Should England be a Catholic country again? Dream on, I hear you say. But surprisingly, that is the motion for an intriguing debate which is due to take place – or will have already taken place by the time you read this – at the Royal Geographical Society, London, on March 2. The organiser is The Spectator, one of the oldest magazines – if not the oldest – in the world.
Now it is only a debate and debating societies are notorious for proposing outrageous motions for all and sundry to be outraged by. More often than not their objective is to generate heat rather than light. Nevertheless, under the surface of this event we can perhaps detect something more significant. Ten years ago you might have trawled through a good few newspapers and journals before you came across the word Catholic or found anyone in any way preoccupied with the teaching of the Catholic Church. Not so now.
The Pope is coming to Britain in September and just a few weeks ago he was outraging some there when he had the temerity to point out some moral realities in relation to laws being trundled through the mother of parliaments. In its promotion for this debate The Spectator tells us that the Anglican Communion is deeply, and perhaps irrevocably, split and the Catholic Church is offering a berth to any Anglican who wants to convert. In this year of the Pope’s visit, is it time for England to become a Catholic country again, it asks?
The debate may end up giving a resounding thumbs down to the idea but that is of less consequence than the fact that it is being debated at all. The fact is that God is Back. That is the title of a book published recently pointing to the resurgence of religion and belief in God throughout the world. God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, argues against the secularization thesis and claims that there is a global revival of faith with the “free market” approach to religion observed in the USA being successfully employed in many places, especially China.One of the authors of that book is now the editor of another venerable British journal, The Economist. Shhh…he is a Catholic.
This is not the first debate on this kind of topic to take place in London in the past six months – and the other, negative in the extreme, has had a remarkable consequence.
This was the debate organised last October by Intelligence Squared a UK based organisation that stages debates around the world. The motion was: That the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. Against that motion were Christopher Hitchens, one of the high priests of secularism, and Stephen Fry, one of the high priests of the militant gay lobby. Both are brilliant men and brilliant debaters. Another high priest of secularism, Richard Dawkins, was there and even before the night was out he was gloating on his website:
I have just witnessed a rout – tonight’s Intelligence Squared debate. It considered the motion “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”. Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, opposing the motion, comprehensively trounced Archbishop Onaiyekan (of Abuja, Nigeria) and Ann Widdecombe, who spoke for it. The archbishop in particular was hopeless.
The voting gives a good idea of how it went. Before the debate, for the motion: 678. Against: 1102. Don’t know: 346. This is how it changed after the debate. For: 268. Against: 1876. Don’t know: 34. In other words, after hearing the speakers, the number of people in the audience who opposed the motion increased by 774.
The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed by two hugely popular, professional performers. The archbishop had obviously decided that it would work best if he stuck to facts and figures and presented the Church as a sort of vast charitable or “social welfare” organisation. He emphasised how many Catholics there were in the world, and that even included “heads of state”, he said, as if that was a clincher. But he said virtually nothing of a religious or spiritual nature as far as I could tell, and non-Catholics would have been none the wiser about what you might call the transcendent aspects of the Church. Then later when challenged he became painfully hesitant. In the end he mumbled and spluttered and retreated into embarrassing excuses and evasions. He repeatedly got Ann Widdecombe’s name wrong. The hostility of both the audience and his opponents seemed to have discomfited him.
How did it happen? Apparently the efforts of the organizers to get speakers who might in any way match the anti-Catholic speakers proved difficult and they ended up practically accidentally picking the unfortunate Archbishop, almost by accident – it appears someone bumped into him at an airport or something like that – and throwing him into the lions’s den with a considerably less happy outcome than when Daniel was landed there.
But the whole debacle has proved to be a wake-up call for English Catholics. After the rout The Tablet screamed – well, probably not; that’s not its style – and asked what could be done to put this right. Out of that came the suggestion from the Benedictine Abbot of Worth, Christopher Jamison, that a modern-day version of the Catholic Evidence Guild, a “speakers bureau” of talented and well-equipped polemicists who were unafraid of articulating the Church’s positions on issues of faith and morals, notably in quick-fire settings such as public debates and media interviews. The original guild was founded in 1918 and was instrumental in giving the world such luminaries as Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward.
When the notorious The Da Vinci Code hit the bookstalls, and later the cinemas, in the last decade three Catholics came together to form “The Da Vinci Code Response Group” to set the Christian and Catholic record straight for the multitudes who were swallowing that load of rubbish hook line and sinker. The three consisted of Abbot Jamison and two media men, Austen Ivereigh and Jack Valero. The three have now come together again, along with Kathleen Griffin, formerly of the BBC, to give substance to Abbot Christopher’s suggestion and initiate a project which they are calling Catholic Voices. Ivereigh is a Guardian contributor and European affairs correspondent for the Catholic journal America in the US. Valero is a director of Opus Dei in Britain and works in the prelature’s UK communications office.
The objective of Catholic Voices is to form and nurture a team of 20 articulate speakers, both men and women, of varied ages and backgrounds, who are able to respond rapidly and convincingly to media requests for commentators on Catholic issues. The immediate objective is to prepare this team in advance of the Pope’s visit in September and to be able to deal authoritatively with theological and ethical “hot-button” issues which frequently come under the spotlight “especially those in which the Catholic Church and contemporary society appear at loggerheads.
The approach of Catholic Voices will be to avoid two traps which Catholics seem at times to fall into: an excessive dogmatism and defensiveness on the one hand and an excessive naiveté on the other. They think this dogmatism comes in part from an attitude which assumes that the media is hostile and pagan. This leads to Catholics either refusing to engage with the media or doing so in a way that refuses to concede anything to the media’s own idiom. At the other extreme of naiveté you have those who go all out to evangelise the media and who seek to avoid all harsh and challenging questions with which the media confronts them.
“Our approach”, they say, “is one that takes seriously the media’s role as the agency of accountability in contemporary democratic society, and which needs to understand its idiom. This project seeks to enable Catholics to articulate the reality of the Church and its beliefs in ways that are straightforward and transparent. We should not be overly concerned with persuading people to assent to the Catholic faith (the ‘evangelization’ strategy) but with ensuring that they understand the Church’s teachings. Our task, in other words, is to communicate the reality of Catholicism, and to combat misunderstandings and myths.”
So, with the anti-Christian lobbies mobilising to arm themselves against the impact of the visit of the Pope, and the Secular Society trying to prevent this from being an official state visit, Catholic Voices has it work cut out for it. But people are not stupid. When they don’t bother to think they can be superficial and shallow in their judgements. But when they are given something which will really engage their minds they very often come to the right conclusions. Catholic Voices might do just that – and if it does who knows just what miracle might happen. It may not have happened by March 2nd, but maybe in a few decades from now we might be looking at a different religious landscape in “England’s green and pleasant land”.
To return to dreams. In that famous old weepie, A Star is Born, Norman Maine asked Esther what her dream was. She said that she could see a talent scout from a big record company coming into the club where she was singing and he would sign her…and then he’ll make a record…”
“And then?” Maine asked.
“The record’ll become No. 1 on the hit parade….be played on juke boxes all over the country…and I’ll be made. End of dream”.
Maine then said, “There’s only one thing wrong with that”.
“I know.” Esther replied, “It won’t happen.”
“No, it might happen very easily,” he said.”Only the dream isn’t big enough….Don’t settle for the little dream. Go for the big one.”
She took the plunge, quit her day job, and became a star.

