All must have prizes!

Well, here's a turn up for the books. Ben Trovato of Counter Cultural Father has named me for a Liebster Award. Thanks very much! I have no idea what this means but it sounds fun and will cost no money, so what the heck?

Actually, as I understand it, Liebster Awards are given to those never likely to win one of your Bigger Blogger Vote-For-Me Awards, so I hope those I tag below don't get offended! Anyway, let's see if I can achieve the required conditions as set down by Ben:

1. to provide eleven facts about myself so readers can learn more about me (if, that is, they manage not to fall asleep before reading all eleven)

2. to answer all of Ben's questions (not under duress, I take it) and

3. to nominate other worthy recipients.

Let me direct serious-minded readers to some other place at this point in the proceedings and invite all others to step this way:


Eleven little-known facts about Ches

1. As a boy, Ches was taken to a barber called Harry who only knew how to cut hair so it looked like a German helmet (and there are photos to prove this fact).

2. Fact 1. explains his hostility to all things German, though not his hostility to the French.

3. Ches would gladly send all French people to the moon on a one-way ticket, no questions asked.

4. Ches's early musical career was brought to an abrupt end when John Williams told him his thumb technique was crap.

5. Despite his crap thumb technique, Ches has nevertheless been able to negotiate his way through adult life with some success.

6. Ches found it hard to be a cowboy in Rochdale, like the song said.

7. But since he never tried to be a cowboy elsewhere, Ches can provide no account of the difficulty of being a cowboy throughout the rest of Great Britain.

8. Ches grew up not far from Langley where Ttony originates.

9. Nevertheless, Ches would not know Ttony if - using the traditional Langley greeting - Ttony walked up to Ches and smacked him in the gob.

10. Ches is lucky to have found a woman who, for obscure reasons, loves him, in spite of the many more obvious reasons to avoid him as keenly as one avoids a Jehovah's Witness.

11. This fact, and Ches's beautiful children, account for the spring in his step noted by those who spy him on his rare sallies into the public eye.

I hope that was mildly enlightening.

Here we go with Ben's questions ...

Ben's questions and my replies ...


What inspired the title of your blog?

A letter of Count Joseph de Maistre in which he called the sacraments 'the sensible bond' between heaven and earth. It seemed to me to sum up the incarnational approach to life that ought to be the mark of a Catholic grounded in faith and not ideology.


Why should people read your blog?

Why should people read anything? We read to know we're not alone, as someone once said.


What is your personal favourite post on your blog?

Ricomythia


What has been the most popular (most viewed) post on your blog?

The Endgame of the SSPX


Which post on your blog has attracted most comments?

The Endgame of the SSPX


What other hobbies or interests (beyond blogging) are you prepared to admit to?

Cooking. Love it.

What are your hopes for the new pontificate?

I hope for nothing from Pope Francis, but everything from God. If I hope Pope Francis avoids one thing, it is all heterodoxy, heteropraxis and all narrowing of the Catholic sensibility. Er, I know that's three things, but so what?


Where is your favourite place of pilgrimage, and why?

The Holy Name Church in Manchester - not a traditional site of pilgrimage, but its importance to me cannot be put into words.


Who is your favourite spiritual author, and why?

Georges Bernanos - because he is not a spiritual writer! He's a spiritual realist - the best kind of spiritual writer.


Which of these questions did you find it most difficult to answer?

Why people should read my blog. Blimey, how can one answer that without sounding one's own trumpet?

Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?

How very dare you!

Ten worthy recipients of the Liebster Award

I nominate the following for a Liebster Award, in the hope they have not already been nominated.

1. Thoughts from Banklands

2. The Path Less taken

3. Linen on the Hedgerow

4. On the Side of the Angels

5. Bridges and Tangents

6. In Hoc Signo Vinces

7. Humblepiety

8. LMS chairman

9. Tea at Trianon

10. A Reluctant Sinner


Ches's questions (largely pinched from Ben

What inspired the title of your blog?
Why should people read your blog?
What is your personal favourite post on your blog?
What has been the most popular (most viewed) post on your blog?
Which post on your blog has attracted most comments?
What other hobbies or interests (beyond blogging) are you prepared to admit to?
Where is your favourite place of pilgrimage, and why?
Who is your favourite theological writer, and why?
What would be your one piece of music in a desert island scenario?

