Holy Orders

The media have been having a bit of fun with the story about the seven seminarians who walked into a pub in Cardiff last weekend in clerical garb and were initially refused service by a barman who thought they were a stag party in fancy dress, before the assistant manager stepped in and rectified the misunderstanding by offering them a free round of drinks.

The bit that caught my eye though was the statement by the Archbishop of Cardiff in which he said, "It's wonderful to hear that the seminarians were celebrating their own path to priesthood by having a good time in Cardiff, which of course they are allowed to have."

It seems to me that the Archbishop is responding there to the unspoken idea that there is something wrong with priests, or those training to become priests, enjoying a few pints in a pub. I blame Henry VIII.

As well as triggering a schism from Rome with his adulterous marriage to Anne Boleyn, Henry in unleashing the English Reformation shut down the monasteries which until then had brewed huge volumes of beer, as well as being the economic hub of an agrarian society, buying goods from the small farmers and tradespeople around them.

Thankfully, the connection between the Church and brewing continued elsewhere in Europe, with merry monks and plastered priests still adorning beer bottles from the Trappist breweries of Belgium and the monasteries of Bavaria.

Irish Blood, English Heart

The untimely passing of the comedian, actress and scriptwriter Caroline Aherne, who died last week at the age of just 52, led me to reflect once again on a particular aspect of her prodigious talent.

Like many other comedians, musicians and performers who came out of the Manchester area in the 1980's and 1990's, Steve Coogan, Morrissey, Marr and the other members of The Smiths, Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, Terry Christian, Shaun Ryder of The Happy Mondays and Mani of The Stone Roses, Aherne was the child of Irish immigrants. As a Catholic born in Manchester of Irish descent, albeit farther back, I've often wondered what it is about that combination that seems to produce such talents.

I think there are two things. One is that being an outsider allows you to see things more clearly than others and, even if only unconsciously, feel little affinity for or need to respect an Establishment (Protestant, pro-monarchy and Empire) that you're not a part of. The other is that as the child of immigrants you belong to the "other" not just in the country you live in, but also the one your parents left, a "double outsider" if you like.

One of Caroline Aherne's earliest, and funniest, comic creations, the Irish nun Sister Mary Immaculate, must surely have been based on her teachers at the Hollies FCJ Convent Grammar School in Manchester.

Books of the Year

I've been scanning my bookshelves, looking at the books I've read this year.

Most of the fiction I've read has been as a result of media of one type or another, whether radio, TV or newspapers, and so has some of the non-fiction, such as Morrissey's Autobiography. Some of the fiction has also been the result of reading non-fiction too as I'll explain.  Anyway, here are the fiction books I've read in 2013.

Black-out in Gretley by J.B. Priestley

Spy thriller set in an English town in World War II which I read having listened to a radio adaptation with Anton Lessor.

The Code of the Woosters, The Inimitable Jeeves and Much Obliged, Jeeves by P.G.Wodehouse

Having read The Fascists in Britain by Colin Cross, about Mosley and the British Union of Fascists in the 30's, I went in search of his fictional counterpart Roderick Spode.












The Aerodrome by Rex Warner

For the same reason, I also read this about an attempted takeover of Britain by fascist air force officers.

Sweet Thursday and East of Eden by John Steinbeck

I read Cannery Row years ago and would have read the sequel Sweet Thursday too if I'd heard about it before. East of Eden, Steinbeck's epic Cain and Abel-based novel set in his native Salinas Valley in Northern California, had long been on my "books I really should get round to reading" list.

Home to Harlem by Claude McKay

A poem by McKay and a short biography of him that I read in a newspaper (a Jamaican-born black Communist in America and Britain in the twenties, he later converted to Catholicism) prompted me to read this, his best known novel.

Red Or Dead by David Peace

Having enjoyed Peace's The Damned Utd about Brian Clough's short reign as manager of Leeds, I pretty much had to read this about another of football's colourful characters, Liverpool manager Bill Shankly.