Two novels from the twentieth century, each in its own way, stand out above all others as signposts of a kind on the human journey. Each was the kind of signpost which warns you of danger. One was clearly so. The other, more focused on the apparent progress and benefits to mankind of science and technology, was also a warning – although the extent to which its author was beguiled by those scientific advances himself is still something that is disputed.

The first is George Orwell’s classic nightmare, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, a nightmare which for a period of the 20^th century seemed to have a real possibility of coming true. The other, written earlier, is Aldus Huxley’s “Brave New World”. It is another nightmare but one with elements which seemed to hold certain attractions for the author himself at the time in which he dreamed it up.

For any human being with a love for freedom, beauty and truth, both novels presented a shocking picture of a world in the future. The implicit message of both was that these were worlds in which we might all be living some day. Of the two, Orwell’s dystopia at one time seemed the more horrific and the more plausible. It was more so because of the spread of Stalinism across eastern Europe and the lowering of the Iron Curtain between East and West. But with the collapse of communism and the end of the cold war that threat of global totalitarianism seemed to fade.

The world portrayed by Huxley, however, has not only seemed to become more possible but in fact many of the elements on which it is founded seem already to have been built into our own way of life and become part and parcel of the very world we live in today – test-tube babies, genetic engineering, embryonic manipulation and all.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four the world of that year is described by Winston Smith, a disaffected bureaucrat and member of “The Party” who works for the dreadful Ministry of Truth. He explains its elements and the intricacies of “thoughtcrime”. “Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death.” The Thought Police who detect all thoughtcrime have two-way telescreens with which they monitor everything that happens in private and in public – and spies are everywhere. The Party is supreme and tolerates no opposition. Children are taught to inform from their infancy.

Smith’s life is devoted to revising historical records to match the official version of the truth as it is decreed at any time. It is a perpetual job and involves, among other duties, re-touching official photographs and deleting from the historical record people now declared to be “unpersons”. The Party’s slogan is “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.” On that basis war is perpetually maintained between the so-called power-blocs of the world. Love is banned for all Party members – who are the elite and distinct from the “proles”.

In the course of the novel it is revealed that the motivation of the Inner Party – which really rules everything – is not its stated aim of achieving a future perfect society but simply to retain power. It becomes clear that what is really being engineered is a society where there will be no family, no love of any kind and a society where the “love” of Big Brother will be all. It will be a society without the slightest trace of mercy and one in which art, literature, science, any unorthodox thought or anything that would distract from devotion to the Party will be impossible.

I suppose most of us might have feared at some stage that such a society was a real prospect – and was indeed already a partial reality for  people living in large swathes of the planet. We are now less concerned about that – with the exception of the fears we might have for the people of Afganistan of Pakistan should the Taliban prevail.

Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in 1932, seventeen years before George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book is now considered a classic but was criticized for a weak plot initially. It was shocking to many and was frequently banned. Many were not quite sure whether it was for or against the world which it depicted and for or against eugenics and drug-taking in particular. Was the brave new world a Utopia or a dystopia?

Whatever it was, reading it today there can be no doubt but that we have travelled far farther along the road to this world that we have to the world depicted by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The “enlightened” people in this brave new world – ironically the phrase is taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest which, along with all of his works, is banned in the brave new world – live on “soma” and on blatantly carnal pleasure. “One cubic centimetre (of soma) cures ten gloomy sentiments” is the advice to someone who is a bit down. “A gramme is better than a damn” is the motto for someone feeling frustrated or angry. Does that sound familiar?

“There’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that’s what soma is.”

People in this world are manipulated into utter dependence on the system. In the novel Huxley portrays a society where stability and order are everything and are maintained by the sacrifice of freedom and all sense of personal responsibility. None of the people challenge the caste system where people are classified as Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and lower down the alphabet, according to their abilities, dispositions and docility to the State.

At the heart of this idea is the belief that technology is the supreme benefactor of mankind. Its God is Ford and the great gift of this God to mankind is the flivver – that is, the motorcar, standing in for everything that technology offers us today. “Our world is not the same as Othello’s world,” one the characters tells us. “You can’t make flivvers without steel – and you can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.” And flivvers, standing in again for all our mod cons, can’t be repaired. “Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.” That is another motto from Brave New World. Remember that the next time you bring your digital watch, your microwave or whatever, for repair and are told that to repair it will cost much more than buying a new one.

All this is the very same danger which Pope Benedict is drawing our attention to in his new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, where he tells us that “the development of peoples goes awry if humanity thinks it can re-create itself through the “wonders” of technology, just as economic development is exposed as a destructive sham if it relies on the “wonders” of finance in order to sustain unnatural and consumerist growth. In the face of such Promethean presumption, we must fortify our love for a freedom that is not merely arbitrary, but is rendered truly human by acknowledgment of the good that underlies it. To this end, man needs to look inside himself in order to recognize the fundamental norms of the natural moral law which God has written on our hearts.” But in the brave new world men and women cannot look inside themselves because there is nothing of themselves to look at. Superficiality is all and what is there has been put there by others.