Franciscan conniptions: the Gothic, the Baroque and the Pope

My private life - which is and will remain unknown to most of you - is seriously busy at the moment. This is why I have not blogged much in the last few months and also why I have been chomping at the blogging bit since last Wednesday without so much of a whiff of getting near the computer keyboard. How about that for mixed metaphors?

So it was that my significant others and I gathered around a warm TV screen just over a week ago to await the announcement of the election of the Supreme Pontiff. There is something extraordinary about such a moment, even when it is participated in via TV. I was struck by Pope Francis's serene composure as he looked out on the crowds. I was deeply touched by his leading the people in St Peter's Square in prayer - the simple words of the Pater, Ave and Gloria Patri... instantly recognisable to the millions tuning in on TV. In that moment, we expected a pope but we also got a pastor.

Was I happy the cardinals had elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio? Not especially, though it was some satisfaction to know that my prediction for the 2005 election finally came through in 2013. (This time I thought he was too old.) I wasn't unhappy either. You choose your friends; you cannot choose your family. I know somebody chose this pope, but I didn't. How can you choose a father? It's enough that the cardinals elected him - not that I believe the ludicrous thesis that they were directed by the Holy Spirit in their choice. I rather hope they were, but there is no mechanism that ensures as much.

No, the fact was simple: here was the next Successor of Peter. On that night - on that night - I really don't know what else we were supposed to reflect on. God sends us shepherds as an act of his Providence; indeed, not only as an act of his Providence but also as a condition of his continuing incarnation among us in the Church. There would be plenty of time to fuss about Papa Bergoglio later on. On the night of the election what mattered was that he was our Papa.

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And then the Punch and Judy Show began. I'm too tired to recount the way the story developed, and most of my readers know it anyhow. On the night in question I merely reflected on how Rorate Caeli, that most high-minded of blogs, which had pompously refused to stoop to participate in disseminating those leaked SSPX letters last year, lost no time after the conclave in publishing a piece of invective 90% of which was wildly gratuitous affirmation. Naturally they stood on the soapbox of high-mindedness and blustering courage. Look at the pictures: Bergoglio on his knees being 'blessed' by TV evangelists. I don't dispute that of course, and hold such an act in the highest contempt. But anyone looking more closely at the Rorate article could clearly detect in this diatribe the evidence of local church politics, the backstabbing, and even the snobbery. Bergoglio after all uses "demotic language" ...

In the normal Punch and Judy logic of the internet, these observations make me a slavish worshipper of the new pope. Er, no, my friends, no. Not so. I've warned you about tribal thinking before. I have my anxieties of course. Reliable sources - and that does not mean the BBC during Tuesday's Inaugural Mass, but well-connected friends in Rome last week - have reported that when offered the mozzetta before going out to greet the crowd, Pope Francis said, 'You wear it monsignor. The carnival is over.' But a mozzetta is not carnival attire. It denotes juridical authority; in his case, supreme pastoral authority. Did he not like the colour? I suggest it is the inconvenient colour of the blood of the martyrs. If he thought the mozzetta is no longer such a symbol, he only needed to step out on the balcony with it on and parse its significance for a waiting world. "Dear friends, I wear this robe which symbolises the yolk of my new responsibilities and the blood I ought to be ready to shed for you." Instead of which ... Well, he spoke simply and well, but what is this chippy attitude to the Benedictine polyphony of aesthetics? Some now claim this incident is an urban legend because Andrea Tornielli says it did not happen. I'm afraid I don't buy that. Why is it so unthinkable that the pope might have said something nervously sarcastic before speaking to millions across the world for the first time? Oh, yes, because he's the pope and cannot make an error ... And why is it taken as given that if Tornielli says a thing is or is not so, then, we must all receive his word like some sacred script, setting aside our urban legends? Credo in Tornielli?

