How bureaucracy works

August 8, 2010 at 10:20 pm (Bureaucracy, Catholicism)
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Listen up, kids, because you might learn something here. This is where we give you some valuable analytical tools.

Non-Catholics often find Catholic politics completely impenetrable in that, even if the media get the actual facts of a story right, they don’t have the background knowledge to make sense of the information. This is assuming the best of intentions and ignoring for the sake of argument those people with a habit of serial misinterpretation or, alternatively, making stuff up. That’s why you get this disconnect where Catholics watching Newsnight or reading the Guardian feel that they’re getting this discussion of another “Catholic Church” in a parallel universe. And don’t even start me on Liberal Conspiracy.

But, before I head off into a rant, there’s another side to this, in that Catholics are often baffled and bemused by Church affairs. Even well-informed, attentive Catholics who know there’s such a thing as the Magic Circle find themselves scratching their heads at the bizarre and inexplicable things the Magic Circle does. Whereas if you have the right analytical tools (like a knowledge of bureaucratic organisations) a lot of what seems inexplicable at first sight turns out to be absolutely bog-standard.

Let us take as our case study the Catholic Education Service. As luck would have it, CES is very much topical in the Catholic press at the moment, as many Catholic schools are showing interest in Michael Gove’s academies scheme as a way of escaping the dead hand of CES. It’s also the case that, regardless of what you think about academies, Oona Stannard has vastly exceeded her remit in her anti-academies campaigning, and not for the first time. But here’s an interesting question – who is Oona Stannard’s line manager? Technically, I suppose, it would be Bishop Malcolm McMahon, the BCEW’s point man on education, but I suggest it is not very likely that +Malcy will be eager to crack the whip. He’s never struck me as having anything of the Simon Legree about him.

Anyway, you may remember some years ago there was a big stink in the press when a bunch of dangerous criminals were released early and went on to commit serious crimes. Who had authorised their release? Was it a minister, a Home Office official, someone in the Prison Service? Had they been through proper parole hearings? In fact it turned out that these dangerous crims hadn’t been released on anyone’s instructions; they’d been released by a computer programme, so it wasn’t anyone’s fault. Nice one.

The logic of bureaucracy will be a familiar one if you’ve ever had dealings with CES. Let’s say you have a concern about the content of lessons in your local school. You talk to your head teacher, and she tells you that she’s just a functionary carrying out the policies of the diocese and CES. Since you feel strongly on the subject, you contact your diocesan bishop. He tells you that, while of course he has a pastoral concern for all the schools in his diocese, detailed educational matters are up to CES and you should really talk to them.

So then you contact CES, which is a trial in itself. After having your call transferred multiple times and having to spend hours listening to “Greensleeves”, you eventually get a human being on the other end of the phone. You put your question, and are told that (a) CES does not comment on individual schools, and (b) in any case, CES does not make policy but is simply an executive agency responsible to the Bishops’ Conference.

At this point you may give up or, if you’re really enterprising, you might contact Malcolm McMahon. If you do, then it’s a fair bet that +Malcy will tell you he’s not a micromanager and you should really direct your questions to CES.

You may think this sounds very much like a system where nobody is responsible for anything, and you would be right. You may suspect this opacity is deliberate, and I would have to agree with you. You may wonder why they haven’t just developed a computer programme to do this, and all I can tell you is that CES have been struggling valiantly with the problem, but are having trouble getting their Sinclair ZX81 to cooperate.

Here’s something else, the appointment of former Labour MP Greg Pope as deputy director of CES. Those people kicking up about Mr Pope’s voting record on abortion and such may have a point, but it’s not necessarily the most interesting point.

The pertinent question would be, was there a pre-existing deputy director’s position? I don’t think there was. So did the Magic Circle create a feudal appanage for Greg Pope out of the goodness of their hearts? I think not.

The appointment of a deputy to the blessed Oona is a recognition by the bishops that there is in fact an Oona Stannard problem. But how do they respond to that problem? By reverting to the same instincts that come into play whenever they have to respond to a problem, by (a) throwing money at the problem and (b) finding a politician to suck up to. This is what I mean by a bureaucratic organisation, with its own ingrown culture, developing its own internal logic. And what seems at first sight to be bizarre turns out to be quite explicable.

Actually, I blame Hume for a lot of this. But that’s another story…

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Lower our expectations we must, hmm

August 7, 2010 at 12:03 am (Catholicism)
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All right, let’s take a brief look at the current issue of That Magazine We Don’t Mention, for there’s something in it that’s been annoying my brain the last few days. I mean, more than usual.

Bobbie Mickens has been at a trendy theological conference in the Alpine city of Trent, site of the famous ecumenical council, which gives him the opportunity to whine about the Extraordinary Form and, indeed, the whole of Church history prior to 1962. But this is par for the course, and it’s not that that’s been annoying me.

There’s a big ad for this West End debate on 14 September about whether compulsory celibacy should be abolished, which is an interesting topic even if the discussion is usually hackneyed, and I fear the orthodox side is seriously rhetorically outgunned. On the reformist side of the argument is Tablet trustee Baroness Helena Kennedy, who is a formidable debater, and Tablet director Professor Tina Beattie. On the status quo side are the ubiquitous Jack Valero, who is commendably game to go in for these things; Bishop Malcolm McMahon, who evidently has nothing better to do two days before a papal visit; and Fr Stephen Wang of Allen Hall Seminary. All I have to say about the latter is, if you haven’t yet been exposed to the devastating charisma of Fr Stephen Wang, you’re in for a treat.

But it’s not that.

There is a very short and anodyne piece on the Birmingham Three, which can’t be ignored any more, especially as more keeps leaking out. Since it can’t be ignored, there’s an article that reports the situation without actually explaining what’s going on, let alone asking awkward questions like what exactly Iggy Harrison thinks he’s playing at.

But it’s not that.

We turn to the latest in the patchily interesting “Understanding Benedict” series, and this week the author is the shambling miscreant Ed Stourton. Lord, give me strength. If that wretched toad had been a hoodie-wearing, cider-drinking yob from a sink estate, the Daily Mail would be holding him up as the cause of Broken Britain, but of course Ed went to Ampleforth and is a Tablet trustee, so that’s all right then. Anyway, at the point where theology needs to be discussed, we usually get a load of guff from Fr Tim Radcliffe, but oddly Ed eschews the obvious in favour of quoting extensively from… Fr Stephen Wang. If you think this sounds like an old boys’ club, you have grasped a great truth about the Tablet.

But it’s not that. Nor even is it the editorial on Turkish membership of the EU, which I’ve read three times in the vain hope of finding a point. No, I’m thinking of Clifford’s column. Because, once again, dear old Clifford is in his Karl Rove mode.

