Religion

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

An unlikely alliance of Communists and Catholics could yet spoil Macron's coronation

After their humiliation with Brexit and Donald Trump, the pollsters returned to form in France with their predictions of a Macron and Le Pen first round victory. If the polls are as accurate with their forecast for the second round, then the new president of France will be the centrist Emmanuel Macron. The 39-year-old is the overwhelming favourite. But nonetheless, there are reasons for the National Front to hope that they could still replicate the political earthquakes of 2016. For that to happen Marine Le Pen will have to attack Macron on two fronts with the purpose of attracting votes from both the far-left and the conservative right. Between them,

Friday

Damian Thompson

Pope is planning to retire, say allies – but only once he's appointed enough liberal cardinals

Allies of Pope Francis are saying that he’s planning to follow the example of Benedict XVI and retire. But he’ll only do so once he’s appointed enough liberal cardinals to make sure that the next conclave doesn’t elected a conservative who will interpret Catholic doctrine more strictly than he does. This, at least, is what allies of the Pope have been telling colleagues – claiming that they’ve heard it from the pontiff himself. (Francis himself is a notorious chatterbox and so are some of the cardinals close to him.) The Pope, now 80, apparently wants to hold three more consistories at which he will bestow the red hat on bishops who share his vision

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

François Fillon is the anti-Islamist candidate - and an Islamist target

The news on Tuesday that French security services have prevented another attack by Islamic extremists should come as no surprise given the proximity of the election. Nor should the fact that according to police sources the intended target was François Fillon. When police raided the apartments in Marseille of the two suspects, they reportedly discovered a submachine gun, two handguns, three kilograms of TATP explosives, which was used in the 2015 suicide attacks in Paris, and a newspaper photograph of Fillon. The Islamists loathe the conservative candidate, more than they do Marine Le Pen, despite the fact that she leads the National Front, a long-time foe of conservative Islam. When

Sunday

Theo Hobson

Christianity is at the heart of Britain's shared values

Theresa May does a decent job of saying that Christianity is at the heart of our shared values. It’s a difficult thing to say without sounding disparaging of non-Christians, but I think it’s something worth saying. Some will say that the Prime Minister should stick to politics, especially when there’s so much politics to do, and stay away from religion. If she wants to give us a headmistressy pep-talk, fine, but keep it strictly secular. I don’t agree. It’s for each prime minister to decide whether to veer into religious territory. (There’s no constitutional bar to him or her getting all happy-clappy – not a danger with this glumly cautious

Friday

Hardeep Singh

A Sikh festival with a universal message at its heart

In April each year Sikhs around the world celebrate Vaisakhi. While it marks the Indian spring harvest, the festival has a much deeper significance for adherents of Sikhism – it commemorates the birth of a nation of warrior-saints. Over the weekend some of Britain’s 423,000 plus Sikhs began these festivities with impressive street processions called Nagar Kirtans in both London and Glasgow. The latter included a beturbanned bagpipe player to boot. It’s a family friendly affair, with an abundance of free food (langar), martial arts displays (gatka) and speeches from ‘community leaders’ and politicians. But it’s the story at the heart of Vaisakhi — the life and death struggle for India’s freedoms

Seth J. Frantzman

Can Iraq’s Christians ever recover from Isis?

Since June 2014, when Islamic State attacked northern Iraq, the desks at Mar Ephrem seminary in Hamdaniya, a city 18 miles southeast of Mosul, have stood empty. Today, they are dusty and rooms once teeming with priests and nuns in training are dark; student ID cards, with titles such as ‘Syrian Catholic: Parish of Bashiqa, Iraq’, litter the floor and a statue of the Virgin Mary lies smashed. Now, Isis are gone. But in their wake an eerie quiet remains and the path of destruction is a visible reminder of their legacy, with thousands of houses destroyed in the fierce battle to retake the city last October. And for the Christians who live in Hamdaniya, the question remains: will they

