View from the Tower of London

IVF and Every Other Possible Thing Wrong

2009-06-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

I saw your comment on the blunder at a British National Health Service fertility clinic which resulted in one couple's embryo being implanted into another woman. (See More IVF Problems.) Given the microscopic size of sperm and eggs it is amazing that it does not happen more often - or maybe it does and it is not publicised, or is not recognised. How would a couple be certain that a child was NOT their own - unless they went in for DNA testing of their newborn or a black baby was the offspring of white parents......

I am reminded of the excellent grammatical practice of parsing a sentence. The whole gruesome saga needs some moral parsing to draw out everything that was wrong with this story and modern Britain.

1) The couple who lost their baby were unmarried.
2) The instant solution to the problem was abortion.
3) The practice of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) is grossly immoral from so many viewpoints that it is incredible that any civilised society allows it, much less pays for it.
4) My taxes were used to fund the fertilisation, the abortion and (the undisclosed) truckload of compensation paid to the couple......

I am also reminded of a comment from a "Scotland on Sunday" journalist a few years ago. He was describing the Scottish social services' reaction to yet another horrible death of a little boy at the hands of his heroin-addicted parents. The official reaction would be to recruit the same sort of people to child protection teams, but supervise and train them better. "This is so obviously wrong that it will almost certainly be done".

I attach below the appropriately scathing comment from Melanie Phillips. We are supposed to be paying for a National Health Service, not a National Happiness Service. It is unbelievably expensive and is allegedly the biggest civilian employer in the world (if you leave out organisations like the Pentagon and the Chinese army). But it cannot afford to indulge every deluded whim of the population for cosmetic surgery or weight reduction or fertilisation treatment.

The most insane example which I have seen happened a few years ago when a very short but perfectly healthy teenage girl underwent leg lengthening surgery at our expense to make her tall enough to be an air hostess. Not surprisingly, her broken and stretched femurs proved rather fragile and she had at least one refracture (at our expense, of course).

Melanie writes as an agnostic Jew, so you would hardly expect her to be completely sympathetic to Catholic teaching. And as for her hope that the ludicrous Tory party will be any better once they replace the present Labour government, you can only adapt John McEnroe's immortal words: "You Cannot Be Serious, Woman!"

========================================

15th June 2009 "Daily Mail" of London
by Melanie Phillips

A ghastly blunder at an NHS fertility clinic has left two sets of prospective parents devastated.

A couple who had already produced one son through in vitro fertilisation decided four years later to have another child by using the last viable embryo of nine which had been created and which was stored at an NHS clinic in Wales.

To their horror, they were told that through a clerical error this embryo had been implanted in the wrong woman’s body — and aborted as soon as the mistake was discovered.

It is said that staff at this clinic had been struggling with an enormous workload. But this was by no means the only such debacle in NHS fertility clinics.

New figures due to be published this summer will show around 200 serious mistakes and ‘near misses’ in such clinics. Such blunders deepen doubts not merely about standards at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, but about IVF itself.

There is no question but that it brings great happiness to otherwise childless people whom it enables to have a baby. But it has also raised a host of ethical issues that have multiplied and remain unresolved.

Many find it distasteful and troubling — to put it no more strongly — that because it is so difficult to implant an embryo successfully, more are necessarily created than will eventually become babies and so the majority are eventually destroyed.

Creating potential babies in this way only to dispose of them has undoubtedly helped erode respect for human life.

The procedure has also led us into the ethical quicksands of embryo research and ‘designer’ babies, not to mention in some cases breaking the biological link between parents and children and enabling other women to have children without a father being around at all.

More sharply still, for most people IVF simply doesn’t work. Almost three-quarters of those who put themselves through this trying procedure will not end up with a baby. By raising their hopes only most cruelly to dash them, IVF must surely deepen their anguish.
True, much IVF work is done privately. But given all these concerns, the question is whether it should be funded by the taxpayer at all.

That may sound harsh for those who do have IVF children on the NHS. But in a service with finite resources and where provision is always rationed in one way or another, choices inevitably have to be made about what the NHS should provide and what it should not.
After all, the NHS is a health service, not a happiness service. So where should the line be drawn? At what point does clinical need turn into ‘what I want’ instead?

Is it right, for example, that the NHS should pay for gender reassignment or gastric band operations for those who cannot — or will not — lose weight by conventional means?
Such questions are especially acute now. For despite the attempt by Gordon Brown to pretend that the Government will not make cuts in public services, it is clear that this is indeed the case.

As the respected Institute For Fiscal Studies has pointed out, the Government’s own spending plans envisage that from 2011 there will be cuts of around 7 per cent over three years.

Remarkably, Mr Brown is brazenly denying these statistics even though his own Government has produced them. He is doing so because he thinks that tarnishing the Tories with plans to cut public services such as health and education is one of the biggest weapons in his electoral armoury.

So he will challenge them to say whether they will cut teachers or nurses, or to spell out what NHS treatments they will stop funding.

But this tactic is not only cynical and dishonest: it is fatuous. Asking what public services either Labour or the Tories would cut is to pose the wrong question.

That’s because central government should not be making such decisions in the first place. It is wrong for a politician or some Whitehall bean-counter to say people can’t have IVF or the latest drug to combat Alzheimer’s.

Whether or not these things are efficacious or worth the money is a calculation central government should not be making. It should be no business of the state to tell us what treatments we can and can’t have.

But as long as the Government controls the purse-strings, it is entitled to make up the rules. What’s wrong is that it does control the purse-strings. It’s our money, and we should be entitled to decide how to spend it.

For we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Government cannot be trusted to spend it properly. We know about the serial computer debacles.

We know about the huge profligacy and waste, with the idiotic non-jobs of ‘diversity outreach co- ordinator’ and such-like.

We know that in both health and education, gazillions have been poured straight into a black hole. We know that, while the extra money has undoubtedly brought about some improvements in the NHS, most of it has been wasted.

As for education standards, we can see them slipping as we hear ministers lying through their teeth that they are rising. And the most heavily funded state schools are often the very worst.

What the current crisis surely tells us is that this is now the time to stop prattling meaninglessly about ‘cutting waste’ and ‘increasing efficiency’ and address the root of the problem.

The era of paying central government to deliver public services such as health and education should be declared to be over.

We should start with a blank page on which should be written two fundamental principles: that the public should be put in the driving seat, able to choose what type of services to have and to take responsibility for those choices; and that the poor should be protected, so that all have access to a decent level of provision.

These principles would play out differently with different services. Personally, I favour some kind of European-style social insurance scheme for health and long-term care, and education vouchers to give all parents a proper choice of schools.

In countries where such schemes are in use, standards for all in both health and education are vastly higher than in Britain.

With our current system demonstrably bust, this is surely the moment to start a serious debate on these matters. But on all sides, politicians are unable or unwilling to tell the public the truth.

By denying what his own economic policy means, Gordon Brown is treating voters like imbeciles. But the Tories are scarcely any better. When Shadow Health spokesman Andrew Lansley let slip that, like the Government, the Tories would also be forced to cut public spending, his leader apparently rewarded him for his honesty by a roasting.

The Tories are still terrified that they will be painted all over again as the ‘nasty party’ if they acknowledge that the game is up for the NHS and other public services. So they are effectively colluding with the Government in the spending charade.

But times have changed. Everyone knows that whoever wins the election will have to make cuts. The new issue is that the public will no longer tolerate being lied to, about this or anything else. They are demanding honesty and transparency in political life.

And that means an end to the illusion that everyone can have identical access to everything — from IVF to ‘gender reassignment’ — at all times.

It means an end to this puerile politics of the playground. Now is a golden opportunity for the Tories to seize the agenda — along with their courage — and change the terms of the entire debate.

Planes, Malls, and Three French Corpses

2009-06-16T06:06:00.000-07:00

Farnborough lies twenty miles south of Reading. At one time it was distinctly separate from the neighboring town of Aldershot, “Home of the British Army”. Now the two boroughs have merged into one suburban sprawl, so the only way you can tell the difference is the boundary signs as you drive from one to the other.

Farnborough is the birthplace of British aviation. Every two years the airfield hosts a major air display. As you drive in from the north, you pass a full size replica of Britain’s first jet aircraft, the Whittle of 1941.It is proudly mounted in flying pose at the entrance to the airfield or “aerodrome” as some road signs quaintly describe it. See http://www.frankwhittle.co.uk/content.php?act=viewDoc&docId=9&level=top.

The town centre is an unremarkable assembly of malls and car parks, with clones of every major British bank, clothes shop, coffee bar, fast food provider and mobile phone retailer. The only thing to distinguish Costa Coffee here from the same outlet in hundreds of British malls and high streets is the replica World War 1 biplane suspended above your head as you consume your cappuccino.

But walk for a few minutes from the shopping malls and you enter a parallel universe. Take your life in your hands, cross the A325 road, pass through a pair of electric gates next to a unappealing apartment block and climb the hill beyond. In less than 200 yards you find yourself in front of a monastery with a very French domed church alongside it. All French features present and correct: 9 foot gargoyles, marble floors, extraordinary glass in the side windows, three members of the Bonaparte family resident in the crypt.

Yes, Emperor Napoleon 3rd, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte (the loser of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo), is buried here. Alongside Napoleon 3rd there is his wife the Empress Eugenie and their only child, Prince Louis who died tragically at the age of 23 in 1879. This marked the end of any realistic hopes of a Bonaparte restoration in France at a later date. Many Frenchmen had regarded the young Prince Louis as the Emperor in exile. For better or worse, their beloved France would henceforth be a secular democracy and their bodies would lie in permanent exile in a foreign land. “Buried” is not strictly the right word; entombed is more correct, as their corpses are housed above ground in three splendid sarcophagi made of Aberdeen granite. These tombs are allegedly similar to those used in the British Royal family’s private burial site at Frogmore. The Abbey website ( http://www.farnboroughabbey.org/) explains:

In 1880, the Empress Eugénie bought a house in Farnborough. Crushed by the loss of her husband Napoleon III in 1873 and the death in 1879 of her 23 year old son in the Zulu War, she built St Michael’s Abbey as a monastery and the Imperial Mausoleum.
Dom Cabrol, the prior of the French Abbey of Saint Pierre de Solesmes, had dreamed of a monastic foundation dedicated to liturgical studies, but no suitable property or funding had been found, though the vicissitudes of the anti-clerical France of the 1890s made the thought of a house abroad increasingly attractive. The Empress Eugénie invited these French Benedictines here in 1895 and thus the daily round of work, prayer and study began.

Monsignor Ronald Knox, who was received into the Catholic Church here, described the Abbey as ‘a little corner of England which is forever France, irreclaimably French.’ In 1947 a little band of monks came from Prinknash Abbey, near Gloucester, to anglicise the house and ensure the continuity of the monastic life here. The last French monk, Dom Zerr, died in 1956.

The community today draws on the richness of more than a hundred years of monastic prayer and witness in this place and more than 1500 years of Benedictine tradition. “

Farnborough Abbey is a Benedictine foundation, but these are a very distinct type of Benedictine. In contrast to the Benedictine monastery at Douai, twenty miles west of Reading, the Farnborough Benedictines are a contemplative community. Douai is open all the time; you can casually drop into the splendid church at any time of the day and join the monks at one of their regular Offices. Farnborough is open once a week at 300pm on a Saturday for a guided tour, but otherwise the monks preserve their privacy and seclusion two hundred yards from the bustle of 21st century England. At present there are 7 monks ranging in age from 23 to 96. The oldest member can recall the early, totally French days when any Englishman was a highly suspect intruder. There is typically a new novice every year, but there is a steady turnover; the majority do not persevere. Seven monks sounds very few, but it is enough to maintain a vibrant spiritual and working community. The monastery was never intended to be large, unlike some of the huge European houses which accommodate 200 or 300 monks. The most that could reasonably be housed at Farnborough is 14.

The electric gates beside the apartment block are mostly kept shut to preserve the sense of enclosure for the monks. If you want to get in, ring the bell, speak into the intercom, and give a good reason for intruding on their prayers and work. They aim to conserve St Benedict’s ideal life balance of prayer, manual work and study. They run a small farm with a mixture of cows, chickens and bees. But the work for which they are best known is book publishing and binding. Also the monastery now houses the National Catholic Library. I visited this library many years ago when it was housed near Westminster Cathedral in London. For years the Franciscans maintained this incredible resource, but had to give it up. It was threatened with dissolution and dispersal until the monks offered it a new home. So, between the NCL and their own library, they now have 125,000 books on site for 7 monks.