We begin with Clifford recalling opinion polling prior to JP2’s visit to Britain in 1982, and the expectation that there would be Protestant resistance to the visit:

In fact, after the Catholic population itself, it was the members of the Free Churches (arguably the most Protestant section of opinion) who were most favourable to the visit. But the greatest opposition came from a hitherto unsuspected body of opinion, which was mainly detected by correlating the result with newspaper readership. Yes, they were Guardian readers.

You don’t say, Clifford! Actually, that could have been determined by just reading the Grauniad, whose approach to such matters often resembles the Protestant Telegraph circa 1971.

…it’s a safe bet that at least as much media attention will be given to those relatively few activists who want to wreck the visit as to what the Pope actually says or does himself, or the hundreds of thousands who will turn out to greet him.

This is true. In fact, something that has struck me about the Protest The Pope Coalition is the disconnect between the amount of sympathetic media coverage it’s been given and the uniformly derisory turnouts at its events. The last picket of Westminster Cathedral attracted fewer than thirty people – even Peter Tatchell only claimed fifty – and they seemed to be heavily made up of professional protesters like Peter. To understand that, you have to consider the Coalition itself, which is the usual anti-religious lash-up of OutRage!, the National ‘Secular’ Society and the Worker-Communist Party of Iran plus a few waifs and strays. When this constellation are organising anti-Islam rallies, it’s normally the WPI who provide the warm bodies, but the Iranian exiles don’t really give a stuff about the Pope either way, and Maryam Namazie seems to have concluded that her time is better spent broadcasting Hekmatist propaganda to the freedom-loving peoples of the world.

If you then factor in the rather elderly and inactive membership of the NSS, and then realise how small OutRage! actually is (hence its reliance on headline-grabbing stunts), you come to the conclusion that there really isn’t a coalition at all. It is no wonder that their public meeting next Thursday, to be addressed by Tatchell, Terry Sanderson and that Italian wackaloon who wants Berlusconi to annex Vatican City, is not being held in the Albert Hall but in a library in Richmond. What the coalition does have is Peter Tatchell, with his tremendous media profile, the enormous respect he’s held in, and his unparallelled ability to sit in a TV studio energetically talking rubbish to anchors who know even less on the subject than he does.

And yet, the Rod Liddles and Johann Haris notwithstanding, Clifford doesn’t care to speculate on why the other side dominates media discourse so completely. That’s a slippery slope that might lead to pondering why the Church’s comms are so awful, and tactless vulgarians might start to wonder aloud what exactly Alexander DesForges and Mary Wang have been doing to earn their keep. And, since CCN is essentially a vacuum, one’s mind turns to Jack and Austen’s Little Voices project and thinks, “Well, it can’t be any worse.”

Catholics might meet trouble halfway by lowering their expectations of the visit…

That would be difficult, as Benny hasn’t even touched down yet and it’s shaping up to be a monumental shambles. Or perhaps by lowering expectations Clifford means taking a stoical attitude towards downsizing plans, like holding the Newman beatification in a shed in Sparkbrook.

…hoping, for instance, that Pope Benedict won’t actually make things any worse than they are already.

It’s not really B16 I’m worried about, not in an environment where Kieran Conry can hail a passing journalist and unload his stream of consciousness with impunity. I suppose a cynic may think Clifford was worried about the Pope saying something controversially orthodox and out of step with the liberal zeitgeist, but that would just be silly.

…the Pope is sometimes the author of his own misfortune, with a clunky public relations touch that leaves ill-chosen words or phrases open to misinterpretation by correspondents looking for copy.

Well, Benedict doesn’t share JP2’s instinct for sugaring the medicine, but those familiar with his work will know that he’s very careful and precise in his choice of words. What he doesn’t do is express himself in soundbites; and let’s also concede that the Holy See press operation (that is, Fr Federico Lombardi and his trusty fax machine) is not state-of-the-art. I merely draw attention once again to the transcendental crapness of English Catholicism’s media operation, which Clifford is surely aware of, and wonder whether our old friend is being slightly disingenuous. Surely not.

We needn’t doubt that Pope Benedict is capable of delivering a message to the British people that they need to hear, despite the strong chance it will be drowned out in the clamour. But the medium is often also the message.

This is Clifford McLuhan just getting into his stride…

They say that to teach mathematics to Jimmy, you not only need to know mathematics, you also need to know Jimmy. So to offer the insights of Catholic faith to the British, you have to know the faith, which the Pope surely does inside out, but also to know the British.

And so we come back to the old Tabletista trope of a Catholicism so thoroughly Anglicised that only some minor liturgical details would distinguish it from the good old C of E. I also for some reason recall Clifford’s old story about how in the runup to JP2’s visit the English bishops organised a team (including a young Fr Vincent Nichols) to draft papal texts with a view to JP giving the feelgood messages he so excelled at, while sidestepping moral or ethical issues that might upset the Guardian-reading public. I get the feeling that some people would quite like to see that happen again.

Finally, Clifford ends up with a little conclusion on the relevance of Cardinal Newman, but sagely warns us against the tendency of modern observers, whether conservative or liberal, to create a Newman in their own image. Tu quoque, mate.

87 Comments

Nichols calls on faithful to embrace change

August 4, 2010 at 11:49 pm (Catholicism)
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CCN – The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, today issued a stirring appeal for change to the Catholic faithful.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Thought For The Day, Archbishop Nichols said, “Hullo Brian, hullo Sue. You know, the other day I saw Austen Ivereigh gesticulating wildly and declaiming something about Barack Obama and change we can believe in. At first I though Austen was just having a little turn – he’s been a bit moody since someone stole his toadstool and fishing rod – but then it occurred to me that there was in fact an important message in his jibber-jabber.

“My mind flashed back to the popular 1980s Liverpudlian sitcom Bread, with its inspiring portrayal of a big family all pulling together to get through the hard times. Once again we are living in hard times, and the Church is determined to play its part in pulling together. For example, we are currently rolling out an ambitious programme of reducing our heating bills by insulating all our churches and schools with millions of unsold copies of the Tablet. In doing this we hope to combine our economy drive with our plan to make the Church carbon-neutral. And I believe, in a very real sense, that points us in the direction of the change we need to go forward together.

“So I am asking the faithful to have a good rummage down the back of their sofas, and see if you can find any spare change. Or perhaps you have a jar of pennies that’s just lying around doing nothing. At this point I recall what Our Lord said in the Parable of the Talents about how it is praiseworthy to put your change to work. So, instead of having your penny jar just sitting on the fireplace gathering dust, you may like to consider contributing to the common good by sending it to Mgr Andrew Summersgill. Every little helps.

