It being All Saints’ Day on Tuesday, we sang ‘For all the saints’ in church: ‘Oh, may thy soldiers, faithful, true and bold,/ Fight as the saints, who nobly fought of old/ And win with them the victor’s crown of gold.’ Meanwhile, the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral were falling apart because most of them thought it was wrong to nobly fight in any way at all. Most of the clergy involved in this curious situation keep referring to the danger of ‘violence’, as defined by Canon Giles Fraser in his resignation last week. ‘I feel that the Church cannot answer peaceful protest with violence,’ he said. Naturally, the clergy don’t want legal action, and the Dean lacked the wisdom of the serpent in going down this route so quickly. But the ‘violence’ against which Dr Fraser warned is surely what most people would call ‘the force of law’. The action has been dropped for now, but if it later proves necessary, the campers outside the cathedral may be ordered, by a court, to vacate the ground on which they are trespassing. There is no violence in that. Even if they disobey the order, and the authorities then physically move the protesters away, there need not be any violence, unless the protesters themselves commit it. If they commit it, theirs would not be a peaceful protest. So the clergy who oppose a court order on principle are saying, in effect, that one must never bring legal action against people who might end up behaving violently. If so, the house of prayer would quickly become a den of thieves. No civil or ecclesiastical society can operate on that basis.
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One does have some sympathy for the Church of England, however, because it is so grievously misunderstood. Hardly anyone seems to know that bishops, though ‘seated’ in cathedrals, have no power over them. This power is held by deans. It is a medieval division of authority which the Roman Catholic Church abolished at the Council of Trent, but which survives in the C of E. In the case of St Paul’s, the newspapers clamour for ‘leadership’ from the Archbishop of Canterbury, but he is ex officio unable to provide it, except in the generalised moral form which he showed in his piece in the Financial Times on Wednesday. He can no more issue orders to a dean and chapter than you or I can. Even the Bishop of London cannot, normally, put his own house in order, although he does have a sort of reserve power as ‘Visitor’, and Dr Richard Chartres is doing his best to fill the breach vacated by weaker brethren. To people used to the secular command structures of business, this may seem a ridiculous way of doing things, but in fact there is a lot of sense in it. In a national Church, available, in principle, to everyone, it is a dangerous thing to let power concentrate. The Anglican quality of tolerance could not survive an authoritarian system. But since this is so, there is all the more onus on deans and chapters to act decisively within their own sphere. In my experience, deans are, on average, more religious than bishops: they are more concerned with worship and less with meetings and committees. They usually operate by the church version of the theatrical principle that ‘the show must go on’. Once St Paul’s rushed to close on grounds of health and safety, the unfortunate Dean, Graeme Knowles, lost his moral advantage, and never regained it, so there is a sad logic in his resignation.
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A more robust clergyman is Cardinal George Pell, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. Last week, I heard him give the annual Global Warming Policy Foundation Lecture. He was sceptical on the subject of man-made climate disaster, and scathing about how ‘attempts to make global warming go away’ will ‘fall mainly on the shoulders of the battlers, the poor’. A few days later, a friend in the aid trade told me that the Department for International Development refuses its clients any money for any project using extractive industry. If you think how absolutely our own prosperity depends upon affordable energy, such a policy is not much better than refusing food to the hungry.
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Greece is the cradle of democracy. Wonderful how, as soon as it decides to try out a bit of the stuff 2,500 years after it first thought of it, the chancelleries of Europe explode with rage.
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It is alleged that the seventh billion baby was born on 31 October. It is certain (I think) that I was born on that exact day 55 years ago. When I was born, the world population was roughly 2.83 billion. In the ensuing 55 years, there have been no world wars and prosperity and health have greatly increased in all but a few countries. Yet people have continuously predicted economic, political and environmental collapse because of population growth. The truth is that human beings are much better at coping with change than we give ourselves credit for, especially when that change has been collectively unplanned. For most of the human race, it is proving a blessing to have been one of the many, not the few.
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Sadly, Sir James Savile, who was exactly 30 years older than I, did not quite make it to the big day, and did not personally contribute to human increase. Reading his wonderful obituary in the Daily Telegraph, I realised that I was one of the early witnesses of his national fame, because I started watching Top of the Pops when it began in 1964, and there he was. To me, he was a frightening figure. I felt I could discern in him that quality — very common in entertainers and politicians — of having no affection whatever for his audience. I did not like this at the time, but now that I am older, I feel that such people have a sort of artistic integrity. Why should they like us? Why should we want them to be normal? How could we expect them to be, when they live their lives in studios and hotel rooms, under television lights and on hustings? Perhaps it is our very expectation that they should be nice, normal and human which fills them with rage. After all, it is their weirdness, not their niceness, from which we benefit. They must think us ungrateful for not recognising this.
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