
that he was so sorry for thedistress
and embarrassment that ordinary
Catholics have sufered.
Earlier, in his Chrism Mass at St
Marys Catholic Cathedral in
Edinburgh on 26 March, he spoke
about the disturbing and
perplexing circumstances involving
a group of priestswhich had led to
the resignation of Cardinal OBrien.
He said Catholics had been
disappointed, distressed and
saddened beyond beliefby the
allegations. He also criticised the
media for reporting and
commenting on the matter
relentlessly and unsympathetically.
Archbishop Tartaglia admitted the
fallout from the scandal had been
very damagingand had left
Catholics feeling weary, besieged
and vulnerable.
In his homily during the Easter
Vigil Mass at St Andrews Cathedral
in Glasgow, he said: It may take us
some time to climb out of the hole
we are in at themoment.
On Easter Sunday he returned to
St Marys Cathedral to apologise to
Catholics again and said the
Church was having troublecoming
to terms with the scandal.
What makes our present
situation so sad is that our ability
towitness has been damaged and
we must build it up again byliving
more fully our life in Christ,he said.
Meanwhile, in his homily on
Maundy Thursday, the Archbishop
of Westminster, Vincent Nichols,
warned that a culture obsessed with
diet and body image was
undermining young peoples
relationship with God.
The Bishop of Shrewsbury, Mark
Davies, said on Easter Sunday that
the loss of God was at the root of
attacks on human life, including
abortion and poor treatment of the
elderly.
6 April 2013
|
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|
27
Signatories included Baroness Hollins,
left, and Baroness Scotland
MAZUR/CATHOLICNEWS.ORG.UK
28
|
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|
6 April 2013
The World Community
for Christian Meditation
Christian Meditation
Conference
14-16 June 2013
Led by
Fr Laurence
Freeman OSB
One and the Many
Unity of Faith Diversity of Belief
at
High Leigh Conference Centre,
Hoddesdon
For more details or to complete
a booking form contact
Jacqueline Russell:
t: 01296 488450 (ofce hours);
e: jacq.russell@ntlworld
Or go to our website:
www.christianmeditation.org.uk
Sarah Mac Donald
In Dublin
THE IRISH bishops have warned that the
Church could refuse to perform the civil ele-
ments of weddings if same-sex marriage is
introduced.
The Church in Ireland provides the majority
of marriage solemnisers in the republic.
Around 4,300 out of the 5,600 on the Register
of Solemnisers are Catholic priests.
The issue is being considered by a
Constitutional Convention as recognition of
same-sex marriage would require an amend-
ment to the Irish Constitution. The
constitution requires the state to guard the
institution of marriage with special care and
protect it against attack.
Over 1,000 submissions have been made
on the issue to the Constitutional Convention
including a 10-page written submission from
the Irish hierarchy. In this document, the
Bishops Council for Marriage and the Family
signalled a willingness to withdraw the
Churchs services as solemnisers in protest.
Should this happen, up to 70 per cent of
marriages could be affected.
In their submission on 13 March, the bish-
ops stated: It is important to note that in
Ireland, the Church and State cooperate
closely in the solemnisation of marriages. Any
change to the definition of marriage would
create great difficulties and in the light of this,
if there were two totally different definitions
of marriage, the Church could no longer carry
out the civil element.
This could mean the republic would have
to adopt a model similar to other European
countries where Catholics would have to get
married in a register office as well as taking
part in a sacramental ceremony in a church.
Legal recognition for civil partnerships was
granted in 2010 and gave same-sex couples
most of the rights afforded to married
couples.
THE CATHOLICChurch in Ireland is to lose
control of at least 23 primary schools with
most of them transferring to a multi-denom-
inational structure, writes Sarah Mac Donald.
The move follows a government survey of
parental demand for alternatives to Catholic
patronage of primary schools in 23 areas
across Ireland.
The Church in Ireland controls 90 per cent
of the countrys 3,200 primary schools and
the Government would like it to divest its
patronage of a proportion of these. The survey
findings are likely to result in the establish-
ment of new multi-denominational schools.