“And, if possible, it would be nice to get it before the papal visit next month. Not to put too fine a point upon it, if this turns out to be a complete shambles it will make me look very bad in front of the Holy Father and, more importantly, Chris Patten. This dreadful loss of face could just possibly be avoided if the faithful look in their hearts, and down the back of their sofas of course, and truly grasp the necessary change.”

[Ends]

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Problems of the succession

August 2, 2010 at 12:27 am (Catholicism)
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There’s a story in the latest Phoenix [subs required] that’s worth a bit of a look, not least because readers outside Ireland won’t see it. Furthermore, this being the Phoenix, it’s worth a bit of critical expansion because, as so often with that esteemed organ, it isn’t actually wrong but it isn’t necessarily right either, and depends rather heavily on putting two and two together and making five.

I refer of course to Goldhawk’s discussion of when and how Cardinal Seán Brady is to step down. The when will of course become clear in due course. Regardless of his minor role in the Brendan Smyth affair, any connection whatsoever to the Smyth atrocities is profoundly toxic; the trouble is deepened by one of the victims he interviewed suing Brady personally; hostility toward Brady goes way beyond the usual suspects of RTÉ, the Irish Times and the Labour Party; Brady is, in essence, damaged goods and, while I do like that the Catholic Church doesn’t order its affairs according to opinion polls, he is damaged goods in such a major way that he’s unlikely to make it to the statutory retirement age. It may or may not be fair, but that’s ecclesiastical politics for you.

As it happens, Brady turns 71 in a couple of weeks and has had some well-publicised health problems, so he may not be averse to taking early retirement. Indeed, he has already asked Rome to provide him with a coadjutor archbishop, which would signal an orderly transition, with the coadjutor effectively running the Armagh archdiocese and Brady himself functioning as a figurehead, gradually fading into the background. The Vatican has not yet responded to the request, but it’s difficult to see how B16 could turn it down.

This is where we come to the question of who will succeed, and it’s very much tied up with the figure of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin. As readers will know, Martin has a unique standing as the publicly identified Good Guy in the sexual abuse scandal; because he gets how serious it is, because he’s a good communicator in terms of shame and repentance, and not least because, having been parachuted in from outside the discredited Irish hierarchy, he doesn’t have cover-ups in his own past to live down. In short, he’s the bishop who it’s okay to like.

I don’t actually dissent from that, but it’s important to bear in mind that Martin is also a very wily ecclesiastical politician. Look, for instance, at the narratives that you often find in the Dublin media. We have Archbishop Martin’s lone struggle against the Irish Episcopal Conference, and against Brady in particular; we even have Martin’s struggle against the Vatican, which idea disintegrates after thirty seconds when you remember that Martin is effectively Benedict’s troubleshooter in Ireland. These stories of Martin as an isolated and underappreciated figure alternate with speculation about the rich reward that will be his for cleaning up the Dublin archdiocese. Some of this is wishful thinking, but some of it is so blatantly self-serving that, if it doesn’t emanate from sources close to the archbishop, it really should do.

Now then. A lot of people in Dublin had their noses put out of joint when Brady rather than Dermo got a red hat at the 2007 consistory. This isn’t just a matter of the esteem Martin is held in, it also reflects a Dublin incredulity that the primatial see should be a rural backwater like Armagh. Beyond that, there can be little doubt that Martin would dearly love to be a cardinal. It’s a question of how he gets there. The Irish hierarchy only gets one cardinal elector, and regardless of whether Brady retires from active service, unless you forcibly prise the zucchetto off his head there will be no vacancy until he turns eighty in 2019, by which time Dermo himself will be facing retirement. You’ll remember the last conclave, when it turned out the sole Irish vote belonged to the retired and discredited Cardinal Des Connell.

We can also probably rule out the possibility of Martin himself moving up to Armagh – a native Dubliner would not go down well in a see normally occupied by Ulstermen, and in any case Martin is at the dangerous age of 65 where, if he took Armagh now, he may not get another job before retirement. It’s been spun for some time that he might get a plum posting in the Roman Curia, which would suit him down to the ground, but as I see it he’s too valuable for Benedict to move – he’s about the only Irish bishop the Pope can have any confidence in – so he’s stuck in Dublin until further notice. This is what’s known as a dead stymie.

The Phoenix then goes on to identify the two leading candidates for Armagh, but this seems to me to be missing the point. The big question is whether the forthcoming Apostolic Visitation will herald a rationalisation of dioceses along the lines proposed by Benedict’s old friend Vincent Twomey. There are an awful lot of episcopal retirements coming up in the next couple of years – and already retiring auxiliaries are not being replaced – so that will ease things somewhat. There’s really no need for Ireland (or England for that matter) to have more dioceses than Belgium and Austria combined, and almost as many as the far larger Catholic community of Germany.

But let’s talk candidates, and leave aside the lunatics on the phone-ins calling for Fr Brian D’Arcy to be the new archbishop. The two men put forward by the Phoenix for the Armagh job are Bishop Noel Treanor of Down and Connor, and the Belfast-based theologian Fr Tim Bartlett. These two are identified as the candidates of Martin and Brady respectively, but it’s a bit more confused than that.

Tim Bartlett is young, smart, talented, media-savvy and very well-connected. He’s especially close to Brady and basically functions as the Cardinal’s unofficial aide-de-camp. I have no doubt that some day he’ll get the mitre he’s always being tipped for, but for the primatial see he may be a little too young and too nakedly ambitious. My expectation would be that he’d be tried out first in a small rural diocese, although amalgamations might narrow the field there, and remember that Brady himself was a pretty obscure figure down in the wilds of Cavan when he was tapped for Armagh. Only in retrospect did people look at Brady’s extensive connections and join the dots.

As for my local bishop, Noel Treanor… well, he he’s been a fairly low-profile figure at Down and Connor, though at least he hasn’t turned out to be an active liability. Goldhawk identifies him as Martin’s man, largely on the basis that both “had spent years in elite church circles abroad”. Well, Treanor did spend some time at the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, but at the time the Vice-Rector there was none other than Fr Seán Brady. He also spent a bit of time on secondment in Brussels doing some justice and peace stuff. It’s not exactly the same as Martin’s long-term background in the Holy See diplomatic service. Which is not to say that Martin may not favour Treanor, nor that he may not try to pull a few strings in Rome… just that the Kremlinology isn’t all that clear-cut.

