Catholicism Rocks!

One of the joys of belonging to an ultramontane Catholic family is the multiple opportunities to attend religious services at times when sensible citizens are wondering whether there's 'time for one more' or gazing lovingly at a kebab. My mother managed to attend 3 Masses this time: a 9 p.m. ersatz midnight Mass, an actual midnight Mass, and a morning one, presumably in case she'd sleepwalked her way into mortal sin overnight.

For the sake of family harmony, I accompanied her to the proper Midnight Mass, secure in the knowledge that a web-equipped mobile device named after a fruit would enhance the experience considerably. Twitter and a variety of news sources provided an enhanced reality which far outweighed the entertainment on offer in meatspace.

Or so I thought… Having previously only attended Mass in remote rural locations, I wasn't prepared for the festive spirit of urban Catholics. I knew something was afoot when a gentleman who'd started his celebrations early shouted 'I want a word with you, Father', during the sermon. To be fair, I've often wanted to say the same thing, particularly when the subjects have been contraception, Israel/Palestine and a variety of other hot-button issues. The heckler was escorted out by a pillar of the community: but that wasn't the only excitement of the evening. The next addition to the liturgy was a pair of young ladies resplendent in 'Sexy Santa' dresses and hairpieces bearing Christmas illuminations. They giggled their way through most of the sermon (clearly drink had been taken, because the jokes were sorely undercooked) before they too were gently encouraged to sling their irreverent hooks. Rather a shame…

Finally, I spotted a chap whose condition was swinging rapidly between stupefied and somnolent. Sure enough, within a few minutes he'd dozed off, snored loudly, before doing a classic sideways pratfall from the pew to the bench. Up got the gentleman ushers once more, visibly weary with their new careers in ecclesiastical security.

Still, it's not always the congregation. Peace, love and harmony were noticeably absent from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem:



Goodwill to all men!

The Last Supper - with nachos

I adore Chris Parks' rendering of the Last Supper, using luchador wrestlers and Mexican food. It taps into the skateboarding subculture beautifully, and the Mexican aspects are spot on, evoking that culture's much more emotional approach to Catholicism. I was brought up in Irish and British Catholicism: a lot of silence and shutting-up. Hispanic, especially Mexican Catholicism is much more dramatic, whether it's the festivals or the misery (partly because it's a cover for pre-Christian activities too). I don't think I'd believe in God if religious practice had been more fun, but I might not despise it quite so much:

Self-loathing, the Rory McGrath way

No, not hating Will Self, although plenty of people do.

Rory McGrath is some kind of comedian, though I've only ever seen snatches of him being witty and informed on panel shows. He's published a memoir which seems to revolve around his difficult separation from his childhood Catholicism and the rift this caused with his parents. As an ex-Catholic myself, I can understand: there's a tacit silence on the matter around my parents, though I used to really enjoy baiting them when younger ('Hey, did you know the cross is simply the latest manifestation of sun symbols?' 'Does the collection pay for the priest's legal fees?').

I probably won't buy McGrath's books because I'm not particularly interested in him, but this imaginary confession struck me as personally applicable:

In short, I'm a lazy, selfish, drunken, overweight waste of space, with a gaping emptiness in my soul that I try to fill with self-indulgence and cheap thrills.

Not a bad life. At least, I get by.

Give a pope enough rope…

The Pope's here (well, Scotland, which is a different territory to England and Wales in Catholic jurisdictions. It's all good fun: Ian Paisley and a boatload of Northern Irish Protestant fundamentalists are over to protest the presence of the Anti-Christ on British territory. A German cardinal has made a racist remark about multicultural Britain looking like a 'third-world country' (despite many Africans being Catholic), leading atheist thinkers are suggesting that Benny be questioned by police about the church-wide child abuse scandal, and British Catholics are apparently less than enthusiastic about turning up to join in the fun. 