What a place to visit and how much politicking, sadness, humour and history is packed into these few acres. Napoleon 3rd died in exile 3 years after the catastrophic French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. When the war started, the cry in Paris was “A Berlin!”. Unfortunately the Prussians crushed the French Army and surrounded Paris. When Napoleon died in 1873, he was buried at St Mary’s Church, Chislehurst, south-east of London. There were various ideas for a suitably dignified memorial/mausoleum in that area, but none came to pass. The Catholic Church in Chislehurst was the property of the diocese. Land near the church belonged to a Prussian who had served in the 1870 war and was none too eager to sell any part of his land to accommodate the redundant Emperor.

Eventually his widow Eugenie had the opportunity to buy Farnborough Hill, a grand house built in a somewhat Continental style and sited in a huge estate. She hired an eminent French architect to extend it to accommodate her huge collection of Napoleonic memorabilia. It is now a Catholic girls’ school (see http://www.farnborough-hill.org.uk/ for a glimpse of this Grade 1 listed building). She arranged for the present monastery and church/Imperial Mausoleum to be built on a neighboring hill. Then she invited the monks. Part of the appeal for the monks was the fact that Farnborough had two railway stations. From one station you could reach Oxford and its Bodleian Library in a hour. From the other station you could reach London and its huge range of libraries in an hour. This was very attractive to the scholarly Benedictines.

When Napoleon’s coffin was finally moved from Chislehurst to Farnborough, history had one big joke to play. His remains were transported by rail…via the huge Waterloo station in south London. (See “The Bourne Ultimatum” for the memorable chase across this crowded terminus). Eugenie lived until 1920, though she said that she died in 1879 with her only child.

French politics is as heavily burdened by the past as that of any other nation. Napoleon Bonaparte is buried in great style in Paris. Having visited his tomb in 2006, I could only regard it as a monstrous waste of a glorious church. Yet his nephew remains in British exile, long after the cause for his staying abroad has faded away. Every so often there is a move to try to repatriate him, but so far the monks and the Bonapart family in France remain united in wishing him to stay in Farnborough.

His life continues to be celebrated quietly in unexpected ways. 2008 was the 200th anniversary of his birth and several diplomats from France and other countries turned up at Farnborough to pay homage. Most amazing of all was the Romanian ambassador. What on earth was he doing here? Well, Napoleon 3rd had helped to save Romania from being colonized by the Ottoman Empire and they were still grateful. The Swiss wanted him to be buried on Swiss soil, as the Bonapart family at one time spent a long exile in Switzerland. So a packet of Swiss soil is tucked underneath his sarcophagus.

I was reminded of my visit to Peterborough Cathedral a few years ago. Every year there is a service at the tomb of Katherine of Aragon, Henry 8th’s first and ever-faithful wife. As she was Spanish royalty, the Spanish Embassy in London always sends a representative.

The week before my visit was the 130th anniversary of Prince Louis’ death. His sarcophagus had at its base several wreaths with French inscriptions. Who will bother to remember any of our statesmen or celebrities in 130 or 200 years time? In most cases, we fervently wish that we could not remember them today.

Guilty Until Proven Guilty

2009-06-14T04:52:00.000-07:00

It is both reassuring and disappointing to notice that human nature does not change. Our most recent public sensation was hot enough to share the front pages with the latest disgraced Member of Parliament’s outrageous expense claims. As several perceptive commentators have noted, the age of the witch hunt is ever with us and this week’s witch is one Vanessa George, a nursery worker from the original Plymouth in south-west England.

Mrs George qualifies as Demoness of the Week due to allegations that she took pornographic photos of the little children in her care and sexually abused some of them. Apart from the inherent shock value of the alleged offences, the yellow press are plainly lining her up as Myra Hindley Mark 2. But legal quibbles such as “Innocent till proven guilty” can be safely ignored, both by the media and the enraged mob at her court appearance, who spat on her and attacked the van in which she was transported.

Theodore Dalrymple had ample exposure to evil in the course of his career as a prison doctor and described the same mentality among prisoners. Many prisoners considered themselves hard done by and claimed they had been set up or framed by the police or judicial system. But no such benefit of the doubt was extended to those suspected of sexual offences against children. They were instantly guilty if charged and could expect the most ferocious punishment from fellow inmates.

Before rushing to judgement, the press might have remembered the recent fiasco of two nursery workers in Newcastle, at the other end of England. This pair were found to be innocent after years of agony when they had been falsely accused of similar offences. But, hey, what's the problem about destroying the lives of Mrs George, her husband and two teenage daughters when there's so much money to be made?

The intelligent and exceptionally well informed journalist Dominic Lawson recently wrote that the British media have been in mourning since the death of the child killer Myra Hindley in prison in 2002. For the past 40 years, the images of two blond women have been guaranteed to sell newspapers, magazines and TV programs. One is Myra, the other is Princess Diana. Admittedly Diana’s hair colour was natural, while Myra’s came out of a bottle. But her 1960s iconic image of the hard-faced bitch with the blond beehive hairdo is ever enduring and endlessly reproduced. Later pictures of her in prison, with dark hair and a sweet smile, make her look like your favourite aunt and don’t fit the fairy story so well.

Unless you have lived in Britain for the last forty years, you cannot imagine the degree and quality of hatred focused on this woman. The only remotely comparable kind of loathing might be that directed at Adolf Hitler. But even Hitler’s public presentation lacks the peculiarly venomous edge which Hindley’s name instantly provokes. I was with friends on the evening in 2002 when her death was announced on TV and one friend’s vehement and heartfelt comment was “Good!” This friend is a really sweet natured and loving person; she was also born after Hindley’s trial and conviction.

Myra’s crimes were hideous, though not exceptionally horrible by the standards of British murders of both children and adults. I can think of numerous child killings over the last 40 years that were even worse and those perpetrators are almost completely forgotten. The barbaric killing of two French students in London in 2008 made Hindley’s crimes look mild in comparison. Yet I expect the names of their two vile killers to be largely forgotten a few weeks after they begin their 35+ year sentences. But she was caught in a perfect storm of circumstances partly outside her control.

Obviously the serial killing of children excites particular revulsion. And the fact that a woman participated made it doubly heinous, even though she was an accomplice who did not physically kill the children. True, she need not have associated with the depraved Ian Brady or gone along with his murders or assisted in the burial of the bodies. But there were two extra factors which have compounded and extended the infamy of the “Moors Murders” case, as it is known (The bodies were buried in the bleak high moors east of Manchester).

The first was the audio evidence. When she came to court in 1966, even hardened policemen were shaken to the core as tape recorded screams of their tortured 10 year old victim, Lesley Anne Downey, were played back. Reasonably priced tape recording equipment had only recently become available to the general public and Brady had put it to use to record his crimes. As far as I know, it is still the only murder in history where the crime was tape recorded. It helped to seal Brady and Hindley’s conviction and added another level to the public outrage at her crimes. Also the audio evidence had a visceral and immediate impact. No verbal testimony from any number of witnesses or academic pathologists could equal the searing agony of the little girl pleading for mercy and finding none: “Please let me go home to my mummy…..I swear on the Bible, I won’t tell anyone”.

No wonder that her crimes have achieved almost mythical status as examples of ultimate human evil. I say “her” crimes because Hindley is associated forever in most people’s minds as the more evil of the pair. No body wants to hang a woman. But in Hindley’s case nearly everyone would gladly have made an exception. Except that option was no longer legally possible.

Here we have the second complicating factor in her case. The last two people to be executed in England were hung in 1964. The use of the death penalty was suspended for a few years until formal abolition around 1970. As a sop to public sentiment, various officials and politicians promised that “life imprisonment for murder would mean life”. The lying bastards. “Life imprisonment” most usually means 10 years or so before release on licence. In the case of Hindley and Brady, it did turn out to be a life long sentence. She died in prison and he is still inside, probably having slid into insanity by now. So, for the thirty-six years of her imprisonment, much of the public could justly feel that an exceptionally evil killer had cheated the gallows.

The relatives of the victims publicly and repeatedly threatened to kill them if they were released. The politicians and officials responsible for parole thus had an extra nasty dimension to consider, apart from the usual established criteria for releasing a convicted killer back into the community. If Hindley was released (as she should have been freed under the normal rules in the 1990s), she would almost certainly have been killed by vigilantes. No new identity or “secret” address would have survived for 48 hours; a corrupt official would have sold it to the press before she was freed. And if she was killed and her murderers brought to justice, would a British jury convict? You might get another notorious case of a jury approving of murder, as happened in Australia where a vigilante policeman used his service revolver to kill a man he accused of molesting a relative. The victim was dead and couldn’t defend himself in court, but the policeman walked free despite there being no reasonable doubt as to his guilt.

But Hindley was not just a reviled serial killer. She was also a great long term investment from the media viewpoint. She was only in her early 20s when convicted and the reporters knew that they had a wonderful story for decades to come. For the rest of her life she was a guaranteed earner for the British press, who were and are happy to ignore any law or code of ethics in the pursuit of a great story. Any news of Hindley’s life in prison or any hint that she might be soon released were guaranteed front page coverage, along with the understandable but still unappealing chorus of hatred from a group of her victims’ relatives (who I understand were kept on a retainer by at least one tabloid).

Lord Longford, the Catholic campaigner for prison reform, quickly discovered this when he befriended Hindley. Whenever he visited her the press were waiting for him at the prison gate. He had arranged his visits confidentially in advance, so it was plainly a corrupt prison officer who was leaking the information to the newspapers. But despite his protests no one was ever detected or punished. No British politician would ever dare to offend the press barons.

So ever since her demise the newspapers have been looking for a replacement. Most of those who looked like possible candidates have proved to be fifth-rate villainesses and quickly forgotten. Even Vanessa George looks too insubstantial to be a convincing understudy for Hindley. But the search goes on.

The sad wasted life of Myra Hindley contained extra embarassments for Catholics in Britain. Lord Longford always had something of the Holy Fool about his public persona and his long association with Hindley did neither of them any favours. He was convinced that she was a good Catholic girl who had sincerely repented of her crimes and deserved to be released. I could feel only that if she truly understood the nature of her crimes, she would understand that she fully deserved a full life sentence and should accept that with resignation. As a prison visitor, I met another prison visitor who had visited Hindley and gained an utterly different impression of her character and disposition. She declared unequivocally that Hindley was “the most evil person she had ever met”. As this prison visitor was not nationally famous, merely a local volunteer, she had no political influence or powerful friends and was thus of no use to Hindley in lobbying for an early release.

In his article for “The Sunday Times” on 31st May ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6395923.ece ), Dominic Lawson considered the present chaotic shambles which poses as British policy for sentencing criminals of varying degrees of villainy. He quoted effectively from a great Christian thinker who Lord Longford might have been wise to consider before he endorsed Hindley's pleas for clemency:

“The advocates of our system maintain that it is more humane, since it allows for the prisoner who displays penitence to be released much earlier. Sixty years ago CS Lewis demolished this conceit in his essay The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment. He pointed out that a sentence based solely and inflexibly on the wickedness perpetrated – the concept of just desert, which was increasingly being denounced as “mere retribution” – was the only way of linking punishment and justice.

By contrast, said Lewis, if sentences served were based on a subjective assessment of the rehabilitative process, “grumpy unrepentant prisoners” could be consigned to perpetual incarceration while those cunning enough to “cheat with success” would be freed.

The dystopia foreseen by CS Lewis is now the English system of justice.”

2009-06-11T04:03:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

I have driven past the church of St Laurence in the historic town of Petersfield (40 miles south of Reading) many times. Its styling is eye catching and unusual for a small town Catholic parish church

http://www.petersfieldparish.org.uk/page/Home.aspx

In fact, Petersfield has an excellent collection of churches. The Methodist church across the road from St Laurence is very handsome, but the 800 year old St Peter in the ancient Market Place is a gem of a building. Of course, it was a Catholic church for over 300 years until Henry 8th came along. But the Anglicans have done a great job of preserving it and adapting it for modern needs, most recently in the year 2000. It is very visibly a vibrant parish church, as befits its position in the heart of this lovely town. The Farmers' Market was in full swing in the Market Place a few yards from its doors when I visited.

As I admired its refurbished interior, a couple came in. The man explained that it was a year since their marriage in that historic setting.

St Laurence's most famous parishioner was one Sir Alec Guinness, who, between "Star Wars" and " Passage to India", lived nearby. Pity that I could not get inside St Laurence. Like nearly all Catholic churches in England, its doors remain firmly locked between Masses. I am sure that its interior is good match for its very striking shell.

U.S. One of the Largest Muslim Countries?

2009-06-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

Here is a fascinating excerpt from Melanie Phillips' blog of 3rd June 2009. It is not often that you know that a politician is lying the moment he utters a sentence. Usually, you just don't have the background knowledge to instantly detect a blatant falsehood. And even if you suspect that you're being fed garbage, you don't have the time to research the facts. But the Leader of the Free World has spoken one piece of drivel which almost all his audience must have known immediately to be untrue.