Anyway, I have no doubt that Noel would think himself a worthy candidate for the big job. When the media furore over Brady was at its peak some months ago, there was a rather amusing sideline where the Irish News kept trying to get a statement out of Treanor indicating confidence in Brady, but Noel proved almost impossible to find.

Two further points. One is that, even if Brady gets a coadjutor archbishop with the right of succession, it won’t necessarily be his favoured successor. The coadjutor wheeze was a favourite of JP2 and Ratzinger when seeking to replace a loose-cannon prelate with someone more orthodox, notably in the famous case of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle back in the 1980s. More recently it was used to install none other than Diarmuid Martin in the Dublin Archdiocese, as Des Connell was diverted towards spending more time with his study of French philosophy. So it’s not just a case of whether, but of who.

Finally, the Apostolic Visitor for the Arrnagh archdiocese is – you’ve guessed it – none other than our old friend Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. Doubtless Cormac will want to discuss with Brady the circumstances of him shuffling off the archiepiscopal stage; it may also help that Cormac sits on the Congregation for Bishops, and if there’s string-pulling to be done in Rome, he’s even less of a slouch at it than Brady or Martin.

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Release the Birmingham Three!

July 28, 2010 at 12:08 am (Catholicism)
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Just a brief note, but Damian has put up something quite important relating to the Brum Oratory saga. His main point is that, notwithstanding the approaching papal visit and the centrality of the Oratory to it, this boil has been festering for so long that it needs to be lanced. And so it does – one would hope that at some point even the most obscurantist of Catholic hierarchs would realise that “let’s keep this quiet lest we rock the boat” is not a winning strategy these days.

There are in face two interlocking stories that have both been rumbling on for months. One is the case of Fr Paul Chavasse, who had to leave the Oratory after stories of his close friendship with a young man started doing the rounds. Everybody concerned swore it was a completely chaste friendship, but tongues were wagging and the Oratory management, alert to the possibility of scandal, moved into action. Too bad for Fr Paul. That is the simple bit.

The more puzzling bit is the matter of Fr Dermot Fenlon, Fr Philip Cleevely and Brother Lewis Berry, who were all sent into exile by the Oratorians’ apostolic visitor a few months back. More precisely, they were ordered to spend an unspecified amount of time in prayer, at locations several hundred miles away from each other. Very few people know why, and none of them are prepared to say, except that there is no question of impropriety – which prompts the question of why the severe punishment at a very exciting time for the Congregation. Rumours, of course, have been flying around Birmingham, and James has been doing an admirable job following up the story. There is some vague talk that this has something to do with the Newman beatification, all three of the exiles having been involved with the Newman Cause, but that could cover all manner of sins. It could of course just be personality clashes or bog-standard factionalism at the Oratory.

Anyway, some parishioners have got so frustrated at the Oratory’s stonewalling that they’ve issued an open letter on the subject. And this serves the worthwhile purpose of dragging the matter further into the spotlight, where the Oratorian bigwigs would rather it was not. At this point, they can either rescind the punishment or give a clear explanation of why the punishment was imposed in the first place, preferably both. What is not sustainable, especially with the Oratory in the spotlight coming up to B16’s visit, is to sing dumb and let the rumour mill go into overtime. As Max Clifford will tell you, if you don’t control the story then somebody else will.

Oh, just one thought. While the Oratorians themselves have been very shy and retiring, the press officer for the Newman Cause has been popping up on BBC West Midlands to say that there’s nothing to see here, honest guv. In fact, at one point the press officer was keen to issue a press release saying that there was no story here. That sort of thing causes me to slap my forehead in despair. Transparency is a viable press strategy, as is plausibly spinning the story; total silence not quite so good; what I don’t think is viable is the equivalent of sending a press release to a school of sharks telling them exactly where in the water they can find blood.

Did I mention the press officer for the Newman Cause is the ubiquitous Jack Valero? I don’t want to be nasty about Jack, who is a perfectly pleasant fellow, but surely the reason he gets all these media gigs is that he’s supposed to understand how to handle the media? Still, it could be worse. They could have left it to Jennings.

24 Comments

The return of Fatty Pang

July 26, 2010 at 12:17 am (Catholicism, Diplomacy)
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As so often, I think Peter Oborne is on the money when he deplores the importation into British politics of the American practice of handing prime diplomatic posts to superannuated politicians. And as with many bad things in the British body politic, it’s a practice resorted to by John Major and then enormously expanded by Mr Tony Blair; and it is symptomatic of the decline of the FCO and the Diplomatic Service.

I mention this in connection with the impending retirement of our local man Francis Campbell as ambassador to the Holy See. Francis is an impressive figure in many ways, and demonstrates that there’s still some strength in depth in the Diplomatic Service. He is of course the first Catholic to have held his post, after Mr Tony in one of his fits of lucidity swept away the FCO rule barring Papists from the job; yet he has a depth of theological knowledge that makes him ideal for the post, such a depth in fact that it’s hard to process that he’s an Irish Catholic. He has also, largely by his own initiative, rescued what used to be a diplomatic backwater and made it rather an important post.

So it’s rather depressing that the rumours around Francis’ replacement have centred around, well, superannuated politicians. First the rumour was that Cameron was going to give the job to Ann Widdecombe, a prospect that will have had many people falling off their chairs. Widders is an admirable woman in some ways, but someone with such a reputation for, let’s not put too fine a point on this, bluntness shading into outright rudeness is not an obvious candidate for diplomacy. Yes, she can work to a brief, but one wonders about the mental processes of anyone who thought she would be a good fit for the art of getting your way by discreet persuasion.

But now there’s a twist in the tale. From behind Uncle Rupert’s paywall, Ruth Gledhill informs us that Widders is not taking on the Vatican job as she’s due to go on Strictly Come Dancing instead. So who might be in the frame? Ruth tweets that the favourite at the moment is Chris Patten. Yes, that Chris Patten. The legendary Tory grandee, diplomatic troubleshooter, papal visit coordinator and trustee of That Magazine We Don’t Mention. This may just be some kite-flying, but it’s as plausible as anything else.

Pros and cons? Well, Lord Patten does have a well-earned reputation for competence and is known to be quite good at discreet persuasion. One may also whimsically hope that he will confirm the Holy Father’s opinion of the state of English Catholicism, and hasten the long-overdue housecleaning. On the debit side, should Chris get the job Ma Pepsi will be insufferably smug, and Bobbie Mickens might be able to dry his eyes for a little while. One may expect a veritable orgy of self-congratulation from those quarters.

Who really believes there’s no lash-up between the government and the Tabletistas? Only dumbos.

61 Comments

No offence, but why Magyar?

