Catholicism

Thursday

Magnus Linklater

Fleet Street’s ‘wild Irish girl’

In her early days on Fleet Street, Mary Kenny, as she herself admits, was cast as ‘the wild Irish girl’, and did her best to live up to it. She held her own with the drinkers at El Vino’s, gave new meaning to the phrase ‘talking about Uganda’ when discovered in flagrante with an African lawyer,  and later rode the ‘condom train’ to flout Ireland’s contraception laws. Some of these stories surface in her memoir, Something of Myself and Others; others she draws a veil over, with a Catholic reticence of which her mother would doubtless have approved. Or perhaps she simply cannot remember them all. ‘Like much of my

Thursday

Michael Questier

Lords, spies and traitors in Elizabeth’s England

There are still some sizeable holes in early modern English history and one of them is what we know — or, rather, do not know — about the aristocracy. Of course, peers who held high office under the Crown often have their biographers. But there is still a rooted assumption among scholars that the aristo-cracy as a caste or class was in decline during and after the later 16th century. If the papers have not survived, we are left with little idea about a peerage family apart from snippets of information and the odd anecdote. Also, the sort of documents which tend to get kept are the ‘boring’ ones —

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Sex, secrets, and self-mortification: the dark side of the confessional

I have a confession to make. I really enjoyed this book. It’s been a while since I admitted something of the sort, and I feel ashamed, because, although it’s smartly, smoothly written, my pleasure was partly based on titillation. I smirked — I occasionally snickered — at the madder facts of self-mortification, whereby in the Middle Ages the (frequently female) faithful might flaunt their holiness in acts of rank humility. Elizabeth of Hungary kissed the feet of lepers; Margaret Marie Alacoque ate vomit; Catherine of Genoa, it’s said, sucked the pus of a plague victim. More than this, though, John Cornwell’s history of confession is preoccupied with sex, which always

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Fears for Scotland, and John Cornwell answers Melanie McDonagh

Save our Scotland Sir: Matthew Parris is quite right to praise Lord Lang’s speech in the Lords on Scottish independence 9 (‘The End of Britain’, 8 February) and there were other notable contributions, especially from Lord Kerr, on the European dimension, and Lord Robertson, the former secretary-general of Nato. But is anyone listening? The debate got virtually no coverage in the Scottish editions — and I suspect even less in the English ones. Meanwhile the SNP publicity machine rolls on here and is now promising an annual ‘Indy bonus’ of £600 for every man, woman and child in Scotland, exceeding the £500 threshold at which (as Alex Massie pointed out in

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Forgive me, Father

For non-Catholics, the most luridly fascinating aspect of Catholicism is confession. Telling your inmost sins — and we know what they are — to a male cleric, eh? In a darkened booth. How medieval is that? Well, the fantasies that people who never go to confession nurse about it are about to be shored up by a new book on the subject by the Catholic author John Cornwell. It’s called The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession. On the cover is a scary-looking picture of a confessional — not somewhere you’d take the children, frankly, but right at home in a Hitchcock movie. John Cornwell is a friend, and

Thursday

Blair Worden

What Englishmen learnt from Europe

The pattern of foreign travel by wealthy young Englishmen that became known as the Grand Tour began in the Renaissance and matured in the 17th century. In its origins it was a training for statesmanship. The state’s takeover of the church, which had done so much of the state’s official business, enlarged the employment opportunities of the nobility and gentry. So did the expansion of the government’s administrative resources and ambitions. But with the opportunities came challenges. Monarchs needed their advisers and officials and diplomats to be skilled and knowledgeable. So noblemen and gentlemen urged their sons to look beyond the accustomed pleasures of the hunting field and get down

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The one man who makes me hope for peace in Syria