Even if you lived in Detroit, with a very large concentration of Arab-Americans, you would have your doubts about the USA being "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world". Years ago I read that 80% of Arab-Americans were Christian and I suspect that has not changed too dramatically as more and more Arab Christians flee the Middle East.

=========================
Wednesday, 3rd June 2009
A statement -- or an aspiration?
9:57am
Having previously declared that America is ‘no longer a Christian nation’ – to be precise:
... At least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers...
Obama has now announced, on the eve of his pilgrimage to make obeisance to the entire Islamic world, that the US can be seen as a Muslim country:

‘And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,’

Mr. Obama said.
Uh? Here are some statistics of the number and percentage of Muslims in various countries:

Indonesia: 207,105,000 (88.2%);
Pakistan: 167,430,801 (95%);
India: 156,254,615 (13.4%);
Turkey: 70,800,000 (99%);
Egypt: 70,530,237 (90%);
Nigeria: 64,385,994 (45%);
Iran: 64,089,571 (98%);
Algeria: 32,999,883 (99%);
Morocco: 32,300,410 (99%);
Afghanistan: 31,571,023 (99%)
Saudi Arabia: 26,417,599 (100%)
USA: 4,558,068 (1.5%)
Just what planet is this US President on? Or is this not a statement but an aspiration?

=========================

Invisible Massacre

2009-06-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

Here is part of the ever thoughtful Archbishop Chaput's article in "First Things" on 2nd June 2009. He was reflecting on the uses of technology. He mentions the downside of the invention of cars. "traffic jams, oil dependency and pollution". Is he leaving something out.....like mass carnage? The fact that such an intelligent writer could omit the most obvious downside of widespread car use is testimony to how invisible death on the roads is.

Yesterday's Air France disaster over the Atlantic finally pushed the Members of Parliament expenses row off the top of the British news agenda for a day - this never ending scandal went down to the Number 2 slot for a day, so I expect it to be back at Number 1 tomorrow and for every day until a General Election is called or the "Daily Telegraph" runs out of politicians to destroy. 228 people have probably died in that crash. The death toll on the British roads, among the safest in the world, is 3,000 a year - more than 12 Air France disasters. The death toll on US roads is over 40,000 a year - an Air France disaster every two days.

The Chicago Tribune ran a series of articles some time ago about Illinois high school students killing themselves in a series of gruesome and easily avoided accidents (e.g. if they had been driving sober or at less than 100 mph). Perhaps older or younger citizens' lives were less valuable or less newsworthy, because I never saw any similar series on accidents involving other drivers. But most of the time road deaths never make the news unless it is an exceptionally high death toll.
============================
"The historian Edward Tenner once warned that every new technology brings with it a "revenge of unintended consequences." We invent cars, for example, to move us more quickly--and of course, they do. But we also end up with traffic jams, oil dependency and pollution. We're never as smart as we think we are. The modern scientific mind likes to imagine itself as Prometheus, the hero of Greek myth who's punished by Zeus for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans. But we're really much more like the Sorcerer's Apprentice: smart enough to use the Master's magic, but not smart enough to know where it leads or how to control it.
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Because It's WRONG! (Part 5)

2009-06-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

Here is a great article from "The Independent" of 30th May 2009. Richard Ingrams is one of the surviving founders of "Private Eye" - a fondness for alcohol and general unhealthy living has carried off some of his friends and colleagues from the early 1960s. But Richard is still going strong. He often refers to commuting to London from Reading, so he obviously lives somewhere in this area. But as so-called "real life" is always crazier than the most heroic satirical efforts of "Private Eye", perhaps he realises that satire is redundant nowadays.

His article on the recent approval of a gay clergyman by the Church of Scotland is a prime example. Such an event would have been regarded as beyond the bounds of worst-taste satire when "Private Eye" started. But it is now hardly surprising - just the final end stage of the disintegration of Scottish Christianity, so evident on my holiday in Scotland in 2008 when I came across any number of closed churches converted to other purposes.

Remember the stern 1920s religion depicted in "Chariots of Fire", when the great Scottish missionary and athlete Eric Liddell refuses to run even an Olympic heat on the Sabbath? Some of Eric's spiritual descendants are definitely NOT taking the admission of gay clergy lying down, so we have yet another schism in full swing. The more vacuous talk there is of "Christian Unity", the more disunity there is in real life.

As Richard so truly says, "we are all very relaxed about the breaking of the marriage vows". In the last few weeks, yet another pair of my Catholic friends (with two children) have split up. Admittedly, I was not surprised from a Catholic viewpoint as their marriage had long struck me as a good business arrangement rather than a true Christian union, but it was still intensely depressing.

And if even the formerly rigorous Kirk in Scotland is indifferent to adultery and sodomy what is wrong? What is the purpose of such a "Church", except as a a vaguely spiritual welfare and social society?

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What was a vocation has turned into just another job

Being a priest, in the eyes of the secular media, is no different from any other job. It follows that we should no more think of objecting to a gay minister of religion than we would a gay dentist.

Hence the general rejoicing that the Church of Scotland has voted in favour of the appointment of its first ever gay minister, Mr Scott Rennie, 37, pictured.
Here is an organisation long associated with the harsh puritanism of John Knox now showing itself to be tolerant, forward-looking, modernising and all kinds of words that don't mean anything much.

The fact that Mr Rennie was married with a young child but has left them, is now divorced and living with a man is neither here nor there. In today's world we are all very relaxed about the breaking of the marriage vows. "Jesus loves me," says Mr Rennie, so it must be all right then.

The issue of openly gay clergy has already caused a major upheaval in the Church of England and now the same sort of crisis is threatening the Church of Scotland.
But the issue is not really to do with homosexuality. The only way the churches can survive is if priests and ministers are seen to be making personal sacrifices which the rest of us are not prepared to make. Then they will be respected.

As soon as they feel free to marry, get divorced, remarry, live with other men and so on then they are telling us that there's nothing so special about being a priest. It's just another job, like being a dentist. So no wonder the media are being so supportive.

Farmer Builds Model of Biblical Temple

2009-05-25T19:15:00.000-07:00

Here's link to incredible model and many pictures:
http://www.letterofrepentance.com/FarmerbuildsmodelofBiblicaltemple.html

Dear Stan,

Yes, I saw the report on this incredible project in a British newspaper. Norfolk is a county on the east coast of England, about 100 miles north-east of London. As it is very flat, it was the site of numerous RAF and USAAF bases in WW2. Its biggest Christian claim to fame is the major shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, frequented by both Catholic and Anglican pilgrims. Its major city, Norwich, has TWO cathedrals - one Catholic, one Anglican.

I love models of anything. The best one I have seen recently is an incredibly detailed model of Worcester Cathedral (about 80 miles north-west of Reading) which was displayed in a side aisle of this magnificent building. On the upper levels of the Lutheran Cathedral in Berlin there are several excellent models, to varying scales, of the entire cathedral and parts of its structure.

To my stunned surprise, I discovered a major Catholic cathedral only twenty miles south of Reading today. I was briefly checking out the Army town of Aldershot on a day's random driving. There was a very large and handsome Victorian church in the heart of the military district. I wandered in, assuming that it was an Anglican church as it was so similar in general style to other Anglican parish churches in Southern England. But no, it was the Cathedral Church of the Armed Forces and the seat of the Catholic bishop to the Forces. I ended up enjoying coffee and biscuits (cookies) with the priest and congregation who had just finished Mass. Like other aspects of the Church in England, the chaplaincy to the Armed Forces exists in a parallel universe with hardly any overlap with the main diocesan structure. But this Cathedral's congregation is divided between military families, who are mostly short-stayers before transferring to another Army town, and civilians who are the long-term backbone of the parish.

This very splendid building, with lavish stained glass, mosaics and statues, was indeed an Anglican church up to 1973 when the Anglicans offered it to the Catholic chaplaincy. In the entrance porch a display case contains the trowel used by Queen Victoria to lay the foundation stone in 1892. Now there's a claim to fame; I suspect it is the only Catholic church in the world to have its foundation stone laid by Queen Victoria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Church_of_St._Michael_and_St._George

Here is the link to the Wikipaedia article on the Cathedral Church of Saints Michael and George in Aldershot. It was designed by two military engineers. Not many Catholic churches have such architects, I bet.....though there is the wonderful little Italian chapel in the Orkney Islands in Scotland, which I told you about last year. As that was converted from two prefabricated Nissen huts, you might argue that that was also a military building.

Because it's WRONG! (Part 4)

2009-05-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

The most recent overblown British media frenzy is still running as I write. It is even worse than the insane coverage given to the demise of Princess Diana in 1997. At least the media moved on to other trivia once she was buried. Now we have continuous coverage of the excessive expenses which Members of Parliament have been claiming. The problem is that there are over 600 MPs, while there was mercifully only one Princess D. Thus the unsavoury revelations about our elected representatives could run for the next year, with another juicy titbit being unveiled every day or two.

Nearly all the revelations centre on claims for MPs' "second homes". As most MPs represent constituencies outside commuting distance of London, they need a base both in their constituency and in London. The problem then becomes, which is their "main home" and which is their "second home"? The assumption is that they pay the costs for their main home out of their $100,000 a year salary (which is well over twice that of the ordinary working Joe in Britain). But the costs for the "second home" can be reimbursed out of public funds. And the permitted allowances for everything from redecoration to new kitchens to new widescreen TVs and home cinema systems are very generous.

So, all of a sudden, the enraged working Joes of Britain have been introduced to a new meaning of the word "flipping". It does not refer to practices such as tossing pancakes, but the way MPs have been able to switch their "main" and the "second" homes. You could call your London base your "main" home in 2007 and claim expenses for your "second" home in Yorkshire or wherever. Then in 2008 you could nominate the Yorkshire property as your "main" home and claim a second truckload of money for refurbishing, refurnishing and equipping your "second" home in London.

It was not just the blatant fraud involved which has provided ample fuel for public fury. The details of expenses claimed aroused further mirth and derision. My favourite was the Conservative MP who claimed $3,000 for cleaning out his moat. But of course....no English gentleman of taste and breeding would be seen dead with a dirty moat. The luckless Home Secretary revealed a mixture of greed and parsimony when she claimed for everything down to a $1.30 electric plug. (This very senior minister is on over $200,000 a year). She had an even worse day when it was revealed that her cable bill, which was also being charged to the public purse, included a couple of pornographic movies which her husband had watched.

Further merciless fun has been had at the expense of the MP who claimed mortgage costs for a property where the mortgage had already been repaid. As "The Daily Mash" explained, he is the first person in history not to realise that he had repaid his mortgage. And the guy who claimed $13,000 for a new TV.....I did not realise that it was possible to spend so much on any domestic TV. But apparently it is, if you buy it from the top-of-the- market Danish manufacturer Bang and Olufsen.

There have been so many revelations every day that by the time Saturday's crook is unveiled you have forgotten the crooks named on Tuesday and Wednesday.

But our pleasure at seeing one crook after another being publicly crucified should be tempered with several other considerations. For one thing, the information was obtained corruptly by the "Daily Telegraph" when they bought a CD full of this devastating information from an insider. Thus they have acted corruptly to expose corruption. It has been notorious for decades that British tabloids corrupt police and prison officers and civil servants for inside information. In more than one case such corruption probably compromised murder investigations. Now a so-called "quality" paper has indulged publicly in the same sordid practice; almost certainly every British paper, "quality" or downmarket, is in the corruption business if there's a great story on the market.

For another, the DT has a monopoly on this data and is thus able to drive the news agenda for every broadcaster and every other newspaper. These have been reduced to playing catch-up as every day the DT leaks another chunk of information and another politician's career goes down the toilet. Also it looks as if the DT is itself playing a political game to destroy the careers of politicians who the Conservative Party leadership want out of the way.

Also various commentators have been lashing out at the way every one of these crooks has claimed that their expenses were "within the rules". Of course they were. The rules in question were set by MPs. But these commentators have been going further, insisting that MPs should behave according to some stricter moral code than the letter of the law requires.

These condemnations look doubly laughable. For one thing, most journalists' best creative writing has traditionally been reserved for their expenses claims. My favourite was the journalist who reportedly claimed for a lawn mower when he lived in a fourth floor apartment. This story may be apocryphal, but lavish entertainment and fictitious travel costs are always good for tax-free boosts to journalists' salaries. And even without the creative expenses, many journalists, broadcasters and editors are on far higher salaries than MPs - up to $1.5 million a year, which makes their accusations of greed look all the more hollow.