July 21, 2010 at 12:30 am (Catholicism)
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There’s a story doing the rounds at the minute, which may well be apocryphal but nonetheless has something of a ring of truth about it. The story is that Pope Benedict (83) recently had to explain to a meeting of Curia staffers what exactly the internet was. When you ponder the question of why the Church has worse PR than Mel Gibson, it’s worth considering that not only does the fabled Vatican PR operation consist of one elderly Jesuit with a fax machine, but going beyond that there’s a whole level of Curial cluelessness. It’s all very well being countercultural – in some ways the Catholic Church could stand being more countercultural – but that shouldn’t preclude having some grasp of how the modern world works.

But there are a couple of points about the internet that are worth teasing out. You may think that B16 makes an unlikely silver surfer (though note for comparison Ian Paisley’s down-with-da-kidz vote against the Digital Economy Act), but set against that his occasional exhortations to the clergy to use modern tools like blogs and podcasts for the purpose of evangelisation. It’s also rumoured that Mgr Georg Gänswein is quite a whiz at Mafia Wars. By the way, you do find techno-savvy in the oddest of places these days – for instance, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has just issued an appeal to Russian Orthodox priests to get blogging. The impact of the online apostolate is something that I’ll come back to in a second.

But first, there’s something that’s been bugging me about the Holy See website. Don’t get me wrong, it looks nice, and there’s plenty of useful material there. Journalists may find the section on responses to the sexual abuse crisis especially useful, notably the full translation of the famous Crimen sollicitationis, which should (but won’t) mean that pundits shooting their mouths off about Crimen sollicitationis will criticise what it actually says, rather than what Christopher Hitchens imagines it says. But that’s not what I want to address. What I want to address is Summorum Pontificum.

We’ve just celebrated the third anniversary of the publication of Summorum Pontificum, the Emancipation Proclamation of the old Latin Mass, which is one of the most important acts of this pontificate. It’s important because it goes to the heart of the liturgical reform, and indeed to priestly formation. It’s also important because the requirement to offer the Extraordinary Form when a group of the faithful demand it strengthens the principle of subsidiarity and bishops’ accountability, which is a big reason why bishops don’t like it.

In more general terms, the rehabilitation of the usus antiquior raises the liturgical bar all round, even where it isn’t regularly celebrated. My firm view is that all priests should be required to be able to celebrate in both forms, and that learning the old form not only improves a priest’s facility with the Novus Ordo, but the connection to the traditional form changes his view of the Mass and its meaning. It links him to the organic Tradition as against the hermeneutic of rupture that’s associated with the suppression of the Tridentine rite since 1969, which severed the new vernacular form from the old Latin.

So, given that Summorum Pontificum is hugely important, and given that the Holy See website is usually very speedy in getting up translations of official documents in divers languages (the translations aren’t always the best quality, but they do go up quickly) – with all that borne in mind, why is it that, a full three years after the publication of Summorum Pontificum,  the document is only available online in Latin and, randomly enough, Hungarian? I mean no disrespect to the people of Hungary, which for all I know might be a hotbed of enthusiasm for the Extraordinary Form, but – Hungarian? Why not Basque, or Inuit, or that African language with the click in it? Is it beyond the capabilities of the Holy See to produce a text in Italian or Spanish or German or English? If there’s a lack of linguists around the Vatican, which I find hard to credit, I suggest that B16 phone up Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, who to my certain knowledge could put him in touch with a few linguists with time on their hands.

Magyar, forsooth. You would almost think there were people around trying to sabotage Summorum Pontificum.

Finally, I return briefly to the whole question of the online apostolate, and I was pondering something that Will Heaven said last year:

The internet – and how Catholics are using it to communicate with each other – has played a huge part as well. Ten years ago, you would not often have a US archbishop criticising a wayward editorial in a British Catholic magazine. Nor would the laity have access to Vatican documents which they can print out to show to their local parish priest. The internet has changed all of this. Sure, the Catholic Church has always been about universals. But now Catholics have formed an online community they’re becoming a more coherent force, and they won’t be sidelined or misrepresented.

Leaving aside relations with the outside world, there’s an obviously revolutionary internal element to this. Modern communications tools make it much easier for stroppy laity or indeed stroppy priests to hold bishops to account, which is very much a good thing. Those further down the food chain have better access to information than ever before. Wild West Masses in Austria, which ten years ago would have been a matter of urban legend, can now be uploaded onto YouTube and flashed around the world in seconds. This is most advanced in America, with an extremely pugnacious Catholic blogosphere, which has forced the Catholic press to up its game, which in turn has an effect on the hierarchy. A deadbeat bishop in Wisconsin, or it may be Arizona, will soon come to know the Wrath of Zuhlsdorf; and anything that makes bishops nervous helps keep them honest.

Things are very different in Britain, where Church culture remains very dusty and respectable and deferential, which is why the Magic Circle bureaucracy is so useless; why the Church remains the market leader in rewarding incompetence; and why a wheeler-dealer like Jack Valero or a social climber like Ma Pepsi can wield so much influence. It’s even worse, of course in Ireland, where we near enough have Zombie Catholicism, a body drained of life but just shambling on and on. But the cold wind from across the Atlantic will blow some cobwebs away on this side as well.

During the fourth century, as some Tablet readers will recall, the majority of priests and bishops went over to Arianism, while it was the laity that in its mass remained orthodox. In general terms, the target today is the pathology of clericalism; in the short term, tackling the prevalence of sheer bloody incompetent shambolic bureaucracy is the order of the day.

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Malcolm in the middle

July 20, 2010 at 1:22 am (Catholicism)
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There’s an interesting article this week in That Magazine We Don’t Mention. No, it’s not Bobbie Mickens’ bizarre view that local bishops can issue translations of the Missale Romanum under their own steam, assuming they can tear themselves away from Cowboy Masses and now World Cup Masses. No, it’s not Christa Pongratz throwing a strop over the appointment of the new Bishop of Eisenstadt. I’m not even referring to some spectacular lionising of Kevin Dowling, who seems like he’s positively trying to secure an invitation to the Palazzo Sant’Uffizio.

What has caught my eye is a little piece on the Anglican Ordinariate, which would really leap off the page if given the properly irreverent treatment.

First, some background. To properly appreciate this, you need to know that the Magic Circle don’t like the Ordinariate. They don’t like the Ordinariate in the first instance because they were comfortable with the old ecumenical process via ARCIC, which is a nice excuse for Catholic and Anglican hierarchs to have pleasant cups of tea with no actual end in sight. On the other hand, with the retirement of Walter Kasper as Christian Unity czar, there is nobody left in the upper echelons of the Roman Curia who thinks corporate reunion with Canterbury is a viable proposition. The most important ecumenical process now is with the Eastern Orthodox; there are very interesting things going on in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod; and, of course, there are the Anglo-Catholics.