Weirdly, the Vatican has claimed that Cardinal Kasper is now staying behind 'for health reasons': isn't there something in the rules about not lying? Certainly Channel 4 News has a different story:

Although he is in the course of retiring from his inter- Christian faith office in the Vatican, Kaspar has been Pope Benedict’s point man for this trip. This was to have been his swan song. So much so that last night the cardinal was to be found at a banquet thrown in his honour by the German embassy in Rome.

It was at the very moment that the German ambassador was welcoming his prestigious guest across the threshold of his embassy last night that the Vatican press office was letting it be known that Cardinal Kaspar was suddenly too ill to travel to Britain.

My dear old mum isn't subject to this apathy or hostility: she's in the choir for Benjy's Party in the (Cofton) Park. It's all very low-rent: they've even got notorious third-class degree-holding, tile-choosing TV D-lister, Conservative Party activist and Anglo-Palin loan shark Carol Vorderman compéring the faithful massive in Hyde Park.

How different it is from John Paul II's triumphant tour of Britain and Ireland in 1982. Back then, that nasty old man was a hero to many: he'd taken a shot for his faith, and he was a leading Cold Warrior, doing his best to undermine the (admittedly unpleasant) regime in his native Poland and across the world. He was a deeply frightening conservative figure, fresh from crushing the Liberation Theology movement which saw South American priests siding with the peasantry against the disgusting military regimes installed by the US and its friends, and fighting the scourges of planned parenting, feminism, socialism, female ordination etc. etc. etc., yet everyone treated him like he was God's representative on Earth!

I should know. Aged 7, I was one of the huddled masses trying to grab some sleep on an airport runway - in the rain - waiting for an old man in white to drive past me at high speed.

We sang some hymns, prayers were said, I was given a special Missal with the Papal Arms on them and we went home. Bigger than Elvis. Ahem. Not quite as good a story as my brother, who shook hands with Il Papa when his school choir sang in Rome, a moment captured forever in a photograph long renamed 'His Holiness Meets the Pope', though little brother never did make it into the ranks of the priesthood.  Far from it - he's almost a lawyer.  Still, I imagine he'll meet plenty of priests in that line of work, many wearing handcuffs, and not for pleasure.  

Did the visit reinforce my Catholicism? Hard to say. So much of my life revolved around the faith - Catholic School (amongst them, the ironically-named Sisters of Mercy), Mass on Saturdays and Sundays and often in school, Benediction, Stations of the Cross, the Rosary. I was, for many years, an Altar Boy. Yet I can never remember having an inner core of belief. These were things I did rather than meaningful symbolic experiences for me. Being an altar boy meant memorising a massive set of actions, all of which had to be done to perfection and exactly at the right time. Get it wrong, and congregants would loudly tut at you - there wasn't much time for devotion. Looking back, being Catholic wasn't exactly a distinct identity for me, because I didn't know anyone who wasn't Catholic, but it certainly was my cultural framework, and continued to be so long after I consciously realised that I didn't believe any of the supernatural bits and disagreed with virtually all the political stands associated with the faith. Oddly, I never, ever recall anyone trying to persuade us that God existed, or of anything flowing from that - it was just assumed, and was therefore never raised as a question - in school, church and home, religion was a matter of practice because the fundamentals were accepted with as little examination as breathing. 

The biggest divide between my parents and myself is their Catholicism. Or more precisely, their ability to sustain any sort of belief. I just can't do it, and haven't the empathy to understand their capability. At times I've regretted this - it would be lovely to have an explanation of Everything that doesn't require examination, and someone else to blame for all my faults, but only in moments of weakness. I actually find the weirdness, complexity and mystery of the universe far more compelling than supernatural stories invented by half-starved desert nomad from 3000-2000 years ago, and long ago decided that taking responsibility for your own actions (good and bad) is far better than blaming the Devil for the bad and crediting man with beard for the good. 

As to morality being shaped by religion: I'd rather do my best solely to help others here and now than do it simply to avoid a smiting from someone who can't be bothered to make his whims clear. To me, atheism isn't a negative: it's about embracing a human-centric morality.