The second flaw was the almost total lack of condemnation of the Telegraph's own corruption of a civil servant to get their hands on the data. Informed guesswork suggests that they paid around $130,000 for the CD - an absolute bargain, considering the publicity it has generated. But so many media people are personally corrupt; if they are paying bribes for stories or in receipt of fraudulent expenses and bloated salaries, they are hardly likely to condemn a fellow media worker.

The third flaw is the fact that the sums involved in MPs' expenses are microscopically small compared with the truckloads of taxpayers' money poured down the toilet on everything from the 2012 Olympics to useless weapons to useless computer systems. But these MPs made the mistake of embezzling imaginable sums of money. The $13,000 for a new TV generates outrage because people know how much a good ordinary TV costs and that the $13,000 would buy them a good secondhand car, a purchase they can imagine making. $20 billion squandered on the National Health Service computer system is just an unimaginably enormous sum and no individual is ever going to order such an object for himself. Yet such criminal incompetence and extravagance in spending public money attracts very little attention in comparison to $1.30 claimed for a new bathplug.

The fourth and most grievous flaw was the "Because it's wrong!" tone of all the writers, as if they were reading from tablets freshly delivered to Mount Sinai. Even the atheist philosopher A C Grayling was wheeled on to add his fuel to the bonfire of condemnation. He was loud in his insistence that politicians and the rest of us should have an inner voice telling us that something which was publicly shameful, albeit technically "legal", should not be done even in private when no one was likely to detect it. Of course the Church has always taught that our consciences should be formed according to an objective standard of morality. So which objective standard of morality are we using this week? A C Grayling? The editor of the Daily Mail? Or the Daily Telegraph? Or the BBC's political correspondent? Take your pick. That's the great thing about the consumer society; limitless choice.

After all, I should declare an interest here. In my Civil Service days, I felt no particular restraint in claiming any expenses going. The sums involved were small compared to the MPs' extravagance, but the principle was just the same. You are always far more careful with your money than other peoples' money, especially when the cash is coming from one gigantic impersonal trough labelled "taxation", rather than out of a small company's budget or your parents' pocket. Yet it was every small company and every parent in the country who I was screwing every time I put in a claim. And all my claims were of course entirely "within the rules" and approved by other civil servants.

Drawing All Faiths Together

2009-05-13T07:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan

DAFT is "Private Eye"'s name for Tony Blair's Faith Foundation. After his recent efforts to convert the Pope to Blairism, it was wonderful to see that The Great Charlatan has now been recognized as a monstrous fraud by the Vatican. Efforts by a new convert to change doctrine were obviously not well received, but the idea of Bush's sidekick acting as an honest broker in the Middle East was plainly beyond satire.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/may/13/tony-blair-faith-foundation

God in Strange Places

2009-05-10T06:46:00.000-07:00

I keep meeting God in some very strange places. As I noted in a recent post He was recently on the front cover of that very secular political weekly, the "New Statesman". And on a BBC documentary on the plight of the Church of England. And in the spectacular blockbuster "Knowing", which proved yet again that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If it did not explicitly mention God, it shamelessly cribbed many of His famous special effects, such as the Ascension and Fire from Heaven.

Now He appeared on page 33 of "The Times" colour magazine on 9th May. A new religious order, The Community of Our Lady of Walsingham (www.walsinghamcommunity.org), provided material for a 5 page article with several photographs. The article started by describing the latest recruit who presently flies all over Europe as an air hostess and is due to enter the convent in September 2009. In fact the number of pages is more than this order's current number of members - who are Sister Camilla, the order's founder and webmistress, and Sister Gabriella.

Thus the air hostess will increase membership by 50% when she joins. Just about all parish prayer groups are larger than this miniature order. Why on earth would a major paper take any notice of it? Well, there is the rarity value of its plans to become a mixed-sex religious community - the first in England since the Reformation. There is certainly space for extra recruits. Several men are interested in the development of the Order and may make the plunge soon, once accommodation arrangements are sorted out.

It sounded like a rare piece of good news for religious life in Britain, where convents have been closing the length and breadth of the land. As I drive to work along Bath Road in Reading, I pass the Monastery. This is a very upmarket apartment development which was a Carmelite convent up to 1998. Then the aging and dwindling community dispersed to other Carmels and the site was sold for secular housing. Three miles to the north, the convent in Southview Avenue, which housed the nuns who taught me as a small child, was similarly sold a few years ago.

The new order is based in Brentwood, about 40 miles north-east of London. It was founded only in 2004. Looking at the reasons quoted for its foundation, I couldn't avoid the feeling that it owed as much to the consumer mentality as to traditional religious inspiration. Page 70 of the same magazine reviewed a new Japanese restaurant in central London. Of course, London has restaurants for just about every cuisine on earth. If you didn't like that restaurant, there are plenty of other Japanese eateries to feed you. And if you don't like Japanese food at all, you can choose from hundreds of other food styles from Portugal to the Phillipines. Pages 40 to 53 described several styles of the latest men's and women's clothing - the tiniest sample of what you can find in London's shops large and small.

Page 58 onwards contained the storyboards for the new commercial for Chanel No 5 perfume, the sequel to Chanel's 2004 commercial starring Nicole Kidman, which was reportedly the most expensive commercial ever made. This new commercial is being made by the director of "Amelie" (plus 250 technicians), stars Audrey Tautou, and will probably cost more than most European feature films. According to the article, the director "made the most of its (Chanel's) agreement not to be tightfisted about the production costs". You might think this is a seriously insane agreement to make with any creative filmmaker, but then someone once told me that perfume has a higher profit margin than any commodity except heroin.

This glossy and gloriously materialistic magazine seemed like a totally incongruous setting for an article on the religious life. But the founder explained that "I wanted the poverty of the Franciscans, the zeal of truth of the Dominicans and the liturgy of the Benedictines". I couldn't help feeling that this implicitly insulted all three existing orders on 2 out of 3 counts. I am most familiar with the Benedictines, because of my visits to Douai Abbey which is a Benedictine foundation. Certainly their liturgy is first-rate. But are they lacking in the Truth and Poverty departments??

It seemed faintly bizarre to fashion a religious order which fitted you exactly, much as I visited the tailor in Hong Kong to get a suit of the exact material, style and size to fit me precisely. Even the writer of the article wondered if it would be better to support an existing order than create yet another brand. And surely if you found an order precisely to your specification it must reduce the chances of finding like-minded members, just as my tailored suit would fit very few other people.

Sister Camilla also explained that she wanted a community which would be both "of the world" and yet rooted in time for silence and prayer. Er....don't numerous existing orders do just that, underpinning their work as teachers/nurses/whatever with a serious prayer life?

It is not the smallest religious order I have come across. On my trip to Medjugorge in 1996 I met a very well educated English "nun" who claimed to be the only one of her order, with a distinctive blue habit. Admittedly Medjugorge tends to attract people who are madder than a sackful of cut snakes, to quote a great Australian phrase. She wasn't the craziest person I met that week. There was the nurse from Glasgow who described the visions she saw when she stared at the sun. But this one-sister order ran the nurse a close second, especially when she described a stained glass window in the Medjugorge church which contained a nun with a habit exactly like hers. No, it definitely looked nothing like yours, Sister.

I can only wish the new foundation well and hope fervently that the mixed sex aspect does not result in a horrible car crash somewhere down the road, with the resulting publicity all over the pages of newspapers even less Godly than "The Times".

Great Daily Articles on Morality, Culture & Notre Dame

2009-05-09T04:57:00.000-07:00

Stan,

See great article on 1st May 2009 post in http://www.firstthings.com/. Once Lacy Dodd, a student at Notre Dame, found herself pregnant she quickly discovered what sort of guy her boyfriend, another ND student, was. He was all in favour of a quick abortion. As she says, "pro-choice" doesn't include the choice to keep your baby. Of course, like most articles, it leaves out far more than it includes. Like, does her daughter have any kind of relationship with her Dad? What sort of relationship could you have with a parent who wanted to abort you?

Bill

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Bill, do I have to subscribe? It looks as if I can't get to the articles other wise. Stan

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You don't need to subscribe to First Things to read most of the excellent material. There is a DAILY ARTICLE LINK on the top page and it is just a matter of going to the bottom of that article and clicking on the "Read More" link. [On the U.S. site, the articles for May are strung all together. Just scroll through them. -- SW]. This leads you to the previous daily articles in date order.....then you scroll down to the abortion article of 1st May.

The article for 8th May is particularly pertinent as it echoes the theme of one of my posts "Because it is wrong!" The author of the 8th May article reminds us of the centrality of moral principle in deciding the rightness or wrongness of an action. Thus it is expedient for the state to bug a confessional to obtain a murder conviction, or to torture someone to obtain anti-terrorist intelligence, or to conduct stem cell research to obtain a medical cure.....but all these actions violate a higher moral principle.

As well as the daily articles, you can click on the Archive tab at the top to get a mountain of back numbers of First Things. Enough to keep you reading for years. It is only the two most recent issues which are protected to encourage you to subscribe....

Latin Mass for One

2009-04-15T21:17:00.000-07:00

Is the Latin Mass less worthy of reverence than “Hamlet”?

Tuesday after Easter. I have a spare hour, so why not check out the daily Latin Mass at St William of York? It was at 1120am on that day only, which you might think was an odd time for any Mass. Not pre-work or post-work or lunchtime; it might attract only retired people or homemakers or the staff and students at the adjacent university who can make their own time. In fact, even these had other things to do and I found myself alone in the nave.

It was the first time I had ever been the sole member of the congregation at any Mass in any language. It certainly encourages concentration when you are the only one to make the responses AND in a foreign tongue. Fortunately most of the Mass is either silent or said by the priest, so my mispronunciations were not too plentiful, despite a sore throat. Unfortunately the long gaps of silent prayer made it extra hard to keep my location in the Mass booklet. With no clear visual or audible cues to guide me I was flicking back and forth in the booklet to see where my hoarse voice might next be needed. Suddenly the priest would proclaim: “Dominus vobiscum!” and my rusty childhood reflexes kicked in with “Et cum spiritu tuo.” Phew! Back on track at top of page 23.….

Even more unnerving is making sure I am kneeling, standing or seated at the right points. Normally you follow the herd movements up and down. Mercifully there are directions in the margins of the Mass booklet.

In some ways it was a wonderful nostalgia trip, with the glorious prayers ripped from the liturgy after Vatican 2 now coming up fresh as new paint. What could be more wonderfully new every day than the opening lines: “I will go up to the altar of God, the God who gives joy to my youth”? What bunch of destructive eejits thought that they would attract young people by editing out prayers like that? The Good Centurion, quoted for 2,000 years at every Mass just before Communion, was similarly evicted. “Lord, I am not worthy that thou should enter under my roof….” After all, in the 1960s atmosphere of universal peace and love as prescribed by Ho Chi Minh, a saintly imperialist military guy did not quite fit the picture. Now the God who gives joy to every one’s youth and the virtuous commander were back in daily prayers.

Come Communion, I advance to the altar rail. The altar rail has not been eliminated every where - I knelt at one in St Stephen’s Cathedral in Budapest in 2004. But at St William they have to improvise for Latin Mass - the strip of kneelers/bookrests normally used for the front row of seats is pushed forward to form a temporary altar barrier. You might think that a congregation of one would be difficult to miss, especially when he is my size, two rows from the front and the only voice responding, albeit croakily and shakily. Do I receive the host? Er, no, the priest carries on in silent prayer, back to me, apparently unaware of my bulky kneeling presence.

I retreat bemused to my seat, Mass concludes, followed by several post-Mass prayers which I had not heard in years, including the old favourite to St Michael the Archangel. Then, as the priest is finished and I am on the point of leaving, he asks apologetically if I wanted Communion. Well, yes… I quickly regret this as it involves a rewind to the pre-Communion prayers, distribution of the host (to me alone) and then a repeat of the post-Communion prayers.

Would I do it again? Definitely. Would I switch to it entirely as an alternative to the English rite? No. The sense of being an onlooker rather than a participant in the Mass was too palpable and you can see why even some Popes wrote about Catholic congregations being silent spectators. But the current marginalization of the Latin liturgy is both a monstrous injustice and a serious deprivation for much of the Catholic population in all countries. Only a minority of Catholics in England can easily get to a Latin Mass and savour a rich slice of Catholic history and prayer and I am sure that is the case in most parts of the world. We are incredibly lucky in Reading to have such easy access.