Don't get me wrong, I couldn't give a rat's wotnot about lace or ermine myself. And I know it was a tense moment for him, and that some people resort to sarcasm under pressure. Maybe Pope Francis does. But I agree with others. If we lampoon the sensibilities of any wing of Catholicism - if we lampoon the baroque as pure carnival or turn our nose up at the unwashed Franciscan - we risk creating a narrower Church, not a broader and more welcoming one. The waiting world assumes blithely that Francis's coming from the other side of the world means that he does not suffer from European parochialism. Yes, but what if he brings his own parochialism with him? Catholicism is big enough for the Gothic and for the Baroque, for the ermine and for the shabby cassock. It is not, however, disposed to allow one side of Catholic sensibility to turn its own measure of things from counsel into precept. Always beware those who want to turn counsel into precept and impose it willy-nilly. I warn you solemnly.

As for the rest, well, I have to say I have appreciated Pope Francis's sermons and addresses in the last week and, on rereading them, have tried to understand what he has to say to the Church. I applaud his frequent mentioning of the Father of Lies. It shows a ready supernatural realism which refuses to be airbrushed from the public pronouncements of the pope. I cheered when the first secular author he quoted was Frenchman Leon Bloy - no soft Catholic liberal by any stretch of the imagination. And, there is no doubting the piety of the man - Marian and Eucharistic - though his past record suggests an openness to liturgical illiteracy and irreverence that should shame even a Jesuit.

***************

I'm not hopeful. I have tried to move beyond placing my hope in any of our shepherds. God knows what he is doing with the Church, and sometimes God only knows. I only know that whatever happens is 'for my better grace'. I pray for the Holy Father. So should you all.

Ches fiddles while the ballots burn

So it has begun. And it will not end until white smoke belches from that chimney atop the Sistine Chapel and a new pope is announced: a gaudeum magnum in this vale of tears.

What must it be like to be among their number? A million empty commentaries in this last week - and mine is only the latest - have convinced me we know little about any of the cardinal electors and even less about their preoccupations at this moment. Oh yes, we know the usual. But what do we really know? For any cardinal with a conscience, walking into the conclave must be like stepping into the antechamber of the particular judgment, especially with all those frescoes of Michelangelo looming overhead. Any cardinal with a conscience must feel like a newly ordained priest ascending to the altar for the first time, anxious not to sully with his human weakness the extraordinary mystery which he performs. The solemn oath taken at the ceremony this afternoon sealed the moment in an eternal bond. If you lose your footing now, your Eminences, - as Bolt's Thomas More might say - you may not hope to find yourselves again.

For all this extraordinariness, it was wearisome to hear Cardinal Sodano preach this morning during the Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff. Executive summary: what the world needs now, is love, sweet love, that's the only thing, that there's just too little of. Others have since said what I then said to those who watched the Mass with me: the good cardinal must have missed the Year of Faith and the Synod on the New Evangelization, not to mention the scandals of the Curia, if he thought for a second he was giving voice to the key concerns of the moment. Of course he said that the chief act of charity was to give the gospel to others (happy thought!). And who could condemn him for talking about love? Not I! Still, this was the dregs of the pre-Benedictine legacy, so much so that it looked rather a weak attempt - and who could blame him? it was his only public chance - to shape the thematics of the conclave. But Sodano is no Ratzinger, holding forth eloquently and with prophetic insight and strength, about the dictatorship of relativism eight years ago. And I cannot imagine Sodano impressed any of the undecideds.