The Alteration by Kingsley Amis

I spotted this on a top ten of alternate history novels in the Review section of The Guardian. It's set in a still Catholic 70's England in which officials of the Holy Office include Foot and Stansgate.

House of Earth by Woody Guthrie

Not quite the ecosocialist masterpiece some have tried to make it out to be but another book I had to read given that I've been a Woody Guthrie fan since my teens and his music led me to both Dylan and the blues.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

I've always been sold on books by TV programmes that dramatise parts of them. This, featured in an edition of BBC2's Culture Show presented by James Runcie about books set in the London Blitz, is the last of Greene's explicitly Catholic novels.



















The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

I know it's been knocked for its length, plot structure and ending but I quite enjoyed this Booker Prize-winning New Zealand Gold Rush-set detective novel.

Habemus papam

The election of Cardinal Bergoglio as Pope represents a number of firsts.

The first Pope from Latin America, the first from outside Europe since the eighth century, the first Jesuit and the first to take the papal name Francis. On the other hand, Bergoglio, as his name suggests, is of Italian descent, a return to four and a half centuries of Catholic tradition which reflects how the Church has changed over its long history while remaining essentially the same.

Pope resigns

To be honest, I just wanted to write that headline. Who knows, it might be another six hundred years before anyone gets the chance again.

Lighting up the Dark Ages

A new series about art in the so-called Dark Ages, the period of Late Antiquity following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, started on BBC4 last night.

Art crtic Waldemar Januszczak began by looking at Christian art in the early fourth century, when Christianity was still a persecuted sect whose adherents gathered secretly in catacombs (within a couple of decades, it would become the official State religion of the Roman Empire and begin its rise to power as the Catholic Church). 

Januszczak is a witty and engaging presenter. I enjoyed his explanation of the Latin Rotas square, a secret Christian code that I hadn't heard of before, unlike the  well-known Greek chi rho (XP) and Ichthys (fish) symbols which he also discusssed. His look around the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna with its stunning Byzantine mosaics was the highlight of the programme for me though.

The rest of the series will counter the myth that the peoples who migrated into the collapsing Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries were uncultured barbarians and that the Dark Ages represent a step backwards for European culture.

Football and fascism

For the second time in a week, Tottenham fans have been subjected to anti-Semitic abuse as a result of the club being perceived to have a large support in the Jewish communtiy of North London.

Last Thursday in Rome, Spurs fans were attacked in a bar by men shouting "Jews!" and then racially abused by Lazio supporters in the Olympic Stadium. Yesterday at White Hart Lane, West Ham fans  chanted about Hitler and hissed in imitation of the poison gas the Nazis used to kill Jews in the Holocaust.

At the height of football hooliganism in the 1970's and 80's, British clubs including Chelsea and Leeds had a sizeable far-right following. At others, notably Manchester City and Newcastle, the fascists were driven off by a combination of the left and the local black community.

The conflict between Republicans and Loyalists in Northern Ireland means that fascist hooliganism in Britain is also linked to religious identity with clubs having a large Catholic support seen as left-wing and anti-fascist and Protestant ones such as Rangers in Glasgow providing foot soldiers for the BNP and National Front. Unlike in Britain. where Catholics are overwhelmingly of working-class Irish descent, in Spain and Italy the Church, football and fascism have long been linked with clubs such as Real Madrid, Espanyol, Lazio and Inter supported by fascist politicians and organised neo-Nazi groups on the terraces.

Gunpowder, treason and plot

The sky was lit up by bonfires and fireworks last night as people celebrated the four hundred and seventh anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot.

Alternate history being very popular (especially if it's to do with World World II), I was wondering if anyone's ever speculated in print about what would have happened if Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators had suceeded in blowing up the King and Parliament on the fifth of November 1605.

Two questions strike me. Firstly, would England have become and remained an absolute Catholic monarchy like Spain? And given that the Puritans in Parliament, the backbone of the English revolution, would also have been blown up, would Charles I still have lost his head in 1649 even if a Protestant monarchy had been restored after 1605?