But as they say - there's a difference between atheists and Catholic atheists, and I'm inescapably the latter.

This just in from the Department of You Couldn't Make It Up

You may have noticed recently that the Catholic Church in Ireland is in total meltdown. Dozens of priests have been caught sexually abusing children, bishops have had to resign for their parts in covering the scandals up and often moving these priests to new parishes where they carried on abusing, and large chunks of the young population were educated or simply locked up by the church with the approval of the state.

What's the answer to this widespread rottenness?

Why, it's to crack down on liberalism in the Church! Apparently being staffed with rapists isn't the core problem: it's priests who've allowed their congregations to skip confession, buy french letters and take communion while divorced. The sinners!

So if you've slacked off in church attendance because you suspect your priest's a child rapist, they have the answer: more pilgrimages and getting back to Benediction. For you, not for the priest.

The basic message from the Vatican seems to be 'it's not me, it's you'.

I don't know why I care, really. I don't live there and I don't believe a word of the dogma. I guess that this is the burden of the ex-Catholic. If only we could strip out the supernatural stuff and try the basic message ('carpenter's boy promotes kindness and being less judgmental'), we might all get along a little better. And fewer altar boys would be raped.

And the award for joined-up thinking goes to…

…The Vatican.

Specifically, for putting Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor (an Englishman, despite his name) in charge of their inquiry into the Irish church's institutional facilitating of clerical child abuse.

Yes, that is the Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor who ignored warnings that Father Michael Hill was a danger to children, didn't report him, and moved him to a different post, where he abused more children.

The Irish situation is part of the postcolonial legacy (I knew I could blame the British somehow). The Catholic church never supported Irish independence as an institution, though many priests did so individually. When the Church was illegal, rebels and clerics made common cause and identified the fight for religious freedom with that for national freedom, which suited both sides down to the ground. When the British bowed to pressure and legalised  Catholicism in 1829, the Church swapped sides because it always sticks like glue to power. Some say that's where it went wrong in 312AD, when Christianity was legalised in the Roman Empire, eventually becoming the official religion: a persecuted Church will be sympathetic to the persecuted - a state church will cling to power however evilly it is wielded.

That's what happened in Ireland. The Church had the nationalist movement in its pocket, because rebels fully identified being Catholic with being Irish. As services were in Latin, Irish withered away in one of the places it could have thrived (Welsh, banned in most areas of life, was saved by its use in Chapel). The Church preached reactionary messages which became the core of Irish nationalism whereas other countries' nationalists incorporated class politics too. Meanwhile, the Church itself, gradually gaining control of education at most levels, preached against Irish independence.

When Independence came about, the Church was sanctified at the heart of the new state. In particular, it had total control of the educational system - partly from religious devotion, partly because a poor new country had no funds and energy to start from scratch. Allowing the Church to carry on meant one less thing to worry about.

It simply handed the country's children over to a church which had no concern for local situations, the rights of the individual, the needs of the state and a conscious rejection of democracy and oversight. The Church's priority was the maintenance of its own hegemony. Almost every single politician, businessman, local government official, doctor, dentist, teacher and policeman was educated by the Catholic church from a toddler to a graduate.

Very few, therefore, were capable of conceptualising the country, the people or the state other than as Catholic entities above all: the demands of the Church were paramount. So it was easy to develop the mindset that complaints were automatically groundless or isolated aberrance. The state and the tiny elite that ran education, the justice system, the civil service and the business class were captured by the Church and that was the end of it.

What changed this situation? The gradual onset of European secularism, I guess. The growing body of evidence that hegemony had warped the national consciousness. Perhaps the example of emigrants who'd thrived in a more open society. The sharper conflicts in the North, possibly. There was a 60s moment in Ireland, but it was short and muted - contraception and divorce were only fully legalised in the 1990s.