Meanwhile, the mysteries pile up around us. The mystery of what the cardinals are saying to each other is but the most intangible. More immediate is the mystery of how the media manage to find such know-nothings to inform their interminable commentaries. My current bete noire is Sister Jane Livesey who keeps popping up on the BBC. Journalists ask her only one of two or three questions, but the main one is always, 'But don't you think the new pope has to give a larger role to women in the Church?' I'm not sure if this is because they are obsessed with the issue, or because they realise she is such a dummy that it is pointless asking her about the key concerns of the billion Catholics out there waiting for a new pope. She certainly never attempts to redirect the conversation. Forgive my being mean, Sister Jane, but to paraphrase something for which I cannot find the reference:

Dear Sister Livesey,
Does it ever strike you,
The more we hear of you,
The less we like you.

I digress. The mystery. The mysteries. You either believe in this stuff or you don't. And for those that believe, it is a testing time, a time where some are demanding convincing explanations to fill the gap of uncertainty. These they demand with apparently no discernment, either from the media or from nut-job conspiracy hacks who provide their own commentary - ...

... while others find their life just goes on; goes on like life in Auden's account of the Musee des Beaux Arts. Which, I venture to suggest, is how it probably should be. It is easy to get carried away in the frenzy but really the situation is very simple. If we get the pope we need, it will be a man whose transparency simply allows us greater access into the mystery of the One whose vicar he is. And life will carry on with its joys and hopes, its trials and bitterness, its fond moments and its dark days. Indeed, life will carry on that way, even if we don't get the pope we need.

For now, however, while some are dreaming of a reformist pope who will really push the 'Tradi' agenda, others are dreaming of a moderate pope who will "Hume-ify" Vatican politics and make holiness and aid a kind of urbane double act. And the simple faithful? I dare say they are hoping for what they always need: a father, a dad even, who does what real fathers do: violently splat wasps and other nasties one minute, and read to us sweetly from our favourite books the next. That I think might even be a perfectly succinct way of summing up the Petrine tasks of protecting the sheep while feeding them.

Yes, and if the conclave can elect a pope like that, I might even make an effort to like Sister Jane Livesey.

Go on, your Emminences, I dare you.

Whence comes this restraint? From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty

Cardinal Keith O'Brien's admission of sexual misdemeanours has shocked the Church in Scotland, not to say in the rest of the UK. I confess to having been impressed by O'Brien's contribution to the culture wars last year - not because of the arguments (which often lacked finesse and sounded sometimes slightly hysterical) - but because he seemed to have found a backbone where many mitred executives exhibit a dubious species of cartilage. The public fall of this most vociferous of Catholic defenders (at least in recent times) has done more damage in the public eye to the Catholic cause than I currently care to imagine.

But few have yet to see this issue in the light of another report which swayed into the public domain last week and barely caused a stir. The Telegraph reported last week on the latest findings of sociology researcher Prof Linda Woodhead concerning guilt in a modern religious context. Woodhead's research covers a range of denominations but it is the figures about Catholics that made me sit up the most:

Only 12% of practising Catholics (and 9% non-practising) would feel any guilt about using contraception.

Only 57% of Catholics said they would feel guilty about adultery (just 1% higher than the general population).

Only 19% of Catholic said they would feel guilty about sex before marriage.

Only 30% of Catholic said they would feel guilty about using pornography.

The statistics make for good headlines ... only, there were none or hardly any that dealt with them. Now, of course, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. But am I the only person who sees a strong correlation between this wholesale failure of the Church to shape its members' consciences and the fall of a Scottish cardinal who has admitted to sexual misdemeanours apparently committed against those for whom he had pastoral responsibility? Assuming - I think quite safely - that these misdemeanours are the ones of which O'Brien stands accused, we can conclude that this is not the case of a delinquent cleric wandering off to a gay bar in some unknown corner of a city. This is the case of a man with elevated responsibilities preying - whether in drink or not is beside the point - on those who were placed under his care. My gay acquaintances tell me that it is his lies rather than the sex which we should be concerned about. I shake my head at their failure to see that it is neither the lies nor the sex - though these are bad enough - that are worrying, so much as O'Brien's exploitation of his pastoral and moral position.