Thursday

Mary Ann-Sieghart

How I was taken for a terrorist by United Airlines

This article originally appeared in the Spectator in 1991 You are a Spectator reader, an honest, law-abiding, professional with moderate political views. You think you don’t look like a terrorist. Think again. I arrived at Heathrow airport with a good 50 minutes to spare before my scheduled flight to Berlin was due to leave. I was flying there with United Airlines, and going on with British Airways to Moscow to attend an Aspen Institute conference on behalf of the Times. United Airlines took over PanAm’s routes from Heathrow last month. Presumably somewhat sensitive, after Lockerbie, about inheriting PanAm’s security reputation along with its routes, the airline runs its own security

Wednesday

Jonathan Meades

Concrete cuckoo

The Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council provides a salutary example of a tiny ‘elite’ foisting ‘anti-elitist’ practices on the ‘non-elite’ — and coming a cropper. Vatican II’s dates are important. The Council was convened in 1962 and concluded in December 1965. These were the high years of the most uncompromising architectural modernism and, just as pertinently, of the craze for theatre-in-the-round, whose champions considered the proscenium arch to be an authoritarian (very possibly ‘fascist’) instrument inimical to ‘participation’. Rome’s neophilia left much of the clerisy bewildered. It was admitting temporal fashions to a spiritual domain. Maynooth’s head was spinning. The Council’s bias was towards the Liturgical Movement’s long-hatched plans for

Charles Moore

The Spectator's notes | 12 April 2017

Each Easter, I think of David Jones (1895-1974). He was a distinguished painter and, I would (though unqualified) say, a great poet. There is a new, thorough biography of him by Thomas Dilworth (Cape). A sympathetic review in the Guardian wrestles with why he is not better known: ‘The centrality of religion to Jones’s work offers a clue to his obscurity.’ Jones recognised this possibility himself, writing about ‘The Break’ in culture, which began in the 19th century. He thought it had to do with the decline of religion, but more with a changed attitude to art, caused by mass production and affecting what he called ‘the entire world of sacrament

Theo Hobson

Secularism is part of God's cunning plan

How should Christians relate to the culture around them? That is the question raised by Rod Dreher’s article in the Spectator this week. He’s right that it’s a pretty fundamental question. If we Christians don’t know how to answer it, our message is likely to seem muddled. In common with many leading theologians of the last few decades, he claims that the answer is simple, if we are daring enough to see it. We should defy the false gods of the age, ‘the norms of secular society’. Liberal Christianity has failed to do so, and so has allowed the erosion of its sacred inheritance. We must be counter-cultural little Benedicts. He sums up this position with admirable clarity. He

Matthew Parris

Give me the Anglican option

The Algerian government’s official tourist guide describes ‘the walled town of Beni Isguen — normally closed to foreigners — where the women, clad entirely in white, reveal only one eye to the outside world’. Rod Dreher’s Easter call to devout Christians to separate themselves as a community from what he believes to be the degeneracy of our western culture puts me in mind of that sad, disturbing place. Beni Isguen is one of the oasis towns near Ghardaia in southern Algeria. I visited many years ago and can be sure there has been little change since, for the community has clung to unchanging and uniting beliefs for hundreds of years.

Monday

Theo Hobson

In defence of Christian doubt

A new survey finds that a quarter of British people who describe themselves as Christian say they do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Well, it won’t surprise you to hear that I think they are on theologically dodgy ground. Christians should affirm the resurrection of Jesus, however much they struggle to reconcile it with their rational assumptions. Unless it is affirmed, this whole religion is obviously toast. And yet, before we all agree to join in pouring scorn on these muddled sort-of Christians, I want to point out that the issue is not entirely clear-cut. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus but I also don’t really. I affirm

Sunday

Damian Thompson

Egypt's Palm Sunday massacre is an attack on Christianity

At 9.30 this morning, during Mass at St George’s Church in Tanto, north of Cairo, Coptic Christians were celebrating the joyful entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And then, in the twinkling of an eye, He was welcoming at least 25 of them into His kingdom, as a bomb went off inside the church. That, at least, is what hundreds of millions of Christians believe; as Holy Week begins. They will be praying for the slaughtered men, women and children of St Mark’s – and also for the victims of a suicide bombing outside St Mark’s Cathedral, Alexandria, soon afterwards. As I write, the death toll from the second attack is reported

John L-Allen-Jr

Today's attack in Egypt is the latest strike in the war on Christians in the Middle East

At least 36 people have died in Egypt after blasts targeted Coptic Christians on Palm Sunday. Today’s attack is just the latest strike in the war on Christians in the Middle East. As Jonathan Sacks observed: ‘until recently, Christians represented 20 percent of the population of the Middle East; today, 4 percent’. In 2013, John L. Allen Jr. wrote for The Spectator on the global persecution of churchgoers — the unreported catastrophe of our time. Unfortunately, the article still holds true today. Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters

Friday

Damian Thompson

Are you scared to talk about your faith at work?