And of course the God of the Brave New World is not a god at all. He is man himself: “The Gods are just. No doubt,” we are again told. “But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; providence takes its cue from men.” An echo here of all those who go to our legislatures and leave their God outside the door as they go in to do their work in the name of harmony and stability and what they mistakenly call the common good by which they really mean the common denominator.

Education is, inevitably, a kingpin in the whole system and it is education with a terrifying agenda: “Till at last the child’s mind is (made of) these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides – made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions… Suggestions from the State.”

All this, remember, is in the context of a total denial of human freedom”. Yet again we might ask ourselves the question, “Are we there yet?” Maybe not, but we need to ask ourselves if that is where we are heading – fast, with our eyes wide open. Huxley’s “brave new world” seems a much more imminent threat to our civilization today than the now happily faded dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Michael Kirke is a freelance writer. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net.  Other writing can be found at www.mercatornet.com and on his blog, Garvan Hill. www.garvan.wordpress.com

A little book was published a few years ago entitled “Speeches that changed the world”. It’s not really a very serious book – more a curiosity – and its title was a little less than apt. It really should have been called “Speeches that changed the world, some for better, some for worse and some that thankfully didn’t.” But while that title would be a more accurate guide to what was between the covers it probably wouldn’t have brought the editor much by way of royalties.

But the book did leave me thinking of great human documents that did or should have changed the world for the better as I once again leafed through – on my way to a second reading – of the latest encyclical from Pope Benedict XVI, “Caritas in Veritate”. This is a truly amazing tract for our troubled times. I suppose it was too much to expect – but what a great disappointment and failure of duty – that our media of communication, printed press, radio and TV and numerous participants in the blogosphere, have so abysmally failed to recognise it, analyse and relay it to the sorry world at large. It answers so many questions, points to so many fundamental causes of our current malaise and offers so much hope for a better future for the world if only we would listen to its wisdom. Its marginalisation betokens nothing less than a tragic blindness to truth.

A few years ago there was some talk that Tony Blair’s thinking on matters of social policy was grounded in his reading of the social teaching of the Catholic Church. Whether that was true or false we do not know but in making that observation someone said that as far as any basis for a Christian social policy was concerned he had little choice: Catholic social teaching was really the only show in town. In this encyclical, nothing less than a Magna Carta for the 21^st century, Pope Benedict has taken the show to a new high.

The great themes of this papacy – so far, and who doubts but that there will be more – are Love, Hope and Truth. Having led us to consider the first two in his first encyclicals he now draws them together in a third. He unites them in harmony with Truth and applies them to the pressing problems which confront mankind trying to get its collective act together with regard to living decently and happily on this planet of ours.

Charity – Love – he tells us is at the heart of the Church’s social doctrine. We sometimes subject Charity to the cliché, “charity begins at home”. This is the charity to be found in what the Pope calls “micro-relationships” – with friends, family members or within small groups. But he reminds us that charity has also to be the dominant principle governing our “macro-relationships” – social, economic and political ones. It is here that the great flaw in the modern understanding of charity is to be found, leaving us with a charity which is, as the Pope says, “emptied of meaning”. Why? Because charity has become separated from Truth and separated from Truth it is separated from its very source, God himself. His words here might remind us of St. Josemaría Escrivá’s words written in The Way over 60 years ago: “If you lose the supernatural meaning of your life, your charity will be philanthropy,…” in other words, beginning and ending with the love of mankind.

The question here links into another malaise of the modern world of which Pope Benedict is so keenly aware. Charity, he explains, “needs to be understood , confirmed and practised in the light of truth.” Only in this way can it really have the credibility that both charity and truth need to have their proper effect and power “in the practical setting of social living.” A real problem arises when mankind in immersed “in a social and cultural context which relativises truth, often paying little heed to it and showing increasing reluctance to acknowledge its existence.”

So this encyclical is both a call to Charity and a call to Truth. “Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite. Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space.”

The Pope goes on to elaborate the consequences for a society in which charity and justice – or what passes for charity and justice – are divorced from truth and are determined and guided by the common will rather than by true discernment of the common good. How familiar we are with this mantra from politicians who leave their individual consciences at the door as they proceed to enact laws for the “good” of our society? Truth is irrelevant to them. What matters to them is what the electorate thinks. Truly representative democracy – which advocates for Truth first and foremost – is a dead letter in this kind of populist politics. Leadership means nothing.

“In the present social and cultural context, where there is a widespread tendency to relativize truth…a Christianity of charity without truth would be more or less interchangeable with a pool of good sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance. In other words, there would no longer be any real place for God in the world. Without truth, charity is confined to a narrow field devoid of relations.” Towards the end of the encyclical the Pope deals with a number of practical consequences of this sterile set-up where a society anchored on true human values is replaced with soulless technical ones.

He points out that deviation from solid humanistic principles that a technical mindset can produce is seen today in certain technological applications in the fields of development and peace. Often the development of peoples is considered a matter of financial engineering, the freeing up of markets, the removal of tariffs, investment in production, and institutional reforms — in other words, a purely technical matter. How sadly familiar are all these terms!

He admits that all these factors are important but asks us to consider the clearly mixed results they have had, arguing that human and social development will never be fully guaranteed through automatic or impersonal forces, whether they derive from the market or from international politics. “Development is impossible without upright men and women, without financiers and politicians whose consciences are finely attuned to the requirements of the common good. Both professional competence and moral consistency are necessary. When technology is allowed to take over, the result is confusion between ends and means, such that the sole criterion for action in business is thought to be the maximization of profit, in politics the consolidation of power, and in science the findings of research.”

Among all the other things that this great encyclical is, it is profoundly pro-life. How could it not be since Truth is at its heart. Needless to say this aspect of the document has been largely sidelined. One commentator in the blogosphere has noted how its  insistence (echoing John Paul II) that life issues – specifically abortion, euthanasia, and the eugenic planning of births – are at the core of justice questions and that to ignore these specific issues is to acquiesce in enormous damage to human culture. He points out  that these same people are also deeply unhappy with Caritas in Veritate’s repeated referencing of Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humane Vitae, which reaffirmed orthodox Christianity’s vision of sexual morality, because many of them have invested enormous energy over the past 41 years trying to nuance away or outright deny Catholicism’s defined teachings in these areas. (Samuel Gregg in http://blog.acton.org).