Yet you can get Latin Mass at any concert hall in the world, but as an artistic exercise, not a profound act of worship. No one dares to insist that a mass by Beethoven or Bruckner must be translated into fourth rate English before it is inflicted on the ignorant concert goers. Given the price of concert tickets in most countries, the hall managers would probably have an instant riot on their hands. Similarly for all the shorter prayers and devotional pieces set to incomparable music such as Mozart’s “Ave verum corpus”. Latin is plenty good enough for such masterpieces. Most Shakespeare producers and directors are happy with the English of 1600 without going in for a simplifying translation into the English of 2009. Is the Latin Mass less worthy of reverence than “Hamlet”?

Thoughts After Easter

2009-04-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

Guildford, 30 miles south-east of Reading, is a town I have driven past on numerous occasions, but never visited. I finally got round to it on Easter Monday. What has it got to offer? Well, there is an enormous cathedral, started in 1936 and finished in 1961 after countless interruptions due to WW2 and shortage of funds. By the time it was finished it was only 2 years to go to the "Honest to God" debacle and the on-going crisis of Anglicanism which continues to this day. So maybe it is the one of the last Anglican cathedrals to be built in England, or anywhere else. Like the John Keble church in North London, which I mentioned in a recent post, it has a very distinctive (or unfortunate) 1930s architecture which some have applauded and some have compared to a power station.

The Christian heritage of Guildford overflows in every corner. There is the huge "Friary" shopping mall. In the middle ages there was a friary on the site, which was destroyed under that thieving, murdering, adulterous scoundrel Henry VIII. (Though for the Day: Was he even worse than Tony B Liar? Probably not as Tony is responsible for far more deaths in Iraq and even Henry, whatever his countless shortcomings, was not keen on sodomy or abortion. And both had the brass neck to set themselves up as heads of religious foundations.). Then there was a large house called The Friary. Then, in the 19th century, there was the Friary Brewery. Now commercial change has brought a mall whose interior can hardly be distinguished from a hundred others the length and breadth of Britain.

Further up the picturesque High Street, past the coffee shops and mobile phone retailers, there are the almhouses, founded by a local man who went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury. They are still used 400 years later to house the elderly and still are called a "hospital", in the archaic sense of a place of refuge for the elderly rather than a medical centre. A short distance away there is a very prominent statue of this Archbishop.

Across the road from the almhouses there is Holy Trinity church. The signs outside advertised the multitude of Holy Week activities, including a dramatic reenactment of the Passion around the streets of Guildford on Good Friday. It was performed by a local theatrical group, founded by Peter Hutley, a fervent Catholic convert. They also produce a colossal outdoor play of the Life of Christ in beautiful countryside at nearby Wintershall. It is the nearest we have to the Oberammergau Passion Play. But Oberrammergau is performed only every ten years, while Wintershall happens every summer. See
Recreating the Life of Christ.

Back in Reading it had been a similarly crowded schedule at the much smaller church of St William of York. But it was not the long-time worshippers who were doing all the work. The Latin Mass Society used the church nearly every day for the two weeks before Easter. On some days they were there all day for multiple acts of worship or activities, such as a family picnic on the day before Palm Sunday. Services such "Tenebrae" which I had seen only on obscure websites suddenly appeared on the parish noticeboard for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Suddenly we mainstream Catholics using the English rite were starting to feel marginalised in our own church.

We ought to feel grateful. For years St William has not had a priest of its own and has been served by the parish priest at St James. But the poor man is horribly over-stretched with multiple duties such as the prison chaplaincy and the diocesan marriage tribunal. If the diocese was going to close any churches, we knew that St William had to be the first for the chop in the Reading area. Its special selling point was its closeness to the University campus, but there is another, larger church, Our Lady of Peace, barely 100 yards from the north-east gate of the campus. St Williams, with only two Masses per week, was grossly underused and was barely more than a dispensable "chapel of ease", despite its devoted congregation.

Now there is at least one Latin Mass every day and at least three Masses on Sunday, plus any number of other services and social activities. There is a fourth Sunday Mass if the Hungarian priest is in town. And the LMS are buying a property for their priest in the area so they are settling in seriously for the long term. And they are advertising for a confessional structure to fit into the "crying room" at the rear of the church. How much longer before they re-convert the sanctuary to the pre-Vatican 2 style, purely for Mass with the priest facing the altar, his back to the congregation? If they are visibly the most active users of the premises, it would be hard to refuse them.

We pray for re-birth and renewal of the Church, but sometimes our prayers are answered in very unexpected ways. The future belongs to the fervent and, to judge from the length of their Holy Week services, the LMS worshippers are fervent. One of our congregation who checked out their Good Friday service in 2008 left well before the end because of the heroic length. She should be grateful we have not adopted the Russian Orthodox style of standing throughout services. One English traveler to old Russia recorded the rigours of Holy Week in a pewless Moscow church: "May God grant us His special help to get through this week! As for the Muscovites, their feet must be made of iron".

Beneath the Waves

2009-04-14T17:33:00.000-07:00

Gosport, on the south coast of England, has been a Navy town for centuries. Driving into town I passed signs pointing to the "Institute of Naval Medicine". Not many towns have one of those. What is so special about "Naval Medicine" as opposed to ordinary doctoring? Well, you have all the problems associated with deep sea diving. And the risks of radiation contamination from the reactor in your nuclear submarine. See Institute of Naval Medicine.

Which brings us to the reason for my visit - the Submarine Museum. Not many towns have one of these either and what an enthralling place it is.

In fact Gosport is far more interesting than you might suspect. The main roads and most of the side roads look like the dreariest and most nondescript sections of Reading or any other small to medium sized English town.

But then I passed Holy Trinity Church. The exterior is eye catching enough, with its free standing column of a clock tower separate from the main church.

But the interior is wonderful, with a light filled nave and beautiful decoration.

In front there is a tree in full glorious blossom and to the right a most handsome Georgian house which used to be the vicarage. To judge from the expensive motors outside, this very desirable residence now has more affluent tenants. And immediately to the right of this house was a gate with the baffling name board: "Bastion No 1". Effectively it is a public park. Obviously it is not the only "military" park in the world - think of Battery Park in New York or Fort Canning Park in Singapore. But at least they put "Park" in the title, while the Gosport local council were content to leave this little patch of green with its stark military name, reminding the public of all the Bastions which protected Gosport.

A hundred yards behind the church are two huge slabs of apartments: ugly as mortal sin, erected by developers with the imagination of a mentally retarded flea. It made this little 1696 oasis all the more amazing and unexpected. You might expect it in a historic town in Germany or Italy, but not in functional, military Gosport. To add to the enjoyment, the parish website explains how the ministers of this Anglican church have been of the High Church persuasion for 150 years and spread "catholic" (with a small "c") teaching in the town. See http://www.holytrinitygosport.co.uk/welcome

This little gem is only a few minutes drive from the Submarine Museum. This institution is divided between an ultra-modern building, a very shabby entrance area in the course of reconstruction, various tacky wooden/semipermanent structures and an actual submarine "HMS Alliance".

This stands clear of the water on massive supports and the completely exposed expanse of its hull makes the rusty bits only too clear. But the interior lived up to my expectations of a traditional diesel-electric submarine: horrendously cramped, minimal comfort for the crew. There were levers, wires, piping, switches, dials, consoles and mysterious bits of machinery everywhere, low hanging objects to hurt the tall like me and irregular floors to trip up the unwary.

Our elderly guide had served on "Alliance" and was full of submariner stories. He ran soundtracks to demonstrate the overwhelming noise from the diesel engines and the bowel-loosening sound of a surface warship approaching and dropping depth charges. Obviously they couldn't reproduce the violent shaking of the submarine or the smell of terror as the crew braced for the attack and possibly the last seconds of their lives. Of course they couldn't reproduce all the other smells of submarine life: the cooking, diesel oil, toilets, body odours (no washing, laundry or shaving for weeks on end). He commented that when a submariner took the bus home after a tour of duty he was guaranteed a seat well to himself.......

Outside "HMS Alliance" on the quayside there is a memorial to all the Royal Navy submarines which have been lost. It is poignantly and appropriately headed "Resurgam" (I will rise again). This was also the name of an early submarine. One of the few I recognised was "HMS Thetis". It is a sign of how secret and uncelebrated much of our submarine warfare was. Thetis was not even lost in battle; she sank ignominiously in Liverpool Bay, close to shore, in 1939 before the outbreak of war. A guy opened the interior cap of a torpedo tube not realising that the other end was also open. 99 men died. George Orwell, writing during WW2, described how upset he had been at the highly publicised sinking of Thetis and the desperate attempts to save the crew. He had hardly been able to eat for days at the thought of all those young men suffocating in the cold and darkness of their steel tomb. Now he noted how every one rejoiced when a German U-boat was sunk and fifty fine young men died similarly.

Inside "HMS Alliance" there was a quotation from a WW2 British admiral - "In submarines there is no room for error. You are either alive or dead." Too true. There is limited buoyancy, limited space to evacuate a flooded or burning area, limited oxygen, limited battery power, limited space for spare parts or tools to fix any failures.......

Yet there was space for a most unexpected item. The new museum building had a miniature organ on display. In submarines access space is desperately tight. Every opening is a point of weakness in the pressure hull and so they are kept small. The 21" torpedos could just about slide down through the hatch into the tube area. Similarly this tiny organ could just about fit through the hatch. Until the 1980s such an instrument was standard issue in submarines for religious services. I don't know how often they were used, but the fact that they were permitted in such a cramped vessel speaks volumes about earlier generations' priorities.

Other aspects of British military culture were revealed in the interviews with crew members on a modern nuclear submarine. Obviously the meals are much better nowadays. The "Alliance" veteran described the green bread, tinned food and how they had two choices for dinner - "You ate it or you didn't eat it". With a nuclear reactor you have effectively limitless power to provide refrigeration, water and clean air, so the chefs can be more adventurous and stale food smells are dispersed by the air conditioning. Also an officer was asked about the privileges of rank beneath the waves. "Well, we have a steward to look after us...." Holy Cow. We are taking servants into battle? I as almost as stunned many years ago when a TV documentary showed a steward serving coffee to officers relaxing in the plush wardroom of "HMS Illustrious". But "Illustrious" is an aircraft carrier, almost as big as a liner.

Also there were several signs that even such a functional and serious museum is not immune to the charms of showbiz. The torpedo section obviously contained a long exhibition on Robert Whitehead, the British inventor of the torpedo. A Royal Navy Admiral H.J May commented in 1906: "But for Whitehead, the submarine would remain an interesting toy, and little more". Whitehead married an Austrian lady. One of their granddaughters, a very lovely girl, was invited to the launching of a new Austrian submarine in 1912. She caught the eye of its handsome and courageous commander, one Captain von Trapp. They married and had seven children, but she tragically died of scarlet fever, leaving the youngsters motherless. For the rest of the story, see the"Sound of Music". One display room celebrated the submarine in literature and movies. Obviously Jules Vernes' "20,000 leagues under the sea" and its 1954 movie version held pride of place, but Sean Connery's features adorned the poster for "Red October" and other undersea films showed our unending fascination with this alien and desperately dangerous environment.

Tony Preaches to the Pope

2009-04-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

Here is a story ("Daily Telegraph@, 8th April 2009) which practically redefines chutzpah. Our former Prime Minister thinks that the Pope should change the Church's teaching on sodomy. How did our Cardinal Cormac ever let this snake into the Church? Mercifully Cormac is retiring soon and being replaced by Vincent Nichols (of Birmingham archdiocese). I like the comment below Damian's article from an American reader who says that he reads the "Daily Telegraph" because the US papers are still besotted with Obama - not for much longer I suspect.....

Tony Blair wants the Pope to rethink his line on homosexuality.
What about Blair's line on abortion?

Prophets of Doom - Cagey Catholic Monarchs

2009-04-14T17:14:00.000-07:00

The recent blockbuster "Knowing" rang a distant bell in my memory. In an early scene the Nicholas Cage character's astronomical colleague is stunned. How can Nicholas believe the theory that a pageful of apparently random numbers, written in 1959, contains prophecies of a string of disasters from 1959 to 2009? The incredulous colleague correctly points out that such pattern-seeking theories are a dime a dozen.

The only occasion I met such a theorist in person was in 1978. I was working for the Department of Social Security in Reading and visited a guy who had paid no National Insurance (Social Security tax) for a few years. He lived in a little cottage in an idyllic corner of South Oxfordshire about ten miles north of Reading. He had given up his regular job and was devoting his whole life to deciphering a pattern of words in the Bible. I wish that I had kept detailed notes of his explanation, because I can't remember any significant points of his hypothesis or what great secret he was hoping to unveil to mankind. As I have heard nothing of him since, I assume that his labours were futile.

He was living off his savings - very frugally, as he had a wife and two children, who allegedly fully supported him. I wrote my report and the case was filed away as he was doing nothing illegal; if you do no paid work, you pay no National Insurance.