A total of 43 areas have now been surveyed
and in 28 there has been demand for an addi-
tional patron.
However, the level of demand varies
between just 2.2 per cent and 8 per cent of
parents.
In a statement, the Irish Bishops Council
for Education said the overall findings pro-
vided a notable affirmation of Catholic
schools.
The chairman of the Catholic Schools
Partnership (CSP), Fr Michael Drumm,
toldThe Tablet that in 15 areas surveyed there
was nearly negligible demand for an alter-
native form of patronage, indicating general
satisfaction with the level and quality of edu-
cation being provided by Catholic schools.
The survey provided for the first time an
accurate measure of the number of parents
with children in school who would prefer or
would avail [themselves] of a different type
of patronage if it was available to them, Fr
Drumm said.
But he said the Church would like to facil-
itate change in dialogue in local communities
in a phased approach. We have to bring peo-
ple with us on this it cannot be imposed,
he said. There is no threat to denominational
education the minister [Ruairi Quinn] has
made that abundantly clear.
A draft report into the
death of expectant mother
Savita Halappanavar at a
Galway hospital last
October has cited medical
personnels uncertainty
over Irelands abortion laws
as a factor in the tragedy,
writes Sarah Mac Donald.
The Health Service
Executives (HSE) report
suggests that medical staff
overemphasised the welfare
of the foetus to the
detriment of Mrs
Halappanavar, who died of
septicaemia on 28 October.
It was the first maternal
death at the state hospital in
17 years.
The report also highlights
failures by the staff in
managing Mrs
Halappanavars infection.
The draft report, which
was put together by a
seven-member team
chaired by Professor Sir
Sabaratnam Arulkumaran,
is due to be sent to the
Cabinet ahead of
publication perhaps as
early as next week.
However, it has been
criticised by Mrs
Halappanavars husband,
Praveen, who believes it
contains shortcomings and
fails to explain why his wife
died.
His solicitor and a
medical adviser are due to
meet the HSE inquiry team
this week on his behalf and
this may result in
amendments. Meanwhile,
an inquest into the death is
due to open on Monday.
IRELAND
Bishops issue
gay-marriage
warning
Schools to switch from church patronage
6 April 2013
|
THE TABLET
|
29
50 YEARS AGO
Dom John Willem, a Cistercian monk from
Caldey, was consecrated, in St Olavs
Cathedral, coadjutor Bishop of Oslo with
the right of succession. It was a unique
occasion in the history of the Church in
Norway. The new bishop is the first
Cistercian monk to work in Norway since
the Reformation, the first native Norwegian
bishop to be consecrated in Oslo, and only
the second monk of his order to be
appointed bishop in this century.
In his sermon at the English Mass in
the cathedral on Sunday, Fr Peter Lowry,
formerly a pastor at St Olavs, spoke of the
great event in Norwegian Catholic history.
Less than a hundred years ago, in 1869,
Norway was created an apostolic vicariate.
This ended one of the most chimerical juris-
dictions the Church has ever known the
apostolic prefecture of the North Pole. With
its headquarters in Alta, in the Norwegian
province of Finnmark, a small village on
the borders of the Arctic Ocean, the pre-
fecture covered Norwegian and Swedish
Lapland, the Russian peninsula of Kola,
Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the northern
part of the American continent from Baffin
Bay to Melville Island; and was later
extended to take in the Shetlands, the
Orkneys and the county of Caithness in
Scotland. This fantastic creation, drawn
with a Roman compass regardless of race,
language, politics or geography, was the
responsibility of a Russian bishop, with
seven priests to assist him.
The Tablet, 5 April 1963
100 YEARS AGO
At Wednesdays sitting, Mr Reginald
McKenna, [the Home Secretary], secured
a second reading for his Bill to empower
him temporarily to release prisoners ill
from hunger striking, &c., by a majority of
253. He pointed out that there were three
alternative ways of dealing with hunger
strikers: release, forcible feeding, or leaving
a prisoner to die if he would not take the
food supplied. But the prison authorities
were answerable for their prisoners, and
they could not take a risk involving their
lives. Neither could they release merely
because a man resisted. Therefore he asked
for power of temporary release, under
licence, forcible feeding being reserved for
persistent offenders. Mr Charles McCurdy
made a violent speech against the Bill as a
restriction of the liberty of the subject, and
Mr Keir Hardie moved that the House
should decline to proceed with it until the
Prime Minister redeemed his pledge to be
responsible for the result of a free vote of
the House on womens suffrage. Sir A.