As Syria’s second peace conference looms, and we prepare ourselves for a lot of hot air drifting over from Geneva, I’ve been making a list of those players in the civil war who actually want peace and those who don’t fancy it one bit. The anti-peace side is easy. There’s Bashar al-Assad, of course. Hillary saw to that during the first conference. Perhaps she’s right that he shouldn’t be part of any transitional government, but if he loses all power, Assad and his Alawite clan are toast. So what use is peace to him? The rebels of the Islamic Front alliance are the latest Washington craze; they’re the alliance of

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Dot Wordsworth: We’ve been self-whipping since 1672

Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had held that Tory backbenchers were now self-whipping. When she aired this opinion on Radio 4, Michael White of the Guardian did a Frankie Howerd-style, ‘Ooh, Missus!’ routine. Surprisingly, self-whipping is no neologism. The satirical Nonconformist clergyman Robert Wild, in a poem on Charles II’s declaration of indulgence in 1672, refers to the ‘self-whippings, of the Popish Priests’. He meant the use of the discipline for ascetic motives. This was equally frowned upon by the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The calm, familiar hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ was

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Why G.K. Chesterton shouldn’t be made a saint

The bad news for fans of G.K. Chesterton is that there are moves afoot to make him a saint. The Catholic bishop of Northampton, Peter Doyle, is reportedly looking for a priest to promote his canonisation. Pope Francis is an admirer, too; he supported a Chesterton conference in Buenos Aires and was on the honorary committee of the Chesterton Society. So why is this a bad idea? Chesterton was, among other things, probably the most engaging apologist for Catholicism, long before he became a Catholic. His little book Orthodoxy is the best personal account of the faith you’ll come across — unabashedly subjective, wildly romantic, fundamentally right. His Napoleon of

Thursday

Susan Hill

The Breath of Night, by Michael Arditti

There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is subtle and shrewd enough to know that ‘issue books’, which are tracts not works of the imagination, are dull to read and rarely work as fiction should. He presents us with characters who are fully rounded, credible human beings living through moral dilemmas, affected by them, caring about them, living and dying within their context. In other words, he is an intelligent novelist. But he is also a good storyteller, so this new novel is both stirring and exciting to read, and has a setting which is not ‘background’ but

Thursday

Damian Thompson

The new God squad: what Archbishop Welby and Pope Francis have in common

It’s a few weeks after the election of Pope Francis, and a notoriously leaky church source is talking about the revolution to come. The new leader of the faithful is a sharp operator who finds himself surrounded by ‘a medieval court system of hopeless characters, each jealously guarding their own silos of activity. There’s lots of crap people in key positions.’ Meanwhile, away from the court, bureaucrats churn out windy memos. They may not know it yet, but the process of ‘clearing out the weeds’ will start soon — possibly as early as this August. That might seem over-ambitious, but we’re not talking about the sleepy Vatican. The source is

Friday

Freddy Gray

The political class’s new phobia: big families

After almost a week of media breast-beating about the Philpott case, a creepy consensus is emerging over benefits for children. Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative backbencher, wants child benefit to be limited in future to a family’s first two children. Lots of Tories agree. So does former Tony Blair speechwriter, Philip Collins. ‘This would save £3.3 billion if it were applied to all recipients,’ he writes in his Times column today. ‘Many working people take the responsible view that, though they would love another child, they cannot afford it. Well, yes. No doubt out there is a degree of feckless fecundity among claimants, and that’s a bad thing. We should not incentivise

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

At last! A tango-dancing pope

Just a year ago on this page I was writing about Pope Benedict XVI’s elder brother Georg and how, while ostensibly discreet and loyal to his celebrated sibling, he contrived at the same time to make him look too old and bumbling for the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. In a book, My Brother, the Pope, this old priest from Bavaria said that his younger brother had never wanted the job, was too physically frail for it, and found it a tremendous strain. Georg Ratzinger must now be feeling somewhat vindicated, but at the time he was ‘off message’, for the Vatican was insistent that the pope was on