Maybe the parallels should be with Albania, or Romania - states founded and moulded in the weird grip of a single vision, now blinking in the sunlight of ideological diversity.

A change of pace

For the past few weeks, I've mostly been listening to Riot Grrl and 80s/90s indie pop (Pale Saints and Heavenly mostly), but the next album on my alphabetical trawl through my hard drive is a compilation of Benedictine monks singing Gregorian chants.

Now, I'm ambiguous about religious music as it is: it can be utterly sublime, but it's written for the glorification of an imaginary being which has legitimised all sorts of appalling behaviour (and some good things, to be fair). I'm also ambiguous about Benedictine monks: I spent some of my school life in the tender care of this lot (as well as the Christian Brothers, the Sisters of Mercy - who were heavily armed and not inclined to mercy, I can tell you) and they were, by and large, drunks, mental and physical bullies and very much not what you'd call holy. I just can't imagine the ones I knew producing this kind of contemplative music. I also supposedly sang this stuff in the school choir - nobody worked out that I simply mouthed the words for 2 years because choir practice was better than the homework sessions which were the alternative.

So this is a beautiful album, one which, I suppose, can be treated by atheists as simply music - being in Latin helps most people, but I can follow enough to get annoyed - but it holds all sorts of other associations for me.

Of course. Jews made priests abuse children

At least, according to the retired Bishop of Grosseto in remarks he now denies.

A website quoted Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, as saying he believed a "Zionist attack" was behind the criticism, considering how "powerful and refined" the criticism is.

Allegedly speaking to the Catholic website Pontifex, Babini, 81, was quoted as saying: "They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers."

Babini has previously been quoted on the Pontifex website accusing Jews of exploiting the Holocaust, as well as criticising homosexuality.

They'd have got away with it if it wasn't for them pesky kids

Yes, the Catholic Church, in the form of the Bishop of Tenerife, has unearthed the guilty party in the sexual abuse scandals sweeping the world.

His comments were that there are youngsters who want to be abused, and he compared that abuse to homosexuality, describing them both as prejudicial to society. He said that on occasions the abuse happened because the there are children who consent to it.

"There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what's more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you", he said.

Yes, it's the children. The doe-eyed little teases lining up at the communion rail, making come-hither gestures in the sacristy. What's a priest to do? Entrapment!

I'd stay away from Tenerife if you have kids. You wouldn't want to be responsible for the effect your children have on His Grace, would you?

Happy Easter

I spent a good deal of the evening standing around too: accompanying my mother to the Easter Vigil (for you non-Catholics, an extra-long Mass). It was a bit like the EDL do: flaming torches, shaved heads, boredom. Still, I saw bats, a badger and found it ethnologically interesting. No mention of the church's latest problems though!

Quick plug: many of you are highly opinionated and prefer to express yourselves in short, concentrated bursts (Ben? Are you there?). So head over to onesentencereview.com, my almost brother-in-law's new website. You can do what it says in the name. No books section yet though…

Holy (rock and) rollers

Why they've done it, I have no idea. But the Vatican, in the form of L'Osservatore Romano, its newspaper, has seen fit to issue a list of Top Albums. It's a bit embarrassing really - haven't they got better things to do? So here it is:

1. Revolver by the Beatles

2. If I Could Only Remember My Name by David Crosby

3. The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd

4. Rumours by Fleetwood Mac

5. The Nightfly by Donald Fagen

6. Thriller by Michael Jackson

7. Graceland by Paul Simon

8. Achtung Baby by U2

9. (What's the Story) Morning Glory by Oasis

10. Supernatural by Carlos Santana

What do you think? Mostly MOR rubbish? I can't see much of a link other than it's 70s rock and that genre's spawn - too young for the Pope and too old for the rest of us. Though perhaps 2 is a reference to His Holiness's age and 6/7 hints at recent Irish Catholic sex scandals. Morning Glory is of course another sexual reference…