Cripps pointed out that the Bill was not for
exceptional powers of arrest, but of release.
The Tablet, 5 April 1913
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Pride to blame for problems
in priesthood, says McMahon
Liz Dodd
THE BISHOP of Nottingham has blamed the
sin of pride among priests for failures and
scandals such as clerical sex abuse.
Bishop Malcolm McMahon told priests at
the Chrism Mass in Holy Week that they were
particularly susceptible to the sin because of
the danger that positions of authority could
make them feel invulnerable.
We find ourselves in positions of power,
of influence and control, and almost without
thinking we can let these go to our head,
he said, adding later: Pride is the problem
We can become so full of ourselves, jus-
tifying our wrongdoings and weaknesses
that before we know it we have been over-
whelmed.
Referring to the early resignation of
Cardinal Keith OBrien (see page 27) and the
election of Pope Francis he said that recent
weeks had brought both joy and shame and
humiliation.
The bishop, a Dominican, reflected on his
experiences of the Spiritual Exercises of St
Ignatius of Loyola last year. He explained that
these exercises the heart of Jesuit spirituality
showed the perils of the desire for riches,
honours and pride.
It is too easy, very easy indeed, for us to
fall from grace because priesthood lends itself
greatly to these temptations, he said.
Bishop McMahon added that priests soli-
tude and the absence of a supportive
community made them more vulnerable.
He also thanked Pope Francis for providing
the Church with an example of Christ-like
poverty and humility and praised priests in
his diocese for living simple lifestyles close to
the poor.
Riches, honours and pride can never be
the norms of the priesthood, or the Church,
he said. It is only as humble priests that we
will remain credible.
His remarks came as a new survey carried
out on behalf of The Sunday Times revealed
that four in 10 people in Britain have little or
no trust in priests.
According to a poll of 1,918 adults, asked
whether they trusted a priest, vicar or other
clergyman to tell the truth, 26 per cent said
not much while 14 per cent said not at all.
(For the full text of the bishops homily go
to www.thetablet.co.uk)
PCC rejects complaint against The Tablet
THE PRESS Complaints Commission has
found that The Tablet did not breach the edi-
torial code of conduct in coverage of St Marys
University College at the end of last year.
The wife of Professor Philip Esler, the for-
mer principal of the Catholic higher education
college, claimed that the coverage of St Marys
in print and online had breached the Editors
Code of Practice on the grounds of accuracy,
on offering the opportunity to reply, and on
the grounds of harassment. Professor Esler
stepped down as principal earlier this year.
His wife, Patricia Esler, who was acting with
the knowledge of her husband, alleged The
Tablets reporting included a number of inac-
curacies. But the commission found that in
each story Mrs Esler complained about, The
Tablet had not breached the code with regard
to accuracy.
Mrs Esler also said that this publication
had repeatedly failed to ask Professor Esler
for comment. But the commission said that
because there had been no breach of the accu-
racy clause, there was no breach of clause 2.
Furthermore, The Tablet had on occasion spo-
ken to Professor Esler and routinely sought
comment from St Marys press office.
Finally, the commission rejected the claim
that The Tablet had harassed Professor Esler.
In its decision, the commission said that
harassment under the code means physical
harassment in the newsgathering process
and that the code does not seek to prohibit
legitimate debate or campaigning journalism.
Bishops meet in Rome
The Bishops of England and Wales are to hold
their Low Week meeting this year at the Villa
Palazzola, near Rome.
Following two days of meetings, which start
next Friday, they will remain at Palazzola for a
six-day retreat
The bishops meet twice a year and normally
gather at Hinsley Hall, Leeds. Villa Palazzola is
the summer residence of the Venerable English
College, Rome, although is also open to the
public.
