The Spectator's Notes

10 May 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

Congratulations to Wendy Alexander, the leader of the Scottish Labour party, for proposing the referendum on Scottish independence which (see previous Notes) the Conservatives should have been advocating for ages. Gordon Brown’s power is declining, so Miss Alexander is no longer worried about making him, by her action, look sillier than ever in his opposition to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. She has spotted that the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, is actually holding back on his promise of a referendum, looking for the best time (which he calculates would be just after a Tory general election victory with almost no Tory seats in Scotland). It is good politics, and probably good for the Union, to anticipate him.

To save priestly time, the Roman Catholic bishops of England and Wales decided a couple of years ago to commute those Holy Days of Obligation which are Feasts of Our Lord to the nearest Sunday. This means that Catholics are no longer obliged to attend Mass on the weekday in question. This year’s celebration of Ascension Day — which fell on Thursday last week — brought home to me how bad the change is. Just as Ash Wednesday takes place 40 days before Easter, so, by necessary symmetry, Ascension must be 40 days after. Therefore, even if it can now be marked on the Sunday following, it surely should not be abolished on the day itself. But when I went to Mass on Thursday, I found that Ascension Day did not exist, and we were celebrating St Joseph the Worker instead. To make matters even more confusing, I noticed that some Catholic churches did treat Thursday as the feast day. At Mass on Sunday, our parish tried to celebrate Ascension Day, but this was drowned out by the fact that it was the first Sunday in May and so the garlanding of the statue of the Virgin was the main attraction. A priest friend tells me that the whole thing is just too complicated. He wants the date of Easter fixed to the same Sunday every year. ‘After all,’ he says, ‘we only do all this because of the Jews and the moon.’ Hard to imagine Christianity without the former, though.