But even if we set aside the abuse of his pastoral responsibility, O'Brien is simply the most public example of what is now the withered Catholic conscience in 21st century Britain. O'Brien is supposed to be a rarity among the clergy, and I would like to think that is true. But how can we say he is a rarity among Catholics, the vast majority of whom - as Woodhead's research shows - have very little conscientious objection to sexual licence? Bad leaders are the ruin of the people, but the people get the leaders they deserve. In this context, how can we be surprised if a man so ready to fly morally as high as a kite, falls like Icarus on a pair of Tesco Value wings? I sat here yesterday wondering if O'Brien might even be a kind of Catholic suicide bomber, destroying himself in order to attack the institution that he has betrayed so badly. But that would be crediting him both with far too much intelligence and far too much malevolence. He is - by all the available evidence - simply a man with an eye for the main chance. I suspect there is a little bit of O'Brien's badness lurking in all of us. His fall should be a salutary warning.

************

Meanwhile, in Rome, before O'Brien's admission, they were talking about the accusations against him being the manifestation of a homosexual plot to derail the conclave. We might dismiss and deplore such talk as complacency, were it not for the fact that we now find at least one of the accusations against O'Brien (and of course O'Brien's resignation) was known to Rome before the Observer's report, and quite possibly as early as late last year. At the very least, there were ten days between the pope's announcement of his resignation and the story of O'Brien's accusers becoming public when high ranking members of the Church's hierarchy must have known what was happening.

Autrement dit, dear friends, ...well, this looks/appears like / stinks of/ resembles a cover up; of a decision to let O'Brien sail into retirement with these accusations unmentioned ... until the press got hold of them. Unless they were outpaced by the events, it seems that someone somewhere with serious authority chose to risk the greater scandal which has now occurred, rather than face the lesser scandal of O'Brien retiring early under suspicion. Have the Roman authorities learnt so little? Are they so preoccupied with cardinatial dignity? Even now? These days, humble parish priests get put on gardening leave when this kind of thing happens. I know of several priests who have had to endure months of uncertainty in a state of clerical limbo while sexual allegations were examined. And yet O'Brien, whose resignation was on the pope's desk, got to carry on in his position as the senior Catholic hierarch in Scotland and the only cardinal from the UK heading to the conclave as an elector.

Whichever way you look at it - blame it on complacency, indolence, unmitigated esteem for the cardinatial dignity, or whatever - Rome has played its own part in helping O'Brien bring further opprobrium on the Catholic Church in the UK. If O'Brien had exercised some self mastery, he would be going to the conclave. If those responsible had exercised their responsibility, the Church would have been seen to act with the determination of an institution resolved to expel from its body the toxic contagion of sexual misconduct and the fear of minor scandals which lead ineluctably to even greater scandals.

We don't need a reforming pope right now. We just need one who will preach penance. Reformers who are not saints become wreckovators. Christians who know no penance are just deluded. And those who keep whinging about the terrible persecution of the Church by the secularists need only reflect on this sobering fact: that on the eve of the conclave, the Church - in O'Brien and in its administrative failure - made the bullets for those who would attack it.

Auto-destruction indeed.

Letter to my son who has just turned nine

How do you tell your nine-year-old boy that you might not come back from the war?


11 October 1916

My dear lad,

You have just turned nine, a great age which has also become now the most touching. Too young to take part in the war, you are old enough at least for it to shape your memories, and sufficiently aware to understand that you, all of you nine-year-old children, will later have to weigh up its consequences and learn its lessons.

What a happy life, both agreable and full, we will then have provided for you, if in fact you know how, and wish, to remember and understand! And so that you might remember, dear boy, I willingly accept the difficulties of the present, along with all the risks and the separation - which is most difficult of all - which has so disrupted our family home where we lived with your mother and where we doted on you.

So, just like when you were very small and I sat you on my knee to tell you stories or show you lovely picture books, with all of your tender attention listen carefully to the things which will seem at first rather serious, even to a big boy of nine years old, but which it will be a comfort to me to have told you, dear boy. It will reassure me to know that you will attach yourself to these words, having heard them from my mouth, and that you will understand them: yes, your daddy will thus be more at peace, should I after the war no longer be there to explain them to you.