The bishops last retreat was held at the Royal
English College in Valladolid, in Spain, 2006.
Leaders fallible, Welby warns
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby,
used his Easter sermon at Canterbury
Cathedral to warn against pinning too much
hope on frail and fallible political and church
leaders.
He said that all individuals were vulnerable
to human sin and that it was cruel to elevate
institutions such as the NHS, the Government
and the Church to heights where they cannot
but fail.
Assuming that any organisation is able to
have such good systems that human failure
will be eliminated is naive, he said.
30
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THE TABLET
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6 April 2013
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HOLIDAY ACCOMMODATION
PEACEFUL, private accommodation for
holiday, retreat, or rest for Priests and
Religious in lovely Windsor country.
Cottages for 1-6 people, every
convenience. Near Heathrow and Henley.
Apply: St Johns Convent, Kiln Green,
Reading RG10 9XP. Tel: 0118 940 2964.
RECRUITMENT
St Marthas Convent
House of welcome and peace in the charming
historic village of Rottingdean by the sea. For
holidays, quiet breaks, private retreats. En-suite
rooms, home cooking, private chapel.
5 minutes from church. Minimum stay 2 nights.
SAE for brochure to St Marthas Convent,
Rottingdean, East Sussex BN2 7HA
Tel: 01273 302354
stmarthasrottingdean@yahoo.co.uk
Acorn Chrisan Healing Foundaon - Director
We believe that Jesus passionately desires every person to
be transformed through experiencing his love and care.
Acorns calling is to make this a reality through our work
of listening, healing and reconciliaon.
We are looking to recruit a successor to Rev Dr Russ Parker who is
stepping down as Acorns Director later this year to pursue a
freelance porolio of teaching and wring.
Full details are available on our website (www.acornchrisan.org).
If, having studied these, you would like further informaon please contact
Simon Strachan, Chairman of Trustees
(Strachansimon@gmail.com tel: 01276 684942)
Leers of applicaon, with CVs and contact details of two referees should be sent
(marked Condenal) to Simon Strachan at Acorn Chrisan Healing Foundaon,
Whitehill Chase, High Street, Bordon, Hants GU35 0AP.
Closing date: 31 May 2013
HOW TO APPLY:
Obtain further information, including selection
criteria from the ACU Careers website
www.acu.edu.au/careers
Australian Catholic University is
an Equal Opportunity Employer
Campus Ministry Manager
Based in North Sydney, Australia
National strategic role
International applicants encouraged to apply
Do you have the passion to drive the mission focus of the
University for both staff and students?
Do you have extensive ministry experience within the
Catholic Church?
Are you interested in working in one of the largest
Catholic universities in the English-speaking world?
If so, then this could be the role for you.
Applications close: Sunday 26 May 2013.
Classified 6 April.indd 30 02/04/2013 11:31
6 April 2013
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THE TABLET
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31
RECRUITMENT
Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies
Melbourne campus and Sydney campus (Stratheld)
Two positions available
Teaching in Biblical Studies and the Universitys Core Curriculum
Research and scholarship
As one of Australias leading research institutions in Theology, we are committed to research, quality learning
and teaching and providing our students with the knowledge and skills to reect intelligently on their own values,
faith, and tradition, as well as on society and the world in which we live and work.
We are seeking scholars who are passionate about research, are committed to student centred learning and have
a strong community engagement focus to realise our vision. You will join a national University-wide community of
theologians and philosophers and contribute to a Faculty which continues to grow in strength, output and prole.