But this is only scratching the surface of a magnificent document. It needs books to be written about it. It needs and will reward multiple readings, discussions, seminars, conferences until such time as it penetrating thought and practical observations sink into our shallow heads and begin to bear some fruit in our 21^st century waste land; before that waste land becomes a true desert, that desert of deserts alluded to in Benedict XVI’s own inaugural address back in 2005.

“The pastor must be inspired by Christ’s holy zeal: for him it is not a matter of indifference that so many people are living in the desert. And there are so many kinds of desert. There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love. There is the desert of God’s darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast. Therefore the earth’s treasures no longer serve to build God’s garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction. The Church as a whole and all her pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance.”

Raskolnikov looked curiously at the speaker. She was a pock-marked
wench of thirty, covered with bruises, with her upper lip swollen. She
made her criticism quietly and earnestly. “Where is it,” thought
Raskolnikov. “Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death
says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on
some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand,
and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting
tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of
space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live
so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever
it may be! . . . How true it is! Good God, how true!

And good God, we might add, what has become of us? How have we come to this pass that this truth, so graphically put before us by Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment, should seem to be no longer accepted easily by us? More and more frequently we seem to read in our newspapers accounts of individuals, coldly and rationally, choosing to end their own lives, subverting the law of nature which decrees that it withholds from each individual person the right to decide when and how we both begin and end life on this earth.

 How did the sight of that law, written in our very hearts and which in truth gives us the intimation of eternity, get lost to so many. There is perhaps no other phenomenon in modern culture which so devastatingly illustrates the chasm with which a godless ethic rents our society.

 The debate on assisted suicide and euthanasia is important. It is a debate, the outcome of which will determine the protection or otherwise of the lives of innocent people in every jurisdiction under the sun in which it will determine legislation on the matter. Tim Maugham, Professor of Cancer Studies at the University of Wales’ College of Medicine, has pointed out that where voluntary euthanasia has been legalized and accepted, it has led to involuntary euthanasia. This has been demonstrated in the Netherlands where as early as 1990, over 1000 patients were killed without their consent in a single year. A report commissioned by the Dutch government showed that for 2001, in around 900 of the estimated 3,500 cases of euthanasia the doctor had ended the person’s life without there being any evidence that the person had made an explicit request. The British Medical Journal and The Lancet both report on these details.

It is indeed chilling that Lady Mary Warnock can be so forthright in her assertions about the rights of society to dispose of its elderly, infirm and dependent members so readily. It is so chilling that Melanie Philips in the Daily Mail, last September – following a shocking interview with the good Peer in a Scottish church magazine, no less – posed the question:

“Has there ever been anyone who has displayed more inhumanity towards her fellow human beings, and yet had more influence over British society, than the noble Baroness Warnock? Lady Warnock has declared that elderly people with dementia are ‘wasting’ the lives of those who care for them, and have a duty to die in order to stop being a burden to others.

“On pitiless Planet Warnock, people are valued in proportion to their ability to lead an independent life. If they can’t do so, they are to be written off as valueless — and even more nauseating, they are being told they actually have a duty to end their lives.”

Given the undoubted influence of Lady Warnock perhaps we should be fearful. But in some ways the debate about euthanasia and assisted suicide is a side-show to the real question before us. How did we get here? More importantly: how can we get out of here? Warnock’s views are at the deeply sinister end – and because they are so evidently sinister are less threatening – of a wider mindset which takes a view of human life in which the horrors of what Philips calls “planet Warnock” are thinkable: human life is ours to do what we like with it. The truth is, it is not.

 Why has the unthinkable become thinkable? The reason is that the society we live in has become divided in two and one part of that society has returned to the customs of the old pagan world which Christianity vanquished nearly 2000 years ago. It is not now a pagan world – strictly speaking – because even in that pagan world there was a vision of something beyond man, warped as it was, to which man must defer. Now there is nothing. Man is at the centre of the universe.

 In Quo Vadis, the great Polish novel about the early Christians in Rome by Henryk Sienkiewicz, the noble Petronius, reluctant confidant of the emperor Nero knows he has reached the end of the road and faces execution if he does not act first and take his own life. Flight would be “dishonourable”. He prepares to do so much to the distress of his secret and unrequited lover and slave. She declares her love as he is dying and opening her veins dies at his side.

 This was the Roman way, the way of a society and a civilization in deep decay. Contrasted with this in the novel is the Christian way, portrayed through the characters of the hero and heroine, Marcus and Lygia – along with Peter, Paul and the multitude of Christians in the catacombs. This was the way which eventually triumphed in Rome and whose values have substantially held sway in the Western world for the past 2000 years. Until now? The deep cleavage we mentioned earlier now threatens the destruction of this way and on the outcome of the so called “culture wars” of our age the future of this way depends. Will that outcome be defeat, truce or victory? God only knows but we do have promises.

 Alexander Solzhenitsyn once summed up our predicament in a famous address at Harvard University. A tireless critic of both East and West he told us what we had lost, why we had lost it and implied how we might be redeemed from the catastrophe before us – one dimension of which we have just been considering.

 “How has this …come about?” he asked. How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him… with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

 “We turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense”.

 We must believe that defeat is unthinkable. The best we can hope for is victory with truce, perhaps, a half-way house. We must hope for a reconversion in the minds and hearts of all – even Lady Warnock. It is possible. But in the meantime we must fight to hold the ground we still have and tirelessly proclaim what Solzhenitsyn hoped we would proclaim – that man is not the centre of all things, that there is an eternity, a life after death and that that death – when and how it comes to us – is the gift of our Creator, not ours.

The New York Times carried a story yesterday under the headline:  “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny, by LAURIE GOODSTEIN. The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, leaving some fearful that they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition.” It was quite a negative report but I suppose it would be too much to expect any real understanding of the role of the Magisterium in the New York Times. However, I decided to post a comment which I hoped might offer an alternative perspective on the issue. What was a bit shocking about it all was the flood of ultra-liberal and anti-catholic comments the piece attracted from other readers.

