Romney's continuing religious troubles

Some well-informed people — Rupert Murdoch among them — have suggested that Mitt Romney could exploit Obama’s increasingly fractious relationship with America’s Catholics to win the presidential elections in November. The so-called 'Catholic vote' is often said to be the crucial swing factor in American democracy.

Romney, however, may be facing a bigger socio-religious stumbling block than Obama's: evangelicals. They don’t like him. Mainstream Protestant Republicans in the north have plumped for Mitt, generally speaking, but he has been far less successful in the evangelical south. ‘As a county’s...

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Abbott couldn't be grandstanding, could she?

For anyone who doesn’t think of abortion as an unqualified good for humankind, today’s Diane Abbott row is quite sad. Abbott has walked out of the cross-party talks on abortion counselling, calling them a ‘front for driving through the anti-choice lobbyists' preferred option.’

‘I entered into the meetings in good faith,’ she huffs. ‘I was genuinely interested in improving the quality of counselling available to women.’ As James reports, though, it doesn’t appear as if la Abbott had hitherto taken the talks all that seriously. Could she be grandstanding,...

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The truth about lying

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics about lying. The University of Essex has today published a study about dishonesty in Britain, and its conclusions are prompting some concern. The ‘ethics and integrity project’ found that our society is far more relaxed about the truth than it used to be — only one person in every three, apparently, is now willing to condemn lying in their own interest.

In 2000, 40 per cent of the study’s respondents said that picking up money on the street was ‘never justified’, whereas it’s just...

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Anti-Catholic Times?

Today’s Times has a sensational follow-up to the horrible story about a paedophile monk at Downside school. Sean O’Neill reports that – following the scandal of Fr Richard White, who last week was jailed for five years for gross indecency and indecent assault – the Department for Education has taken ‘an urgent interest’ in child-protection procedures at the Catholic boarding school. Apparently, an inspection report refers to ‘seven monks who have worked at the school at different times and whose behaviour has been a cause of concern’.

But does Mr O’Neill have...

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An ecclesiastical attack on the government?

Last week, Archbishop Nichols of Westminster, the spiritual leader of Catholics in England and Wales, said that the government’s cuts ‘are already being felt disproportionally by the most vulnerable.’ This, The Catholic Herald reported, is the closest any Catholic bishop has come to attacking the austerity agenda. The Archbishop’s statement could be seen as an attempt to put the Catholic Church to the left of the coalition. 

But should it? Politically, the Archbishop’s speech was more neutral than anything else. Here’s a longer quote:

“None of us

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The Church of England's power struggle

Blimey, who’s going to resign next? Chartres? Williams? The Queen? God maybe? What’s going on here?

A high-profile branch of the C of E has been put in the media spotlight in a way that it cannot cope with. It is being cast as stooge of the System, bankers’ poodle. It wants desperately to communicate its sympathy with liberal opinion, with the concerns of the protesters. It feels that it is being cornered into looking like their antagonist, even like some sort of tyrannical regime, hiding in a big domed palace....

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