Join our dynamic and engaging
community of internationally
esteemed scholars
Applications close: Monday 15 April 2013
To apply and obtain further information, including position descriptions,
visit the ACU Careers website www.acu.edu.au/careers
Australian Catholic University is an EOWA employer of choice for women
Shaped by the past, creating the future
THEOLOGY AND RELI GI ON
LECTURESHIP IN CONTEMPORARY
CATHOLICTHEOLOGY / CATHOLIC
STUDIES & DEPUTY DIRECTOR OFTHE
CENTRE FOR CATHOLIC STUDIES (CCS)
Salary: 37,382 - 44,607 pa (Grade 8)
The Department of Theology and Religion seeks an experienced
university-level teacher, researcher, and academic administrator for a new
full-time, non-fixed-term Grade 8 Lecturer post (Associate Professor
equivalent) in Contemporary Catholic Theology and/or Catholic
Studies. As Deputy Director of the CCS, the postholder will play a key
strategic role in leading the day-to-day work, academic programmes,
projects, and theological outreach activities of the CCS. Proven
experience in management and administration is required. We expect to
appoint at the higher end of the Lecturer scale. This post has arisen
because of the CCS Dean and Directors being seconded to oversee a
major development project for the Centre and the University.
Applications are particularly welcome from women and black and
minority ethnic candidates, who are under-represented in academic posts
in the University
The closing date is 23 April 2013. The selection process will be
held over two days: afternoon of Thursday 9 May and all day
on Friday 10 May 2013.
Further details of the post are available on our website
(http://www.dur.ac.uk/jobs/)
An outstanding Catholic school Ofsted February 2011
Federation of Bedford Catholic Schools
St Thomas More Catholic
Teaching School
Tyne Crescent, Bedford MK41 7UL
Tel: 01234 400222
www.st-thomasmore.org.uk
CHAPLAINCY CO-ORDINATOR
32 heurs per week, term time pIus hve training days
leveI 4, peints 22 26, 14,839 16,806 per annum
Due to the retirement of our much treasured Lay Chaplain, we have an exciting opportunity
for a Chaplaincy Co-ordinator to shape the spiritual life of the community in close
partnership with the other Catholic Schools in our Federation. You will work collaboratively
with sixth formers and staff as key leaders of the faith community, support and encourage
the schools pastoral care for the whole school, students, staff and parents and promote,
plan and organise the celebration of liturgies and co-operate with others in developing the
catholicity of the school community.
You will:
Be able to use prayer and spiritual development to draw young people closer to God
Be able to communicate effectively with students and staff and the wider community on
matters of faith, emotional wellbeing and morality
Have the lived personal experience to connect with the faith journey of diverse members
of this community
Be able to reach out to those of faith and doubt in our community and to listen to all views.
Have a strong sense of witness to your Catholic Faith
In return we can offer a pleasant, attractive and well maintained working environment with
a bespoke and contemporary prayer room, a strong and supportive Governing Body, an
outstanding team of staff who see spirituality as core to their role as educators plus fantastic
training opportunities in collaboration with NORES and a chance to play a part in the future
of an outstanding Teaching School.
To register an interest, view recruitment documentation and complete
an application form please go to the vacancies page on the school
website or contact the school office at the above address
(after 15 April 2013).
Closing date for applications is: Friday, 26 April 2013.
We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of
children. The successful applicant will be required to undertake an
enhanced DBS check.
Classified 6 April.indd 31 02/04/2013 11:31
32
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THE TABLET
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6 April 2013
Volume 267 No. 8992 ISSN: 0039 8837
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Catherine Pepinster, Paul Vallely CMG.
CALENDAR
Sunday 7 April:
Second Sunday of Easter (Year C)
(or of Divine Mercy)
Monday 8 April:
The Annunciation of the Lord
Tuesday 9 April:
Easter feria
Wednesday 10 April:
Easter feria
Thursday 11 April:
St Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr
Friday 12 April:
Easter feria
Saturday 13 April:
Easter feria or St Martin I, Pope and Martyr
Sunday 14 April:
Third Sunday of Easter
14
9 770039 883202
For the Extraordinary Form calendar go to
www.lms.org.uk and look under Find a Mass
EVEN ON this bitterly
cold day, you could feel
their warmth at 10 paces.