Here is my own effort:

Is it not a little ironic that committed Roman Catholics – nuns or others – should have difficulty accepting the authority of the See of Peter at the end of a whole year dedicated in the Roman Church to reflection and study of the life and teaching of St. Paul? St. Paul’s letters to the Christian communities scattered through the Roman Empire in his time very clearly took members of those communities to task on a number of issues in which he saw them straying from the principles which he had given them in the exercise of the authority vested in him by Christ and the other Apostles. Of course such “visitations” as these nuns are complaining make no sense if one rejects the source of Paul’s mandate and replaces it with a self determining authority. To do so, however, is a rejection of the defined nature of the Church as the authoritative institution it was founded as and has successfully persisted as though two millennia. I think St. Paul’s response to these self-regarding people would have been a good deal more robust than the gentle – but hopefully firm – response they are getting from the Holy See today.

On June 28, the Holy Father, Benedict XVI went to the Basilica of Saint Paul to preside First Vespers of the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul to close the Year of St Paul.
The Holy Father spoke of St. Paul’s efforts to get the young Christian communities to change their old ways of thinking, “saying that we become new if we change our manner of thinking…our manner of reasoning must become new… … our manner of looking at the world, of understanding reality– our whole way of thinking must change from the roots … we must learn to understand the will of God, allowing it to shape our will, until we desire what God’s desires, because we realise that God wants only what is good and beautiful”.

“In chapter four of the Letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle tells us that with Christ we must reach adult age, mature humanity … Paul wishes Christians to have faith which is ‘responsible’, ‘adult’ ” not be mistaken for “the attitude of those who have stopped listening to the Church and the Bishops, and who autonomously choose what to believe and what not to believe”. Benedict XVI then indicated as examples of adult faith, commitment to promote respect for the “inviolability of human life from the first moment” and “acknowledging matrimony between and man and a woman for life, as the order of the Creator, restored by Christ ”, and he underlined, “adult faith does not let itself be carried here and there by different currents. It withstands the winds of fashion. It knows that these winds do not blow from the Holy Spirit”.

Given those words it is not hard to understand – but nonetheless regrettable – that some will not want to accept an authority which speaks so clearly.

Prepare to be muddled. Down the tracks we see in the distance another bundle of contradictions coming our way. By the time you read this it may have already trundled over us into the pages of history. Hopefully we will cope with it and use it to all our advantage rather than allow it to demoralize and dishearten us. (Alternative intro: “It must needs be that scandal cometh” No doubt about that. Just open your newspaper. “But woe to nevertheless, woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh.” Now that gives food for thought. That’s all out of Matthew 18.7) The report of the Commission of Investigation of the Archdiocese of Dublin into child abuse is imminent. Ireland is bracing itself for a scandal. But scandal is a funny thing – “funny peculiar”, that is. More often than not it is rooted in the ignorance of the scandalized, an ignorance which in this case will be fed and nourished by the fourth estate which should be working to remove it. What is the scandal – and scandal, we need to remember, is not the evil that may or may not have happened but the effect of the perception of that evil on others? What is the ignorance at its root? It is the idea that the Church of God, founded by Jesus Christ nearly 2000 years ago, has been responsible for unspeakable crimes and has in some way failed in its duty of care to the most vulnerable of its members. This is the scandal and it comes from the muddled thinking about the true nature of the Church which is being perpetuated constantly. If only the commentariat would clear its collective mind on the basic facts about which it holds forth so readily, there might be less of a muddle, less confusion and consequently less scandal. If that happened we might all then be in a better position to make a more effective response to the horrors that as human beings we all have to and always will have to deal with in keeping ourselves together as a civilized society in this world. Last October 15, speaking at his general audience, Pope Benedict went back to St. Paul to clarify for us the true nature of the Church. He showed us that there are two senses in which we can use this word “church”, one of which is central and transcendent, the second of which is more peripheral and earth-bound. The failure to recognize and acknowledge the first of these is and will be at the root of much of the misunderstanding and scandal which inevitably follow the revelation of the crimes and misdemeanors of members or officials of the Church on earth. This failure was typified by an editorial in The Irish Times last year after the announcement that the Eucharistic Congress would take place in Dublin in 2012. Rather patronizingly we were told: “There is a touch of the masterly where the Catholic Church is concerned about the announcement that the 50th International Eucharistic Congress will take place in Dublin in 2012. It gives a battered, bruised and demoralized institution here in Ireland a positive focus for the immediate future, while also allowing it to redirect its gaze from horrors past.” The Church of God is not “battered, bruised and demoralized.” Her members may feel so but they must never lose sight of the truth that the Church of God is and always will be as triumphant as Christ promised she would be. The only battering and bruising will come from outside – in the form of persecution. We know that the gates of hell may rail against her but will not prevail. We know that from within there will be betrayals and weakness – as evidenced by the betrayal of Judas and the weakness of Peter – but that she herself will remain unblemished until the end of time. This is the Church which will get no recognition in the headlines of our newspapers and news bulletins. What did Pope Benedict say last October which helps us to be clearer about all this? The word “church”, he explained, has a multi-dimensional meaning: “it indicates a part of God’s assembly in a specific place but it also means the church as a whole. And thus we see that the “Church of God” is not only a collection of various local Churches but that these various local Churches in turn make up one Church of God. All together they are “the Church of God” which precedes the individual local Churches and is expressed or brought into being in them.” He then pointed out that it is important to observe that in St. Paul’s writings the word “Church” almost always appears with the additional qualification “of God”: “she is not a human association, born from ideas or common interests, but a convocation of God. He has convoked her, thus, in all her manifestations she is one. The oneness of God creates the oneness of the Church in all the places in which she is found” – and that includes Dublin, Ferns, and anywhere in the world. The sins of those who strive to be members are not sins of the Church. It is in its failure to recognize this and in its constant confusion of aberrant individuals, or even the human inadequacy and poor judgment of their leaders, with the Church itself that we are ill-served by our media. Pope Benedict explained the two dimensions further when he elaborated on the Pauline concept of the Church as the “Body of Christ”. One is sociological in character, according to which the body is made up of elements and would not exist without them. The Pope notes that in this interpretation St. Paul uses an image which already existed in Roman sociology – “a people is like a body with its different parts, each of which has its own function. But all together, even its smallest and seemingly most insignificant parts, are necessary if this body is to be able to live and carry out its functions.” Clearly – as indeed happened in the early Church – when things go wrong and people act badly then they have to be dealt with. This does not, however, indict the Church itself. The enormity of the error of attempting to do so becomes clearer when we look at the second dimension of the Pauline concept of Church as the Pope explained it. The Church is the actual Body of Christ. “Paul holds that the Church is not only an organism but really becomes the Body of Christ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, where we all receive his Body and really become his Body. Thus is brought about the spousal mystery that all become one body and one spirit in Christ. So it is that the reality goes far beyond any sociological image, expressing its real, profound essence, that is, the oneness of all the baptized in Christ, considered by the Apostle ‘one’ in Christ, conformed to the Sacrament of his Body”. If we can remember these explanations of the reality and the mystery of the Church then we will be able to deal more effectively with the problems we create for ourselves as human beings trying to live up to the standards set for us in this awesome Communion. In dealing with our inadequacies, our crimes and misdemeanors, there will be pain and plenty of it. There will be sorrow in the face of the pain we inflict on each other and sorrow for those who fall away in doing so. There will also have to be correction. We will remember that no man is an island and that all of us can share some responsibility for the failings of each other. St. Josemaría Escrivá once said something to the effect that there were no bad priests; there were priests who failed to live as they should because the rest of us did not pray enough for them. There need not be scandal; there need not be a falling away from the Church because of a false scandal at the crimes of its members. When we truly understand why all this has happened we will realize that the only true solution is to be found in a renewed and deeper commitment to the Body instituted by Christ himself, his Church.