Plainly the Cage character has an equally sympathetic employer, as he seems to be able to absent himself from his official duties at M.I.T. whenever the spirit moves him. But maybe M.I.T is more spiritual than you might suspect from its sternly rationalist title. In this movie, the first view you enjoy of its campus is centred on a most imposing domed building that could well be a temple or basilica.

Admittedly the spiritual themes in "Knowing" are pursued with as much subtlety as an air raid. The dazzling ascension into the spaceship accompanied by angelic figures and a torrent of light, the apocalyptic destruction of mankind (in effect by fire from Heaven), the final images of two innocent humans in a glorious landscape dominated by a magnificent tree......haven't we been here before? In the End is the Beginning, to be sure. But the fact that the scriptwriters pressed the traditional spiritual buttons shows some marginal lip service to the core beliefs of most Americans. Of course they also pushed the filmmaker's favourite emotional button (Children in Peril) with the zeal of a lab rat hitting the Food switch.

All the above special effects were exceedingly bloody impressive on a $50 million budget, a pittance by Hollywood blockbuster standards. It also paid for a spectacular air disaster, a forest fire and the most insanely over-the-top train wreck I have seen since "Speed". (Gentlemen, subway trains, in New York, or anywhere else, just don't go fast enough to create such mayhem.) I couldn't complain about the bang for my bucks, even in a typically over-priced British multiplex. It certainly pays to shoot movies in Australia rather than in a Los Angeles studio. But were there any wider lessons we might draw?

One obvious lesson is that all the dollars on the planet can't guarantee a half-decent screenplay. You might object that asking for any internal coherence or intelligent story development in a major movie is an inherently silly request. You would have a better chance of finding the truth in a British tabloid. But the very title "Knowing" and the early part of the film, where logical thought is needed to decipher the code, might raise some hope of a moderately thought provoking fable.

Sadly, "Knowing" is so appallingly written and realised that the numerous logical contradictions in the screenplay are simply evaded in a parade of stunning special effects, and any intelligent story development is crushed by a series of creepy or baffling incidents. Why the presumably super-intelligent extraterrestrials spent their time hanging around the hero's home like a bunch of dim witted kiddy fiddlers instead of evacuating more of the human race or working out a way to deflect the Sun's wrath and save us all......well, that's a mystery known only to God and (maybe) the scriptwriters. If you believe the prophecy written down by the little girl in 1959, these aliens had at least 50 years to evacuate or save us and they did precisely nothing. Or they might have made the message less cryptic in the first place and allowed us a chance to save ourselves.

Of course prophecy is an inherently contradictory business. If you accurately predict the future and someone believes you and tries to change it, the prophecy is falsified. The only satisfactory story of prophecy that I am aware of is, of course, Macbeth. The witches' prophecies are entirely "true"; they are sufficiently accurate to lure Macbeth into mortal sin. Yet they are also sufficiently misleading to deny him a moment's genuine benefit or peace of soul and eventually lead him to utter spiritual and physical destruction. And the story is structured so that the anti-hero progresses through his prophesied future with a predestined inevitability.

400 years after Shakespeare, it would be nice to think that highly paid filmmakers would be prepared to face the implicit contradictions of prophecy in an interesting way, but no such luck. Perhaps we should just be grateful for any sympathetic treatment of religious attitudes in a major movie. It was particular refreshing to see the hero's quietly decent pastor father portrayed in a positive light instead as a nutcase, bigot or charlatan.

I have speculated in the past that popular culture provides ways of preparing the public for radical changes in scientific perception. The most obvious recent example is "Sex and the City". The completely irresponsible behaviour of four promiscuous women in New York, the AIDS capital of the planet, was a pretty merciless mockery of the horseshit fed to the public for years by the AIDS industry. Similarly the role played by the Sun's fluctuations in the heating of the earth in "Knowing" looks like an equally savage mockery of the "CO2 = Global Warming" yarn we are still being sold in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

Is "Knowing" another straw in the wind, signalling abandonment of crassly rational explanations and looking instead for salvation from the Heavens? There have been a few signs recently, in the most unexpected places. On 3rd April, I saw the word "GOD" in enormous letters on a magazine cover in W H Smiths newsagents, not normally a hotbed of piety. No, it was not on the cover of "The Tablet" or "The Church Times". The "New Statesman", normally a left wing political mag appealing to a small number of people who still take left wing thought seriously, was running a special issue on religion.

Given the contributers, I took it about as seriously as you could take "Knowing" on cosmology or prophecy. Here were all the Usual (gruesome) Suspects. Christopher Hitchens (but not his religious brother Peter), Richard Dawkins, Polly Toynbee..... A few of the more reliably on-message theists, such as A. N. Wilson, were wheeled on. Since writing "The Death of God" (around 1999), Wilson claims to have found God alive again.

The Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, was permitted a typically intelligent three column inches...about the same as our ever-asinine George Monbiot, the noisiest promoter of the religion of global warming. Good to see that Prophets of Doom are still given a hearing. But given the 3 pages devoted to Hitchens and Dawkins combined, you knew where the NS editor's sympathies lay. No danger of the good Rabbi or any competent Catholic theologian being given three pages. Yet the fact remains that religion is a prime factor in human affairs and cannot be ignored even by a handful of eminent atheists in major Western cities.

Religious problems just keep breaking out, like an itch the secularists cannot quite reach to scratch properly. The bruhaha over the recent idiotic Parliamentary Bill allowing the heir to the Throne to marry a Catholic is a prime example. I pointed out that such permission could mean that the Monarch after next might be a Catholic head of a Protestant Church of England. Not according to the fine print on the front of "The Daily Telegraph" (who usually get their religious facts straight). Any spouse of the heir would have to agree that their children be brought up as Protestants. So the heir could marry a Catholic as long as she was a bad Catholic. What if the spouse was a Jew (bearing in mind that Jewish identity is transmitted via the mother).....or a Muslim....or a devout Hindu?? Er, better to drop the whole dumb affair and keep on offending only Catholics.

The recent appointment of our new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, attracted plenty of space in the secular press. The discussion on his merits was conducted in grossly secular terms, but the fact that they thought this item deserved the column inches is another sign that the Death of God has been greatly exaggerated.

And as I write, BBC Radio 4 is transmitting a documentary discussing the politics and legal status of the Church of England. Should it continue to be the recognised State Church, with the hereditary monarch as its anointed head and seats reserved for Anglican bishops in the House of Lords? How can the Church in England be boxed in by foreign Anglican Churches (who comprise the majority of Anglicans and inconveniently keep insisting on traditional Christian teachings) AND adapt to the sexual practices of 21st century Britain (including the practices of its monarch)? One of the contributers blamed Richard Dawkins for stirring the pot and raising the anomalies of the C of E's position. Perhaps we should be grateful to the troublesome professor for raising the public profile of religion.

Another contributer on the program pointed out another aspect of the "Catholic Monarch" debate. If the Monarch became Catholic, he would be anointed at his Coronation by an "Archbishop" whose priestly consecration was "null and void" according to the Pope's encyclical "Apostolicae Curae" (On the Nullity of Anglican Orders) of 1896. Holy Cow, we are getting the Latin title of an encyclical issued 113 years ago quoted over the secular BBC radio waves.

The future remains unknown, but it seems that the prophets of the death of religion still have a very long and futile wait ahead of them.

2009-04-13T05:18:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

Hope that all goes well with your work deadlines. A bit of light relief from the "Daily Mash" on the G20 meeting, which is probably more accurate than the acres of "serious" commentary on the subject:

G20 PRODUCES ONE TRILLION DOLLARS FROM BEHIND YOUR EAR

At least one commentator reckons that the trillion dollar figure is a smoke-and-mirrors illusion.

Also an exclusive revelation on what happened when the Obamas met the Royals - though the real life antics of the Royal family are much funnier. See Kitty Kelly's book on "The Royals". If you add up all the rumours, Prince Charles has at least one brother and sister who are not related to each other.

I TAKE MY COFFEE BLACK - LIKE MY WOMEN, SAYS QUEEN

Spirit of the Age - from John Keble to Hitler

2009-04-13T04:45:00.000-07:00

I always enjoy the motto:

He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower. As with great art, faith that lasts is faith that answers to higher standards than today’s trends.
—attributed to Dean Inge, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.

This was visually demonstrated years ago when I took a wrong turn when driving in Mill Hill in north London. While passing the rows of ordinary houses in this very ordinary suburban road I saw a building which made me slam on the brakes and pull over immediately.

I had never seen a church, or indeed any other structure, quite like John Keble Church.

There can't be many churches named in honour of one of the leading lights in the 19th century Oxford Movement within Anglicanism which spawned Cardinal John Henry Newman. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keble). But it was not its name which was so arresting; its design was eye-popping. It was a church which had been designed to be ultra modern for the 1930s. The London sprawl and the electric railway had just reached out to nearby Edgware and created the need for new Anglican parishes.

The architect had obviously chosen a style which he conceived as fitting for the 1930s, as much of its time as the new railway stations on the line up from Central London or the semi-detached houses with their state-of-the-art radios and electric light all around it. A few very affluent families in the area would have had a car and, who knows, one or two might even have had a TV. The BBC started the first regular high-definition (405 line) transmissions in 1936, the same year John Keble was completed, and Mill Hill was within range of the only hi-def transmitter in the world.

Plainly any old-fashioned notions of church design were as ridiculous in 1930s suburban London as a horse and buggy. I don't know to what extent the clergy aided and abetted the design, or if it was done over their dead bodies.

As a result John Keble Church is now almost grotesquely dated and somehow much more old-fashioned than the thousands of beautiful older churches throughout the land. These ancient buildings, whether Gothic, Victorian or Norman in style, have a timeless quality while John Keble merely looks very odd. Hardly any other English churches in the interwar period were built in this style, which makes it even more of a curiosity.

The only remotely comparable church I have seen anywhere is the Sacred Heart in Prague, built a few years earlier. That is also one of a kind, but the boldness of its conception and detailing, especially the enormous clock, works far better than its London contemporary and it has aged very well.

I first saw the Sacred Heart from the top of the nearby TV tower. This started construction as a Communist era prestige project but by the the time it was completed in 1992 the old regime had been swept away. The TV tower's restaurant was decorated in a strange mixture of darkish blue materials; this was probably some local designer's idea of what was ultra-chic in 1980s terms, but it now looked as passe as John Keble.

John Keble Church is a terrific metaphor for the religious and secular fashions which now look even more dated and bizarre. At the time, of course, the 1936 Olympics were in full swing and the great and the good were queuing up to praise the wondrous things Herr Hitler was doing in Germany: eliminating unemployment, building a nation wide freeway system 20 years before the USA got started, launching the first public TV broadcasts in the world (in Berlin in 1935), promoting technological advances of every kind. The first jet aircraft in the world would be German and take to the air three years later.

As a recent article pointed out, the 1936 Olympics were the first truely "modern" Olympics in many ways: the first to be televised, as well as the first to have mass commercial sponsorship and the hokey "torch marathon" from the original Olympic site (this latter spectacle was invented by Hitler's propaganda geniuses).

If Herr Hitler was not quite your cup of tea, there were astonishing reports of Comrade Stalin's successes in boosting Soviet GNP, building a whole new egalitarian society and abolishing poverty. The Western parliamentary democracies with their mass unemployment and social injustice were plainly on their way out.

By the 1960s both Stalin and Hitler were SO five minutes ago, almost as dated as John Keble's architecture, and their erstwhile advocates were widowers indeed. The surviving Hitlerites and Stalinists had mostly either reinvented themselves as devote democrats or retreated into embarrassed silence, though a few faithful followers still preached the discredited "gospels." All popular opinion (as interpreted by the noisier media pundits) was now allegedly on the side of a new revolution in church and secular life: for the Mass in the vernacular, sexual liberation, overthrow of traditional authority (in favour of liberating politicians such as Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao), the worship of youth and the denigration of traditional culture in favour of new music, art, etc.

All these trends have either been abandoned, savagely ridiculed or produced horribly sour grapes. So we have yet another generation of widows and widowers. As I noted in a recent posting, you can tell the 1968 party is over when even "Le Monde" is willing to see the dark side of Fidel Castro.

Of course a few aging rebels still preach the liberationist gospel, most hilariously our own Polly Toynbee who only recently was vigorously defending the Permissive Society of her long-ago youth in the 1960s. Even Members of Parliament in her beloved Labour Party are unhappy at the fruits of the Swinging Sixties, if only because they are so horribly expensive at a time when the country is nearly bankrupt. It was all very well squeezing responsible families to support the feckless in the good times, but now in 2009 one parent families are a luxury we can't afford and can't get rid of.