We stopped to look at the
little herd: a living, gently
steaming wall of roan flanks and rumps
formed up against the bitter wind to protect
a single, lank-legged calf. White-and-red win-
ter coats thick and shaggy, the shorthorn cattle
stared at us out of centuries of patience. These
animals tell the history of our country better
than any book. Their docility you wouldnt
get this close to the hair-trigger temperaments
of more modern cattle breeds speaks of gen-
erations of intimacy between human and cattle.
With the lives of people and cows intermeshed,
cattle couldnt be aggressive. Frequently we even
Glimpses of Eden
cohabited, living room and byre on either side
of a central hearth. Children forever under their
feet, milking them from an early age, sharing
playgrounds, a crosspatch kicker would soon
be bred out of the strain. Part pet, wholly a life-
line, family cows also needed good milking
capability to provide rare nutrients for the sub-
sistence farmers family. Thick pelts were
required, too, so that for all but the coldest times,
beasts could forage on the thin fare of winter
grass. This excellent foragibility as modern
farmers now call it, is also the future of short-
horns and other native breeds. Modern breeds
may require the chemically enhanced grass
of intensive farming, shorthorns fatten hap-
pily on more natural, low-impact pasture.
Jonathan Tulloch
ROSE PRINCE
THE ETHICAL KITCHEN
Frozen in time
YOU DO NOT have to see images of sheep
buried in snowdrifts to feel anxious for the
farming fraternity in this late developing spring.
The prolonged cold tells us that anyone, or any-
thing, out in the constant chill of night must
be suffering. Normally, by this date, I would
be cutting wild garlic in the woods, but the
shoots are so tiny, it is not yet worth picking
them. We know the wild garlic will get there
in the end because it is naturalised in wood-
land. But when will we see some British salads,
asparagus or garden peas?
There may be a harvest from heated green-
houses, but expect to pay more. Ultimately,
we will have to be patient the glut will come
in the end. A long period in cold ground can
benefit certain vegetables. British asparagus
tastes better after a hard winter, producers say,
giving it the edge over any grown elsewhere
in Europe. A grower in Gotland, an island in
the Baltic Sea, once showed me a crop of leeks
in May that had been in the ground since the
previous summer. Enormous and handsome,
their flavour was concentrated and strong.
Unless you checked the country of origin
information in supermarket fruit and vegetable
sections, you would never know that summer
had not arrived. Peas, asparagus and
mangetout are all there, yet worryingly little
is even from Europe, let alone Britain. Peru
and Africa seem to be sending their summer
to us, with even more abundance than before.
There is an argument for importing certain
produce during the quiet early winter months,
when there is little more than purple sprout-
ing broccoli and pink forced rhubarb from
British farms. We need citrus fruit, pineap-
ples and bananas for nourishment, and a few
imported greens do no harm. But packaged,
podded fresh peas, air-freighted from Peru,
with the English crop just around the corner?
It is likely that the Peruvian peas will be cheaper
than the British crop, disadvantaging it when
it does arrive on the shelves.
There is a source of British greens that is
inexpensive and which we can feel good about
eating. It seems appropriate, anyway, given our
chilly climate, to head for the freezer looking
for peas and broad beans and spinach. This
trio, in particular, freeze well, meaning the veg-
etables lose little of their fresh taste. Only blanch
them for a minute: eat whole leaf spinach with
plenty of butter; pod the broad beans from
their white-ish outer skins and dress with olive
oil, an amazing British winter salad to eat with
grilled fish. And peas make pea soup with
fresh stock, cream and a little bacon.
Pea soup with bacon shards
Serves 4
2kg chicken bones or wings
60g butter
3 onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
750g frozen peas or petit pois
300ml double cream
8 rashers thin-cut streaky bacon, fried until
crisp
Roast the chicken bones at 220C for about
45 minutes or until golden. Put in a pan with-
out the fat and cover with 2 litres of water (or
more). Bring to the boil and cook for 1 hour
to make a rich stock. Strain through a sieve.
Melt the butter and add the onion and gar-
lic. Cook until soft, then add the peas and 1.5
litres of the stock. Bring to the boil, remove
from the heat and blend until you have a rough-
textured soup. Add the cream and season the
soup; reheat and serve with the crisp bacon
broken in shards over the surface.