Religious believers feel nervous about expressing their faith at work – either by wearing symbols or talking about religion. They’re worried they’ll be mocked by secular bullies. And employers aren’t aware of the situation. Or don’t care. That’s the implication of a new ComRes report, which I’m discussing on this week’s Holy Smoke with my new co-presenter Cristina Odone. As you’ll hear, we don’t agree. She thinks religion is becoming the love that dare not speak its name in the workplace. I think we’re in danger of being dragged into a PC grievance culture. There are also some very sharp observations from Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain. Anyway, here’s our

Tuesday

Rufus Larkin

Russia is a new front for radical Islam

Moscow Russia’s REN TV, which published the first image of a person who planted a bomb on a train in St Petersburg’s metro, reported that the security services are not ruling out the possibility that his clothes and beard may have been a disguise used to fool the authorities. But since racial profiling is practised as a matter of course in Russia, it would seem peculiar for a would-be terrorist to dress up in an Islamic disguise, especially considering that there are even more police than usual out on the streets and in the metros of major Russian cities after the recent anti-corruption protests. Out in the Moscow snow, I heard old

Saturday

Max Hastings

We should worry more about Putin’s Russia than Muslim fanatics

Last week’s events in London raised a recurrent dilemma for journalists, including me. It is a huge story when a terrorist kills four people then is shot down in Palace Yard, Westminster. Yet dare we say how fortunate we are that since 9/11 Muslim terrorists have proved incapable of mounting an attack remotely as lethal as that on the Twin Towers? An intelligence officer told me recently that he worries far more about Russia than about Muslim suicidalists, and this must be the rational assessment. The public needs awakening to the menace posed by Vladimir Putin’s adventurism. Meanwhile, Khalid Masood’s dreadful deed reflects the flailings of a death cult. These

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

Theocracy should scare us more than terror

In yesterday’s Guardian, David Shariatmadari confronts the claim that Islam is an especially violent religion. The claim, he says, is undermined by the fact that jihadi terrorism is a very recent phenomenon. Yes, there is also the violence of empire-building in its history, but you could say this of Christianity too. ‘Aspects of Islamic teaching do indeed justify some kinds of violence. Islam isn’t a pacifist religion. But again, it has this in common with Christianity, Judaism and other world faiths.’ As I have said quite a few times before, it is simply wrong to say that Islam and Christianity have much the same view of war and peace. Judging from

Monday

Damian Thompson

Persecuted Iraqi Christians 'supported Trump 100 per cent' because they felt betrayed by Obama

There’s an extraordinary moment in this week’s Holy Smoke podcast when the aid official supervising the resettlement of 12,000 Iraqi Christians says that the latter supported Donald Trump ‘100 per cent’ in the US elections because they felt betrayed by the Obama administration. Stephen Rasche, legal counsel and head of resettlement programmes for the Chaldean Catholics of northern Iraq, confirms that this community – now on the verge of extinction, and due to run out of medicine in 45 days – has received no help from US aid agencies or the United Nations. We recorded the episode on Friday, the day after Rasche had addressed MPs and peers in Parliament. One hopes they listened

Friday

Theo Hobson

Cynicism is the West's great weakness

Pankaj Mishra’s book Age of Anger is good in parts, but also shows the weakness of leftist thought. It is a bold history of political ideas that traces the extremism and populism of our day to nineteenth-century sources. Both Isis supporters and Trump supporters are reacting to the insecurity caused by neoliberal globalisation, he argues. ‘Cosmopolitan civilisation based on individual self-interest’ has brought material wealth at the cost of creating huge expectations that lead to dangerous resentment. And now social media intensifies such resentment. More people reject traditional politics, due to ‘the gap between the profligate promises of individual freedom and sovereignty, and the incapacity of their political and economic organisations