Secondarily, the Magic Circle don’t like the Ordinariate because the CDF is running it, and their collective nose is out of joint because Grand Inquisitor Levada announced the initiative before they had a chance to sabotage it. (And, not coincidentally, shortly after Cardinal Cormac’s retirement.) The CDF is taking the lead officially because it’s an international initiative – the request for an ordinariate came initially from the breakaway Traditional Anglican Communion, whose main strength is in North America – and unofficially to stop Eccleston Square playing silly buggers with a project close to B16’s heart. So there is, to put this very politely, a question mark over the BCEW’s commitment to the project.

Now then. As you may know, there was recently this meeting of 55 Anglo-Catholic clergy to discuss the Ordinariate. And the Catholic hierarchy was represented at this meeting by Bishop Malcolm McMahon of Nottingham. At the time, I remarked with tongue in cheek that this was proof of how positive Eccleston Square was about the Ordinariate, because surely the opportunity of spending more time with +Malcy would be the clincher for those wavering Anglo-Catholics. And lo, my predictive powers were not too bad.

The gist of the thing is that some wiseacre asked whether, under the Ordinariate, married men could be ordained. Malcy’s short answer was no. Well, he said, married Anglican priests could be ordained as Catholic, and this might be stretched to married ordinands. But married laymen becoming Ordinariate priests, absolutely not. No way, Pedro. Married priests in the Ordinariate would be a stopgap measure and would naturally die out.

At this point, Anglo-Catholic Bishop Keith Newton of Richborough made a most unhelpful intervention. Check this out:

This was, however, challenged by Bishop Newton, who after the meeting questioned whether Bishop McMahon had the authority to pronounce on the issue. The Bishop of Richborough said: “I want to hear what the CDF has to say; they are in charge of the ordinariate, not Bishop McMahon.”

Ouch! And it only got worse, as +Keith was inconsiderate enough to actually quote what Anglicanorum coetibus had to say on the matter:

§ 2. The Ordinary, in full observance of the discipline of celibate clergy in the Latin Church, as a rule (pro regula) will admit only celibate men to the order of presbyter. He may also petition the Roman Pontiff, as a derogation from can. 277, §1, for the admission of married men to the order of presbyter on a case by case basis, according to objective criteria approved by the Holy See.

That seems fairly straightforward to me. Celibacy will be the norm for entrants to the priesthood, but exceptions can be made on a case-by-case basis contingent on the approval of the Holy See. So married laymen may be admitted as candidates if the Ordinary can make a strong enough case for the individual concerned; what we’re not sure about is just how liberally the CDF would interpret that in the future. So, Keith was right and Malcolm was wrong. QED.

I do like, though, this bit at the end:

Bishop McMahon replied that while [Newton’s] reading was “correct”, he stood by his earlier answer.

At which point you slap your forehead. This is the sort of thing that could lead poorly informed observers to draw the erroneous conclusion that the Bishops’ Conference is not very keen on the Ordinariate. Malcolm had better start pulling his socks.

48 Comments

Press, and how not to do it

July 16, 2010 at 1:13 am (Catholicism)

[Sigh] Here we go again. [Deep breath] Damian has put up an eloquent lament on the terminal inability of the Holy See Press Office to get its point across to the media, which I wholeheartedly agree with, but as usual, that’s not going to stop me expanding on the matter.

This is all apropos of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issuing new norms for the handling of graviora delicta, the serious offences reserved to the CDF under canon law. These are mostly matters relating to doctrine and the integrity of the sacraments, but since 2001 the CDF has also had oversight of clerical sexual abuse of minors. The latter, of course, what the media cares about in this situation.

So the CDF has announced measures to expedite the trials of accused priests; raising the statute of limitations from 10 years to 20 following the complainant’s eighteenth birthday (in line with existing practice, where the statute of limitations is normally waived on request); adding possession of child pornography to the list of graviora delicta; allowing for certain extreme cases to be resolved summarily by the Pope issuing decrees of dismissal from the clerical state; and extending provisions for offences against minors to offences against mentally disabled adults. To which I can only say good, and about time too – mostly, this is a codification of reforms that were brought in haphazardly some years ago, but it can’t hurt. If you want to know more, have a look at John Allen’s typically fair-minded analysis. But is this a positive news story? Nooo, of course it isn’t.

Because of course this was a blockbuster statement containing other norms issued on reserved delicts that aren’t as interesting to the media, such as desecration of the Eucharist, abuse of the sacrament of penance, heresy, schism and – the kicker here – sham ordinations of priestesses. So the line taken by those media outlets – such as the Guardian and Channel 4 – which appear to have decided that Popery, not climate change, is the major threat to the human race, is that the Vatican is equating child abuse with those nice ladies who just want to be priests. The fact that in the press conference Fr Lombardi and Mgr Scicluna explicitly said they weren’t doing so is irrelevant in a climate where media discussions of matters Catholic don’t need to be constrained by anything as trivial as the facts. However, while stupidity and malice in some quarters can be taken for granted, was it really beyond the wit of the press office to issue two separate press releases, one on the abuse issue and one on the doctrinal and sacramental issues? Your enemy may shoot you anyway, but there is no moral obligation to hand him a loaded gun first.

So why do they keep on doing it? At this point I’d like to midrash on Damo, who is correct in the essentials. The stories he tells about the Holy See Press Office – it only opens for about five minutes a week, anything dicasteries have dumped on the desk is issued without proofing, there’s nobody there who speaks English – are only slightly exaggerated. But there are reasons why it’s ineffectual. Conspiracy theorists may not credit this, but the “enormous Vatican spin machine” is basically Fr Federico Lombardi SJ with a modicum of admin support and however much espresso it takes to keep him going. To expand further, Lombardi always insists that he isn’t the Pope’s spokesman – if the Pope wants to say something, he does so himself – but the Vatican spokesman. He doesn’t have the access to, let alone influence over, Benedict that we would associate with the relationship between Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair, or Andy Coulson and David Cameron. Lombardi answers to the Secretariat of State, which means that Vice-Pope Tarcisio Bertone gives him some broad guidelines and leaves him to his own devices. Needless to say, he doesn’t have any authority in dicasteries other than State, and is completely unable to stop Curia bigwigs from going off message.

These are all organisational constraints. This is before we even get onto talking about whether or not Lombardi gets the secular media (doubtful) or about the press office suffering from institutional lethargy as well as having a deaf ear for the Anglophone media.