They just don’t get it, do they? But then, how could they? St. Paul, writing nearly 2000 years ago to Christians in Corinth might just as easily have been writing to Pope Benedict these days, reassuring him – and us – that regardless of the media and political hullabaloo over what he has been saying to the world at large, he is on the right and true path.

Now, the Spirit we have received is not the spirit of the world but God’s own Spirit, so that we may understand the lavish gifts God has given us. And these are what we speak of, not in the terms learnt from human philosophy, but in terms learnt from the Spirit, fitting spiritual language to spiritual things.

The natural person has no room for the gifts of God’s Spirit; to him they are folly; he cannot recognize them, because their value can be assessed only in the Spirit. The spiritual person, on the other hand, can assess the value of everything, and that person’s value cannot be assessed by anybody else. For: who has ever known the mind of the Lord? Who has ever been his adviser? *[Is 40:13] But we are those who have the mind of Christ.

What an extraordinary Pope this is, surely one of the “lavish gifts God has given us” for this day and age.

Did the so-called “guardians” of this world really think he was going to tailor his teaching to the standards of the world, to their “wise” analysis and judgments as to what is needed to keep our planet healthy and happy? And do his so-called friends and allies – who are all jumping up and down in frustration at what they see as his lack of public relations savvy – really think that he is naively putting his foot in it. They want him to restrict himself to soft words and to tailor his actions so that no one is offended.

A British ecclesiastic has expressed the opinion in the aftermath of the recent African visit that that the Pope is being badly advised and that the Vatican’s communication strategy must improve. This all reminds us of the management consultants who were supposedly called in to advise Jesus about the team of apostles he was building around him. Eleven of the twelve originals were rejected on what seemed like very logical and sensible grounds. Only one was found to be suitable for the job. That was Judas Iscariot – sensible, level-headed and very practical.

This Pope speaks the truth to the world and the world finds it hard to take. To try to justify themselves and to try to ensure that people will not hear what he is really saying and doing they cloud his words and actions in gross misrepresentation or else hold them up to ridicule and condemnation for flying in the face of their judgment. They generally do both. According to radical, stone-throwing, failed revolutionary Marxist from the pseudo student revolution of 1968, Daniel-Cohen-Bendit, now a respectable pillar of the liberal European establishment, the Pope’s view on this matter bring him close to “pre-meditated murder”.

There is no doubt but that people have been offended by the truth spoken by Pope Benedict. But there is equally no doubt that offence has been taken rather than given. He has expressed regret that this has happened and is clearly sorry that this should be the case. However, he has not retracted one word or reversed one action because all his words and actions have been true. Take three instances.

What about the Regensburg address – called “infamous” by some? He quoted a view expressed over 600 years ago and asked a few pertinent questions about the nature of Islam. He did not even assent to the view quoted. He spoke the truth and offered Islam an opportunity to respond with faith and reason. He did not get much of either but the questions are still awaiting a coherent answer.

He lifted the excommunication imposed on the illicitly consecrated bishops who followed  Marcel Lefebvre into schism from the Catholic Church. One of them happens to be an idiot – maybe even a dangerous idiot since he denies the holocaust. But apart from the fact that his excommunication had nothing whatsoever to do with his idiotic denial of  the facts of history, being an idiot – even being a dangerous idiot – has never been nor will ever be a reason for excommunication. Excommunication brings with it the prospect of eternal damnation, a very serious thing. To expect the Pope, the vicar of the Good Shepherd here on earth, to leave it in place when the original reasons for its imposition were no longer in play is not even dangerous idiocy; it betrays a grossly inept sense of justice.

And finally, the latest – his honest and true answer to a journalist who put a question to him in a plane on his way to Africa: the propagation of condom use in Africa actually ”increases the problem” of AIDS. Of course it does – as it increases a great many other problems across the face of the globe which are the source of so much human misery: abortion, divorce, family disintegration, promiscuity, teenage pregnancy – for which the world in its “wisdom” thinks condoms are a solution.

Time Magazine in its headline on this story described the Pope’s remarks as an example of “Candor over P.R.” We might read that as “truth before spin”. What is important is that people hear and understand the truth. Being all things to all men is not an end in itself. As enunciated by St. Paul it was, as I recall, so that he might help all to their salvation. The admiration of the world is not what the Pope needs nor wants. If some of his hearers draw back and no longer go about with him this cannot deter him from speaking the truth. Surely all this must remind us of the discourse on the Eucharist recounted in St. John’s gospel?

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst. The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, “I am the bread which came down from heaven.”
But he wasn’t finished – he got into deeper water:
I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Now one might think he would have a little more P.R. savvy and tone down the message since it was clearly causing trouble. But no, on he goes.