A lot of this hinges on the role of individuals in history. As someone once said, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." Individuals are important - Cromwell in 1649, Robespierre in 1789, Lenin in 1917 - but so are the conditions in which they find themselves.

I doubt that England would have become and remained either an absolute or a Catholic monarchy if Guy Fawkes had suceeded in 1605. The rising class of merchants and bankers in London would have seen to that, just as they did in 1649 and again in 1688 when James II tried to impose one.

Gay marriage: a simple solution

The Archbishop of York has added his voice to that of the Catholic hierarchy in opposing gay marriage. In an article in The Guardian, John Sentamu argues - without really saying why - that allowing gay marriage would undermine marriages between men and women. The Catholic Church has been circulating petitions against gay marriage at Masses and in its secondary schools.

Unlike in America, Britain does not have a large body of religious people opposed to gay marriage - most Catholics are not whatever their Church says and circulating petitions against it in schools had led to protests by Catholic teenagers. What the resistance to gay marriage by the Catholic Church and Church of England really signifies is a "long, withdrawing roar" of people who know they no longer have the grip on society they once did.

The root of the issue in England is the intertwining of religious and civil marriage with Anglican vicars, Catholic priests and other ministers conducting ceremonies that combine the two. The answer is to separate them, as happens in many (religious) countries like France and Egypt so people can choose to have a civil marriage, a religious one or both. Everyone could have a civil marriage and it would be up to religious who could have a religious one, with the more enlightened Christians like the Quakers and Unitarians presumably marrying any couple, as they already do with civil parterships.

Separating civil and religious marriage would also probably also involve disestablishing the Church of England, a big step towards a secular society which would also allow Anglicans rather than politicians to control their church.

Mission impossible?

The Association of Catholic Priests, an unofficial grassroots group of Irish clergy, met in Dublin yesterday to call for reform of the Church, specifically married priests, the ordination of women and the election of bishops.

A married clergy is not impossible, but unlikely with the current Pope. The Eastern Catholic churches have married priests and there have also been papal dispensations for married Anglican clergy opposed to women's ordination to become Catholic priests in the last decade. The ordination of women is much harder to imagine given the theological questions it would open up, not least among the ex-Anglicans who have joined the Church over this very issue.

It is the election of bishops though that really is a bridge too far for the Vatican. The Catholic Church has been accurately described as a fragment of the bureaucracy of the late Roman empire that has floated down through the centuries intact. It's not clear who would elect bishops - clergy? laity? - but whoever it was it would subvert the whole basis of the Church, which teaches that the Pope, as the bishop of Rome, is divinley appointed. The conclave of cardinals that elects a Pope is guided by the Holy Spirit to choose the man who then becomes Christ's representative on Earth.

The Catholic Church and children in care

A Scottish sheriff's inquiry in Paisley yesterday found that the deaths of two teenage girls who committed suicide jumping off a bridge could have been prevented if there had been more staff on duty at the care home where they lived and safety precautions had been taken.

Niamh Lafferty and Georgia Rowe died in October 2009 after absconding from the Good Shepherd unit in Bishopton, Renfrewshire. The home, now closed, was originally run by nuns before being taken over by a charity called the Cora Foundation, described by the Catholic Media Service at the time as "an Agency of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Scotland." The Good Shepherd home has since been the subject of allegations of physical abuse of the teenage girls sent there.

That the care of children has been transferred from local authorities to unelected and unacountable mangement boards is alarming enough — one of the trustees at the Good Shepherd home, ex-Scottish Conservative leader Annabel Goldie has dismissed the scandal, remarking "Girls are going to abscond. That is just one of the predictable consequences of the challenged girls who go to the centre and the environment which the centre has to manage." —  but for them to be placed in the hands of the Catholic Church given its appalling record in this area is a sick joke.

The Cardinal and slavery

I'm not sure whether Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, took any PR advice before writing an article comparing homosexuality to slavery. If he did, he probably ignored it given his track record of publicity seeking.