My top religious themed pop hits (and misses):
Idols - Altered Images
Something to Believe In - The Bangles
Maroon Bible - Beulah
Faith/Void - Bill Callahan (Chorus - 'It's time to put God away).
No Sects Please, We're British - The Bitter Springs
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath - The Cardigans
Jesus Spaceman - Catchers
Just Like Heaven - The Cure
My Angel Rocks Back and Forth - Four Tet
Hindoo Man - George Formby
Pam fi Duw? - Gorky's Zygotic Mynci
Palm Sunday - Go-Betweens
Not Even Jesus - Gold Blade
Christian Girls - Hefner
Sense of Guilt - Josef K
We Will Rise Again - Juliana Hatfield
By My Angel - Mazzy Star
Should The Bible Be Banned? - McCarthy
Mogwai Fear Satan - Mogwai
True Faith (or Ceremony) - New Order
Incense - Picture Center
In Heaven - Pixies
You Are The Way - Primitives
Every Night I'm Mentally Crucified - Prolapse
Sunday Girl - Richard James
The Evangelist - Robert Forster
Faith - Shack
J's Heaven - Slowdive
Barrabas! - SMASH
Catholic Education - Teenage Fanclub
I Saw The Light - The The
I Think We're Alone (Now) - Tiffany… er, maybe. I like it anyway.
Confessions - Violent Femmes.
Pilgrim Hold Your Lamp Up High - Brave Captain
Exorcisto - Girls vs Boys
Holy Are You - The Electric Prunes
Space Spiritual - Axelrod / Nat Adderley

Don't take the soup, do send your money

Haiti was hardly a natural disaster. Other countries in the area have survived recent disasters in far better shape - such as Cuba and Dominica, the country which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

Haiti has been an international football for basically all its existence, colonised by France and Spain, punished for its wonderful slave rebellion, occupied by the US, and toyed with during the Cold War, then abandoned when it was no longer useful. It has never had a stable, altruistic government, enduring a litany of dictators who ravaged the place for personal gain while following orders from the nearby superpower, or self-styled saviours who, failing to make any headway with a society that filled the void where government should be with gangs, ended up selfish or incompetent. If Haiti was a Muslim country ripe for 'radicalisation', or it had oil, then it would never have reached this condition. Experts in all areas would have been dispatched to help, food would have appeared, elections would have been held. Instead, we get a token UN force and medical aid from Cuba, which is on a major diplomatic mission to South America and its neighbours.

The earthquake was bad, but the massive death toll and damage are entirely caused by historical conditions. Without stable government, Haiti never had the money or inclination to develop boring institutions like an Inland Revenue, a Forestry Commission, a Trade Ministry, or a Buildings Inspectorate. Without managed trade, the Haitians had little access to hard currency, and therefore taxation was difficult. No tax = no importation of fuel for cooking. No fuel = massive deforestation: I saw a picture the other day of the Haiti/Dominica border. The Haitian side was totally denuded of trees, whereas the Dominican side was thickly wooded.

Without trees, topsoil is eroded and land is destabilised. Without town planners and buildings inspectors, Port-au-Prince became a jungle of flimsy concrete buildings sited on destabilised, deforested land. When the earthquake hit, the hills collapsed and the buildings fell down on top of each other, leading to the horrendous death toll we have.

Pat Robertson saw the disaster as God's punishment, and plenty of people would like to see it as an unforeseeable Act of God. It wasn't. We caused it, through neglect. Boring organisations like the Department for International Development fund botanists, architects and infrastructure experts to do this kind of thing, but their budgets are too low because we hate paying tax, and their attention is diverted to whatever country we've invaded most recently. No doubt their budgets will be cut even further under whichever government we're getting next.

Meanwhile, what to do with your money. Haunted by racial memories of 'taking the soup' (the British habit, in Famine Ireland, of feeding the starving only if they converted to Protestantism), I'm wary of religious aid. Even if their motivation is getting to heaven by doing good works, I'd rather give to secular charities. Richard Dawkins has made it easy: send your money here and every penny will be given to the International Red Cross and/or Médècins Sans Frontières. He'll even cover the administration costs if you use PayPal.