Your nine years which make you so strong for your mother - for me and for France also - your nine years: I am so proud of them!

I do not believe myself guilty of weakness or sentimentalism. I admire this one general, whom I know, who does not wear mourning clothes for his sons and never speaks of them ('so as not to grieve my men and weaken their courage' he says) He had two sons, his pride and joy, who fell on the same day aged twenty and nineteen. I admire him, though I do not know whether I would have the strength to follow his example. I would have clasped you to my heart, and then, without crying or wailing like others do, I would have waited and done my part. But nobody can tell me not to be happy if now it is my turn and not yours; if I must go and you remain behind.

To my mind, it is one of the most poignant problems of a war, to choose in advance which of those born to defend a nation must be offered first for sacrifice by that nation. Let me tell you frankly: given all his responsibilities, the death of a thirty-five year old man destroys a home. But I cannot help wondering whether it it not still sadder if all the hopes of that home for the future die. Certainly I feel how deep will be my sorrow in leaving my beloved wife and child behind, but at least I would have had years of happiness and love with you, and the bitterness of my regrets will be swept away by all my sweet memories.

I will sorry about all the things I have not done, or that I will not have been able to do. But at the same time, I will think that you are there, you, my son, to continue my work, to bring about what I could only plan or dream of doing. The death of a child is crushing and futile, but the death of a father - a noble death like all deaths during this period - will on the contrary inspire and bear fruit.

Do you understand now, my dear little boy, all the hope we have placed in you, we your forebears, at this gravest of hours, all we expect of you, my nine-year-old son, and why I say that in leaving before you, we will have chosen the better part? For if God does not allow us to be together at the end of the war as we were before, instead of the dark despair into which your death would have plunged me, my last thoughts will have been a comfort and a consolation: the memories and the example that I have tried to leave you.

Albert-Jean Després.

Lieutenant Després was killed in action on 21 April 1918 during the Battle of the Lys (Flanders).

O my prophetic soul!

'Where there is no shepherd, the people will be scattered ...'

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When I blogged about Bishop Williamson's explusion from the SSPX nearly two weeks ago, I wrote the following:

It is possible of course he could launch his own roving ministry, not aligned with any group in particular, but available to those groups he considers faithful to the Catholic cause, much as he did when, without permission, he recently visited the traditionalist Benedictines in Brazil to give confirmations. There could emerge in the near future a kind of Williamson Federation, loosely tied together, all mutually sympathetic, willing to have his ministry, but not especially willing to tie themselves to any fixed structure.


Now, in his first post-expulsion move, a webpage appears with the following message taken from his latest Eleison Comments:

It seems that, today, God wants a loose network of independent pockets of Catholic Resistance, gathered around the Mass, freely contacting one another, but with no structure of false obedience, which served to sink the mainstream Church in the 1960’s and is now sinking the Society of St. Pius X. If you agree, make contributions to the St. Marcel Initiative; they will certainly come in useful. For myself, once my situation stabilizes, I am ready to put my bishop’s powers at the disposal of whoever can make wise use of them.

I say these comments are taken from his latest Eleison Comments; they are not quite the same. His letter on Saturday actually read:

For myself, as soon as my situation stabilizes in England, I am ready to put my bishop’s powers at the disposal of whoever can make wise use of them.

Interesting that. I note the website and the Saint Marcel Initiative appear to be based in the USA. The funding buttons you can click on at the bottom clearly favour US-based donations. My friend Dom Hugh has given this all the once over here.

Still, returning to the proposition which Bishop Williamson makes above, I am struck by a number of things. We can pass over his parsing of 'what God wants'; I'm more interested in what comes next. He is evoking the possibility of a loose federation of traditionalist groups who are united in the faith, united in the sacraments, but - so much for St Robert Bellarmine's definition of the Church! - not exactly united under a hierarchy. The benefit of this kind of organisation, he argues, is that it suffers from 'no structure of false obedience'.