And the vernacular Mass, the most visible relic of the 1960s turmoil in the Church? It is still surviving, but the liturgical revolution has never produced the great results anticipated 40 years ago - certainly not in terms of church attendance, which has been going downhill like an Olympic ski run. The English translations varied from banal to crass, and like the one parent families, proved horribly expensive as the one approved translator had monopoly rights. No one adopted the dignified existing translations by scholars such as Ronald Knox; these had the serious disadvantage that there was no money to be screwed out of a faithful congregation.

For a while the religious revoltionaries assumed that the Latin Mass would fade away with the aging generation still devoted to it. But who is turning up at the Latin Mass in our own St William of York? Certainly a few of the pre-Vatican 2 parishioners, but an astonishing number of mini-vans full of young families, plus students from the adjacent University. The future of the Latin oddly looks more assured than the vernacular.

Limits to Unity & the Monarchy

2009-04-08T05:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

As a follow up to the pro-abortion "Catholic" politician row, here is a link to an article in the ever-excellent Touchstone magazine with reveals the chaotic and divided attitudes to abortion within US Christian churches. Yet again it highlights the vacuity of so much well meaning waffle on the importance of "Christian unity". If we cannot get agreement even on this issue, what on earth can "Christians" agree on?

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-02-039-c

The old saying "Divide and conquer" springs to mind.

I am also reminded of an article in "Faith" magazine years ago. It looked back to a very different Britain in late 1949 when there had been a lengthy exchange of letters in "The Times" on the subject of Church reunion. In one letter a Catholic bishop had courteously but firmly explained why Catholics and Anglicans could not logically say the Lord's prayer together. They would attach different meanings even to phrases such as "Thy Kingdom come". In this phrase a Catholic would be praying for the world wide establishment of the Catholic church, while the Anglican standing beside him in Christian fellowship would be praying for...er, something else, probably vague in the best Anglican tradition. Such a straight forward and clear thinking recognition of the real problems is absent in the ecumenical droning from modern pulpits.

This basic confusion and reluctance to face bedrock principles is evident this week, with the debate in Parliament on a Private Members Bill to remove one of the few remaining legal pieces of "discrimination" against Catholics. The heir to the throne cannot marry a Catholic without losing the right to secede to the throne. (This became a very faint possibility in the 1970s when Prince Charles' name was paired with Princess Astrid of Luxemburg, who is Catholic. Nothing came of it and she married someone else). But the "discrimination" against Catholics was ignorantly denounced as if it was the equivalent of racial discrimination. After all, no law explicitly forbids the heir from marrying a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu or an atheist on pain of disinheritance.

Yet a fundamental issue of principle still exists and cannot be wished away on the basis of modern whims about "injustice" or "discrimination". Hardly anyone admits that there can be just discrimination. Admittedly British Airways can still discriminate against blind pilots and our hospitals are not forced to accept the mentally disabled as brain surgeons - well, not yet. But only one or two people pointed out one blindingly obvious fact. What if the heir Prince William marries a Catholic and they bring up their children as Catholics, as the Church has always demanded? The monarch after next will be a Catholic head of an Anglican church.

Fortunately the Bill has failed. But the fact that it could even be introduced and waste Parliamentary time and media space speaks volumes about the shallowness of understanding in this country of basic principles of religion and morality.

It is another aspect of the problem I described in an earlier blog. Just about everyone denounces pedophiles as viler than the vilest of the vile, Beasts, Monsters, hanging's too good for them..... But hardly anyone has a coherent understanding of WHY it is wrong and why our enthusiasm for total sexual liberation for adults leads inevitably to the sexual abuse of children.

Randall Terry - Archbishop Burke Discussion

2009-04-08T05:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan

I am reminded of the time my Canadian friend declared in horrified disbelief: "You never heard of Wayne Gretsky?" Well, no. Hardly anyone in England has. Ice hockey just isn't a British sport despite efforts to introduce it. The only hockey played here on a large scale is on grass and mostly by girls and even that gets about as much national media coverage as the Chess championships. Most British people would be pushed to name a single grass hockey player, much less an ice hockey star. The British sports scene is utterly dominated by Soccer.

In the same spirit I feel singularly unqualified to jump in on the Randall Terry/Archbishop Burke discussion, seeing as I have never heard of either of these estimable figures before. But total ignorance of a subject plainly never discourages any British media pundits, so here goes. As the British newspaper motto goes: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."

Based on about 15 minutes Googling, it seems the bruhaha centres on the attempts to publicly discipline Catholic politicians who have no qualms about supporting abortion - with Randall Terry leading a delegation to Rome to lobby various high placed Vatican officials on the visible infidelity of some American Catholic bishops in their attitudes to abortion and other crucial aspects of doctrine. I loved the title of the brief they presented to these title "Oves sine pastores" (Sheep without a shepherd). It is reminder of the Latin titling of encyclicals. Except that here the correspondence is going the other way from the faithful to the pastors.

Terry interviewed Archbishop Burke on videotape to discuss the attitude of bishops in denying Communion to pro-abortion politicians. The Archbishops makes remarks that are clearly critical of those US bishops who do not deny Communion to such politicians. (That is assuming the substantial accuracy of the transcript I have read - see http://www.ahumbleplea.com/Docs/ArchbishopBurkeTranscript.pdf )

The Archbishop's statement (see http://blog.beliefnet.com/pontifications/ ) of 26th March is plainly laughable and indicates that like so many senior clergy (most notably our own ludicrous Archbishop of Canterbury) he just ain't bright enough for the job. Once you have put your views on videotape and the videomaker has left the room, you have no control over how it is going to be edited, distributed or projected. Even if replays of the tape had just been restricted to a small number of pro-life activists, did he imagine that his criticisms of his fellow bishops would remain confidential?

The Archbishop's comments have plainly hugely and deservedly embarrassed many of the US hierarchy. Other clergy around the world must have similarly burning ears; what about those English clergy who accepted Tony B Liar into the Church in the face of overwhelming evidence about his long anti-Catholic record while Prime Minister, as I noted in an earlier blog?

It is heartening to see such militancy in the face of the abortionists. How far they can pursue other aspects of the campaign, such as publicly stigmatising any ordinary Catholic who voted for Obama...well, that is going to make any divisions between Latin Mas enthusiasts and other Catholics pale into insignificance.

Death of the Newspaper?

2009-03-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

A politician is a guy who is generous with other people's money, courageous with other people's lives and eloquent with other people's words. A journalist is much the same, except that he/she usually has enough talent to scribble the words.

With the threatened demise of numerous British and American papers in the current recession, the politicised journalist (is there any other kind?) has become more repulsive than ever before, if that were possible. Two of my favourite hate figures Polly Toynbee of "The Guardian" and Johann Hari of "The Independent" have recently written equally ludicrous articles lamenting the downfall of the printed media as advertisers go elsewhere or stop advertising altogether. As you might expect from these two worthies, their remedies involve extorting yet more money from the ever-luckless taxpayer.

Obviously journalists want money spent on newspapers, just as admirals want more aircraft carriers and truck operators want cheaper gas. But even by the low standards of special pleading and pork barrel politics Toynbee and Hari's appeals were exceptionally crass.

Johann Hari's more laughable idea was that students should be compelled to subscribe to a newspaper as part of the condition for being on a college course. He imported this idea from some American philantropist who was concerned about the impending mass extinction of the major US newspapers and, like any politician, was prepared to be extra-generous with other people's money. This compulsory subscription would not only support endangered titles, but encourage the spread of general world knowledge among future graduates, who are woefully ignorant on many aspects of public life.

Obviously the only printable repost to such an idea, both from students and the rest of the population, would be something like "Go jump in a vat of acid". Why should anyone be forced to buy something which no one wants to buy voluntarily? Why should low-income students be singled out for this honour? And even if students were compelled to subscribe to a newspaper, how many would read it, or read anything beyond the sports and cartoon pages? And why should anyone be forced to buy something which everyone on the planet can read for free on the Internet?

Polly's slightly less laughable idea focused on supporting local newspapers and their allegedly essential role in facilitating local democracy. Numerous local councils spend small fortunes producing glossy magazines to tell the hapless local taxpayers how they are pouring their money down the toilet. The actual readership of these magazines is not known; unlike commercial papers, no one needs to measure readership to justify their existence or to put a reasonable price on advertising rates. But it is unlikely to be larger than three figures for each publication.

One of her ideas is that this visibly wasted expenditure should be re-directed into supporting local newspapers, perhaps via funding mechanisms such as charitable trusts. Again, my only charitable reaction is "Jump in an acid vat, Polly". Why should my hard-earned money be squandered either on a politicians' propaganda sheet or a dying local rag which can't support itself? Sadly, as this is a family blog, I can't quote all the riotously funny and indescribably obscene abuse heaped on Polly by various bloggers such as "The Devil's Kitchen".

And if having Polly in print and on the Internet is not appalling enough, there she was on BBC Radio 4 lunchtime news peddling exactly the same drivel at the licence payer's expense. Being a newspaper columnist is a great way of getting access to other media and thus even greater exposure for your fatuous opinions. It really is a case of "Unto him that hath much, much shall be given", though not in the Biblical sense.

To prove that lousy ideas know no language barriers, the Sarkozy regime in France are proposing to pay for a year's newspaper subscription for all 18 year olds. Given that France has much better broadband provision than Britain, with super-fast connections piping hi-def TV to your plasma TV/supersize computer display, this sounds like a super-fast non-starter. I can read "Le Monde", "Le Figaro", etc on line any time I want. In fact "Le Figaro" (see www.lefigaro.fr ) is happy to send a daily newsletter to anyone on earth, even to a "rostbif" like me. So I get "La lettre d'info du Figaro" in my inbox each day. If your high school French is up to it, sign on for free for a language refresher.

You can see what local papers are up against in sheer value for money terms. My mobile broadband connection costs £8.20 ($12.00) per month (I abandoned the AOL landline link months ago). For that I get every newspaper on the planet in every language, hundreds of superb magazines on every conceivable topic, (all hosting writers far better than Toynbee and Hari), free email, free multiple libraries (see www.refdesk.com to name only one) and only God knows how many awesome databases, such as the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).On the lighter side there's instant shopping from Amazon and thousands of other providers, free music from www.Spotify.com (which is like having an Ipod the size of a suitcase - never buy a CD or MP3 again), video from countless sites, internet radio from 6,000 stations....the list goes on and on.

And I don't even have to get out of bed to obtain any of these goodies. With my netbook and mobile broadband dongle, surfing in bed is one of the little pleasures of modern life.

Our local "daily" rag, the "Evening Post", is published only on five days a week. In a month of 30 days, that is 22 issues at 40 pence per day....say £8.80. So-called "serious" national newspapers, filled with the sort of garbage peddled by Toynbee and Hari, cost twice as much per day. Comparing the "Evening Post", or any other "newspaper", to my internet link is like comparing a horse-and-buggy to a state of the art BMW. I'm afraid the old faithful nag is being retired to the knacker's yard. The difference is that some people actually want to use a horse and buggy on special occasions.

Unlike hundreds of local British papers, the "Post" is not going bust immediately, but it is being reduced to two issues a week from later in 2009. As the weekly "Reading Chronicle" is much fatter and more marketing-savvy (for example, it produces a Polish edition for the thousands of recent arrivals in town), how long a twice-weekly Post will survive is anyone's guess, especially once it loses its frequent publication edge over the "Chronicle".

It is obviously not just the technological gap between print and electronic media. It is displacement time; time spent sampling the internet is time not spent reading dead tree media. After a while you lose the habit and taste for reading traditional newspapers.

But all this is horribly selfish and inconsiderate, you cry. How can we ignore all the people who don't have Internet access and rely on the local paper for local news? Well, obviously the printed media themselves aren't much use to the 15 to 20 per cent of adult citizens who are wholly or partly illiterate. In fact sites like the brilliant www.spotify.com point one possible way to a post-literate future. At present Spotify is content merely to provide truckloads of free music in every conceivable genre from Janacek to Glenn Miller to children's nursery songs to U2. (Sorry, US readers, it is only available in certain European countries as yet). But it can obviously deliver every kind of audio material with equal ease; news broadcasts, documentaries, lectures, drama, "audio books" and much more.

The professed concern of Toynbee and Hari for local or national democracy if newspapers die is particularly laughable, given that their newspapers represent only a small minority of the British public. So-called serious papers like the "Guardian" and "Independent" are outsold 15 to 1 by the tit-and-bum titles like "The Sun". As Toynbee herself told me, when I emailed her in response to one exceptionally idiotic piece she had written: "We need a better quality public in this country". Obviously.....we need far more people who agree with La Toynbee. The true "De haut en bas" voice of the modern secular atheist.