Piers Paul-Read

Satan is back

It used to be said by Catholic priests back in the 1950s that the Devil was delighted when human beings decided that he did not exist. In those days it seemed unlikely that he would disappear altogether from human consciousness because he was so well known — as Baal or Beelzebub in the Old Testament, the Prince of Lies in the New, as Lucifer in the King James Bible, as Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and as Mephistopheles in the legend of Faust; but it has turned out that a subtle move from scripture into myth, folklore and finally literature has been an effective way of becoming unreal. Today we

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 14 March 2013

Sir David must stand down Sir: Reading the reports of Sir David Nicholson’s evidence before the House of Commons Health Committee on 5 March 2013 (Leading article, 9 March), it seems to me inconceivable that he could remain in his post. We are informed by the Prime Minister that in the current circumstances the NHS is unable to do without him. But nobody is indispensable and in any case, to judge by Sir David’s recent performance, he is incompetent, a hopeless leader, has a very poor memory and is more interested in saving his skin than in the wellbeing of NHS patients. While he remains in his post, the anger

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Already, Pope Francis is the victim of cheap journalistic smears

So the new Pope was ‘cosy with dictators’, according to the papers. The only sources for that assertion seem to be Latin Americans left-wingers who are obviously and implacably hostile to the Catholic Church. The most damning ‘evidence’ appears to come from an anti-clerical conspiracy theorist called Horacio Verbitsky, who has alleged in a book called ‘The Silence’  that the Catholic Church and Cardinal Bergoglio were complicit with the murderous military dictatorship during Argentina’s ‘dirty war’. One doesn’t have to be a papist to regard all these hastily re-heated allegations as dubious. (But it helps.) The papers have dug up various other Latin Left ‘activists’ to attack the new Pope. The Times, for

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

What can we expect from Pope Francis?

Some striking facts about Pope Francis. Fact one: the Cardinals have elected a 76-year-old with only one lung. This undermines the idea that Pope Benedict stepped aside so that a younger, dynamic CEO-style figure would take charge, someone who could handle the exhausting job of running the Church. Instead the Cardinals went for a man of great individual piety who has lived a long and holy life. Fact two: we have the first Jesuit Pope. Traditionally, the Jesuits have been seen as a potential rival power base to the papacy. Now they are the papacy. The Jesuits have been, in recent decades, associated with the left, even the wacky wing

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Breaking: Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio is the new Pope

Oh, my God. It’s Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who everybody thought was past it. It’s commonly thought that he came second last time and was the popular liberal choice, only to be thwarted by Ratzinger. Is this a reaction against the papacy of Benedict? What with him being from Argentina, the mainstream media will be quick to hope that he is a progressive. The BBC is already doing it: they will ask if he will be able to ‘move forward’ the key issues for them: gay rights, condoms, women priests etc. Of course that isn’t what he and the Cardinals who voted for him are thinking about. But there is a

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Papal Conclave: would a result today mean Angelo Scola is Pope?

White smoke from the Vatican this afternoon may signal that the new Pope is Cardinal Angelo Scola. But the longer the papal conclave goes on, the more likely it becomes that St Peter’s next successor will be a global figure – which probably means either a North or Latin American, rather than an African or Asian. That, at least, is the prevailing consensus of the Vaticanisti this morning. And it makes sense. Scola, probably the least talked about of the heavy favourites, is the obvious choice to follow Pope Benedict: a theologian of similarly high standing (though his writings are less accessible to lay readers), he has grown in stature

Thursday

Peter Jones

Priests and pagans

The Catholic tradition of priestly celibacy (Latin caelebs, ‘unmarried’), by which Cardinal O’Brien was bound, is not a dogma, but a discipline. In other words, it can be altered at the rotation of an encyclical. Like much else in the Catholic tradition, it has its roots in the pagan world. Asceticism derives from the Greek askêsis, ‘training, practice’. Pagans had long believed that humans could be transformed through mental and physical discipline. Pythagoras, for example, thought that the element of the divine in us could be brought out by fasting and contemplation. Diogenes in his clay wine jar rejected the whole concept of ‘society’; the millionaire Seneca, committed to the idea