Send your money, and ask hard questions of your politicians.

An Irish Christmas

I wonder if Granny O'Grimm has any theories linking the St. Mel's Cathedral burning and the Irish church's sex scandals?



I've had a good couple of days. I visited The Well of Lost Blogs (honours even on the Scrabble, dammit), ate well, received excellent gifts including a cat-shaped pencil sharpener which meows piteously when you insert the pencil into the obvious orifice, record coasters, the concise Larousse and much else beside. I also spent my book tokens today: Nigel Slater's Tender (I'm starting a veg patch in the spring), the new Jasper Fforde (Shades of Grey), and Stephen Foster's …And She Laughed No More, the witty follow-up to She Stood There Laughing, his wry memoir of following Stoke City before the glory days.

Inspired by Ms E-Mentor's adventures in the Victorian Web, I'm reading Braddon's 1861 'sensation novel' Lady Audley's Secret. It's gripping and fascinating. Don't know what the secret is yet though…

Symbolic?

Spare a thought for my dad today: the cathedral in which he was baptised, St. Mel's in Co. Longford, Ireland, was gutted by fire. It was famous for its classical interior, completion of which was delayed for decades by the death and emigration of many Longfordians during the Great Hunger.

Perhaps it is symbolic: another two of the Dublin bishops fingered by the recent report quit today - only one guilty party is left clinging on to his crook (plus all the priests of course).

Confession time: Mel Gibson's mother is from Longford, and named him after the saint, friend or nephew of Patrick. I'm hoping the antisemitism came from his father.

Where's Willy?

There are huge gaps in our knowledge of Shakespeare. We don't know where he was for much of his life, what he thought about the issues of the day, what his marriage was like, and much else besides.

Naturally, this means that there's a massive industry of Shakespeare scholarship and speculation, some rather more fanciful than others. Now, suddenly, the question of whether he was a Catholic has popped up yet again. There's a little evidence of possible Catholicism in the family, but no proof.

Just now, Radio 4 news breathlessly relayed the news that the signature of 'William, clerk of Stratford' (Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordienses) has been found dated to his 'lost years', three times in the register of the English College in Rome, the priests' training college which churned out padres to sneak back into Britain and cater for the rebels in secret.

All very interesting, but hardly news: Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel made this claim (in German) in 2006, and her book was translated in 2007. Why has this turned up now? Is the English College on a fundraising drive? I suspect so… Who knows whether this is true? Working out the bona fides of Shakespeare specialists is tricky, and Shakespeare provides a handy black hole into which people pour their obsessions.

More to the point: it's not definitely Shakespeare, and it doesn't add to our understanding of the plays. The Catholicism or not of Billy has been widely examined and the plays have been read in the light of this by many commentators. This story is more about the Shakespeare industry than it's about Shakespeare.

Bye Donal. Don't go alone

Finally, a senior clergyman has resigned over the many, many, Irish sexual abuse cases. A recent report identified several named Bishops as involved in the cover-ups - moving abusive priests on to fresh new territory, refusing to investigate accusations and the like. Donal Murray, Bishop of Limerick was merely one of this cabal who decided that the strength of the Church outweighs the needs of raped children, their families and the community.

More need to go. Schools need to be handed over to the State (they're still run 'for' the State by religious institutions in Ireland, and the Pope needs to 'fess up. In his previous job, Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith (it probably sounds cooler in Latin), he had responsibility for all this stuff. He knew, and said nothing.

Ireland used to be the hope of the Catholic Church. While other nations slipped away into atheism or (worse) Protestantism, or developed strands of Liberation Theology (the idea that Catholic priests should identify with the poor and the oppressed rather than bolster the ruling classes), Ireland's Catholics stayed obedient, reactionary and devoted. They handed their children over to the Church and received in return a ruling class that never lifted a finger without checking with Rome first. One image serves well: all of the government and senior oppostion, with the brave exception of Noel Browne (an all-round hero), waited outside the funeral service for the President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde (owner of a splendid moustache), because the Catholic church forebade its members from attending Protestant services.