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day….As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.
This was clearly too much for many of those listening – and he knew it
Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”  But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples murmured at it, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.
That was it, and he was not even sure if there was anyone left among his followers for he had to ask the twelve: “Do you also wish to go away?” But they were OK, for the moment anyway. Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”

It all sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it? Two thousand years later the choice is still the same.

Michael Kirke, formerly of The Irish Press, is now a freelance writer. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net  Other writing can be found at www.mercatornet.com

By Michael Kirke

Am I paranoid or is there really a serious and concerted attack on freedom of religion going on around us? There is no question but that on the other side of the Irish Sea there has been more than a trickle of headlines which seem to suggest that things are becoming increasingly difficult for practising Christians. “‘Thousands are at risk’ in NHS after nurse in prayer row is suspended” read a Daily Telegraph headline last month. Caroline Petrie, a community nurse, asked an elderly lady she was visiting if she would like her to say a prayer for her. Another nurse picked this up and reported Mrs. Petrie to the health authority. She was suspended without pay pending an investigation. Mrs Petrie is a Baptist.

A few weeks later a school receptionist found herself being investigated for professional misconduct because she expressed misgivings to friends because her 5 year-old child was reprimanded at school for talking about Jesus to one of her classmates. Jennie Cain had committed the unforgivable offence of sending an e-mail to 10 close friends with whom she attended Church asking them to pray for her, her daughter, her school and the Church. The next thing she knew was that she was in the headmaster’s office being asked to explain her “misconduct”.

Then we have also had the foster mother who was struck off the carer panel in her local authority area because a 16-year-old Muslim girl in her care decided to become a Christian – of her own free will.

In Ireland the approach to intimidation is done a little differently. As yet we haven’t noticed any “official” intimidation – I think – of Christian practice. But am I the only person who was left scratching his or her head earlier this year when The Irish Times carried a “story” on its front page about Kathy Sinnot. It was one of the strangest pieces of news I ever read. The headline read: “Sinnot forwarded e-mail urging anti-abortion novena”. Shock, horror! The report then went of as a piece of investigative journalism, telling us that Kathy actually “acknowledged” – shorthand for “admitted under questioning” – that she had forwarded a chain letter which called for fasting and nine days of prayer as “part of moves to oppose US legislation liberalising access to abortion”.

Now you could read all this as a big joke – in other words as a mockery of religion and religious practice, or you could take it at face value as a report damming people by innuendo for their religious convictions and their unwarranted mixing of religious convictions with political affairs. Either way it amounts to more of the same which Christians across the water are experiencing. Mrs. Sinnot was clearly challenged by the reporter and asked to explain why she had done this heinous deed. She explained, reasonably, that she had forwarded the letter to constituents who had asked to be informed on anti-abortion issues. She was clearly asked to affirm that this was not “any call to action”. God forbid. Then there was further investigation to establish what the origins of this outrageous e-mail were. It turned out be from that arch-pro-life activist, Lord David Alton. We were then told – in the manner of the crime reporter’s shorthand, “he was known to police” – that “Attempts to contact Lord Alton yesterday were not successful”. That, I think, is shorthand for “he was not courageous enough to come forward to talk to us about his part in this shameful affair”.  At least Mrs. Sinnot has not been suspended from the European Parliament for this offence – not yet anyway.

Meanwhile back in the culture wars marriage continues to be a battlefront. While the final outcome is assured – for if there is no family there will be no society at all – it can be assured with greater or lesser pain. Spain is probably the country in the world – at least in the catholic world – where the State has taken the most aggressive anti-family position of all. But Catholics are fighting back. The Archbishop of Madrid, Cardinal Antonio Rouco Varela, in launching a pastoral plan for his diocese some time ago, pointed out that “the crisis affecting marriage and family is an extremely serious one. When someone does not want to hear the most fundamental truth about marriage, that it is a union between a man and a woman, when the ideas are not clear, where have we come? When one believes that he can invent other life formulas for his own interests, we are at the root of the crisis, the crisis of faith.” He pointed out the importance of being aware of what is happening in the world concerning the family, of “understanding how the family is the most important human path and that it is indispensable for knowing Christ and his Law in the world…and is the source of life and hope for humanity.” The work that has to be done, he said, calls for “dedication and extraordinary commitment.”

“Out of the mouths of babes (well, not quite babes) …”  was the phrase  which came to mind recently when reading about a survey carried out in Britain at the end of last year. And perhaps out of those mouths came hope for the future of both faith and family. The survey was carried out among 1500 children under the age of ten and it reveals a lot more sense that you get among many surveys carried out among their elders. While God was not in first place among the things they really want he was in the top ten. Predictably being a ‘Celebrity’ with good looks tops the list with wealth in third position and health at number four. God however is the most famous person in the entire world, beating George Bush into second place. Also on the ‘Top Ten’ list of famous people were Jesus and Father Christmas. What, not Richard Dawkins?

Killing and wars top the list of the very worst things in the world, but divorce is up there as well and it is the thing which most of them would ban if they had the power.

Just over three quarters of the children questioned thought they would probably marry when they grow up although 21% gave a definite ‘No’. Most of them want to have children, with the majority opting for one or two.

And speaking of Richard Dawkins, this little letter caught my eye some time ago:

“Sir, I have always taken Professor Dawkins for an ingenious invention of The Daily Telegraph to amuse us in difficult times. Now I am assured by acquaintances that he truly exists. I am sorry: I really cannot bring myself to believe in him.”

Finally, something to put family in its true and positive perspective in the words of a twentieth century heroine. Audrey Roche, the only woman decorated for wartime bravery at sea, died recently. Her obituary in The Daily Telegraph on February 6 recounts her heroics after her ship was torpedoed by the Germans in the Mediterranean and she saved the life of an injured seaman by giving her lifebelt to him. It also details her eventful life in India and Kenya after the war.  On being asked in 2003 if her time in the Royal Navy was the most important part of her life, she replied: “Good heavens, no. My family is the best time of my life.” She is survived by her five children. Hopefully, we shall see her like again.