I have been reflecting for some time on how the SSPX's own cause suffers unwittingly from the implications of living in a state of exception, which implications can be briefly stated thus: those who decide on the exceptions constitute thereby an authority. If I break one law for the sake of a higher law, I must subsequently agree for my exception to be sanctioned by the authority under which I live. If I refuse to accept its judgment about the exception I have made, I become a law (an authority) unto myself. Bishop Williamson's position is that since there is no higher law than the Faith, then whatever order is contrary to that Faith can be rejected in favour of the higher law. I say is contrary; I should probably say I consider contrary. Because the implication always contained in this argument seems to be that if I consider something contrary to the Faith, then it must be so.

The organisational consequence of this position, however, is now becoming clear. It is better not to have a '(false) structure of obedience' in place so as to avoid any dilemma. The problem for Bishop Williamson is then the 'structure' in which my faith risks coming under hierarchical command. It's a simple calculation: avoid the structure and you avoid the dilemma. Job's a good'un, as they say in the north of England.

But there is a problem here. God gifted the Church with the note of infallibility. But there is no corresponding note of impeccability in governance. Working out of a Thomist logic, Bishop Williamson essentially holds that all laws not for the common good do not have the force of law. But his error is to believe that from the point of view of jurisprudence, every man's mind is apt to judge what is and what is not in favour of the common good. This is a similar error in the field of law to that made by the SSPX in the field of theology: that in matters of the faith, every man's mind is apt to judge what is and what is not compatible with the faith.

I am accused of holding a sceptical position on this issue; nothing is further from the truth. It is one thing to say the human mind can attain truth. It is quite another proposition to say that the human mind infallibly arrives at the truth because it can cite an infallible premiss in its reasoning. But the very fact that in the contemporary Church we have disagrement about what exactly is compatible with the faith - or what is in fact for the common good - urges not that we abandon or temporarily suspend the providential structure of the Church, but that we back it up! False structure of poppycock, say I! It was ever thus!

Bishop Williamson will defend all this by saying that it is in defence of the Faith and, therefore, justified. Surely he should reflect on the fact that all those traditionalist groups out there - those with whom he mostly disagrees on whether there is even a pope now - justify their own position as a defence of the Faith!

So, to whom shall we go, my masters? Which one is actually defending the faith for real? Is it Bishop Williamson or is it Bishop Williamson's old colleague Bishop Sanborn? Is it Pope Pius XIII? And if not, why not? They all defend their position on the grounds of holding to the Faith! My old friend Bishop Terence Fulham calls his chapel a continuing Catholic church - what, like the continuity IRA? Is my old seminary colleague Bishop Robert Neville actually defending the faith? Crikey, could it even be Pope Michael in Kansas who is the real deal? And if not, why not? He's only defending the Faith!

Please, please stop this silliness now, my Lord, before you break something irreparable!

From the archives: Gianna Jensen ...

... because she's a heroine!

****************

August 2010


No doubt one of the unmentionable elephants in the national lounge during the pope's visit in September will be the abortion rate. In 2007 - the latest figures I could find without spending the afternoon looking further - abortions in the UK numbered 198,000 for the year. To put it in a more concrete way, that figure is more or less the equivalent of the population of Newcastle.

In this regard, I was fascinated recently to come across Gianna Jessen. Jessen, an American born in 1977, is the survivor of a botched instillation abortion. She lasted eighteen hours in the womb, burning in the saline solution the doctors had injected into her mother's body to procure Gianna's death. She now suffers from cerebral palsy, though she calls it her 'gift'. To shame us all, she has already run two marathons, and plans to run more. Incredibly, her first foster parents treated her badly, but she was eventually adopted by a family who loved her deeply and raised her to be a most remarkable speaker - caustic, witty, profound - and advocate of the prolife cause.

How many of us English Catholics, mitred or merely baptised, could say with Jessen, "I know I am hated because I declare life"?

Prepare to be humbled.


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