Catholic church

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

The case against gay marriage

Last night, we posted Douglas Murray’s conservative argument in favour of same-sex marriage. Here’s the opposite view: Consultations are, for the prudent, an exercise you only engage in when you’re quite sure of the outcome. I’m not sure, then, that Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, is entirely wise to go all out in galvanising the Catholic community into action against the Government’s plans to legalise gay marriage. As the Daily Telegraph reports today, he is issuing a letter to be read out in churches on Sunday to urge congregations to participate in the Coalition’s consultation exercise on the proposal — against. Two can play at consultations, and the very

Monday

Douglas Murray

The conservative case for equal marriage

With some right-wing voices — including Catholic Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Tory MP Peter Bone and the Daily Telegraph — speaking out against same-sex marriage, here’s a piece Douglas Murray wrote for The Spectator in October arguing that conservatives should instead be welcoming it: In America a new generation of Republicans is challenging the traditional consensus of their party on gay marriage. They — as well as some of the GOP old guard like Dick Cheney — are coming out in favour. In Britain the subject is also back on the agenda with the coalition government, at the insistence of the Prime Minister apparently, planning a ‘public consultation’ on the matter.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

This Troublesome, Ludicrous Priest

If Cardinal Keith O’Brien objects to being considered an intolerant bigot then he should perhaps cease making arguments that are a) intolerant and b) bigoted. Then again, he’s a member of the College of Cardinals and this is part of the price of membership*. His diatribe against gay marriage is an excellent example of this. I suppose some people are exercised by the precise status of homosexual relationships but the Cardinal’s spittle-flecked prose still seems excessive, even by his church’s standards. It is doubtless a cheap observation to note that neither this Cardinal nor any of his colleagues wrote such furious opeds denouncing their church’s willingness to protect child abusers

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Political Speech of the Year

Enda Kenny, Taoiseach, delivered an astonishing speech to the Dail yesterday during which he lambasted the Vatican in ways unprecedented in the history of the Irish Republic. It was, indeed, a republican speech of the best sort during which the Taoiseach asserted  – reasserted would, alas, be too innacurate a way of putting it – the primacy of the state over canon law. At long last a senior politician, responding in this instance to the Cloyne report into clerical child abuse in that diocese and the church’s willingness to cover that abuse up, has stood up to the habitual denial, obstructionism and duplicity of the church in these matters. As

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Coffee House Exclusive: McBride joins CAFOD

                  The penance of Damian McBride continues. After being ejected from No10, and disowned by his mentor Ed Balls, I can reveal that our antihero now has a new job – head of media at the Catholic overseas aid charity CAFOD. He will be doubtless be brilliantly effective at briefing against its enemies (in CAFOD’s case, hunger and the devil). I imagine the pay is several leagues below what he’d get from cashing in on his notoriety and publishing a hit man’s confessions. The weird thing is that McBride could have done so well, had he steered clear of Balls. He was a Treasury

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Rome is Even More Rotten than Dublin

As you know, I’m not much of a Fianna Fail fan. But if there’s any Irish institution that outperforms the ghastliness of the Soldiers of Destiny it’s the Catholic Church. Here’s the latest reminder of that: A letter to Ireland’s Roman Catholic bishops has been revealed by the broadcaster RTE that contradicts the Vatican’s frequent claim it has never instructed clergy to withhold evidence or suspicion of child abuse from police. The 1997 letter documents rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to help police identify paedophile priests. Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II’s envoy to Ireland, it instructs bishops that their new policy of

Friday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: Ratzinger’s vision

A propos of nothing – except perhaps the religious time of year – here’s The Spectator‘s report on one Cardinal Ratzinger setting out his “cautious and conservative” vision for Catholicism at the Extraordinary Synod of 1985: Ratzinger’s synod, The Spectator, Vera Buchanan, 7 December 1985
 Rome – Well, the Extraordinary Synod is nearly over – it has been a well planned, well executed flop. Thus it was conceived and thus it has borne fruit – bland, musty fruit. In Rome no one expected anything else. While foreign presses tried to titillate the public with dramatic tales of clocks being turned back, rivers of modernism dammed, the spirit of Vatican II

Monday

Alex Massie

Tales from an Older Ireland

Lord knows, in matters such as these the Catholic church can enforce it’s own disciplinary regime. But, really, didn’t this particular horse bolt some time ago? An Irish Catholic priest has been banned by the Vatican from publishing any more of his writings after he suggested homosexuality is “simply a facet of the human condition”. This follows an article on homosexuality by Capuchin priest Fr Owen O’Sullivan, published in last March’s edition of the Furrow magazine. Described as “a journal for the contemporary Church”, the Furrow is published at St Patrick’s College Maynooth. […]The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican contacted the Capuchin secretary general in Rome with

Thursday

Alex Massie

Who’s Afraid of Catholic Schools?