Anyway, let’s bring it closer to home. Some of you may be aware of HardTalk, an extended interview show that News 24 runs for the benefit of insomniacs. You tend to see it when you’ve been gazing dreamily into Martine Croxall’s big blue eyes on the late night news, then you wake up and realise to your shame that for the last ten minutes you’ve been gazing dreamily at Stephen Sackur. I mention HardTalk because a couple of months back Bishop Malcolm McMahon was on talking about the sex abuse crisis, and more recently Archbishop Nichols was on talking more generally. Did the hierarchs perform well? Despite Sackur being very poorly briefed, not really.

Stephen Sackur is a graduate of the Paxman school of interviewing, whose main strategy is to ask a really stupid question in a really aggressive way, then repeat ad nauseam in the hope of making the interviewee look shifty. He didn’t manage to lay a finger on +Malcy, but that’s because arguing with +Malcy is like wrestling a blancmange. Evidently Bishop McMahon had been told beforehand to smile and nod a lot, use buzzwords like “reform” and “transparency”, and not to argue with Sackur about the facts no matter how wrong he was. The result was not very edifying. +Vincent did a bit better, being less of a moving target, but he was terribly wishy-washy in terms of defending Church teaching, and really if you wanted some sparks to fly then Keith O’Brien would have been your man.

Which leads me to the problem of CCN as the press arm of the Bishops’ Conference, and it occurs to me that there’s a sort of double-sided self-deception going on here. CCN like to believe that the bishops don’t need minding, when it should be obvious that at least some bishops shouldn’t be allowed out in public without some Catholic equivalent of Malcolm Tucker breathing down their necks. Meanwhile, the bishops like to kid themselves that they’ve got a professional press operation.

It’s not just that Alexander DesForges is not Malcolm Tucker. (Actually, he’s much more reminiscent of Laurence Llewellyn Bowen.) It’s not just that Alexander seems far too preoccupied with this obscure feud he’s got going with Peter Jennings. It’s not just that CCN spends most of its time on internal comms, when a professional organisation would have a separate desk for internal comms. No, I think the most annoying thing about CCN is that it puts out these stupefyingly awful press releases that are just a miasma of vagueness. They will tell you, for instance, that “around 35” people took part in some event, when apparently it would be much too vulgar to say 34 or 37. Some day I expect to see a CCN press release giving attendance at an event as “somewhere between five and a million”. And then, if you ask them for clarification, you find yourself transported into that sequence from The Twelve Tasks of Asterix where Asterix and Obelix have to enter the Madhouse of Bureaucracy.

Wait til I tell you, the Peppermint Spinster can be as sniffy as she likes about “web-logs”, but when the official comms are so shockingly bad you can’t blame anyone for resorting to unofficial methods.

This also leaves the door open for freelance media operations such as that currently being run by the wheeler-dealer from Catalunya and his diminutive tracksuit-clad sidekick. As it happens, this last weekend the dweebs volunteers were up at Worth Abbey for their intensive media training. Why Worth? Well, Abbot Chris Jamison has his finger in nearly as many pies as Jack Valero, and is co-patronising the project along with Dan Brennan. My spies are silent on whether advanced pedagogical methods such as Lego and the Rubik’s Cube were deployed. However, in the video above you can see Dr Ivereigh demonstrating the use of such up-to-the-moment tools as the whiteboard and the dry-wipe marker; he also has an uncanny grasp of Mr Tony Blair’s hand gestures and interview mannerisms, such as that slightly constipated look that conveys sincerity to the teevee viewer.

You may well snicker, but the bar is set so low that you don’t need to have Peter Mandelson on the payroll to get some value added. If you handed Alexander DesForges a dry-wipe marker, would he know what to do with it? My guess is that he’d just stare at it in bemusement, like those ape-men in 2001 when the black monolith appears.

Maybe a slick press operation is too much to hope for, given the creaky foundations and the Catholic Church’s unparallelled ability to reward incompetence. But a functional press operation would be a start, and bishops who aren’t an outright menace in front of a microphone would be even better. The Caitlin Morans or Johann Haris of this world we shall always have with us; there’s really no need to do the bastards’ job for them.

71 Comments

The Capsule, digested

July 14, 2010 at 11:09 pm (Catholicism)

Look, if I’m going to do my weekly penance, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be inflicted on you lot as well. So, as part of the public service ethos of this blog, we’re going to take a race through this week’s Tablet, reading it so you don’t have to. With any luck, it might spare me a bit of time in purgatory.

Let’s begin at the beginning with the week’s big feature, as Ma Pepsi herself undertakes a remarkably sycophantic interview with Chris Patten – ex-cabinet minister, ex-governor, ex-EU Commissioner, all-round governmental troubleshooter and Tablet trustee. One suspects that either the questions weren’t very challenging or Patten completely ignored the questions and delivered a monologue – perhaps both – as we don’t learn very much except that Chris Patten is a wholly admirable Renaissance man. We may perhaps note this closing exchange:

“Like every other tortured liberal Catholic, I’m a huge admirer of Paul VI,” he said.

So is this tortured liberal Catholic also a huge admirer of Benedict XVI?

There is the slightest of pauses: “Pope Benedict has been far more open to debate than his public reputation suggests. I’m thinking of his debates with Jürgen Habermas [published as The Dialectics of Secularization]. And I’m cheered that someone like Timothy Radcliffe should speak so warmly of him.”

Hmm. Kudos to Patten for mentioning the Habermas debate, which is worth anyone’s time. Tim Radcliffe I can take or leave alone.

Next, Luke Bretherton has a rather longwinded discussion of “Dave” Cameron’s Big Society programme. Apart from providing excellent material for a game of Buzzword Bingo, I was not much clearer at the end of the article what the Big Society was, apart from an employment opportunity for thinktank honchos like Geoff Mulgan and Richard Reeves, who seem to be bucking the trend towards small government. There’s also a nod towards “community organising” in the American style, with a big shout out to Citizens UK, the faith-based community umbrella group that organised that big eve-of-poll hustings. At the time, a lot of people scratched their heads and wondered what exactly was this “Citizens UK” which had suddenly appeared from nowhere: they obviously hadn’t been reading the Tablet, which ran a solid four pages of advertorial for it, with two pages each contributed by two of the main movers and shakers behind it, James Purnell and Austen Ivereigh.

Since the election, Citizens UK, based on its actually existing relationship with Boris Johnson, has been slotting itself into the Big Society concept of the voluntary sector taking over from a retreating state. I therefore wonder – and I raise this merely as a point of discussion – whether it’s in the best interests of the trade union movement to fund Citizens UK, given that it’s union members’ jobs that are going to be privatised as part of the Big Society. I know the unions do like to fund worthy causes, but perhaps “extending the global reach of James Purnell and Austen Ivereigh at the expense of our members’ jobs” is stretching the concept a bit.