Hari protested that traditional news-gathering journalism is very expensive and has been supported only by cross-subsidies of various kinds, e.g. from traditional advertisers. Seeing the vitality of on-line bloggers, some of whom make a good living from the Internet, and the fact that some bloggers have broken important stories which the traditional reporters have missed, I am not losing any sleep over the possible demise of the traditional hack.

Newspapers, like it or not, are only one small and disposable piece of the modern democratic jigsaw. Large numbers of people are going to lose out on local and national democratic access if they don't use the Internet, or can't read the local paper, or don't go to council meetings or never approach their local councillor or Member of Parliament.... Actual direct observation of council meetings and direct contact with local politicians costs nothing and is open to every one rich or poor, literate or illiterate.

Part of my joy at seeing the discomfort of Toynbee and Hari is that these two obviously sense that the days of influence of highly placed commentators like them are nearly over. The Internet gives unprecented open access to a worldwide audience to everyone with an opinion.

As I noted in an earlier blog, there are still horses around in present day Britain. But they play an utterly different role in the economy to that they enjoyed 100 years ago. One of the pleasures of studying the old Reading street directories in our local library is the sight of the long-extinct businesses who provided essential services in the early 20th century. Horse traders, blacksmths and suppliers of horse fodder and harnesses share the pages with the early car dealers who would soon replace them. The horse economy is important less than 40 miles west of Reading. In the Lambourn area, there is a major centre of race horse training and breeding. A major infrastructure, including a very specialised horse hospital, thrives in its support - though of course the horsie folk use Range Rovers and Volvo and Mercedes estate cars for everyday transport.

In the same way printed material will thrive in a different way in future. Our local newsagents shelves groan under the weight of traditional dead tree magazines covering hundreds of specialised interests. The "newspapers" stand is an isolated island which could be replaced in a few years by other merchandise with few people noticing or greatly caring. With the super-netbooks of the near future, who will bother to buy a newspaper even to read on the daily commute to London? Already the express coaches from Reading Station to Heathrow Airport boast free wi-fi. Those travellers are already more interested in continuos Web access. Most of the rest of us will soon follow them.

Conventional Wisdom - Pure Drivel

2009-03-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

At least one commentator (Peter Hitchens, as ever) was willing to back the Pope. And incidentally willing to point out that conventional wisdom (i.e. 90% of both politicians' words and media output) is pure drivel.

* Conventional wisdom says the Pope is stupid and wrong to say fidelity and abstinence are better than condoms at guarding Africans from AIDS.

Conventional wisdom, as usual, is talking out of its backside. What the Pope says matters only if anyone listens to him. If nobody does, his opposition to condoms won’t stop anyone using them and will make no difference. If lots of people listen to him, his support for marital fidelity will persuade many people to follow this path, and so save untold lives.

The experience of such countries as Uganda suggests very strongly that he is right when he says this, and that fidelity is a far better protection than a rubber sheath. The only real hope is a change in sexual habits.

I am not a Roman Catholic, but I am weary of the concerted smearing and misrepresentation which the Pontiff constantly faces.

The Other Side of the Revolutions

2009-03-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

After my recent visit to Basildon Park and seeing the exhibition for the "Pride and Prejudice" filmshoot, I reflected on my trip to Jane Austen's home in Chawton last year. Chawton is a picture postcard village and the Austen connection will doubtless ensure that it stays unaltered for a very long time to come.

But of course the outward shell of the buildings does not reflect the multiple social revolutions within the walls. As I toured the upper floor of the Austin house, I heard horses' hooves outside. Sure enough, there was a pair of well groomed animals, with their equally well groomed riders, walking at a relaxed pace down the one street of Chawton. No need to rush; after all, this was Sunday and these were animals kept as an expensive hobby.

In Jane's time, there would have been plenty of horses around, but as essential working beasts, supporting everything from farm work to deliveries of essential products to transporting people locally or nationally. The only horsepower used by most Chawton people today is the 200 bhp under the hoods of their BMWs as they set off for well paid jobs in the Thames Valley or up the M3 motorway to London.

As I came out of the Austin house, I heard the unmistakeable and very rare sound of a steam locomotive. The last steam locomotive ran on British Rail in 1968. Of course - it was the preserved railway which runs behind the row of trees near the house. Again, a form of transport which was the backbone of the Industrial Revolution for over a hundred years is now a tourist curiosity. The famous "Watercress Line" starts at Alton, less than two miles north-east of Chawton. Alton is a little gem of a historic English town, as much as Chawton is a little gem of a village. Appropriately, Alton station is both the terminus of the Watercress Line and the terminus of the real present day trains which carry commuters to London.

Jane Austen's life finished shortly before the railway revolution started in the 1820s in England. No wonder such a famous person traveled only short distances in her lifetime, as I noted in a previous blog entry. Before the railways, any long distance travel was laborious, expensive, time consuming, uncomfortable and often downright dangerous. Period films hardly convey the problems; the immaculately polished carriages and impeccably presented horses are covered by present day Health And Safety laws and legislation forbidding cruelty to animals.

The Railway Revolution was only one of multiple revolutions which separate us from Jane. The Industrial Revolution of which it was an integral part is obviously another. The social and sexual revolutions within Chawton are less visible than the flat screen TVs and the broadband internet links within the historic houses or the BMWs in the driveways. But they are longer lasting and more deeply felt than the ephemeral technologies around us.

Watching the glossy, but unsatisfying 2005 version of "Pride and Prejudice", some of the aspects of the social revolution are far more startling than the beautiful houses and costumes. The interesting, but inadequate "additional material" on the DVD outlined some of the aspects of social attitudes underpinning British high society of the time. Obviously the kind of potential husband with an income of five or ten thousand pounds a year was part of a very, very tiny minority of the British population. Yet a procession of such desirable beaus was paraded across the screen.

Most telling was the position of clergymen. It is almost unimaginable now, but in Jane's time a clergyman held one of the most lucrative and desirable professions in the land - comparable to a very high powered lawyer or City trader today. This is evident in the reference to one character getting eyewatering compensation for losing out on preferment for a parish. The power and wealth of the ordinary clergy was a direct reflection of the national power and wealth of the established Church.

Almost as revealing are the courtesies and behaviors between the sexes - with the young ladies bowing automatically before any gentleman and the care taken over the reputations of the ladies. It was not merely bad being "damaged goods", as Elizabeth's youngest sister threatens to become as she elopes to London. Being related to the damaged goods would be social disaster and spell the end to any hopes of a respectable marriage.

The discretion exercised between a potential "couple" rang a distinct bell. Of course - all that old Catholic teaching about "avoiding the occasions of sin". You should not just avoid sin, but any circumstances likely to lead you to sin. No doubt Jane Austen and all her characters would have been horrified at any insinuation of Popery, but here they were, taking traditional Christian precautions, ensuring that a young man and woman should not even have a private conversation by themselves and that they behaved with the utmost decorum.

Even the present day actors portraying these characters could see some of the advantages of such rules; people knew where they stood, how they should behave and how to interpret the almost invisible signals given by the opposite sex. Not much scope for the present day excuses of "I though she meant Yes, Your Honour".

So here we are after 200 years of English revolutions far more radical than either the French or Russian variety. As Dr Johnson so truly remarked, no sensible man would pay a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. Jane could hardly have comprehended our present day technologies, beyond anything imagined by the most visionary science fiction writers of her time. But she might have written an even more devastating satire on present day sexual behavior - "Nonsense and Insensibility" perhaps?

Jane and Jesus

2009-03-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

It was the 30th anniversary of the opening of Basildon Park (picture to right) to the public under the auspices of the National Trust. So they dropped the entrance tickets to their 1979 price of 90 pence ($1.35) and I arrived early to grab this bargain offer.

I have been to this minor stately home, 10 miles north-west of Reading, once before. But there had been a few changes since my last visit. A whole room was devoted to the filming of "Pride and Prejudice". Part of the 2005 version, starring Keira Knightley, had been shot at Basildon Park, with a few even more magnificent houses around England providing other backdrops. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414387/

Jane Austin was a relatively local girl, spending most of her life in the county of Hampshire, immediately south of Berkshire. I visited her home at Chawton, about 40 minutes drive from Reading, last year. She also spent a short time in Reading, attending the Abbey School about 200 yards from St James. This early 19th century establishment had absolutely nothing in common with the present-day Abbey School for the daughters of the affluent, but I suspect that the latter is very happy about any confusion on the part of the ignorant.

Her life is a reminder of how "local" was the life of nearly all people until very recent times. Such a famous (and fairly privileged) person never travelled outside a 70 mile radius of Reading in her whole life. In her later years, when she wrote her most famous novels, she spent most of her life within a small family circle in a very small radius of Chawton. But then Jesus travelled in an even smaller area and look at his impact...... (Chawton house at right.)

The film exhibition conveyed a highly positive image of the cooperation between the movie makers and the National Trust. This was in marked contrast to the impression of the James Bond film, "The Living Daylights", filmed at Stonor House (picture at right) on the other side of Reading. One of the staff at Stonor told me "Never again!!" Filming a huge budget Bond film was obviously a very different enterprise to "Pride and Prejudice". P and P's budget of $28 million was large by European standards, but modest in Hollywood terms.

Working in such a historic house posed endless problems for the crew. They obviously wanted to keep the National Trust on-side, otherwise they would compromise future cooperation in granting any filmmakers access to the hundreds of wonderful locations controlled by the NT. There were endless restrictions on the intensity of light and temperature; no equipment was to touch the historic walls. All the priceless and irreplaceable artifacts in certain rooms had to be catalogued, dismantled and carefully packed away.

As ever, the perversity of the creative team knew no limits. Having gone to all this trouble gaining access to a splendid house of the correct period, they decided that certain rooms were not splendid enough and needed some improving touches. 18 feet high pillars were constructed by a master plasterer (no fibreglass here) and shoehorned into a room. Once filming was over, they would just be dumped. No use storing all that expensive workmanship in the hope they might be reused in some future historic epic.

Basildon Park has known its up and downs; it is very lucky to survive to the present day without being demolished or destroyed as so many major houses have been. The 1930s depression and World War 2 obviously didn't help. During WW2, the legendary 101st Airbourne Division was billeted there, plus Italian prisoners of war. Between neglect, abuse and the ceiling of the library being scorched by brasiers during the grim 1940s winters, it was in a very sorry state by 1950.

Other parts of Basildon Park were equally enthralling. I couldn't recall them from my previous visit - I can't have paid proper attention. The Sutherland room was given over to a celebration of the largest tapestry in the world "Christ in Glory". This stunning work, 78 feet high by 39 feet wide, hangs in Coventry Cathedral. See http://www.know-britain.com/churches/coventry_cathedral_6.html

The original Cathedral was destroyed in the 1940 air raids on the city; Coventry was a major centre of the arms and vehicle manufacturing industries. At the time the destruction of this major city eclipsed even the London blitz; a new phrase, "to Coventrate", conjured up the new total warfare on civilian and military simultaneously. But was a civilian on a production line making a gun or a truck any less of a soldier than the man who used them on the battlefield? In 2005, when I visited Berlin, the German Historical Museum had relics from Coventry Cathedral on display.

The new Cathedral was consecrated in 1962, with the scorched shell of the old cathedral still standing beside it as a memorial. I have visited it only once in 1967. There was a still a huge empty area, used just for car parking, surrounding the new building. The rubble of 1940 had been cleared away, but no new buildings yet filled the vacancy. The enormous tapestry was emblematic of the new hopes for a new cathedral, a new city, a reborn Anglican Communion in England. The 1950s were a time of religious revival in Britain, with both the native clergy and exotic visitors like Billy Graham attracting churchgoers. In a few decades there was a catastrophic collapse into doctrinal chaos, moral confusion and organisational schism.

The Iliffe family, who bought and restored Basildon Park after WW2, made their money in provincial newspapers in the Midlands. They were friends of Graham Sutherland who designed the tapestry.

The Sutherland room contains numerous sketches and designs, both of the whole tapestry and detailed sections. Such a colossal project had to be subdivided to make it manageable. It also describes the manufacturing process at Freres Pinton in the little town of Felletin near Aubusson in France. To tackle this unprecedented task, this very specialised family firm had to bring out a huge loom last used 50 years earlier - talk about long term investment.

They were not even sure if this old tool could handle the sheer weight of the fabric, over a ton. But they did it and the whole enormous artwork was finally airlifted to Coventry. Someone suggested a 500 year warranty for the tapestry. No problem, monsieur. Tapestries made in the 15th century in that area still hang in cathedrals 500 years later.

See http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/france_159/label-france_2554/label-france-issues_2555/label-france-no.-46_3691/feature-creative-arts-very-much-alive_3692/tapestry-tradition-of-excellence_4947.html