Since it’s Pope Day, let’s consider this tediously-hardy perennial too. Commenting on this post, Fifer asks: Since you’ve given this some thought, then, perhaps you can answer me this – why, exactly, are my taxes being used to fund an education system divided in Scotland on sectarian lines when, out of a population of 5 million, only 65,000 can be bothered turning up to see the head of their faith preach? Even Celtic can manage that turnout a few times a year. If we really are in the dire financial straits we’re told we are, perhaps it really is time to “think of the children” and educate them all as

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Let’s move on from Stephen Fry’s Pope bashing

Stephen Fry is good at taking himself seriously while pretending not to take himself seriously. But slowly, as he gets older and grander, his self-effacing mask is slipping. He’s becoming less and less of a comedian, more and more a sanctimonious bore. Look at the way he has taken it upon himself to denounce, with such gravitas, Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain. In his interview with the BBC yesterday – see above – Fry insists that the Pope should be free to come to Britain. “How could I hold my head up if I objected to that?” he says. What Fry cannot not accept, he explains, is that the Pope’s time

Saturday

A.N. Wilson

Mystery of the empty tomb

John Henry Newman was an electrifying personality who has attracted numerous biographers and commentators. John Cornwell, in his excellent guided tour around this well-ploughed field, recalls the young woman in Oxford in the 1830s who ‘wept with emotion’ at Newman’s very appearance. W. G. Ward recalls the awe which fell upon him and his undergraduate friends if Newman so much as passed them in the street. And figures such as Mark Pattison, James Anthony Froude and Matthew Arnold, none of them followers of the Newman cult in grown-up life, recollected similar feelings in their youth. When the mature George Eliot read Newman’s spiritual autobiography, she said it ‘breathed much life

Saturday

Daniel Korski

The Vatican plays the “Jewish Card”

Speaking in a Good Friday homily, with the Pope listening, the Pontiff’s personal preacher, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, likened the drive by the victims of abuse to seek justice from the Vatican, whose priests committed the sexual crimes, with the persecution of Jews. Victims’ groups and Jewish organisations have said it was inappropriate to liken the discomfort of the Catholic Church to hundreds of years of violence and abuse. But it is more than inappropriate. It shows either an ignorance of the history of anti-Semitism; a desire to relativise the Holocaust; a near-pathological disregards for other people’s suffering; or a wilful aspiration to shift the blame away from the Vatican. The

Friday

Alex Massie

The Sins of the Fathers

The least surprising thing about the latest revelations of the Irish Catholic Church’s complicity in thousands of cases of horrific child abuse is that almost none of it is surprising at all. Shocking, yes, but not surprising. Even those of us with an appropriately cynical view of the Chuch, mind you, can only marvel at the breathtaking mendacity displayed by the Church. The Archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary, says he is ” mindful of the perceived hollowness of repeated apologies” and he has a point. Because until they were caught, the Church displayed no remorse whatsoever. Time and time again, as the Murphy Commission’s report makes only too clear, the

Thursday

Alex Massie

Where the Sisters Have No Mercy and the Brothers No Christianity

Carol Sarler may be correct to argue, as she does in this week’s edition of the magazine, that we have an unhealthy fascination with sex crimes that is both prurient and puritanical. But I’d suggest that, whatever the merits of her wider argument, she doesn’t know very much about Ireland: In Ireland, some 2,000 adults who gave evidence of assault at the hands of Roman Catholic priests and nuns are, probably correctly, spitting tacks. The inquiry into their treatment when in children’s institutions has ruled that, although they did indeed suffer, no charges may be brought, no names shamed and, for what it’s worth, no bank balances swollen by damages