Catholicism's on my mind today. I certainly don't have any nostalgia for my days as an altar boy or choir boy, but it leaves its effects, positive and negative, even on we liberated atheists. I'm definitely a Catholic Atheist! In London the other day, Adam and I visited the National Gallery's The Sacred Made Real exhibition, a collection of paintings and statues from the 17th-century Spanish Counter-reformation. All the statues are hyper-real: John the Baptist's head is painted, and moving around the glass case reveals a neck complete with windpipe and bloody flesh. The Christs are all heavily scourged and wounded, the tears dripping from Mary's eyes are made of crystal.

It's the iconography of a church which feared and distrusted its congregation. Not for them the tales of liberation and joy available in the New Testament. Instead, the emphasis is on suffering and sacrifice: Jesus crucified and the gory martyrdoms of various saints, all dwelt upon with a dark kind of pleasure. The people, clearly, were urged to identify with the misery and pain of these events, rather than to consider the positive aspects of the religion. It's a very personal, inward-looking kind of belief, designed to encourage the faithful to resist the wider social and moral attractions of rival denominations. As art, the images are disturbingly beautiful. As theology, they're terrifying. This is what lies at the heart of the Irish scandal.

Gather round, my co-religionist Catholics

The godless, heathens and heretics (I'm looking at you, Left Behind) have had the gaming world to themselves for too long. It's time for good Romans to fire up the Xbox!

That would be an ecumenical matter…

In case you missed it, Pope Benedictosaurus has announced that any reactionary, bigoted Anglican vicars who are fed up of women tidying up the cloisters and thinking they're priests, can join the Catholic church, no questions asked.

Old Benedict is an utter throwback, determined to drag Catholicism back to the 14th century, despite the groundswell of opinion amongst younger clerics and theologians that looks forward to the eighteenth, at least. Many of the Catholic priests aren't going to be overly impressed by a load of johnny-come-latelies turning up, without really changing their beliefs, and bringing their wives with them - perhaps the Catholics who want to get married should convert to Anglicanism, marry, then come back…

It's not a friendly act, 'unsettling' a whole bunch of a rival's employees, like a football manager. Though it might help the Anglicans by allowing them to offload their worst elements.

A tale of two Erics

Over lunch, until joined by my esteemed colleague Debbie, I carried on reading MacCarthy's biography of Eric Gill.

It's funny how books can lead you through all sorts of terrain: typography to sculpture to Modernism to early-twentieth century sexology, the Arts and Crafts movement and many other things. What caught my attention today was Gill's status as the perfect subject for a moral conundrum. According to this book's take on his sex life, he slept with his wife (fine), other women (naughty Eric), his sisters (ooh, racy), his daughters (not very nice) and sometimes had a go with farmyard animals (clearly unEnglish, in fact positively wrong). Meanwhile, he converted to Catholicism and created the great Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral (as well as an exact copy of Little Eric in marble). When this story broke, there was pressure to have the Stations removed: how could people pray in front of these religious icons knowing that their creator was a sexual transgressor? Or doesn't it matter? It certainly fascinating to read of a man who joined the strictest of religious organisations while not altering his behaviour one iota.

By of comparison, here's one each from his sacred and profane sides (though Gill would hate the distinction (buy prints here or see them and sculptures at the Tate:

Hail and Farewell

See you on Monday, when I'll have either lost a sister or gained a brother-in-law. It's a big Catholic wedding, followed by a hog and lamb roast presided over by a professional chef my sister's friends with. There'll be leaves around for the vegetarians, presumably. Don't expect too much commentary from me: no wi-fi in the church. Honestly, these people live in the Dark Ages, and not just ideologically and morally!