We now move onto dear old Clifford, who offers us a discarded Thought for the Day script beautifully crafted column on civic virtue, with particular reference to the English bishops’ pre-election manifesto Taxation for the Common Good. I mention this only because there’s a bit of backslapping of the Tablet‘s favourite priest, Tim Radcliffe. I swear, between Radcliffe and Schönborn, I don’t know what’s going on with the Dominicans these days, and if Cardinal Browne rotates any faster in his grave he’ll be tunnelling to New Zealand. If you think two separate references to Tim Radcliffe by page 7 looks a bit like an old boys’ club, award yourself a cigar.

Skipping over Jonathan Wynne-Jones on the Jeffrey John saga, which is perfectly all right but out of date by now, we happen upon this week’s mandatory Good Article. This is one on the theology of B16 with reference to its roots in the Tübingen School, by hotshot Australian theologian Tracey Rowland, who, having written two good books on the subject, is as well qualified as anyone. And yet, Tracey is a bit too, well, orthodox for this kind of milieu, and furthermore is a protégée of good old Cardinal George Pell. Incongruous is the word I’m looking for.

Next up is Rome correspondent Bobbie Mickens, profiling Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who’s going to be heading the spanking new Pontifical Council for the New Evangelisation. There’s plenty of tendentious stuff in there about how much Bobbie really doesn’t like B16, but I would like to highlight this bit:

There had been talk for months in Rome that [the Pope] intended to create a department for the “new evangelisation” under the direction of Archbishop Rino Fisichella. However, it was surprising when the Pope officially appointed the 58-year-old theologian as the president of the new office even though he had not yet issued the motu proprio to erect it judicially.

Archbishop Fisichella was thus named to head an office that, canonically, still does not exist. A similar incident happened last November when Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, held a hastily summoned press conference to present a yet-to-be-published document that would create structures for Anglican communities that joined the Catholic Church en masse. The document Anglicanorum Coetibus was published three weeks later. The reason for these backwards sequence of events, whispered Vatican insiders, was to make sure that papal acts “still in progress” could not be derailed by opposition either inside or outside the Curia.

For shame! What a bounder that Ratzinger is, trying to stop Vatican factionalism from sabotaging his initiatives! And forcing Bobbie Mickens to pretend to be a stickler for Curial protocol, too! I can see the poor wee soul reaching for his handkerchief…

On the letters page, one Ben Andradi inveighs against Keynesian economics and calls for government policy based on “the dominant mood of the financial markets”. Nothing intrinsically interesting in that, but I vaguely recall that Ben Andradi is involved in the Catholic Voices project. It’s a small world, indeed.

Skipping lightly over the review section, which is usually not bad, we come to that great source of zingers, the international section, and we are immediately rewarded with a double-header from Christa Pongratz in Vienna. Speaking of whom, Andrew Brown really should invest in a little quality control on CIF Belief. One understands that the Grauniad is obliged to support liberal Catholics, and one may forgive Christa her personal eccentricities, but this is just unforgivably batshit. Anyone who believes that Christoph Schönborn is poised to take the next conclave by storm – well, it’s about as likely as James Purnell being acclaimed Labour Party leader as the candidate of the left.

Unsurprisingly, we have yet another paean to Cardinal Wingnut, who definitely wasn’t slapped down at his recent meeting with the Pontiff, at least according to sources close to Wingnut. But Christa’s main article is about the new Christian Unity czar, Archbishop Kurt Koch of Basel, and… well, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I get the feeling Christa doesn’t like him very much. The thrust of the article is that Koch agrees with the documents of Vatican II, which is not the same thing as what some people mean by the “spirit of Vatican II”; and he gets on well with the Eastern Orthodox, particularly the Moscow Patriarchate’s ecumenism czar Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev. For Christa, of course, this is absolutely terrible.

And so we turn to Bobbie Mickens’ weekly “Letter from Rome”. Bobbie doesn’t like Kurt Koch either, and mentions him not getting on very well with the Wir sind Kirche crowd, as well as him once having been a bit rude about the Greatest Living Switzerlandman, Hans Küng. What a shocking reprobate! Bobbie also tells us of the Pontifical Mass at St Peter’s celebrated by Vice-Pope Tarcisio Bertone to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination. Bobbie gives us some Hello!-style gush over all the dignitaries and celebrities who were present, but notes that “the cardinal – like the Pope – distributed Communion on the tongues of those who knelt before him.” Why, one would almost think Bertone had touched a nerve.

As we enter the home straight, page 35 features an article by Elena Discourteous on the theme of the-threatened-descent-into-chaos-of-the-papal-visit-is-all-sorted-out-not-that-it-was-ever-descending-into-chaos-in-the-first-place. The guts of this is a recap of the joint press conference between Chris Patten and Vincent Nichols, but at the end we get a little teaser on that Eland House seminar:

Around 50 civil servants attended a briefing session on Catholicism in Britain and the life, thought and influence of Cardinal Newman hosted by the Department for Communities and Local Government. Among those addressing the meeting were Mgr Roderick Strange, rector of the Beda seminary in Rome, and Canon Jonathan Goodall, ecumenical secretary of the Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as input from Dame Helen Ghosh, Permanent Secretary of the Department of the Environment and Rural Affairs and a Catholic, who is chairing the lead Whitehall committee on the papal visit.

With charming modesty, Elena does not tell us that Ma Pepsi was a featured speaker, nor that Helen Ghosh is a Tablet trustee.

On page 37, Elena gives us a bit of puffery for Andy Burnham, now anointed “the Catholic candidate for the Labour leadership”, which I suppose is the case given the other four candidates are all atheists, although you’d never guess it from his voting record. It helps that the Tablet gave Burnham the Hello! treatment a couple of weeks back. For slightly more downbeat accounts of the hustings Elena is describing, see here and here.

Finally, we have Bishop Kieran Conry of Arundel and Brighton opining, not for the first time, on how the Catholic Church is irrelevant these days. I often find +Kieran’s argumentation hard to follow – perhaps he’s too clever for me to understand – but I take him to be saying that the Church is offputting by dint of many people associating it with Catholicism, while it really needs to be more relevant and appealing to Protestants, agnostics and Wiccans. Incidentally, +Kieran is the bishop in charge of evangelisation, which might explain why not much evangelisation is happening.

Well, that’s that for another week. I can’t help thinking that Opus-style mortification would be less hassle.

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