Michael Kirke, formerly of The Irish Press, is now a freelance writer. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net  Other writing can be found at www.mercatornet.com

 By Michael Kirke

Samuel Huntington died on Christmas Eve at the age of 81. His death was reported right across the globe for he was one of the most famous political scientists on the planet. Had he died 15 years earlier, however, his death would probably have been reported in academic circles in the US, and perhaps in similar circles the English-speaking world – but little beyond that.

The fall of the Iron Curtain and end of the Cold War sent political scientists scurrying back to their drawing boards to reconfigure the geo-political map of the world. Two of these became academic celebrities overnight as a result of the two readings they offered on the new world order which followed the momentous events of 1989-91. One was Francis Fukuyama – who had in fact been a student of Huntington’s. He gave us his take in 1992 with The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington himself followed in 1993 with an article in the journal, Foreign Affairs, entitled The Clash of Civilizations? Huntington’s article, according to the editors of Foreign Affairs, stirred up more discussion in the three years that followed its publication than anything else they had published since the 1940s.

Of the two theses, that of Fukuyama was probably more misunderstood – for his title invited misunderstanding by the bucketful. Huntington’s was also controversial but although the multiplicity of clashes he foresaw  was for some people too much, the events in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001, turned him into a kind of prophet. In 2002 he expanded his thesis and published a detailed analysis of what he saw as the evolution of global politics in the 21^st century. By and large he was wrong but he had nevertheless identified a factor that was now going to be the dominant one replacing territory and national borders as a defining element in political conflict: cultural and religious identities.

Leaving aside the global dimensions of Huntington’s thesis – where a number of holes can be picked in his argument – we might look at a national American dimension which he highlighted. Huntington poses the question as to whether or not America itself is to become what he calls “a cleft society”.  As he saw it, the cleavage in American society was one generated by the new wave of immigration flowing across its southern border with Mexico. For him it was a threat to the American way of life. Identifying a similar cleavage in mainland Europe he stated that “the issue is not whether Europe will be Islamicized or the United States Hispanicised. It is whether Europe and America will become cleft societies encompassing two distinct and largely separate communities from two different civilizations. For Huntington, of course, Hispanic was also Catholic and full-blooded Catholicism was also a threat to what he saw as the true American spirit rooted in the protestant ethic.

Looking at the changing of the guard which has just now taken place in the United Sates one might wonder if an important phase of the clash is about to come into play. Wonderful and all as the symbolism and the reality of an African-American in the White House is, it is quite clear that there is much more to Barack Obama than his ethnic origin. He has all the hallmarks of a full-blooded liberal protestant, with a paid-up subscription to the kind of American club Huntington feared might be under threat from the forces of another civilization sweeping across the Rio Grande. Indeed, the US Catholic Bishops’ Conference has felt it necessary to spell out some principles of a genuinely Christian civilization to clearly position itself for the inevitable conflict looming on the horizon and signalled by the agenda already pencilled in for the US by the new White House regime.

President Obama’s declared family policy agenda – which includes removal of government marriage penalties, support for civil unions that give same-sex couples all the legal rights and privileges of married couples, adoption rights for same-sex couples and the repeal of the Defence of Marriage Act  – was the first sign of things to come. The Defence of Marriage Act – signed into las by George W. Bush – prevents same-sex couples who have entered a civil union in one state from then having it recognised in court if they move to another state.

For their part the bishop’s counter-blast points out categorically that God established the family as the basic cell of human society. “Therefore, we must strive to make the needs and concerns of families a central national priority. Marriage must be protected as a lifelong commitment between a man and a woman and our laws should reflect this principle.”

“Marriage, as God intended, provides the basic foundation for family life and the common good. It must be supported in the face of the many pressures working to undermine it. Policies related to the definition of marriage, taxes, the workplace, divorce, and welfare must be designed to help families stay together and to reward responsibility and sacrifice for children.”

On the issue of stem cell research using – and then destroying – living human embryos, the new President is reversing the ban on government funding for this which President Bush put in place. On the issue of direct abortion he says he “understands that abortion is a divisive issue” – no marks for stating the obvious. Of course he “respects those who disagree with him”. That can be little consolation for the victims of abortion. But the White House website entry is quite categorical: President Obama will “make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority in his Administration”. From this and other declared intentions it is clear that the practice of abortion is going to become even more firmly entrenched in American society.

The bishops’ position is equally clear: “Human life is a gift from God, sacred and inviolable. Because every human person is created in the image and likeness of God, we have a duty to defend human life from conception until natural death and in every condition.
“Our world does not lack for threats to human life. We face a new and insidious mentality that denies the dignity of some vulnerable human lives and treats killing as a personal choice and social good. As we wrote in Living the Gospel of Life, ‘Abortion and euthanasia have become preeminent threats to human life and dignity because they directly attack life itself, the most fundamental good and the condition for all others’.

“Abortion, the deliberate killing of a human being before birth, is never morally acceptable. The destruction of human embryos as objects of research is wrong. This wrong is compounded when human life is created by cloning or other means only to be destroyed. The purposeful taking of human life by assisted suicide and euthanasia is never an act of mercy. It is an unjustifiable assault on human life.”
President Obama’s programme of legislation on these issues are in such stark contrast to the programme being urged by the leaders of the Catholic Church in America that it is hard to feel that we have anything here other than an impending clash of two civilizations – the one representing rampant individualism, the other representing true and authentic Christian principles.

“We urge Catholics and others”, the bishops write, “to promote laws and social policies that protect human life and promote human dignity to the maximum degree possible. Laws that legitimize abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia are profoundly unjust and immoral. We support constitutional protection for unborn human life, as well as legislative efforts to end abortion and euthanasia. We encourage the passage of laws and programs that promote childbirth and adoption over abortion and assist pregnant women and children. We support aid to those who are sick and dying by encouraging health care coverage for all as well as effective palliative care. We call on government and medical researchers to base their decisions regarding biotechnology and human experimentation on respect for the inherent dignity and inviolability of human life from its very beginning, regardless of the circumstances of its origin.”

I don’t know where Samuel Huntington stood specifically on any of these issues – and out of respect and affection for him I am loath to check it out. However, I hope that from where he is now he has a clearer view of how things should be and whose victory to cheer for in this impending clash of civilisations.

Michael Kirke, formerly of The Irish Press, is now a freelance writer. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net  Other writing can be found at www.mercatornet.com