The Catholic Church regards homosexuality as a grave sin, presumably extending a person's stay in Purgatory almost indefintely. Catholic peers led the opposition in the House of Lords to legislation allowing churches to celebrate civil partnerships if they want to. So far, only nice, liberal Christians like the Quakers and Unitarians have taken up the offer.  The Church of England unsurprsingly can't make its mind up. Having a less centralised structure than the Catholic Church (although it's hard to see how it could have a more centralised one) it will probably leave the decision to individual vicars. The Church of England would also have probably avoided using the term "slavery" given its relatively recent history of slave-owning.

O'Brien sees civil partnerships as a form of slavery which is no less morally harmful because those who enter them do so by choice, unlike the millions of Africans shipped across the Atlantic. The interesting question is by what right O'Brien and his fellow cardinals think they have the right to police the morals of those outside the Catholic Church, especially when they now police those inside the Church pretty loosely, turning a blind eyes to their communicants taking advantages of scientific advances like contraception and IVF that they similarly rallied against as immoral when they were introduced. 

If O'Brien wanted to make a moral statement against slavery, he could of course have spoken out against this.

The Church of Rome in England

The idea that there's any lingering anti-Catholicism in England took another blow yesterday as Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Dunacan Smith led the charge against the poor that is the Government's Welfare Reform Bill and ex-Tory party chairman and now head of the BBC governors Chris Patten appeared before the Leveson Inquiry into press standards alongside BBC chief executive Mark Thompson.

The Church of England has been pretty accurately described as the Tory party at prayer. The reverse is not quite the case though: as well as a Nonconformist former PM (Thatcher), the Tories also have a sprinkling of upper-class Catholics in their ranks like Michael Ancram and Julian Fellowes.

As a lapsed Catholic atheist from Manchester, I am unsurprisingly descended from the Irish peasant and labouring classes who since the nineteenth century have been more prevalent in the North West of England than the upper-class descendants of English recusants. The priests and bishops I knew in my youth came from Cavan or Mayo rather than Ampleforth or Stonyhurst. Although I've never met an upper-class Catholic, I nevertheless have a interest in and certain regard for the English recusants who refused to give up their faith and went underground, sending their sons to be educated on the Continent and smuggling in priests. In part this is based on having enjoyed Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and Paul Scofield's superb performance as Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons but is also to do with being impressed by people prepared to stand against the stream whatever the cost.

Ireland, changed utterly

I can't believe I'm going to write the next sentence.  Ireland has broken off diplomatic relations with the Vatican.  Just a couple of years ago, that would have seemed as inconceivable as Ian Paisley becoming a Catholic or Manchester City winning the European Cup.

The news isn't entirely unexpected.  Earlier this year, the Vatican recalled its ambassador after the Taoiseach Enda Kenny attacked the Church's role in covering up child abuse. 

The official reason for closing the Irish embassy at the Vatican is to save money.  But given that the amount involved is under a million pounds a year - less than Charlie Haughey, the spectacularly corrupt Taoiseach in the 1980's, spent on posh French shirts - it seems almost certain that it is a result of the Church covering up child abuse.

More evidence of the new mood in Ireland came in last week's presidential election when the openly gay senator David Norris beat the staunchly Catholic candidate Dana into sixth place by almost sixty thousand votes.

Roman governors?

According to today's Guardian, the Catholic Church is calling for a "world authority" to regulate the financial markets.

In a document snappily titled Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority, Vatican official Bishop Mario Toso argues that a "central world bank" would lead to "the primacy of the spiritual and of ethics" in international banking.

Who might be qualified to run this central bank, maintaining the strictest secrecy given its crucial but highly sensitive role in overseeing the world economy? Given the rivalry between the world's economic superpowers, where would its headquarters be sited? How to stop politicians interfering in its affairs for their own ends? If only there was a group of unelected politicians in a highly centralised State outside international institutions with centuries of experience in handling vast sums of money in complete secrecy...